Month: July 2023

Hexensieber

One of the great things I’ve found about Tumblr over the years is that there’s an awful lot of vintage SF/horror/fantasy book and magazine art on there, and not just the usual American stuff. I’ve got a ton of fumetti covers from there, plus whatever the Spanish French and German equivalents of fumetti are, which brings me to this:

I’ve seen this image on Tumblr a few times, but only recently have I seen it with such strident colours. It’s not quite as bold in this printed edition:

As seen here:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?603894

The picture itself is by Rudolf Sieber-Lonati, an Austrian artist who did tons of covers for magazines and pulp novels like this; you can sample his range at this site devoted to him (in German), which apparently also carries a few items misattributed to him according to his ISFDB entry…

As also seen here:
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?781729

…but it also appears on this recent reprint of an even older Krimi from Bastei, and with the markedly stronger colours of the version at the top. I’m curious as to which is the “right” version now, is the more colourful version what Sieber-Lonati actually painted (and the colours got lost in the printing and/or that copy of the magazine has faded) or was it enhanced somehow for the reprinted issue (but why, if it was)? I don’t know. I like the bigger colours better, anyway…

Of which country I sing?

Apparently this was a tweet posted to the Republican party’s official Twitter account; I say “was” because they apparently deleted the thing once they realised there was a slight problem. And when I say “realised”, I mean a bunch of other people laughed at them for having posted a graphic with the LIBERIAN flag rather than the American one… honestly, these fucking people fetishise their fucking flag like some sacred fucking object, and they can’t even tell it apart from the flag of the country they founded so they could tell their freed black people to get lost back in the early 1800s. Still, it’s not like their loyalty is to the US as such anyway…

Why indeed, Douglas

Why would Douglas Murray (someone with a demonstrated dislike of non-white people and possible issues with women) care what a woman of colour is wearing at a public event? Might Douglas actually just be what we used to call a racist cunt? No need for a postage stamp, I think. Personally I suspect Dougie is mostly jealous that Yasmin Benoit, an avowed asexual woman, looks better in leather than he, an avowed gay man, probably does.

Well that didn’t take long

I said the other day I’d probably finally stop using Twitter if anything happened to Tweetdeck, and, well, it’s like Elon heard me:

Twitter users will soon need to be verified in order to use the online dashboard TweetDeck, the company announced on Monday.
The popular and previously free tool allows users to organize the accounts they follow into different columns to easily monitor content. It has been popular with businesses and news organizations.
The new policy will take effect in 30 days, the company said in a tweet, and could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertisers under Elon Musk’s ownership. […]
The TweetDeck change could be an attempt to push more users to the Twitter Blue program, through which users can pay for verification. The subscription service costs $11 per month in the US (on iOS or Android), £11 in the UK and $19 in Australia, and includes the blue checkmark, a demarcation previously free to politicians, journalists and other notable public figures.
The service attracted just 150,000 subscribers in its first weeks – a small portion of the platform’s global user base of nearly 400 million. As of 30 April, the number of paid subscribers had fallen to about 68,000, according to reports from Mashable.

I was a little perplexed, if not indeed a little concerned, when Tweetdeck suddenly launched a new design at me last night. I no longer remember when I started using it, but it was certainly at least back in the days when it still supported Facebook, and it stopped doing that in May 2013. And in 10 (plus?) years I don’t believe it’s ever changed its design until now. I am not a fan of the new look, which now makes it look and behave more like the web version of Twitter which I am not a fan of either. I was puzzled by what this new design indicated… and I’m guessing this is it.

And if I’m going to have to pay to use a version of Tweetdeck that just looks like the web version of the site within the next few weeks then, well, I’m not. If the site lasts long enough I’ve no doubt the web version will also require payment to use it (on top of how you currently already need an account to see anything). So once Tweetdeck starts demanding cash, I’m gone.

For what it may be worth, while on Mastodon yesterday, someone posted this interesting theory…

…but, as nice as it looks, I don’t buy it. The whole idea outlined here is simply too complicated for me to believe it, and the fact that we now know Jack Dorsey is no longer as keen on that “singular solution” as he was last October doesn’t help. Also, it kind of relies in some degree on Oolong actually knowing what he’s doing… which is debatable at best.

Also, I joined the queue for Bluesky the other day. We’ll see how that goes. If it does.

“Mature”

For reasons I barely understand myself, I still use Tumblr. I mean, it’s largely because it’s practically impossible to actually look at other users’ archives if you don’t have an account yourself. I understand that reason, what I don’t understand is why I’m still using it to actually reblog stuff. And that’s ALL I’m using it for, it should be said, cos Tumblr has terminated both of my previous two accounts for… well, mixed reasons, in that no reason was actually ever given for the death of the second one and the previous one went down for some vaguely defined copyright violation, and in neither case was I given any warning that I was about to be whacked. Hence I’m only reblogging from others now; let them run the risk.

Tumblr famously lost a huge chunk of its userbase in 2018 after cracking down on the amount of porn on the place, which never actually went away as such (I stumbled on a remarkable of actual hardcore in gif form), but more recently they’ve introduced something called community warnings, so that, theoretically, users could fiddle with their settings and not have to be exposed to that stuff if they didn’t want to, while those of us who did want to see that sort of thing could. It was such a logical solution to the issue that you have to ask why Tumblr didn’t implement it in 2018. And the answer to that is, frankly, “because Tumblr”.

I assume that “because Tumblr” also explains why the community warning thing is apparently working as well as their female-presenting nipple detection technology did back in 2018. I mean…

…this has a community warning on it, as you can hopefully see. Apart from the user avatars, this picture is entirely made of text. I don’t know what about this could be construed as “adult”. I mean, even the language is mild for Tumblr. I’m baffled by this. I don’t know at what point the warning was added, but I have no memory of it being there when I queued the post up. Though, to be sure, my memory is not to be relied upon, but whatever the case it makes no sense. Because Tumblr.

Headline of the year

Lyle Shelton’s Family First Party Accuses Sydney’s Gay Penguins Of Faking It

Good. Fucking. Grief.

Lyle Shelton, professional hatemonger and crypto-fascist, reckons penguins are pretending to be gay. Or, at least, they’ve been manipulated into being a same-sex couple by the people at Sydney Sea Life Aquarium. As a career homophobe and bigot, he’s been offended for years by rainbow-coloured footpaths and flags, but now he’s broadening his visual spectrum objections to black and white birds…

Sphen and Magic’s gay romance first went viral in 2018, when staff at the Sydney aquarium noticed the two Gentoo penguins swimming together and becoming inseparable ahead of the breeding season.  The staff first gave the couple a fake egg to practise their parenting skills and subsequently a real egg to foster.
Since then, Sphen and Magic have raised two chicks together and have been termed the “most devoted couples in the penguin colony”.
Last month, NSW Teachers Federation announced that Sphen and Magic’s story would be part of the school syllabus to teach kids about rainbow families.

And, obviously, this is what Lyle is really opposed to rather than penguins per se. Lest we forget, Lyle is the man Fred Nile picked as his replacement to lead the Christian Democrats before he abruptly decided even Lyle was too much of a cunt even for him; having cried big hot salty tears into his cornflakes, Lyle responded by saying something about supporting the party while “build[ing] a political movement that truly reflects Christ’s character”. To which all I can say is that, having actually read the gospels on multiple occasions over the years, either Lyle has grossly misjudged Christ’s character or I have. And I’m 99.999999etc% sure it’s not me. Also, Lyle’s loyalty to the CDP was so great that a few months later he slung his hook with Family First when that party invited him to run them…

In the end, what can you do with Lyle other than engage in the great Australian Twitter tradition of telling him to eat shit:

Masto… do?

So, a few days ago I posted something about why I still have a Twitter account and Mastodon is an imperfect alternative. And the latter still is, but… well…

Yeah. Twitter had an outage a couple of nights ago, and Elon’s response has been 1) make Twitter visible only to people who have Twitter accounts and 2) limit the number of tweets those people can see.

Verified accounts were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts and new unverified accounts were limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts a day respectively.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified, and 500 posts per day for new, unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details. […]
Musk had said that hundreds of organisations were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
He had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.The social media platform had previously taken steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue programme.

I feel like there has to be some way to stop the data scrapers from negatively affecting users that doesn’t also negatively affect those same users, but then again I am not the genius that Elon’s cultists insist he is, as can most clearly be seen by the fact that I didn’t pay an excessive price for a social media platform that wasn’t actually worth the $44b he paid for it and that I then didn’t ruin by firing thousands of staff, some of whom could probably have produced that solution to the data scrapers in a few minutes.

Oy, and indeed, gevalt.

Supposedly this is just a temporary solution, probably until the advertisers start complaining (“you Boer fuckwit, we want people to SEE our ads!”), and one of my Twitter followers suggests it’s actually only happening on the Twitter app rather than the actual website. So it may not be as bad as it initially looks. And, frankly, I don’t think I even read that many tweets per day anyway. It’s still not a good look when you do something like this and it makes major international news; at some point his co-funders are going to start wanting a return on their investment.

Parenthetically, the day this shit started happening was also the day Twitter’s contract with Google Cloud expired, with Oolong apparently refusing to pay the billion dollar tab he owes Google. I’m sure this has no connection to this rate-limiting bullshit.

Anyway, at least one result of the latest Musk-up is a bunch of people coming back to Mastodon, or indeed coming to it for the first time… but whether or not that sticks is something we’ll have to wait and see, cos it didn’t quite do that for a lot of people last November; and this time I suspect that once Bluesky gets over its own current issues, Twitter users wanting to flee the hellsite are more likely to end up there than on Masto… But I have been wrong about many things in the past, and this may well be another one of them. As for me, I’m waiting to see what happens with Tweetdeck, which is pretty much the only way I can use Twitter; I don’t need the phone app and the actual website is just… ergh. If this fucks up Tweetdeck—which I’m surprised Elon hasn’t terminated already—then that probably will be the final end of Twitter and me…