skyfaller

skyfaller, 1 day ago

The next day after clearing the garden, we were able to sketch out the garden path and put a few plants in the ground in the morning before the rain arrived.

The goal is a native plant pollinator-friendly permaculture food forest, with the emphasis on supporting local wildlife before feeding ourselves. So far we have planted two highbush blueberries, a dwarf black chokeberry, and a Viburnum dentatum / arrowwood. (I think the arrowwood may also produce edible berries, I hope to learn more.)

skyfaller, 1 day ago

@nancywisser These are straight species local ecotype blueberries, the guy who sold them to me said he did nothing to his soil and they grow fine. I do wonder if the soil is acidic enough for blueberries to be happy, but the yucca apparently prefers acidic soil so its health indicates the soil couldn't be too basic.

I mixed some compost into the soil in the hole when planting them, and put compost on top. Someone left a Christmas tree on the street, might add the needles hoping they're acidic.

skyfaller, 1 day ago

@mcneely As local as possible really, depends on the circumstances. Ecoregions don't really line up with state lines, so something regionally appropriate might come from a few states away, while a plant adapted to a different environment in the same state might not be as good.

I got my plants from Good Host Plants, which goes to great pains to get plants appropriate for Philly. They are located in my neighborhood, so plants that grow well for them should work for me. https://www.goodhostplants.com/

skyfaller, 1 day ago

@acm_redfox Birds mostly, our neighborhood has lots of birds passing through on their way to and from the woods, but I also hope to attract snakes and other random critters

skyfaller, 1 day ago

@acm_redfox I intend to plant a rattlesnake master across the garden from the yucca (notice the scientific name, lol): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eryngium_yuccifolium

Should make the garden look somewhat balanced when their evergreen nature stands out in the winter.

I seem to have left that plant at the nursery by accident, though, so I have to go fetch it at some later date.

skyfaller, 4 days ago

@aburka Sadly, bots are now better at solving captchas than humans, so while it can increase the cost of a scam (and thereby reduce its scale or drive it out of business) by forcing the scammer to spend CPU cycles on captchas, every time you use a captcha you are wasting more human time than computer time.
https://0w0.is/objects/ee8401e3-67c8-4fd9-b7f2-037a4247b62e
https://www.pcmag.com/news/bots-better-at-solving-captchas-than-humans

Captchas can't be used to keep out spambots anymore (and in the past they just paid humans to solve captchas to let the spambots in).

skyfaller, 4 days ago

@aburka Sounds like they should have hired spammers

skyfaller, 1 day ago

@chiraag @jacqueline Yep, like I said I've already ordered a Tangara :-) I'm excited!

But @Maggie needs an mp3 player now, and the Tangara isn't available yet.

I actually discovered I had some old mp3 players lying around, the first version of Mixxtape: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mixxtape/mixxtape-the-cassette-reinvented

Sadly I had completely forgotten about them, and when I opened the box, their batteries were 100% dead and wouldn't hold a charge. This is why we need easily repairable open hardware!

skyfaller, 6 days ago

@thecorefiles Hahaha, funny given my recent post about The Bourse. How is business / foot traffic there? Are there other vendors open? Or is it still kind of dead?

skyfaller, 6 days ago

@zorn Yeah, I started thinking about leaving Spotify and reactivating my local music collection when my favorite Dashboard Confessional albums vanished for a while. https://jawns.club/@skyfaller/101398977465333751

My last straw was when Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their music to protest Spotify funding Joe Rogan (an action I supported, but also Joni Mitchell is one of my favorite musicians).

I'm using Syncthing to maintain my music collection across multiple computers at the moment, redundancy seems good.

skyfaller, 6 days ago

@jimshreds @zorn Did any of the bootlegs make it on to the Internet Archive? I understand they have a lot of bootlegs of e.g. The Grateful Dead, although I've never really explored them because live recordings usually aren't my thing.

skyfaller, 7 days ago

@Jgbird @loren What was fast enough to catch the hummingbird? I know they must have predators, but their maneuverability makes it seem difficult.

skyfaller, 7 days ago

@inquiline @billseitz Paul Simon wrote about a mean individual "Stranded in a Limousine" in like 1977. Could be prosecutorial and cop language, given the context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNbKF-S1JH8

But I feel like I've heard "individual" used in lyrics where it wasn't cop language, so maybe it's just from a different time and place and the cycle is coming back around?

skyfaller, 7 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

@inquiline @billseitz "Tenement Funster" by Queen (1974):

I've got a way with the girls on my block
Try my best be a real individual
And when we go down to Smokies and rock
They line up like it's some kind of ritual

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E2mjJvBKs8

I think it crops up as a kind of countercultural term, opposing the individual vs. society. (Now that I think about it, this could also be prosecutorial / cop language, reclaimed as a sign of rebellion.)

skyfaller, 7 days ago

@inquiline @billseitz How about "Screaming Skin" by Blondie (1999)?

"I'm a multicellular individual
You're way out of proportion!
We've got the hemodynamic connection
Don't call me germ!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO7rT1RQujM
https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/77464/

Frankly I have no idea what this song is about, so I can't really speculate as to what the source of "individual" is here. Is it just contrasting the concept of "individual" with being multicellular & therefore made of a vast multitude of parts? Is it medical?

skyfaller, 8 days ago

@Seirdy My favorite temporary Internet subculture was Snakes on a Plane, which (as I remember it) disappeared the moment the movie came out, because the movie was neither good enough nor bad enough to justify building your personality around it. It could never live up to the sheer audacity of the title.

It was a perfectly OK movie. I liked the music video for the theme song by Cobra Starship.

skyfaller, 6 days ago

@gnomon @drdrang All of those other people would of course deal karmic justice with brutal efficiency, but I voted Taylor Swift because she's a lot like ScarJo. If sama were smart enough to learn lessons, he would learn a lesson and not do the same things to Taylor Swift, but I bet he thinks he's above learning lessons, and it's funnier if he proves he's a fucking idiot yet again.

Somehow getting on the bad side of an octopus woman is more understandable, who would see that coming?

skyfaller, 4 days ago

@Bellingen "these roads can be actively encouraged by aggressive infrastructure-expansion schemes — most notably China’s Belt and Road Initiative, now active in more than 150 nations."

I never considered the full implications of China's Belt and Road Initiative, but it's clearly going to cause a lot of harm, including non-obvious effects like this logging. I shouldn't be surprised that roads are harmful, but I guess they're a harm that keeps on harming.

skyfaller, 3 days ago

@liaizon I've been very annoyed because the Transportr website has a map on it that claims Philadelphia is supported. I repeatedly go through a loop where I download it excitedly to check, open the app and find no support for Philly, delete it in disgust, forget this ever happened, repeat.

That said, I also would love FOSS public transit directions on the Web.