FeedCity

Good oligarchs and bad oligarchs. We need to help the good ones have the guts to get on the air, with really good creative advertising, telling the people exactly what's being done to them now, without pulling any punches. They have to be warned and they aren't. You have to be paying a lot of attention to understand. And it's hard to know what to believe. We have to have a voice in this, now.

Andrew Hickey wrote something I wholeheartedly agree with. "If you think the day job might literally kill you, and you have no kids, quit and try that mad idea. That might also kill you, but better to die trying something wonderful than be killed by a crappy job."

My response: "My life story since i was 22, and I'm 69 now. It's worked out okay, not perfect, I have regrets, but I would have far more if I hadn't bet on myself. My 22-year-old self was very right about a lot of things."

Great points in this conversation about how Micro.blog handles longer blog posts with titles. Maybe the time has come for a change here. I’ve never wanted Micro.blog’s timeline to be a bunch of summaries and “read more” links, but right now we should be encouraging longer posts, not relegating them.

Pouring down rain this morning, so maybe not a good time for that walk I was planning. Today is the first day in a week that I don’t have anything on my calendar. That means coding and email progress.

Another upcoming theme from @Mtt! This looks great. It solves a problem that many people ask about:

In my opinion, longform content should have higher visibility than microposts. Unfortunately, that content is often lost in the constant stream of thoughts we push out. As a remedy, I’m soon to release a Micro.blog theme that prioritizes longform content without losing your microposts.

Back in July 2023 I went into the studio along with the rest of Salter Cane. We had been practicing a whole lot of new songs for over a year beforehand. Now we were ready to record them. We went in with a shared approach. We were going to record everything live. We were go...

Pika Pulse is shutting down:

We’re a small team and we want the bulk of our time and energy to be spent building the best software we can. It’s not possible for us to read everything…

I wondered how they handled it and now we know it was a random selection of posts. I wanted Micro.blog’s Discover to feel like a snapshot of posts from the community, but we really do look at each one. It is hard.

We’re overdue for changes too. There will always be some community aspect to Micro.blog, even if small, because I’m unsatisfied with every other social network.

Looking out over the trees and mist from the parking garage at the title company. Just signed our life away for the next 30 years.

Recently there have been some sporadic problems with custom CSS and themes in Micro.blog — basically a glitch when I rolled out an optimization to make Hugo static files faster. I’ve made more improvements today. Please reach out if your blog is hosed in any way.

Giving the Salter Cane website a fresh lick of paint:

https://saltercane.com/

Still digging through support email. Happy to announce that starting next week, @sod will also be joining on a very part-time basis to help answer email questions. We worked with him a year ago on Micro.blog templates too. I’m inspired and thankful for the help!

There should be ads on tv tonight saying they're coming for the abortion pill. Spell it out clearly so the voters can heat it as it happened. Otherwise they will rightly blame the Dems for not telling them what was going on. It's not too late Dems.

One more thing then I have to get back to work. There's a great moment in Woody Allen's Sleeper where a time traveler asks how the world was destroyed when Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead. If you lived in NYC in the 70s and 80s you knew Albert Shanker as a NY character like Al Sharpton or Curtis Sliwa. New York had its own celebrities, people who were famous mostly in New York, but not as much outside. So Albert Shanker with a nuclear weapon kind of fit his character in an extreme way, and it was an inside reference only NYers would get. Well in case you didn't know it, back in that time or a little later, Trump was one of those Albert Shanker types. And yes, he has all the nuclear weapons there are. Isn't that weird?

While I don’t think it’s likely, if in the future, the only EV allowed to be sold in the United States is a Tesla, as Elon Musk has an office in the White House, that won’t be the most ridiculous thing to happen in Trump’s term. Not even close.

From the Verge: Volkswagen cancels ID.7 sedan for US.

Batch, a new favorite. I can’t believe I’ve been living within walking distance to this place for over a year and never tried it before this week. A misty, gray morning.

We're programmed to believe big companies make things the right way and individual people can't be trusted. We're going to have to break out of that rut, to stop trusting them so much. It's like the 2008 banking crisis, but this time they've taken over the government, not just the economy. The tech industry, believe it or not, started with assumption that it was the other way around. That people were the brilliance, and companies started wars to make money (we were the generation that stopped the Vietnam war, btw). I got into computers because I thought I could earn a living that way, but quickly discovered how inherently subversive they are. They weren't just for the nerds with the plastic pocket protectors, they were also for hippies. Some of us are still here and we want to create with you.

Molly White has an excellent OPML subscription list. I want to make something with this, maybe a Bluesky feed reader? I want to show people they can combine skills to make new media. We don't have to wait for big companies to do it for us. We can work together. That's how we rise to the challenges we share. We can flip this bad situation around, turning problems into opportunity. Big changes happen now. We can steer in the direction we want to go.

Seth Godin as usual has the perspective I need to hear, about prioritizing the important things instead of the urgent:

Waiting for trouble means that you’re going to spend your days dealing with trouble.

Over the weekend, I made a few pretty big, probably overdue changes. A couple will be visible, like Core Intuition.

• Springy easing with linear()
• Typed custom properties
• View transitions for page navigation
• Transition animation for dialog and popover
• Transition animation for details
• Animated adaptive gradient text

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