Do I Know You?
I was reading Deadly Headshot's toot on Christmas day, and it got me thinking about Object Permanence and social media.
The funny thing is, I can remember conversations I had on IRC in the late 1990s, but there are many people I greatly enjoyed conversing with on the Fediverse just a couple years ago that have either simply disappeared (either deleted their account or simply don't post/reply anymore), or just don't show up in my "orbit" anymore.
All too often, I completely lose track of who I'm talking to, being enthralled in the conversation itself and not mindful of the individual identity of my conversant. This is exacerbated by the fact that I'm often using a command-line Fediverse client which only shows users' avatars when requested, and in a separate image viewer program.
I think the best advice I can give to someone concerned about their permanence in people's minds online would be to use a simple-but-memorable avatar/profile pic (and not change it), and to have a unique and memorable user name. Thinking of the avatars I find most memorable, some are basically geometric (but unique), some are images of unique faces (one I'm thinking of is a black-and-white halftoned image of a vampire lady), some are custom clip-art, like a certain fellow who strongly resembles an avocado. The ones that I often get confused with other people are the ones that are either extremely simple logos or geometric shapes, or simple portraits. Most faces just aren't that memorable, sorry. ^__^
Keep Buggering On
Well, today is the last day of Writing Month, and this is my 20th blog post of 20, which is what I signed up for.
My last post was a lot more involved and time-consuming than I expected, so I wanted to end on a high note, with a fairly …
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I Miss Palette Rotation
Background
In the halcyon days of 16-bit microcomputers, there was a computer graphics technique used by many demos and some games known as Palette Rotation, Palette Shifting, Palette Animation, or Color Cycling.
Computers weren't fast enough to change the entire contents of screen memory in graphics mode (even relatively low …
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Love is a choice
I was going to go in a different direction for tonight's blog post (thanks to the help of some kind fedifriends), but while starting on that post, I felt like I needed to revive a blog post idea from a few weeks ago first.
A month and four days ago …
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How to love your neighbor...
...in the midst of... all this
You're driving to work and you see them. A bunch of people holding up signs in favor of the human being (if they can be truly described as such!) that you loathe the most on the entire earth.
Your blood boils.
You air out …
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My Socratic Sign
In Part I, I listed several things/places/events that felt magical to me in my life. In this article, I will discuss the most recent one, which I refer to as my "Socratic Sign."
Life, Rebooted
At 40 years old, I found myself without a job and without the …
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Magical Moments
This article is written based on a prompt I shared with a friend a couple weeks ago. You can my article from that "round-robin" prompt exercise here.
Since neither of my fedifriends have written their prompts yet, I'm actually borrowing the idea I gave Amin to write:
I'm going to …
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A Grief Exchanged
The working title of my previous post was, "A Grief Exchanged."
I couldn't quite make the title work in my head, so I abandoned it for "Adoption," which still works well.
I'm re-claiming that title for this post, because I can make more sense of where I was going with …
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Adoption
I wrote six months ago about the process of mourning and also my struggle to find another cat to adopt.
There were a couple times that I had visited with a cat at a shelter and slowly warmed up to the possibility of adopting them, only to find that the …
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Freedom
Content Warning: this is all coming from a fairly Christian worldview, and so may seem a bit like proselyting to those from other traditions and beliefs. I'm just putting out what I'm mulling over, so as always, you're welcome to read it, or wait for another nerdy UNIXy post a …
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