Zompist Bboard Again

Vent: On Friday evening, a fuse blew at the building I work in, cutting all the power to the building. There's still no power as of now, and the situation is likely to persist for a while, so we're working from home at least on Monday if not longer (maybe the whole week!). Bear in mind this is a building with a lot of biology and chemistry work ongoing, so there are freezers for biological samples, chemical extraction and ventilation systems, expensive and important instrumentation (NMR being a big one) and other things, so the situation is also potentially unsafe and could have caused significant damage. (Especially with the NMR!)

Fortunately none of my samples are ruined, but all of my hard disks with data to analyze are at the uni, and they are letting people access the building very temporarily to collect belongings... but let's see how hard it will be to do so. Not a fun situation, especially since I have a student finishing next week and a trip to Italy for a conference approaching very soon...

Ugh. I hope it all works out somehow.

Re: the Reddit situation: the most frustrating thing for me is the realization that I'm not sure I can fully break away from Reddit. During the early part of the protest, I wanted to look up some product reviews, and realized that for the particular subject, I could not find another place that had what I needed. Everything was cheap aggregate sites just listing the top ten products on Amazon, or sponsored posts on somebody's blog, or reviews on a manufacturer's website which, even if I trust they allow negative ones to remain up, still require me to know about a manufacturer and look up products independently, instead of a central location with reviews and opinions on a wide variety of products.

It's often said that when you want to know what real people think about a product or a hobby, you stick "reddit" at the end of your Google search. And it's genuinely true. Sure, there's a few topics out there still hanging on with old-school forums like this one, but most you come across are either dying or so insular it's impossible for an outsider/beginner to find useful information. For many subjects, I'm not sure forums exist at all. I love 'em to bits, but clearly forums haven't caught on with Gen Z/younger millennials the way Reddit has. And neither have the various we're-protesting-against-Reddit-by-making-our-own-version-that's-exactly-the-same-but-you-can-use-slurs that have cropped up. Best case scenario, you find a community that's decent at one topic, certainly not the broad scope of Reddit.

So I feel rather trapped there. Reddit's current leadership and direction sucks, but for sheer searchability and real people rather than endless sponsored posts, there just aren't a lot of good alternatives.

I really wish forums became popular again net wide. Tumblr, for all it's faults, is still one of the better big sites out there, with a lot of folks from twitter and reddit migrating over, and yet the owners and staff are trying to turn it into the exact sites that people are leaving for it. Being primarily a tumblrite, it's really frustrating to watch.

The conlang forums have been a must, but they're slowing down...
reddit is very active but remains on the surface of things...
I go back to the mailing list quite a bit...
but I can't find what I'm looking for at the moment...
who's found an interesting site to share and inspire these days...

The tasks I have set for myself today include dusting a bookshelf, with five individual shelves, filled with a lot of books and, I think, even more DVDs (yes, I'm still using DVDs in 2023, so sue me), each of which will have to be dusted individually. Sigh.

linguistcat wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 10:55 am Tumblr, for all it's faults, is still one of the better big sites out there, with a lot of folks from twitter and reddit migrating over, and yet the owners and staff are trying to turn it into the exact sites that people are leaving for it. Being primarily a tumblrite, it's really frustrating to watch.

Honestly, I always found tumblr unusable for anything but occasional browsing. Even FB is better at organising topics and discussions, and that's a low bar.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 5:49 am

linguistcat wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 10:55 am Tumblr, for all it's faults, is still one of the better big sites out there, with a lot of folks from twitter and reddit migrating over, and yet the owners and staff are trying to turn it into the exact sites that people are leaving for it. Being primarily a tumblrite, it's really frustrating to watch.

Honestly, I always found tumblr unusable for anything but occasional browsing. Even FB is better at organising topics and discussions, and that's a low bar.

Tumblr at least lets you see posts chronologically. Twitter attempted to resist this for a while.

It's still rather smoky (albeit not quite as smoky as yesterday) here in Wisconsin.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 4:38 pm It's still rather smoky (albeit not quite as smoky as yesterday) here in Wisconsin.

Chicago's a little better, too, but this is still the worst air pollution I've dealt without outside of Beijing.

It’s awful here. I sent my manager the local air quality (he’s in a different part of the country) and he was shocked. I could taste the air.

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 4:42 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 4:38 pm It's still rather smoky (albeit not quite as smoky as yesterday) here in Wisconsin.

Chicago's a little better, too, but this is still the worst air pollution I've dealt without outside of Beijing.

Tuesday was the worst air pollution I have ever dealt with.

Running a fever.

PS. Might be time to watch some more DS9. I'm in the middle of season 6.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Thu Jun 29, 2023 3:05 pm Running a fever.

Get better!

An old friend of the family is having some really stupid trouble with some bureaucrats, and while some members of my family are usually pretty good at helping to handle this kind of stuff, this time, it seems really intractable.

This is a stupid thing to vent about, but someone wants to implement an I2C scanner using zeptoforth, and did not know how to do it, so I ended up trying to implement an I2C scanner using zeptoforth, and it turns out that some of the key code needed is horribly broken and I have not been able to fix it. This has really sidetracked me from my latest project, implementing DNS, but I feel that I must fix it before I move on.

My landlady lives directly below our apartment, and her day job requires her to get out of bed at, I think, around 5 AM or earlier. Including on weekends. As a result, she doesn't react well to basically any sound significantly louder than a whisper after about 8 PM. Sigh.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Thu Jun 29, 2023 10:23 am

Linguoboy wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 4:42 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 4:38 pm It's still rather smoky (albeit not quite as smoky as yesterday) here in Wisconsin.

Chicago's a little better, too, but this is still the worst air pollution I've dealt without outside of Beijing.

Tuesday was the worst air pollution I have ever dealt with.

Thursday was the worst air pollution I have ever dealt with when I was in Paris. Hopefully, people will suddenly eventually motivated to do something about the climate crisis.

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 11:39 am Thursday was the worst air pollution I have ever dealt with when I was in Paris. Hopefully, people will suddenly eventually motivated to do something about the climate crisis.

Thing is, they won't be, I assure you.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 12:04 pm

MacAnDàil wrote: ↑Mon Jul 03, 2023 11:39 am Thursday was the worst air pollution I have ever dealt with when I was in Paris. Hopefully, people will suddenly eventually motivated to do something about the climate crisis.

Thing is, they won't be, I assure you.

Don't be so pessimistic. Such pessimism is not helpful in motivating people to do something about it. Sure, too little is done about it currently, but not nothing.