fixing joycons again
I seem to keep fixing joy cons. This time my youngest managed to chew the thumbsticks. Luckily I had some replacement parts. Wonder if Hall Effect thumbstcks might help.
Haddit with Reddit
After 12 years using Reddit, I’ve deleted my data*. I’ll give it a few days to check that my comments and posts have been completely wiped and then I’ll permanently delete my account. Like many other long-term user of Reddit, this is in response to the greed of Reddit’s management and their despicable treatment of Christian Selig, developer of the Apollo app. There’s been a lot of coverage about this recently and the right thing to do is to leave Reddit. I’ve used Apollo for many years and it has been the primary way that I accessed Reddit. I doubt I would have used Reddit very much without Apollo.
Reddit was a mechanism I’ve used for making contact with others with whom I had shared, somewhat niche interests. I’m sure I wouldn’t have encountered contemporary writers like Laird Barron, John Langhan or Caitlin R. Kiernan without belonging to one of the subreddits that have celebrated their work. Or learned about apps like Obsidian. Or got support with tech hardware. Or simply shared enjoyment of music, comics, tv series or movies. “Reddit” was a search term I added whenever I needed information or help online.
It feels like there’s something bigger happening at the moment in terms of online communities. In the early days of the net, many of us used Usenet and blogs. Facebook and Twitter more or less centralised everything and made accessing communities online very easy so – combined with the smartphone – these platforms became ubiquitous. (Google and Microsoft were less successful in this.) My impression is that Reddit enabled people to replace their various accounts on various forums scattered across the internet with one location and one sign-on. Reddit seemed to be the final end of Usenet as a place to discuss anything. This centralisation also concentrated power in the hands of companies who, as we know, monetised user data and now require subscriptions.
It feels that the movement towards decentralisation – away from big tech’s control over platforms – seems to be gathering momentum. I don’t believe we’ll see a return of forums, Usenet or other social media platforms of yesteryear. It does look like social media federation is, though. Simply, the idea is to build a federated network of platforms which no one company controls. Mastodon – essentially a Twitter alternative – is the largest of these federated platforms at the moment but there are many others.
I’ve been on Mastodon since 2018.
In terms of a Reddit alternative, I’ve moved to Lemmy. It’s pretty early days there and – like Mastodon – takes a little time getting used to how to subscribe to communities (the term for subreddits) on different instances. There are lots of communities being set up that seem empty – but I’m sure that they’ll fill up.
What seems to me like an important development in the adoption of Lemmy is wefwef.app, a browser-based app that has a similar interface to Apollo.
* I have to thank Power Delete Suite which made export and deletion of my Reddit data effortless.
Excalidraw & Obsidian
Spent some time today looking at the Excalidraw plug-in for Obsdian by Zsolt Vicsián. (When online,) Excalidraw is a collaborative whiteboard. Using it within Obsidian, Excalidraw functions much like Obsidian’s built in Canvas – but importantly – allows stylus/Apple Pencil input. Making editable handwritten notes is the only feature I’ve missed since moving away from One Note. I’ve been playing with embedding Excalidraw files into Canvas documents kanban/corkboard-style and I’m pleased with the results.
Dance of the Dawn
Chance found me listening to the first track on Yes’ 1973 album, Tales from Topographic Oceans and realising that it was a song from my childhood that I’d been trying to find for a great deal of my adult life. The Revealing Science of God: Dance of the Dawn. The album was one that my mum had at home and I would listen to mesmerised by the eerie opening of the song. For a while I’d confused it with another album of my mum’s, Argus by Wishbone Ash. Things like this are windows into my past.
Here We Are
Impressed and enjoying the first season of HBO’s Perry Mason. Almost at the end of The Two Towers. Have been reading a great deal about the development of the Romance and Spenser’s Fairie Queene. Started Adrian Tchaicovsky’s Shards of Earth. Not reading many comics at the moment other than recent X-Men. Listening to: Van der Graaf Generator (first time ever) and Metallica’s 72 Seasons (better with each listen). Someone said that they felt unstuck in time today and I found myself agreeing.
Reading Memories
I’m almost finished reading The Fellowship of the Ring. Alongside the novel, I’m listening to Phil Dragash’s soundscape recording which I highly recommend. The novel has encouraged lots of memories of the copy of Fellowship I read when I was eleven and took with me to school. It was a large hardback copy without a dust jacket. I remember my puzzlement with the Tom Bombadil and Barrow-Wights chapters which hadn’t appeared in the Bakshi animated movie I adored (there was once a massive falling-out between my friends and me over whether we should go to the cinema to see Buck Rogers or LotR). I can visualise where I sat in the sunny Summer classroom reading after lunchtime. All those years ago.