nev

gene wolfe in the streets, clive barker in the sheets
@nev / bugs
@nv / no e
trans liberation now ⚧
#nobot

[profile pic: drawing of big-nosed olive-skinned chinese-jewish androgyne in big glasses, buffalo plaid, and red lipstick]

Public Key

npub19vzldth50vsweja007hm902cet2gtx40vr0spyd4x9q3ed2t4dwqvupvrs

NIP-05 Address

nev_at_bananachips.club@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqszkp0k4m68kg8vewhhltajh4vv44y9n2hkphcqjx6nzsguk496khqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduvlxacq

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relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub19vzldth50vsweja007hm902cet2gtx40vr0spyd4x9q3ed2t4dwqvupvrs

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Last Notes

2025-04-29 14:38:46

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A great deal of the fedi meltdowns, massive failures, or just generally shitty servers I've seen since 2022 result from a server getting too big too quickly, beyond the staff's ability to manage. In light of that I think it's interesting how one of the Fosstodon admins talks about how they, like, wrung their hands and agonized over going invite-only.
I feel like we've gotten accustomed to open registration, no approval required, in a context of increased centralization where sites are run by multi-billion-dollar multinational corporations that have really advanced infrastructure, spam detection tools, and paid staff whose entire job is dealing with bad actors signing up—or, on the other hand, giant open cesspools like 4chan and Reddit.
Closing registrations or requiring new account approval *should not be a big deal*! I've periodically closed registrations on the instance I run when I don't feel up to it.
Growth in itself is not inherently good, and in a system like this where a server can be run by, like, one person, more users are a *liability* and a resource cost. It's not how you should track the health or success of your community. It is not the only way to internet!!

2025-04-29 13:57:40

my inner dialogue:
look, as a moderator, eventually you are going to be called a Nazi, accused of racism, etc., and you need to be able to handle it professionally, without melting down. if it's spurious or hyperbolic or in bad faith, the best you can do is explain your actions transparently ("the user was not banned for their political stance, but for repeatedly sending unsolicited DMs asking people for photos of their feet"). if it's in good faith, you should have some sort of statement ready, along the lines of "as a white person, i'm aware that unlearning white supremacy is a lifelong process and i'm grateful for people calling me out on any—
oh I see. one of your moderators has a reddit account where he endorses…oh. yes I see. well, that's a bad look. you'd better put out a statement explaining that you did not know of the moderator's reddit account or that he is a fascist-sympathizing all-round bigot; that you make moderation decisions by consensus as a group, and so as far as you know his political views did not influence any particular decisions; and that going forward you'll establish procedures to thoroughly vet moderators, including looking at their other social media pro—
…oh. you're fine with that. you're saying publicly that you don't see a problem with a moderator having those views…okay. right. well, you're on your own, buddy
Context:
- summary: https://awawa.club/notice/AtQeTiRp559GTG3Iau
- thread with examples, screenshots etc. (note: mod has since deleted his account/the posts) https://mastodon.social/@lo__/114370692797365997
- admin's defence: https://fosstodon.org/@mike/114394345053697948
- one admin's blog post https://kevquirk.com/blog/my-thoughts-on-the-fosstodon-drama
- another admin's blog post https://mikestone.me/2025-04-28-do-what-you-love (note, they both describe it as "drama")
- both links via https://mastodon.art/@Curator/114400044441100499
Current status: the offending mod's Mastodon account is apparently gone; it sounds like the admins are taking their ball and going home
#FediMeta #moderation

2025-04-29 04:14:16

I am too tired to stay up for more results, I will check in the morning. G'night nerds
#CDNpoli #elxn45

2025-04-26 14:18:16

At The Local, Nick Hune-Brown addresses the troubling trend of Conservative candidates not talking to the media: https://thelocal.to/conservative-party-media/
In my ward (Taiaiak'on—Parkdale—High Park) the Conservatives never show at town halls or debates either, which perhaps isn't that weird for this firmly left-of-centre ward, but I understand it's a more widespread phenomenon?
#CDNpoli #elxn45

2025-04-26 14:18:16

2025-04-25 16:33:45

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@nprofile…l25h personally I've found that after a while Spotify just kept recommending the same stuff to me.
I have switched to community/public radio (KEXP, KCRW, WFMU, etc.) and discovered a bunch of new artists!

2025-04-21 12:47:10

Oh, jeez.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/pope-francis-dead-1.7514706 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/pope-francis-death-reaction-toronto-1.7514740
The guy wasn't perfect, but he accomplished some important things—and in this time of authoritarianism, intolerance, and general right-wing backlash, I fear what the next guy could be like.
#RIP #news

2025-04-19 19:36:35

in other news, today I learned that crows can correctly nest and close brackets/parentheses, which is going to make me feel just great the next time I'm banging my head against the wall over a script that doesn't work only to find out I forgot to close one (1) bracket
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-perform-yet-another-skill-once-thought-distinctively-human/

2025-04-19 04:42:03

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@nprofile…naem as someone who has moved around a lot and not always gotten their voter information card or been on the voters' list: CHILL, this isn't the United States (yet).
you do not have to be registered in order to vote!
you do not need a voter information card to vote!
- if you don't know where your polling place is, look it up here https://www.elections.ca/home.aspx
- bring ID with you when you vote (any government ID with your name, photo, and address; or 2 pieces of ID with your name and address; full list here https://www.elections.ca/content2.aspx?section=id&document=index&lang=e; or, someone who knows you who is voting at the same place and can vouch for you)
you'll stand in line longer but you can still vote just fine.

2025-04-16 20:28:34

i know people hate to be told they're using software for something it wasn't designed to do but seriously, people who do a lot of long social media "threads" or widely shared announcements/media and want them to be accessible on the same site forever or else at least easily migrated somewhere else…
…a blog. you're thinking of a blog.
(yes, working on a blog post about this)

2025-03-31 22:19:54

Hey #Toronto, where were you on Friday, March 21? If you were:
- on the Via train from London to Toronto in the morning
- in the Pizzeria Libretto at University & Adelaide in the afternoon
- on the Via train from Toronto to London at night
you *may* have been exposed to #measles! More specific details, plus what symptoms to watch for, here: https://www.toronto.ca/news/toronto-public-health-advising-residents-of-potential-measles-exposure/
P. S. if you're not sure if you've got the MMR (measles, mumps, & rubella) vaccine or not, you can get a blood test—OR you can just get the vaccine, doubling up won't hurt you.
#news

2025-03-31 18:41:30

god knows this place has deep and fundamental problems, but fedi, which I joined in late 2016, was the first social media place I openly talked about being trans (after doing a bunch of social/legal/medical stuff in 2014-2015).
(partly because I've seen many a hatchling make an ass of themselves or get taken advantage of by being very publicly trans in those volatile first few years, partly because I didn't want to end up pigeonholed as That Person Who Writes About Trans Things when I wanted to be That Person Who Writes About Municipal Affordable Housing Policy or whatever.)
I have complicated and mostly negative feelings about "visibility". I think it's important for those of us who *can* be publicly out to be so, for the young 'uns and the still-closeted. But "visibility" in and of itself isn't inherently good. It's not inherently empowering. Trans people—specifically trans women—have probably never been more visible in 🇨🇦/🇺🇸 politics. Is that helping us/them any?
there's "visibility" and then there's "the ability to control your image in the public eye" or "the ability to be seen as (and when and where) you wish to be seen" and those are all kind of different things.
anyway I don't have any settled thoughts on this or anything in particular I want people to take away, that's just what's going through my head this #TransDayOfVisibility / #tdov.

2025-03-31 14:36:09

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When evaluating some random claim someone makes on the Internet, you can ask yourself:
- Do they say *how they know this*? Do they have a link to an article or mention a book or person you can look up?
- For claims about a historical event, is any date and place given?
Now, of course, any random person can write a blog post or article saying anything they want. There are many ways to evaluate how trustworthy an article is—including asking the questions above. But let's take small steps for now!
(P. S. the original clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHrZRJR4igQ )
#MediaLiteracy
https://sb-bananachips-club.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/114/257/533/758/774/532/original/ea65277eaf21257f.jpg

2025-03-31 14:24:51

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So in March 2023(?), Tumblr user fleshdyke (https://web.archive.org/web/20230913091647/https://www.tumblr.com/fleshdyke/711416276490321921/thats-because-i-lied-about-this) claimed that public bathrooms are free in Canada because "two gay men got arrested for fucking in a public bathroom but they argued since you had to pay for it it was a hotel and it was fine". User hieronymus-botch called them on this, and fleshdyke admitted they made it up. In March 2025, Mastodon user @nprofile…wslx repeated the false claim with no source.
You may be interested in learning some real history about Canada's indecency laws against homosexuality, and about public toilets!
Hamish Copley writes about how Canada got its "gross indecency" law prohibiting gay male sex: https://thedrummersrevenge.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/the-gross-indecenency-law-in-canada/
And about the first men jailed for "gross indecency" between consenting adults (probably in public): https://thedrummersrevenge.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/the-first-police-raid/
Read more about the criminalization of homosexuality (and eventual decriminalization) in the Canadian Encyclopedia: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-1969-amendment-and-the-de-criminalization-of-homosexuality
Chris Bateman writes about the history of public toilets in Toronto, including fearmongering about gay men using them, for Spacing Magazine: https://spacing.ca/toronto/2014/07/09/happened-public-washrooms-toronto/
See also this excerpt (re: Toronto) from Lezlie Lowe's book about the dismal state of public toilets, here: https://nowtoronto.com/culture/rise-and-fall-of-public-toilets-in-toronto/
There's currently a design contest going for an "innovative" new public toilet, hopefully to be installed in my very own neighbourhood of South Parkdale: https://www.frequencynews.ca/news/toronto-advocacy-group-will-pay-you-1500-to-design-a-new-public-washroom/
And here's some pieces on the fall of pay toilets in the US (thanks to a grassroots free-toilet movement), and the argument that they should be brought back: https://psmag.com/economics/dont-pay-toilets-america-bathroom-restroom-free-market-90683/ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/why-the-u-s-should-give-pay-toilets-another-chance
#lgbtq #history #canada #toronto #parkdale #MediaLiteracy

2025-03-26 00:49:17

happy Middle-Earth New Year (anniversary of Sauron's defeat, March 25, 3019) to all who celebrate

2025-03-24 18:14:40

saw a crusty screenshot-of-other-social-network meme, looked up the original news story, a different news story with more context, the original tweet, the tweet author's website, and now i can't find the post again. oh well.
anyway, one of my favourite little etymological nuggets is that "algorithm" ultimately derives from the region historically called Khwarazm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khwarazm), today on the border between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, because the medieval mathematician whose treatise introduced many mathematical concepts to Europe originally hailed from there. https://www.etymonline.com/word/algorithm

2025-03-17 22:11:54

prog rock is short for "progesterone rock"

2025-03-17 16:49:42

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@nprofile…pye9 When I was blogging more regularly I used to be on Patreon but, as I had no interest in paywalling content, I just cut out the middleman and switched to a PayPal donation button on my site. (You can even set it up to be a monthly thing.)

2025-03-13 16:39:39

New blog post! "Branching Out: Some GitHub.com and GitLab.com Alternatives" https://nevillepark.ca/2025/03/13/branching-out-some-github-gitlab-com-alternatives/ :boost_ok:

2025-03-09 22:21:30

why does installing the linux "at" program also require installing a fucking bsd email program help i'm on debian why
#computeing

2025-03-09 21:16:28

Gitea is 1) commercial and 2) based in the US, which I know many people are looking to avoid.
@nprofile…8x0h (https://codeberg.org) is a public server running Forgejo, which began as a Gitea fork: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/ It's where I have most of my stuff.
A few more public Forgejo servers: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/delightful-forgejo#public-instances Shout-out to @nprofile…h2sp' https://git.gay.
There's also the venerable Sourcehut, whose UI makes me break into hives: https://sourcehut.org/
Want to self-host? @nprofile…gg0f is dead easy to set up and has Gogs, Gitea, Forgejo, and GitLab apps: https://apps.yunohost.org/catalog?search=git&category=dev
OK with Gitea/GitLab servers outside the US? @nprofile…7666 has a public GitLab server: https://framagit.org So do @nprofile…82z0: https://git.autonomic.zone and https://git.coopcloud.tech, plus they'll do paid hosting (price scales with budget).
For cheap independent hosting, PikaPods has Gitea: https://www.pikapods.com/
There are SO many options if you are willing to give up the "everyone on the planet uses the same public Git server" model.
#git #github #gitlab #selfhosting #forgejo

2025-02-27 19:56:45

so, when i was 8-9 or so—this would've been 1993-1994—we got our first home computer. however, bc broke single mom, it was not the latest and greatest. it was a secondhand Tandy of some kind, with a monochrome monitor (yellow on black). there was no mouse, and no internet connection.
it was graphical, with a desktop consisting of various applications in a sort of grid layout. we mostly used the text editor to write stories (printed out on a dot-matrix printer, natch), but there was also a game of hangman, a music application (I distinctly remember a delightfully screechy MIDI version of Pachelbel's Canon in D), and various businessy things like a contact manager and a database application that we had no use for.
anyway, i recently went on a deep dive to figure out what the operating system was, and it was some version of Tandy DeskMate: http://toastytech.com/guis/indexdm.html https://winworldpc.com/product/tandy-deskmate/deskmate-3x
(the music application is only mentioned in the manual for Personal DeskMate2, and hangman in DeskMate 3. the drawing application that looks closest to what I remember is the v2 one. and, like I said, it was a monochrome monitor so things looked a little different than in the screenshots I've found online. I also remember a password-protected "diary" application, but maybe I'm misremembering and it was on a later computer.)
#computeing

2025-02-26 18:57:03

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@nprofile…wjfe source: https://www.thestar.com/business/torontos-pride-2025-festival-in-peril-as-large-sponsors-pull-funding-amid-u-s-backlash/article_fee09b10-f457-11ef-9ca8-13c6de591f84.html
archive in case of paywall: https://archive.ph/0zFHE

2025-02-12 18:44:18

Looking for free ($0) alternatives to Wordpress/Tumblr/Medium/Substack I can recommend to *non-techy*, non-pro people.
What it should have:
- WYSIWYG web interface
- ability to upload photos and easily embed videos
- ideally, basic "newsletter" (ability for people to get new posts emailed to them) functionality; or an RSS feed that can get hooked up to some kind of email service
- not look like shit out of the box (this rules out, e. g., Blogspot)
#AskFedi :boost_ok:

2025-02-10 15:38:04

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@nprofile…lypn it's Canada!!! do we even have enough guns??

2025-02-07 03:34:22

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@nprofile…7h5n @nprofile…640j this person is pro-nuclear, if that tells you anything

2025-01-15 17:01:13

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@nprofile…pye9 @nprofile…9vtz unfortunately the post is for logged-in users only.
I recently read that Lee series; like _The Sandman_ it centres around a (smaller) pantheon of personifications of death, madness, fate, etc., and the authors do have similar styles. It's hardly a unique concept, though, so solid evidence would have to be something like lifting passages verbatim. I trust Nevins knows his stuff (followed him for a while years ago on Tumblr) but would like to see the details for myself.

2025-01-06 15:24:17

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@nprofile…p06x @nprofile…qxzd idle question that isn't really a bug report/feature request: any particular reason for having "view in browser" and "refresh" in the three-dot menu in the top bar, and all the other items in the three-dot menu in the bottom bar?
(I keep instinctively looking for "View in browser" in the bottom menu, not sure if just me)
#tusky
https://sb-bananachips-club.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/113/782/085/529/094/751/original/8ea46ff897a8e824.png
https://sb-bananachips-club.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/113/782/085/549/772/853/original/695653f0d8e759c1.png

2024-12-30 14:39:43

Apropos of current Fedi Main Character but perennially applicable: everyone, every single person (but particularly anyone high-profile and/or male) needs a mutual who often reads their posts, who can tell them to log off and stop posting, and whom they solemnly swear to obey (or at least, whose advice to seriously consider) in this regard. Plus, ideally, a few other mutuals who know who they are and can contact them if necessary. Like an emergency contact, but for embarrassing yourself on the internet.
I'm completely fucking serious about this. This is one of the responsibilities of the backup admin for the server I run.

2024-12-20 16:58:20

idle question: any recommendations for babby's frist VPS hosting?
not for anything important or urgent, just might want something to noodle around with
:boost_ok: #AskFedi

2024-12-17 00:18:12

Well, got back from a walk in the park, took (what felt like) a long nap, woke up and immediately got sucked back into @nprofile…yu7x's _Schild's Ladder_ (which @nprofile…jqvx recommended to me, I think I must have been like "hit me with the hardest, weirdest, mathiest fuckin' Egan you got, I swear I can handle it") which I got halfway through in the wee hours this morning while I couldn't sleep, finally emerged only knowing it was dark and having NO idea what time it was, pleasantly surprised to find it was around 6:30.
I would describe _SL_ as…"_The Gods Themselves_ but with current science and gender politics, and with all the rigor and, unfortunately, literary flair of a physics textbook"? Weirdest thing, while reading (and understanding very little of it, I'm afraid) I could practically…*see* a trippy New Wave sf version of the novel where the extremely didactic passages about quantum theory are rendered through lots of philosophical metaphors and quasi-fantasy stuff.
Anyway I was reading the credits/references and was like, *that* John Baez (@nprofile…fa4k), from mathstodon?? It's the first time in a long while I've known of someone from fedi first and real life second, which used to happen to me all the time on Twitter. A little bittersweet-feeling, yet hopeful.
#sff

2024-12-05 02:03:28

Heads up: the #Guardian and the #Observer are both full of TERFs and have played, and continue to play, key roles in stoking the UK's transphobic panic. So do whatever the fuck you want on December 5 and 6 because UK journalism does not deserve to survive.
(I'm seeing unsourced and usually no-alt-texted screenshots asking people not to share stories from those outlets. I am not going to do people's work for them.)
Context: https://www.npr.org/2024/12/04/nx-s1-5213914/guardian-strike-observer-sale
#news #MediaLiteracy #Mediajustice #labour #strike

2024-12-02 23:22:43

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@nprofile…lypn there's a lot to unpack here

2024-11-29 23:05:03

At High Park for #CriticalMass!
People are gathering, bike lights, scarves and hats are being handed out. Someone next to me is livestreaming!
#bikeTO #BikeNite
https://sb-bananachips-club.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/113/568/727/941/633/134/original/3f14ea8109880b82.jpg

2023-11-22 02:48:09

fucking
WHAT
https://sb-bananachips-club.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/111/451/916/192/783/412/original/6a7eaf3e11365d2b.png

2023-08-30 01:57:48

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@npub1y4h…t26u Paul Verhoeven is not really…subtle about things

2023-08-19 01:03:59

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@npub1r47…wytr are you even Canadian

2022-01-17 17:37:18

i'd like to share my thoughts on juncos
#birdeing #MastoArt #ArtWithOpenSource #CreativeToots 🐘
https://sb-bananachips-club.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/107/639/007/620/740/332/original/1b7830a11a298a89.jpg