@kate@aus.social
@kate@aus.social avatar

kate

@kate@aus.social

Listening, thinking, walking, working, growing things. Here since 2016, worrying about climate, healthcare governance, international education, #compostodon. Lapsed BlueSky, exited X, and in Australia.

Images: a green marble, and a reflected shape of light on a grey surface.

“I want to be on the side of surprise, and against the certainties of pictures and property.” - Barbara Kruger

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

kate, to random
@kate@aus.social avatar

Tough work day yesterday. Walked to the food co-op to clear my head, and ran into youngest walking home from cafe job. “Shit day,” he said convivially.

Of all the surprising things about parenting, worker solidarity is up there.

kate, to gardening
@kate@aus.social avatar

For all of us here who aren’t in tech, this is pretty clear on Microsoft and Recall from @GossiTheDog

It Opens A Lot Of Attack Surface

Thinking about this while , painting, walking the dog, whatever.

The fediverse is a big and pretty open campus of knowledges.

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/112498151409590780

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

I asked my small biz customers to pay by check or e-check and many actually have! I have to invoice them separately so it’s tedious but the real ones are down. well, the real ones plus the lady from Texas who told me she was happy to start getting in the habit of paying for things by check due to the 15 minute city people eventually using credit cards to shut down commerce from longer distances 🤗

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@seachanger What a beautiful website you have there!

kate, to random
@kate@aus.social avatar

Hello helpful fediverse do I know anyone with experience of supporting someone with expressive ?

tty, to random
@tty@sunbeam.city avatar

It feels so meaningful to me when I see some dangerous debris on the bike path, and I slow down & stop, and take the time to move it off the path, so future cyclists don't need to worry about it.

I think about how important and undervalued maintenance is in the dominant culture. Building new things gets all of the glory, when it's the maintainers and acts of service that are what truly, imo, make this world work.

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@tty @natureworks Oh I love this. It happens on informal bush paths around where I walk — people clear overhanging branches and put stepping stones across muddy patches. These small anonymous fixes on a path where you never meet anyone are all time gifts.

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@natureworks @tty I shared this one recently. It’s a creek outlet that constantly shifts position on a busy dog beach. Every day someone takes a moment to make a new little creek crossing for other dog walkers. So in this case there’s also a sense of working with impermanence. I love this aspect.

RickiTarr, to random
@RickiTarr@beige.party avatar

Okay, since I'm on laundry today, a little story.

When hubs and I first got married, we were very much enjoying our little Honeymoon Bubble, and we were being lazy as Hell. We didn't do many chores, but the laundry we really let go. We weren't wearing many clothes at home anyway, so why bother. Anyhow, after weeks we finally reached the swimming suit bottoms situation, and decided it was time. It was loads and loads of laundry that needed done, so I had my husband back the trunk of the car up to a window of the house, then he popped the trunk, and I started tossing laundry out of the window into the trunk. We went to the bank, got about $30 bucks in quarters, and found the emptiest laundry mat we could, and did it all in one fell swoop. We folded it all and loaded it back into the car using those wheeled laundry carts. We never let it get that bad again, and decided it was time to be adults, and do regular chores, but it still makes me laugh imagining what the neighbors and the laundry attendant thought.

Feel free to share your own laundry story, if you feel like it, I love hearing people's stories!

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@RickiTarr My mum finally caved and accepted a washing machine in her seventies. She was a lifetime laundromat user. Her new washing machine said the maximum weight of a load was some small amount. Every Saturday morning when she would have been happily in the laundromat chatting to people, she sat at her kitchen table crossly weighing her clothes on her kitchen scales, Making A Point.

I’d love there to be more laundromats. The last one in our little town just closed.

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@RickiTarr I know. Every time I visited she would get down her scales with me screeching “Mum! You do not need to be weighing your underwear that is not how this works!” With hindsight I recognise this as protest activism for laundromat use …

StillIRise1963, to random
@StillIRise1963@mastodon.world avatar

We don’t all need to buy the exact same things that we use occasionally. We should have organized borrowing.

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@StillIRise1963 It exists! I think in North America they’re called tool libraries. Here in Australia they’re often called “library of things”. There’s one near me. I also notice a lot of informal thing sharing in community gardens.

Recently my daughter’s girlfriend (the landscaper) and I have started tool sharing just between us on the weird things we don’t both need. I suspect this is how it starts, with disorganised family borrowing, then more formal sharing, then community lending.

stefan, to accessibility
@stefan@stefanbohacek.online avatar

Not trying to call out anyone in particular, I see a lot of people doing this, but I'm really curious and would like to understand this better.

Folks who use vague alt text with your images ("a funny book cover", "photo of me outside"), what is your thought process? Is the image description intended for sighted people? Or maybe your admin made alt text mandatory? Or maybe that really does seem sufficient.

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@stefan I thought about this a bit during a power outage yesterday. Posts trickled through but images didn’t load. The variability of alt text was interesting.

I think there’s a kind of captioning that assumes the reader can also see the image and just needs explanation, like a family album: “Mum and Dad in Brighton, 1974.”

kate, to 3goodthings
@kate@aus.social avatar
  1. Took a chance on the rain to walk the dog and the moment we got home the downpour resumed, literally bucketed down—and missed us
  2. Tidied the fridge and found everything for soup
  3. Searched everywhere and picked up a punnet of late sweet pea seedlings and they’re in. Their long water seeking roots know what to do.

@3goodthings

on a rainy Sunday

kate, to random
@kate@aus.social avatar

In the community where I live there’s a winding path that cuts through densely overgrown scrub to the beach. At one point the path meets a little creek and many people could jump over it.

Over the past 20 years, many little informal bridges have been built, and when they give way someone replaces them. This lets kids on bikes and others who can’t jump use the path. The latest is magnificent, we’re all in awe. Someone came down with power tools after the big floods and did this. We’re all benefiting.

This is the to me: if you have the resources and make a bridge (simple or complex, depending on what you’ve got to give) everyone gets to use the path.

kate, to gardening
@kate@aus.social avatar

Hey @dillyd this droplet of water in the throat of an autumn rose in the garden just now brought your beautiful photograph to mind.

@plants

https://allies.social/@dillyd/112072604730321564

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@Philipnschofield @dillyd @plants

Just adding a description: it’s a close up of a rose in early bloom, mostly peach but pink at the edges and somehow lit from within with a bright yellow. In the background, more buds.

I feel sure it’s the same rose as mine!

kate,
@kate@aus.social avatar

@Philipnschofield @dillyd @plants

Hello, we have a winner!

It’s the Joyfulness rose.

https://www.eumundiroses.com/products/joyfulness

kate, to random
@kate@aus.social avatar

Idly curious about aus.social which is typically pretty high on this list but has … vanished.

Everything ok @aussocialadmin?

https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/112357048679868334

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    kate,
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    @seachanger I have a deeply loved friend who believes these things and lives off this model and considering how close we are on every other thing, the AirBnB thing takes me out every time. I sense that to him AirBnB is a kind of maker practice, but to me it’s like my friend has got stuck in a terrible cult.

    StillIRise1963, to random
    @StillIRise1963@mastodon.world avatar

    Anyone interested in becoming a legislator should have to spend one year living with different types of people in different socio-economic brackets. Like study abroad at home.

    kate,
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    @StillIRise1963 I’d add study abroad abroad back in, and extend this to any politician in any country making decisions that affect the world.

    kate, to random
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    Something about the : people describing their own images with language that is precise like a signature. The photographs of @HonDuMuc come with a painterly layer of description that brings out secretive detail. Filmmaker @dilmandila describes flowers exactly as you’d expect a filmmaker to do. @paralithode uses the language of careful poetic observation and I learn every time.

    I seek out like someone opening a window in an advent calendar, and every time I’m so grateful to all the screenreader users here like @bright_helpings who keep pointing the way to this intimate space of wonder that makes things better for everyone.

    kate,
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    Just adding to this because people are sharing it and in case you don’t know: if you add to your post because you haven’t the spoons or language for any reason to add a description for your image, someone can do it for you.

    If your image is a screenshot, you can often grab the text from it—your photo app is eager to do this for you.

    And if someone comes across your image without a description they can write a description and add .

    Tiny sociable innovations and the .

    kate, to random
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    Getting over jet lag has given me odd flashbacks to original Star Trek when the crew didn’t get beamed up properly and somehow got stuck in a between state.

    Very slowly coming good here.

    kate, to random
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    I hope this email finds itself the last of its kind, living a quiet life awaiting species extinction.

    kate, to random
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    I know, it’s a post on AI, but make a pot of tea and give your time to this essay on what’s happening under the shingle of bad thinking on human intelligence. Fine, fine writing from @helenbeetham.

    https://open.substack.com/pub/helenbeetham/p/human-intelligence?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

    aral, to random
    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar

    I don’t understand why the Americans are so excited. Here in Ireland we call not being able to see the sun just another Monday.

    kate,
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    @aral Having just arrived in Ireland can absolutely confirm.

    kate, to random
    @kate@aus.social avatar

    Listening to coverage of the IDF report on the killing of aid workers, while remembering yesterday’s news of AI profiling and the calculations of acceptable collateral killing. Things add up, literally and brutally, in .

    Whatever position you take on Julian Assange, he gave us the right phrase for what has been happening to Palestinians in Gaza by the tens of thousands and now these aid workers: collateral murder.

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