Some website changes, general happenings, etc

Happenings

  • Had my buddy round and baked pizza. It was good.
  • Updated my Pocket Reform last week and started getting bugs with the keyboard and screen. I’ve just updated it again, hoping it’s fixed now…
  • My dad popped over to resume playing Final Fantasy VII. We’re up to the Temple Of The Ancients, near the end of the first disc.
  • Took the boys to an RAF museum. It’s free and you get to see and even go inside loads of historic aircraft. Good fun.
  • Teaching starts up again next week, so I started doing some prep for that. Naturally, that meant my chronic pain flared up (as it does almost without fail before I start a new school term).

Links

  • MNT Pocket Reform Retrospective by selfaware soup. Esther got rid of her Pocket Reform after being done with having such an unstable system with recurring hardware issues. I have had a lot of issues with mine, but I’m still quite emotionally attached to it. Some combination of the gorgeous look and feel, supporting a small indie company, and the darn pricetag.
  • Gamergate but actually. This video from NeverKnowsBest is insanely long, but as he says, he now thinks he knows more than anyone on the planet about what actually went down during Gamergate. What’s clear from the staggering amount of research this guy did is that both sides simplified the narrative and memory-holed a lot of context in order to wage the culture war — context that has subsequently been ignored by even academic research on Gamergate. This rabbithole goes deep.
  • Creating an open-source blogging studies syllabus. Brennan is a blogger who always inspires me, and he wants to create a completely free (like properly free, not free so he can upsell you later) resource to share his knowledge — both writing skills and technical knowledge. I’d love to improve my writing so count me in!

On this site

My crossposting to Mastodon is now provided by bridgy, not micro.blog. I stopped paying for micro.blog because I’m not keen on their approach to community curation and the very questionable response to controversy around one of their developers. However, they still had the link to my RSS feed and hence I continued to benefit from the free crossposting service they provide.

Now I’ve jumped through all the hoops of setting up webmentions and so on to automate crossposting to Mastodon via Bridgy and feeding the Mastodon replies back to my webmentions endpoint. One practical benefit is this now happens the moment there’s a new post, rather than whenever micro.blog happens to look at my RSS feed. The next step will be to set up a webhook to then post Mastodon replies to my site as comments, and then everyone will be able to comment however is convenient for them but they’ll all end up back here.

Playing

I played some retro games with my pizza buddy, and have played some games for the final part of my Master System series. Other than that, it’s just been a bit of Terranigma. I’m partway through chapter 3 now and have just got to what I guess is the first twist in the story.