Month: August 2023

RIP Tater Tot

In memoriam Tater Tot, the world’s favourite new grumpy cat. He came into this world with a cleft palate and four malformed limbs, so he had plenty of cause to look so angry in his photos… and now he’s gone. TT made his Internet debut in a Facebook group started by his rescuer, who advised there of the little fellow’s passing (from uncertain reasons, but possibly pneumonia and/or a heart problem; he was too small to even be tested) and, well, oh. That kind of hurt to read when I saw it on Twitter, where a lot of people are grieving. Poor little bastard.

Reverse the polarity of the idiot flow!

Found this while going through the archives:

…And I love this as much as I did the day I screenshotted it from Tumblr (which must’ve been nearly ten years ago). It’s such a misunderstanding of the show in general and Pertwee’s Doctor in particular. I mean, yeah, Three did render his services, but it wasn’t out of any sense of duty to the nation or UNIT… what motivates him during his exile on Earth is, in large part, self-interest (alongside his own curiosity and compassion); he says outright in the last scene of “Spearhead From Space” he wants UNIT’s help in getting himself away from Earth again. He takes as much from them as he gives to them (indeed, in “Inferno” him exploiting UNIT’s presence at Project Inferno is what causes most of his troubles in that story). It’s almost like Steve didn’t actually watch Pertwee’s episodes, or only saw something in them that he wanted to see but wasn’t really there… these days, of course, if Steve had any idea about the political and cultural subtexts did find their way into the show under Barry Letts’ aegis, he’d just be whining about the wokeness of the whole thing.

Third time’s the charm

Yeah, Dampnut’s been indicted again, this time for the BIG Thing… you know, the whole overthrowing of democracy thing on January 6th 2021… and I’m still not excited by it somehow. Maybe I will be if he actually ends up in jail… and I say “if” rather than “when” cos for some reason I’m not convinced it’ll actually happen somehow.

What the fuck, Florida?

Honestly…

A 54-year-old Florida man diagnosed with leprosy adds to a growing number of cases detected in the south-eastern United States, which appears to be a new hotspot for the disease.
It follows recent alerts from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the first cases of locally-acquired malaria in the US in two decades; four of which were in Florida.
Leprosy incidence, or rates of new leprosy cases, has been increasing in southern parts of the US since 2000, with reported cases more than doubling in south-eastern states over the past decade. Central Florida now accounts for almost one-fifth of US cases.
Yet a shrinking proportion of US leprosy cases are diagnosed in people born outside the country, while a growing number of reported cases appear to lack any of the typical risk factors of the disease.
“Those trends,” write the three dermatologists who alerted public health officials to the Florida man’s diagnosis, “contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the south-eastern United States.”

Not just politically cancerous, but an apparently increasing literal health hazard. Will Ron DeShittis do anything about it? Probably not. Will the other 49 states ever just agree to cut Florida adrift from the rest of the country? Also probably not.

By any other name

The Australian poster for a film that horror fans may recognise as Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm. Evidently it got renamed here to avoid confusion with “Richard Bruce”‘s Fantasm, a… somewhat different sort of film. I can’t imagine that anyone would have confused the two, though… mind you, the “if this one doesn’t scare you you’re already dead” tagline would actually work just as well for Fantasm, which is kind of horror of a different sort…

More Mastothoughts

Here’s an interesting essay from the other day, written by Erin Kissane (who has a couple of other Masto meditations) on the theme of why people have stopped using Mastodon… basically she popped the question on Bluesky (still waiting for that invite, JACK), collated the 500-odd responses she got back, and the title “Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t” kind of sums up the whole thing. An excerpt:

The most common—but usually not the only—response, cited as a primary or secondary reason in about 75 replies—had to do with feeling unwelcome, being scolded, and getting lectured. Some people mentioned that they tried Mastodon during a rush of people out of Twitter and got what they perceived as a hostile response.
About half of the people whose primary or secondary reasons fit into this category talked about content warnings, and most of those responses pointed to what they perceived as unreasonable—or in several cases anti-trans or racist—expectations for content warnings. Several mentioned that they got scolded for insufficient content warnings by people who weren’t on their instance. Others said that their fear of unintentionally breaking CW expectations or other unwritten rules of fedi made them too anxious to post, or made posting feel like work. […]
There obviously are unwelcoming, scoldy people on Mastodon, because those people are everywhere. I think some of the scolding—and less hostile but sometimes overwhelming rules/norms explanation—is harder to deal with on Mastodon than other places because the people doing the scolding/explaining believe they have the true network norms on their side.

There’s definitely something to this. One of my own least favourite aspects of Masto is the evangelising (one thing about Twitter is I almost never see anyone arguing how great it is; no idea if this is also true of Bluesky or Threads, cos as noted I still haven’t had an invite to the former (JACK) and I can’t even download the Threads app to see what it’s like cos my phone is such a piece of shit the Google Play store refuses to add it); it’s like, yeah, if we’re happy on here we already know why, we don’t need to be further convinced and you just look like you’re trying to convince yourself more than anyone else… and the bit about “true network norms” is a part of that, a sort of “the way, the truth, the life” thinking; we’ve found a thing that works for us, therefore it’s the way everyone should follow.

The responses I’ve seen so far on Mastodon itself have been interesting, including one chap who seemed to miss the point of the exercise and take some offence at it:

Like, good for Wyatt and the other people who have no issues with Mastodon, but… they weren’t the subject of Kissane’s question. The question was about people not happy with their Mastodon experience, and about 500 people on Bluesky reported dissatisfaction. Think that it might be YOU, Wyatt. Anyway, he attracted a certain amount of irritation, leading to a bit of a pile-on… of the sort you might have found on Twitter. Who says Mastodon’s nothing like Twitter at all…