so i wanted to put up a thing to pin before this site goes read-only and frozen in time forever. something between a goodbye and a highlights reel. i don't have a big eloquent eulogy to write up here, but i'm gonna miss this place. like so many others are saying, i feel like spending time here cured me, or at least broke some of the dark pattern habits of, other social media. i've been saying it in a few other posts, but i don't think i can ever go back to metrics-driven, or short-form social media
so with that out of the way, i want to kind of revisit some of the cool rememberies from this site, both as kind of one last road trip around the place, and (perhaps more practically) as a place to put a bunch of cool stuff in one place
none of this is exhaustive. a lot of people will be downloading full chost logs, and @staff have said they'd like to archive the whole site if possible. i'm not going to scour the whole site for everything, a small collection of things i remember being good will suffice. i think things should be allowed to be ephemeral and imperfect, anyway
anyway, before we go any further, i think some cool people here deserve a shoutout in no particular order. i can't possibly tag everybirdie here but a few names definitely stand out!
- @blackle for ceaselessly advancing the art of css crimeposting... it may not have been the only one, but it's hard to imagine the landscape without its contributions
- @blep for the cohost prechoster [link]
- @nex3 for the cohost timeline deduplicator and the image grid generator
- @oatmealine for markdown PLUS
- @lexyeevee for CSS for CSS baby pt1 pt2 pt3 pt4 and generally putting in a lot to help people learn stuff
- @minecraft for @chutils [github link]
with that said, let's flap to it!
some of my good chosts (i promise there are a few!)
- you can always be put in the bird tube - i think this might have been my most popular copost
- TRANS RIGHTS - if the bird tube wasn't it, this one was
- piscine one of my earlier post crimes... not on the level of the real website sickos, but i like it
- it is flight feather friday everybirdie's gotta have their version of a friday post, right?
- my two favourite XKCD strips - i genuinely believe these are good lessons and i try to keep them in mind
- [my favourite mug] - this is just me being on my bullshit but i think i've posted this literally everywhere i'm active by now
- i have some egrets - same, really. i love this thing
- toothbrush - i dunno this just made me laugh
- kingfisher tf art post - this is just a couple links to a piece from furaffinity but it's so well done, i want to immortalize it
i made a few effortchosts too. they're not all necessarily polished. i hope they age well, but who can say?
- on digital preservation and letting things be ephemeral - i believe we should keep the things that are important to us, and allow other things whose time is past to fade. we can't keep it all
- two coposts on subjectivity and expecations
- sometimes a thing isn't bad, it just isn't what you wanted - in reference to some discussion on roguelites, but broadly applicable i think
- is it bad or do you just not like it? - on subjectivity and the perceived expectation that our takes are objective and defensible
- exocortex - external assists to shore up what our brains are poor at. novel? no. but maybe a name for a new facet of one of our oldest ideas (i compiled info and ideas for this big end-times copost in Obsidian...)
- computer skills education, systems vs tasks style learning - i feel like this one is kinda rambly and fuzzy around the edges. but it ties in with one of my favourite XKCDs from above, and i think some of the points it hits are valid
some other cool memories while i was posting here
- i experienced the 2024 total solar eclipse while i was on this site - not at totality, but pretty dang close to it
- that time i found a cool blue jay feather - it was in really good condition! didn't turn me into a blue jay though :(
- that time i booped a wild chipmunk (really, they were just checking that my fingers didn't have more peanuts)
- that time i made friends with a flock of red-winged blackbirds while they were nesting
- that time i met an injured cormorant and helped them get to animal rescue - despite being in a bit of a situation, they were very cooperative and photogenic (i never heard back but i hope they're doing well)
birdposting
I don't know if tag views will be preserved in a static archive, so here's a bunch of my birds all in one place. not all of them. some of them are too thoroughly mediocre loli don't think this is extensive... i didn't do a great job tagging everything...
- a Grey Catbird (that's me!)
- a House Sparrow
- a Red-Tailed Hawk
- a Downy Woodpecker
- a juvenile Red-Tailed Hawk
- a vicious pack of roaming feral ducks
- underfluffies (an American Robin)
- a White-Breasted Nuthatch sweeping
- another Red-Tailed Hawk (i have a lot of these...)
- a Great Blue Heron in a tree
- a young Cooper's Hawk (maybe these guys might have been renamed by the time you're reading this...)
- a Red-Winged Blackbird
- Song Sparrow
- another Red-Tailed Hawk (yeah we have a lot of these guys aruond!)
- a Peregrine Falcon!
- an adult Cooper's Hawk!
- Turkey Vultures
- a shiny European Starling
- Red-Tailed Hawk, looking over her shoulder
- Brewer's Blackbird
- Barn Swallow with a snack
- two posts of very young Red-Tailed Hawks, one with fresh prey
- maybe my best photo of a Great Blue Heron
- Red-Winged Blackbird BABIES!!!!
- Canada Goose
- Bananaquit
- Red-Tailed Hawk nestlings
other people's good coposts
i can't possibly compile a list of all the best posts on this site. there's so many. there's so many meaningful posts with real things to say. go check out all of @alyaza's Black History Month chosts. no, really! and there's so many how-tos and short stories and microfic prompts, i cannot possibly hit even a fraction of itwhat this is instead, is a handful of less load bearing posts, that maybe didn't have as big an audience, or were really niche, or just cool, that i think are neat. maybe some people will read a few of them and they'll have a few more eyes on them than they would otherwise
- @astral posting on "topics", a social media feature - i love this post i love this post! i want to see this so badly! i have so many thoughts on structuring social media in literally any other way than just a flat list of people you follow, about every single one of their interests, with no regard to your relationship or closeness to that person. and this copost touches on a really cool idea! i love it!
- @makyo on kissing cute skunk girls aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa im normal about this
- @wildweasel on SomaFM - i just like this service and hope maybe a couple people check it out because of this post. im all for niche genres and kicking sand at the big commercial streaming services
- @joewintergreen on Max Payne lighting - specifically the part about using idle workstation cycles as distributed compute for lighting. i just think that's such a cool, weird, clever little fact that you'd never know about otherwise
- @cariad posting about that one cursed, behemoth power strip
- @ponett posted about game design literacy and thinking about why things are designed the way they are - even when (or especially when) they're not for you
- @aWildLupi photographs not one, but two sonic booms - you can literally see them causing distortion in the air, it's so cool
some neat css crimeposts
same as above, i can't possibly get all of them, but here are a few that stuck in my mindand finally, just some bullshit i think is worth a few lines
- play Ghost Trick
- play Outer Wilds
- play Tunic
- play CrossCode
- play La-Mulana
- play Salamander County Public Television
- play Star Control 2
- play Small Saga
- play Disco Elysium
- play Super Lesbian Animal RPG
- play Get In The Car, Loser
- play SNAKE FARM (and FISH FEAR ME, when it's out)
- read Post-Self
- blue jays get a bad reputation they don't deserve
- find a place you can go that's still semi-natural, if you can, and go there regularly
- go outside in the rain
- watch an animal. let them watch you. you have more in common with a raccoon in the woods than the billionaire power mongers making all of our lives hell. give them a peanut (the animals, not the billionaires, fuck those guys)
- if you like watching animals, consider a monocular - they're not the best tool but they're good to have and portable enough to keep around in a pouch or coat pocket
- computers are bullshit
- look up sometimes (sorry, gamers...)
- play frungy
