Skip to main content



Me third-wheeling.

(Image description: black and white image, possibly of an old tv show, of three figures together. A man and a woman seem to be about to kiss, an ugly sea monster looks on. It's as weird as that sounds.)


Gidi Kroon reshared this.


It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.

reshared this

in reply to Adi Robertson

And who can also draw some _wicked_ airbrush artwork for the side of one's van.


Yesterday Jenna Ortega was at the YSL fashion show in Paris. Here is an article about her outfit for those that can read French, others just look at the pictures.
#JennaOrtega
vogue.fr/mode/article/jenna-or…


The film Scream VI (with Jenna Ortega) is listed for 9 March in Dutch cinemas (one day ahead of the US release), but these things tend to change once the date comes nearer.
#JennaOrtega #ScreamVI

Gidi Kroon reshared this.


Friendica 2023.01 released


Christian Pöschl from usd AG has found another XSS vulnerability in Friendica which is close with this hotfix release of Friendica. In addition some other bugfixes for the distribution of forum postings and improvements to the update process of node infor



The promo for Nadia in You season 4 is out. Nadia is played by Amy-leigh Hickman, who is a massively talented actress.
#YouNetflix #AmyLeighHickman
instagram.com/reel/CnZzZVmqsca…


I want to stress this quote:

"Never forget that the interview is for you, too."

So many people forget that. It's also about you selecting them as employer. It's why I don't consider a "not a fit" result to be negative, especially when it's true.


They did not ask a single question about my technical competencies, my achievements, or what I was looking for in my next opportunity. I was told this interview was a vibe check and that they'd prefer if I asked all the questions to see what was important to me, so I did.

Unsurprisingly, they passed on me the next day for not being a "🚩cultural fit". I honestly laughed for a solid hour.

Never forget that the interview is for you, too.



Gidi Kroon reshared this.


I just had the worst #interview of my entire #career . It turned out to be an insightful list of precisely how NOT to attract talent. In that way, it was really useful to me as a candidate.

Presented for your amusement, here's a thread of what I asked. It's going to be a longboi, but here's my absolute favorite:

🚩 Do you have any queer peers? Is this a safe place for them to work? "We don't talk about that here."

#lgbtq #trans #job #discrimination

reshared this

in reply to EVHaste

🚩What interested you about my experience or profile? Why did you reach out to me?

"You don't have that much experience, and we are looking for a candidate we can mold into our needs." [editors note: I have 7 years of experience, 3 certs, and have shipped over 23 projects???]

in reply to EVHaste

They did not ask a single question about my technical competencies, my achievements, or what I was looking for in my next opportunity. I was told this interview was a vibe check and that they'd prefer if I asked all the questions to see what was important to me, so I did.

Unsurprisingly, they passed on me the next day for not being a "🚩cultural fit". I honestly laughed for a solid hour.

Never forget that the interview is for you, too.



Some of my favourite science history facts:

The term "big bang theory" was coined by a scientist who didn't believe in it but in a static universe. He thought by giving it a ridiculous name, the theory would go away. The name stuck.

"Schrödinger's Cat" is a thought experiment often used to explain an interpretation of quantum physics where things can exist in multiple states at the same time as long as there's no other boundary condition (the cat is both dead and alive as long as you don't look into the box). Schrödinger did indeed come up with it, but since he didn't believe in this interpretation, the thought experiment was intended to make fun of the theory.

in reply to Gidi Kroon

Others:

The cosmic microwave background radiation that is the result from the start of our universe, was first by the researchers thought to be the result of pigeon poo that had built up in their antenna. So this research project involved them standing in the big horn of the antenna with brooms scraping out pigeon poo.

When researchers tried to find out how much gravity was slowing down the expansion of the universe and whether it would be enough to pull the universe back together in some kind of big crunch, they redid their calculations many times because the result was so unexpected. But eventually they had to publish it. The answer to whether the universe's expansion was slowing down enough was that it was speeding up. No-one knows why.



It seems there will be a sequel to Zoey 101! It will be called Zoey 102. I think it's a film rather than a series. Thanks to Erin Sanders for the news! She plays Quinn and both Erin and Quinn are the reasons to watch Zoey 101/102.
#Zoey101 #Zoey102 #ErinSanders


To increase diversity they made sure not all white men they consulted where called 'Paul'.


That was a massively long read, but very interesting.

It lacks the other form of engaging with a post: subposting.


Gidi Kroon reshared this.


I'd fallen for, and helped spread, what I now realize was a myth about quote tweets: That there's almost no research on them. Big mistake! Now rectified.

Here's my new post, digging into more than 30 studies with data on quote tweets. They don't settle all the questions. But there are answers, or at least partial ones, to most. It's still complicated, though.

It's a * very * long read, but there are summary points ....1/2

absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/…

#MissedQuoteBoost #QuoteBoost #QuoteTweets

Unknown parent

Hilda Bastian

@ChrisWere I hope bystander behavior improves so there's less mobbing.

I agree it would be terrible if the worst fears came true - I'd hope that would mean a change of course.

In the ideal world, the community would step in & help people called out for legitimate reasons to see what's wrong, edit/delete, & learn from it - and/or moderators if they had the time to do so.

If moderators don't keep out racists & co though, calling out is a way to show the instance/system is failing.

Unknown parent

Hilda Bastian
@ChrisWere People should be safe on any "mainstream" instance, or their specialized interests. As others have pointed out, if marginalized people have to congregate in particular safe spaces, they can easily be locked out by people who don't want to be made uncomfortable about their racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia etc.


Summarising a document into a smaller document by using a smaller font.

Gidi Kroon reshared this.


I keep getting asked to support writing rich-text-formatted posts in #Hometown (we already read them just fine). I finally wrote down, in this comment on this Github issue, a short essay outlining all my concerns with doing so:

github.com/hometown-fork/homet…

Some of this is problems with Markdown, while some of this is problems with interoperability regarding any rich text rendering at all.

Gidi Kroon reshared this.

in reply to Darius Kazemi

@Darius Kazemi It might be interesting seeing how other activity pubs things do it for compatibility at the very least? I'm using friendica right now (yes I know, I'm no fan of PHP, but after trying like 40 different activity pub things it has the right mixture of features that I was looking for even if it doesn't really have the UI I would prefer, but Mastodon doesn't either) and it has the ability for four different types of Rich text, ranging from BB code like things to Mark down, and I forget what else is those are the ones I use.

Here is BB code bold
Here is Mark down bold
I honestly have no clue how it gets rendered out beyond, but I can mix and match all four different things in a single thing without issue and I've had no problems with such intermixing.

This entry was edited (3 years ago)
in reply to OvermindDL1

@overminddl1 it federates as <strong></strong> tags enclosing the bold text, which I expected, but interestingly friendica puts the bbcode in the "source" field but *not* markdown (it translates the markdown to bbcode)


Sorting posts alphabetically as a new timeline algorithm.


In Dutch, what we write as "IJ" is one character, just spelled like that because the actual character is missing. It takes the place of the "Y" in our alphabet. But we've been using this for so long, that a lot of crosswords and also the Dutch Woordle of a few days back, forget this.
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Interestingly, when I look this up it appears that this has given rise to different sorting rules in dictionaries vs phone books.


They should run each tv series until there's at least one episode where they literally jump a shark.

Gidi Kroon reshared this.


Hello people of Mastodon. I'd like some advice. I've currently got a short feed (last 1-2 tweets, I think, automatically updated) from my birdsite account on my website and I'd like to replace that with something similar for Mastodon. Is that possible and can anyone tell me how to do it on a Wordpress site? Thank you for any help you can offer!

reshared this

in reply to Helen Czerski

you can get an rss feed of your public tweets by adding .rss to your account's uri, so a plugin that parses rss and creates a widget on your blog could potentially serve they purpose
in reply to Helen Czerski

This instance looks really good:

newsletters.projectmushroom.xy…



Jenna Ortega is nominated for best actress in a comedy series at the SAG Awards for her role in Wednesday! She deserves all the awards...
#JennaOrtega #WednesdayNetflix #Wednesday


There are many web site themes.

*filtering out the ones that are some kind of call-to-action thing*

There are no web site themes.



Award season, when the US entertainment industry celebrates the things us in the rest of the world have not even heard about.


Tonight will be the Golden Globe award ceremony where Jenna Ortega is nominated for best actress (subcategory comedy or musical series) for her role in Wednesday. I hope she wins! For me she has already won, and as best actress overall, or best person overall. She is also presenting an award, a different one I assume.
#JennaOrtega #GoldenGlobes


Fear The Walking Dead season 8 will come out in the US on 14 May. This will be the final season.

I'm currently watching season 7, because that has just come out for us in the rest of the world.
#FearTheWalkingDead


Gidi Kroon reshared this.


New blog post: "Retiring Pinafore" nolanlawson.com/2023/01/09/ret…

Probably not going to surprise anyone, but I'm stepping back from Pinafore. Thanks to everyone who followed along with this project over the years!

in reply to Nolan Lawson

oh nooo 😵‍💫
Thanks for developing and maintaining the best client out there! 👏
in reply to Nolan Lawson

@nolan, I'm disappointed to hear that. Thank you for the efforts! (And my apologies for requesting a new feature moments ago. I'm a little behind the times. 😆)


So, transcoding on my PeerTube works again, without going into the swapfile this time. Which is a much smoother experience.

Gidi Kroon reshared this.


Is There Life on Mars? We Asked a NASA Scientist


Short NASA video about what we know of the existence of life on Mars. Imported from youtube.com/watch?v=T3-3RHYGjX…. This video is assumed to be public domain since all NASA videos are thought to be public domain. Original description:

Is there life on Mars? No, we have never discovered life on the Red Planet, but we have found lots of evidence that suggests Mars could have once supported life in its ancient past. There’s even a chance that Mars could be habitable beneath its surface. NASA astrobiologist Heather Graham explains more.

Keep up with all of NASA’s endeavors at the Red Planet: mars.nasa.gov

Producers: Scott Bednar, Jessica Wilde
Editor: Daniel Salazar

Credit: NASA

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

reshared this


Gidi Kroon reshared this.


A Viking was shopping at a supermarket when he came across an elderly woman in a wheelchair, almost in tears.

"What's the matter?" he asked.

"Oh," wept the old lady, "I want to have a look at the frozen puddings, but as you can see, there are three steps down into the chiller cabinets."

"No problem," said the Viking, lifting her onto his back. "I'll take you."

He strolled through the chiller cabinets with the woman on his back. She selected several puddings and put them in the basket he was carrying for her. At the other end, her husband was waiting with her wheelchair.

"I'd really like to thank you," said the elderly lady as the Viking set her back down in the chair, "but I don't even know who you are!"

He just waved and walked off.

"I was really worried about you," commented her husband. "What have you been doing?"

"I've been through the desserts on a Norse with no name."



In this The Guardian interview the band B*Witched talk about 1998, just before they became famous, and what happened since. They recreate a publicity photo they did then.

I was a huge fan. Mainly of Lindsay Armaou. Still am. I had seen them about a year before their first single came out in something I happened to catch on video tape. I was struck.


B*Witched in 1998, photographer unknown.


B*Witched in 2022, by Simon Webb.

#Bewitched #B*Witched #LindsayArmaou
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…

This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to Gidi Kroon

Even though B*Witched was one of the most real girl- (or boy-) bands at the time (actually talented performers, down to earth people), there's still some manufacturing going on as you can sense in that article. I dislike that aspect of pop music with a passion. Sinead was made 'the blonde one', Keavy had her personality and hairstyle assigned that she didn't feel happy with. But they were really young women, trusted the record company and went with it. I think other bands are manufactured to even much higher degrees.

The article doesn't mention it specifically, but when Lindsay talks about being 20 (and the youngest) when they started, we early fans know that is not what was in all the biographies... There she was 18, fresh out of high school was her origin story. I think ages 18-24 could be marketed better to high school kids than 20-26...



Beware of feigned victimhood which some people use to make them feel good about 'kicking up instead of shitting down' when they attack their chosen target.


Apparently Twitter has a setting in your profile for your gender, which they automatically populate based on activity. Mine was set at female 😧. Is it really so unnatural for a man to support women?


Instead of evangelising just let people be themselves and make their own decisions.

I think evangelising comes from doubting yourself after having made a choice that doesn't turn out to be very popular. You want others to also come over to your side so you don't look a fool being on your own. But just look at it from your own perspective: are you happy and getting what you wanted out of making your choice? Then that's all that matters.

I've long since stopped worrying about looking like a fool, since I do anyway. I'm always on my own in my choices.





For season two I have some outlandish ideas. They could go full meta and have Wednesday deal with toxic fandom Wednesday-style, after doing it Tara-style earlier. But I'm actually ready for a full season of Goody Addams. Possibly flashback, possibly dual persona, but we haven't seen nearly enough of this very strong character. Or she flees along the fields and mountains with Enid, eight episodes long.

I wouldn't be a very good script writer. I'd do one idea for eight episodes long.



Scream trying to announce something on the day that Wednesday is announced for season two... Sorry, we can't hear you, Scream!
instagram.com/reel/CnFS6ZrOP6_…



Don't say you don't get the news here. That was within 7 minutes from the announcement.