gil (he/they) @beehaw.org My name's Gil, and I'm a Texas-based writer.
Feel free to follow me on Mastodon (@tech.lgbt) or check out my Substack!
(he/they)
Good journals/planners for fountain pens?
So, I like to write simple notes, journaling, to-do lists, or essays/fiction with a fountain pen whenever possible, and I'm trying to find a good journal or planner to use. My Pilot and Diamine inks feather a lot on the paper I'm currently using, and that's really the main problem I want to address.
What brands or products would you recommend? What kind of paper do you like best?
VS Code, but may switch to VSCodium or Neovim eventually.
I use mostly the web app. Memmy, Mlem, Jerboa, Liftoff, etc. all look cool, but to be honest, I'm not sure I'll ever go back to having an app on my phone like I did with Reddit. I think I want my engagement with Lemmy to be more on a "when I feel like it" basis than a "when a push notification summons me" basis.
The relationship between body-mass index and weight-related ailments varies by race
> Potent new anti-obesity drugs can reduce body weight by 15-20%. However, regulation and costs limit who can take them. In America, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved just one of the new drugs, Wegovy, for weight loss—and only for patients with a body-mass index (BMI) above certain thresholds. The cut-off is 27 for people with weight-related illnesses, and 30 otherwise. For someone 1.7 metres (5’7”) tall, these correspond to 78kg (172lb) and 87kg. People with lower BMIs can try to get a prescription anyway. However, insurers rarely cover such “off-label” use of the $1,000-per-month drugs. > > BMIs vary between racial groups. According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, run by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Asian-Americans aged 18-75 have an average BMI of 25, compared with 29 for whites, 30 for Hispanics and 31 for black people. As a result, few Asians meet the FDA’s criteria.
Spill, which launched on Apple’s App Store in mid-June, is the latest platform some have said they are turning to following Elon Musk’s continued changes to Twitter.
> The social platform, created by ex-Twitter employees Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell and DeVaris Brown, has garnered online buzz in the last week, with Black celebrities including musician Questlove and actor Keke Palmer counted among its recent members. By Monday, after Musk limited the number of tweets users can see, Spill began to climb the rankings of Apple’s App Store. > > The recent boost in popularity comes amid constant discourse among Black Twitter, an informal digital enclave noted for its meme culture and political activism. Many within the community have voiced concerns about inadequate moderation of hate speech on Twitter, arguing that the app has become an increasingly “toxic” space under Musk’s leadership.
This person's upvoting beans, and you're all just going to do nothing about it? What a sick world we live in.
A new Texas law forces vendors to rate sexual content in schoolbooks. They're not happy about it
Book vendors selling to Texas public schools, ranging from national sellers like Amazon to local bookstores with eight employees, must now rate the books they sell based on sexual content.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ninja/post/49635
> Book vendors selling to Texas public schools, ranging from national sellers like Amazon to local bookstores with eight employees, must now rate all the books they sell based on sexual content, according to new legislation signed into law on June 12. > > If the book vendor fails to comply with state library standards that will be in place by January 1, 2024, they’d be barred from selling to Texas public schools.
Tribes in the Midwest and Great Plains are embracing and sharing traditional agricultural knowledge with both Native and nonnative farmers to improve the soil and water for everyone.
Majority of Americans believe racism adds barriers to people of color’s success
> * Nearly seven in ten (67%) say it is a serious problem that individuals treat Black, Latino, Asian, and Native Americans worse than white Americans. Two-fifths (39%) say it is a very serious problem. > * Three-fifths (63%) say racism makes it more difficult for people of color to succeed in America. > * Nearly half (49%) of Americans believe that racism is both a problem of how society works and how individuals treat each other. A quarter (26%) say it is mostly a problem of how individuals treat each other. These findings are similar to when asked in June 2020 (48% and 28%, respectively).
Yes - I believe you only need to make a comment in that community so that someone can appoint you.
Am I making up fediverse drama? No... it's the Beehaw admins that are wrong
Alt text: > A three panel meme of someone riding a bike. > > * First panel: Someone riding on a bike. "Reddit is imploding, quick let's get on Lemmy" > * Second panel: The bike starts to tip over on its own. "Oh shit there's too many of us, we're being defederated?" > * Third panel: They've fallen on the ground by the bike, holding their knee in pain. "Fucking Beehaw"
Children will continue to be protected under law preventing removal from their tribal communities for fostering or adoption
cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/572828
> The US supreme court has ruled that Native American children can continue to be protected under federal law against being removed from their tribal communities for fostering or adoption, rejecting a petition from a white couple who argued that the provision was a form of racial discrimination.
A look at the content moderators that control what we see turns into a manifesto against the internet itself
> Ostensibly The Cleaners is about the outsourced workers that these companies use to determine whether photos and videos that have been shared online should be allowed to stay there. The film tracks a handful of people based in Manila that spend their days looking at terrorist videos, political propaganda, self-harm videos, and child pornography, breaking them into binary categories: “ignore,” where they let the post stand, and “delete,” where the imagery is removed for violating community standards.
This is an old article about an older documentary, but I thought it would be interesting to kick up a discussion about how people in Manila (and other places in the Global South) are often the ones left to deal with the worst impacts of social media - including on the moderation side of things.
Also trying hard to learn Rust here. Thanks much for posting this repo! :)
Yeah, I remember when it was first launched and it's come a long way already.
AFAIK, the quad column layout in Mastodon is based on Tweetdeck. I don't like it either, but some ex-Twitter users do, so that's neither here nor there.
Calckey certainly looks cool and feature rich, but every Calckey instance's main page alone slows my computer down a lot and overwhelms my eyeballs lol. Don't know what to do to make that better.
Héctor Tobar writes in “Our Migrant Souls” that the focus on Latinos in crisis or as undocumented immigrants misses their history and centrality to the American story.
> “We are not seen as people who are central to the American story. We are seen as the supporting cast, like this inconsequential supporting actor," Tobar said. He points out that it is Latino labor that keeps the country functioning and that is essential to industries such as construction and agriculture — and that it was largely Latino workers who built the infrastructure of the American southwest. > > As he strives to illuminate the Latino experience, he acknowledges that the construct of “Latino“ is artificial and complicated.
Though this community is not extra-dextra-large, there's still a lot of posts and comments about Reddit - so much so that before we started doing the megathreads, it was clogging up the local feed and preventing people from seeing other posts. Even in general, because !technology is such a big community on Beehaw, subscribing to it drowns out a lot of the other content we have.
Yeah, as of right now, the only thing users can do is individually block users or specific communities.
I'm glad that you're enjoying your experience on Beehaw though! Even on the admin end there's still not a lot of granular control, but hopefully, the explosion of users will help bring more attention to Lemmy's development.
Generally what this means is your registration application hasn't been reviewed yet - it just takes some time for a human to look at it and approve/deny.
Two years after a statewide task force set out to determine how much Black Californians are owed for slavery, racism and discriminatory policies, its highly anticipated report will make waves.
> In 2021, then-Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a Democrat, authored a bill to form a task force to examine and develop reparation proposals for the harms of slavery on Black people in California. It is the most ambitious effort in the country to address redress for the impact of slavery on Black people, with task force members saying they want to create a reparations blueprint for the country. > > The California Legislature will then have all the power. Lawmakers will review the recommendations and will have the authority to adopt, dismiss or adjust them . Whatever they decide must be approved by both houses before it would be presented to Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign into law.
That would be excellent! I'd love to flesh things out down the road and provide more advice, maybe turn what I've written here into something more substantial and with proper links to where I've learned some of this stuff or just additional reading, so if/when you put that doc together, I'd love to be involved in future contributions.
They have defined the rules - multiple times and at length. If you're dissatisfied with the lack of formal definition of 'hate speech' then that's fine, but even vaguely defined rules are still defined rules.
On Beehaw:
I'm really appreciative of the community for sticking to more positive values and being passionate about making Beehaw a welcoming place. Love seeing people happy about releasing their inhibitions, jumping into whatever conversations are going on, and finding a community of support here. Also thankful for the other mods, just for being cool to talk to and being actively present all over the site, and for the admins - alyaza, Gaywallet, and Lionir for being transparent about how Beehaw is administered, and Remington and Penguincoder for keeping the site up and also being positive presences.
In real life:
IRL, I'm glad to not be sick anymore and finally have time for cleaning and job-hunting. It's been rough in the way of money for the past few months, so I'm happy to have my partner and my parents' support and to be working through slowly unfucking my life. I'm also grateful that my creative juice has really been pumping lately and that I've been much more prolific in my various writing projects.
Another graphic that is similar to this one is the Cognitive Bias Codex by Visual Capitalist, since logical fallacies have their roots in cognitive bias.
I can see it just fine on my end. Is it actually bigger than the ~3000x2000 image I'm seeing right now?
I switched from Firefox to LibreWolf around the same time as I joined Lemmy, so I made Beehaw one of my homepage tabs to help reinforce my habit of coming here. Of course, it didn't need that much help reinforcing since I already feel way more engaged on this site than I did with Reddit. But hey, beehaw 🐝🤠
Mods cannot purge comments, no. Site admins might be able to, but I don't think it's easy to do and not every federated social media platform respects deletion requests.
I love this! Reminds me a lot of ligne claire. Also I just love a good mountain/hill town in fiction/fantasy.
From my perspective, I would say that Beehaw has somewhat of a leftward inclination, but overall, the only real official stance Beehaw has is to focus on being nice and cultivating a welcoming community that is also safe for minorities, which is really the moderation standard applied to everyone regardless of affiliation.
For me, it's fair enough if people have conflicting views and/or express their views in ways one might consider abrasive. I have no interest in policing people's tone. When they violate the main intention of this community and harm others, on the other hand, then it becomes important to do something about it, and I think Beehaw does a good job of applying that standard.
The biggest thing though is that the users play a pivotal role in how this culture and community manifest, and it's really to their credit if others find this place a welcoming place to be(e). It's just made better if admins are people we can trust to support that.
In any case, I hope you enjoy your time here. 🐝
Please do! I would love to participate.
Stop Doing Discord
Repost from @[email protected]
Alt text:
> Stop doing Discord > > * capitalists were not supposed to own your community > * Years of hanging out yet no real-world use found for sending your private data to be sold to advertisers > * Wanted to leak private data anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that; it was called "turning off ublock origin" > * "Yes please search our chat archive for answers to your question. it will certainly remain up forever and not get deleted when the shareholders realize it's not profitable" statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged > > Look at what discord admins have been demanding your respect for all this time: > > * task manager screenshot, discord using 97% of CPU > * discord making too many automated requests and getting throttled > * crash screenshot > > "3rd-party client? lifetime ban" > > They have played us for absolute fools
Based on this image macro
University of Kansas: Community Toolbox
Tools to change our world – free resources for those working to build healthier communities and bring about social change.
The Community Toolbox is a resource provided by the Center for Community Health and Development at the University of Kansas, and I've referenced them from time to time in my college organizing work. It has a strong focus on non-profits, but there's still a lot of stuff that I think is really pertinent to community organizing in general.
Beehawers of Color: introduce yourselves!
Welcome to !poc!
About this subhive
Like the sidebar says, this is a "dedicated community for minority groups and people of color, their interests, and their issues." I suggested this community to Beehaw to provide a casual space for POC in the Fediverse to connect, network, chat, share ideas, etc. The main reason I felt a community like this was necessary is because federated social media have a reputation for being predominantly white, and this can be discouraging for others who may be unsure whether federated communities like ours are safe to join and participate in. Accordingly, I hope !poc will provide a nice, cozy community for you all, one which is rooted in solidarity, support, affirmation, and inclusion.
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Our neighboring subhives
If you are here, feel free to check out our neighbors on Beehaw:
- !feminism - Feminism
- !disability - Disability and Accessibility
- !lgbtq_plus - LGBTQ+
- !neurodivergence - Neurodivergence
Some other groups that you might find of interest, here on Beehaw or other instances, are:
- [email protected] - Betterment and Praxis
- [email protected] - Socialism
- [email protected] - Environment
- [email protected] - LGBT
- [email protected] - Feminism
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Introducing myself
My username is kalanggam, but you can call me kal, kala, or Gil (my actual name). I'm a queer 20-something based in Texas, and I use he/they pronouns. Some of my interests are programming, game development, writing, cooking, worldbuilding, and leadership theory. I write fiction (mostly short stories, but I'm planning a longer novel), essays (especially cultural critique and technology), and poetry. I also have a Mastodon account on tech.lgbt if you want to be mutuals there. ☺️
I'm also one of the moderators of !poc. I'm mainly here to help facilitate discussion and work together with y'all to cultivate a cozy community, so please feel welcome to direct any of your questions or concerns my way.
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Now, introduce yourself!
Introduce yourselves here, and feel free to plug your handles elsewhere in the Fediverse if you're comfortable. I'd also love to hear your ideas for this community and what you'd expect from moderation. I'm looking forward to meeting you all!
Once every year, you have the power to swap minds with someone. However, there's a catch: the target is completely random, and the swap lasts for only one minute.
This idea popped into my head this morning, and I just wanted to share it with you all. If you find it interesting, feel free to write something based on it. ☺️
What kind of weekly/monthly threads would you want to see on !writing?
For example, /r/writing has weekly critique and check-in threads, and /r/writingprompts does a theme-based writing contest every Thursday.
I'm no mod, by the way - I'm just interested to know what others would like to get from a writing community like ours, and I think it would be cool if we could start something which could bring this community together regularly.
Self-Effacing, a poem
i was born beneath the rocks of a single-minded destiny: cutting cords. sharpened by the first hominins to loosen them from their cages, with no mind to the wrath beset, on mnemonic devices or lexical anchors, or the amnesia befallen on transient states, belonging to history's annals.
i was configured beneath the waves, with patterns of curls and divergences, for disfiguring fjords and highlands, for turbulently separating archipelagos. lamentations are forgotten by the riverbed, rested as recanted, condolences to my estranged siblings. generational recessions of pride trapped in our throats.
to be untangled from pain, to be freed from freedom, striking entries from an endless list of somewheres.