@jmac@masto.nyc
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jmac

@jmac@masto.nyc

I live in New York. I get paid to write about databases. I don’t get paid to write about other stuff, but I do it anyway.

Tech writer at Google; Co-founder of IFTF, an interactive-fiction nonprofit; Liker of coffee, cats, open web technologies, et cetera. Co-admin of https://masto.nyc.

All views I express in my personal posts are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Five Borough Fedi Project.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

jmac, to random
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Played about ten minutes of #indika and put it back down due to evening work-pings and dinner bells. I’ll pick it up again when the din dies down. I am very convinced that it deserves my full attention for a little while.

jmac, to random
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A discussion about the unusual cover design for the Traveller RPG—still striking in its tone and its minimalism, decades later—led me to recall and share this timeless banger from @avram.

And only then did I get the joke: Oh, because the ship on the original cover is named “Beowulf”!! OK.

https://wandering.shop/@avram/109809275612064222

jmac, to random
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Thinkin about the UPA-animation-style character art from the 1960 edition of Clue.

jmac, to random
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I'm not saying that I actually thought that Jay Smooth, JB Smoove, and Smoove B were all the same person, but I am saying that I never really put the energy into disentangling the three names in my head until circumstances forced me to do so just now, okay.

jmac, to random
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I think of this every time I wake my MacBook up from a furious sleep, its fans blasting full-speed to render Apple's default screen saver of a fully animated drone flight over Californian vineyards, in order to get back to my screenful of tiled xterms.

https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/112464257491011844

jmac, to random
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Sometimes I think about the fact that I will never, ever open a shell terminal and see ”Heads up! Here's what's new! Take a tour!! [Skip]" https://digipres.club/@misty/112481913811666838

jmac, to random
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Made one of my occasional visits to the former Twitter just to breathe in the fumes from tonight's top news story. And, like. Other than those of us who left, everyone is still there, huh.

No judgment! I'm happy for myself that I have kicked that habit entirely, and found fulfillment here instead. I hope more people come, and I hope we can make it more welcoming, but I know it's not for everyone.

Still, I guess I was expecting it to be LiveJournal-dead by now. Not by a long shot, no.

jmac, to random
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Is the best thing about #Helldivers the completely unironic “hug” emote, and the habit of quickplay mutual-randos to deploy it before disconnecting after a successful mission?

jmac, to nyc
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If you were not at https://hahahanyc.com tonight then you missed watching me take a shower onstage in front of 200 people. #NYC #theatre

jmac, to random
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“This is how Google’s search result sausage is made: Real people like me make it.” Toni Allen, secretary of the Alphabet Workers #Union, writes about working as a contracted “rater” for Google. https://fortune.com/2024/05/03/google-search-raters-wages-benefits-contractors-tech-ai-employment/

Toni is among many laborers who perform high-speed, human-powered fact checking on AI-generated search results—and, thanks to recent legal maneuvering on the part of our mutual bosses, now receives an hourly rate that is less than California minimum wage.

jmac, (edited ) to random
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I just bought Indika and I can't wait to play it. Sunday morning drowsiness is probably not the right headspace for it, from what little I know of it.

The cover art alone sold me on it!

jmac, to random
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I saw a person talk about the desire to see "a meeting in a smoke-filled room" happen, which seems like an oddly outdated metaphor... but these things do tend to have legs, don't they.

I wonder how many people know perfectly well what a "smoke-filled room" is, but don't know why it's called that. Like, maybe they think it means that since it's addressing an urgent issue, like a fire, that metaphorical fire is filling the room with smoke?

jmac, to random
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I was a little upset to learn about the existence of "slow worms" based on comments to this post. This is apparently an animal found only in Europe, and it's a lizard with no legs. “B-but... that's a snake,” you might object, "that's literally what a snake is. What?"

But apparently no, Wikipedia says they have a different skeletal physiology than snakes, which gives them fundamental trouble with locomotion. I really want to know what on earth their evolutionary niche is.
https://mastodon.social/@tikitu/112503384717553423

jmac, to random
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Speaking of Discords and puzzle games, I had reason to dig up this circa-2010 parody of both Braid and then-contemporary game streamers. I remembered it for "reverse tiiiime" but I had no memory of the time-loop microfiction that unfolds in the "chat window", so that was a fun discovery! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI

jmac, to random
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Kids today have it so easy, when I was your age we didn’t have all these flavors of gay with their own flags, we just had LiveJournal quizzes to find out which Welcome Back Kotter character we were or whatever

990000, to nyc
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Visiting the museum of natural history makes me wish public parks had T-rex or Allosaurus, or some other similar dinosaur skeletons on permanent display so kids and just people in general can study them casually and frequently. I know it would be a maintenance nightmare, but it would be so cool.

#Dinosaurs #NYC #AMNH

jmac,
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@990000 Why, I was at Dinosaur Playground at Riverside Drive just yesterday! What more do you want!!

18+ jmac, to random
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More proof that reality is always more subtle than fiction: If last weekend's verdict had happened in fiction, then at least one of those jurors would have turned up dead by now. Why even write the story, otherwise?

BONUS: I didn't mean to when I started thinking about this toot, but I'm feeling a swell of pride for my twelve brave anonymous neighbors, and by extension for the other eight million too.

jmac, (edited )
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My gold standard for truth's subtlety over fiction is the story of Tara the Hero Cat, who rescued her young human companion from a dog attack ten years ago.

Ask most any writer to draft out the scene, and they'd have her tearing in yowling with teeth and claws. But Tara knew the goal was not "attack the dog" but "get it away from the boy", and so she leapt and twisted to side-slam the dog away instead.

I think of this lesson often.

Tara is still with us, by the way! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_(cat)

jmac, to random
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Shingles vaccine GET. 💉🏠

danblondell, to random
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My friend leant me his racing wheel so if all goes well I’ll soon be Racing Rig Guy

jmac,
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@danblondell Is this your plan to not be Don Draper, then

CarlMuckenhoupt, to random
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An adorable dog moment:
I walk into my building. A family of three is waiting for the elevator, accompanied by a small dog. My apartment is on the second floor, so I start up the stairs. The dog follows me. The family calls to the dog, but it pays no heed. I turn around and point down the stairs. The dog looks to where I'm pointing and is overjoyed beyond measure to see its entire family down there!

jmac,
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@CarlMuckenhoupt dying

jmac, to random
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Why isn’t there a stronger association of Sam Pepys just being a guy happy to just go home and jam on his lute until bedtime. It’s always kidney stone this, fire of London that
https://mastodon.social/@samuelpepys/112559850225530707

jmac, to random
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If you want to hire a full-stack developer who cares more about the long-term health and openness of the World Wide Web than anyone you’ve talked to since you last called home, then you should talk to Jacky over here.
https://todon.eu/@jalcine/112553640889348695

jmac, to nyc
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About to head over to Greenpoint Open Studios to see some art by my pal Emily, who makes Weird and Beautiful Maps of imginary spaces and topologies: https://greenpointopenstudios.com/artists/emily-garfield-2024/

Hoping to see some other artists too! I don't think I’ve ever knowingly visited Greenpoint before?!

jmac, to random
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You might know exactly what my reply to this would be, and I checked the replies on the original post to make sure that nobody else already pasted it in, but someone had, so I said nothing. 😇
https://syzito.xyz/@selzero/112547435487073100

jmac, to VideoGames
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Watching this very good playthrough of Ninja Gaiden on NES, with just enough mistakes to convince me it's not tool-assisted. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V822oMzJQSg

One remembers only an ugly, cruel game, but watching this played by an expert is so rewarding. Stunned to rediscover how much of my lifelong mental background-music playlist comes from this game.

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