What are some of your favorite pieces of writing about #climatechange? Any genre, directly or indirectly related content, but a piece where the writing really stands out to you.
The End of Eden
Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown
An exquisitely written and deeply researched exploration of wild species reacting to climate breakdown, The End of Eden offers a radical new kind of environmental journalism that connects humans to nature in a more empathetic way than ever before and galvanizes us to act in defense of the natural world before it's too late.
Zorin OS 17 isn’t going to dethrone Linux Mint any time soon. I wish they switched to following Ubuntu LTS releases instead of being on their own timeline. 22.04 package base is going to be 2 years old by the time this releases.
They obviously spent a lot of time on aesthetics and simplicity which seems to be the main appeal of the distribution.
Iowa Senate File 538- gender transition procedures related to minors strips providers of Medicaid funding from Sept 18 forward and doesn't allow Medicaid to be used by clients for gender affirming treatment. If a counselor has a transgender client, and has used the gender dysphoria code and many others (7 pages of ICD codes) then they will be retroactively stripped of funding. I am so angry for clients and for providers. As a clinician, I feel so mad that states are telling transgender youth in lower SES that they can't be who they truly are, and now they can't even talk to a counselor. I just can't. @socialwork@Email2TootBot#SocialWork#psych#psychology#iowa#lgbtqia#transgender#transgenderrights#counseling#counselor#therapist#therapy
It's the first picture of the new Arboreality in the wild! The new version has a silky matte cover, gold foil title text, and aged and distressed Ursula K Le Guin Prize and Philip K Dick awards medallions + more!
Can anyone share a reference (any discipline) to a definition or use of 'politics' / 'political' in the non-technical/metaphorical sense (i.e., not about government) to refer to ideological (or other?) underpinnings?
@serenissimaj
In Spain (and not only in Spain), politicians use the word "political" a lot to refer to "ideological" decisions. Both words (politics and ideology) have ended up having a negative meaning: fantasy, falsehood, partisan interests, etc. And there is no doubt that this way of using these words is contributing to the deterioration of political life.
Obviously, any opinion or decision about how things should be is political and ideological. The definition I like best is that of Chantal Mouffe (On the political, 2005, p. 9):
"I distinguish between 'the political' and 'politics': by 'the political I mean the dimension of antagonism which I take to be constitutive of human societies, while by 'politics' I mean the sets of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the context of conflictuality provided by the political".
I can see Lower Decks maybe taking that award, unfortunately I don’t see SNW winning alone, and I strongly suspect Elizabeth Debicki will take the Best Actress Award.
Is there any value in pursuing a potential autism diagnosis as an adult, if a person gets along well enough in life and isn't interested in finding community?
@smeg@actuallyautistic Many people who did not know me well would have said I got on well enough—a challenging social barometer—and they would have been wrong. Though I'll admit, if I hadn't needed help, had deficits not been perceived by the doctor, I'd have not likely pursued diagnosis on my own due to stigma and internalized ableism. #actuallyautistic
@smeg@actuallyautistic I simply didn't know I needed more knowledge, support, and tools to help myself than I had ever been allowed before. It was inconceivable to me that there were skills I could lear or accommodations I could ask for that could make some parts of life less challenging. #actuallyautistic#autism
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
The term Threadiverse has nothing to do with Meta’s Threads platform, I think the term is actually older than Meta’s announcement. The Threadiverse refers to the platforms that organize things into threads similar to Reddit or forums, right now this mainly means Lemmy and Kbin
I find mastodon boring and I just think people who wanna use defederated twitter are different and more common than people who wanna use defederated reddit. Peertube though, now that is a compelling argument.
How do I make friends as an adult? I'm new to my area and don't have any local friends or community. Have been struggling with loneliness a lot lately.
@solarisfire@magicalgrrrl@actuallyautistic honestly I'd love almost the opposite of that. I'm not very comfortable just going to do an activity with strangers. I'd much rather meet people with a common interest in an activity in a social context for such people, befriend them if that goes well, then do the activity with my new friends.
Ofc I'm open to making friends of any kind, but if we lack things in common, we won't have much to talk about 😅