theropologist

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

It does wear a body down, being constantly at the mercy of so many motherfuckers.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Just to be clear, when I post without the beige checkmarks, I'm just being a stupid idiot.

When I post with the beige checkmarks I'm being a stupid idiot in my official capacity as Beige Party admin.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

What is Beige? It's the color of undyed sheep's wool. It's also an absurdly bland thing to have strong feelings about, which is kind of the meta-joke of this instance. So for anyone implying it means anything else, you're making yourself the meta-butt of a meta-joke, and a pretty silly one at that.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Question for non-Beige folks on instances running vanilla Mastodon. Has the formatting of our toots been weird since we switched over to glitch on Saturday night? I'm getting scattered reports of links not working, and this is on toots not using markdown or html formatting. Everything looks normal from here but I'm wondering if there's some compatibility issue that I'm not seeing.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

J. Paul Getty was an oil tycoon and a famous miser. He was the richest person in the world but he still washed his own clothes by hand, reused paper to write correspondence, and installed a payphone in his house for guests. Oh and he refused to pay the ransom for his grandson until his captors mailed him the teenager's severed ear. And even then he only payed the maximum amount that could be deducted from his taxes and loaned his son the rest.

When J. Paul Getty died in 1976 he was worth 6 billion dollars, which would be 24 billion dollars today.

That's a little more than half of what Elon Musk paid for Twitter.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

And now it works without Beigeing up the secondary post button too!

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

It's a good day to be a bird :liverpoolfc:

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Ok, the most unforgivable thing about glitch so far is that it's changed the "Beige It!" button back to "Post". I'll have to figure out how to update the css to fix this.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Ok, so I'm gonna say the thing that apparently isn't documented anywhere:

IF YOU ARE RUNNING ON DOCKER, SWITCHING TO GLITCH BREAKS THE STREAMING SERVICE!

This isn't glitch-soc's fault but it would be nice if it were mentioned somewhere.

The real problem is that the Mastodon main branch is on 4.3.0 alpha and this contains a major change where the streaming service has been moved to its own container. This also seems to be documented nowhere except this bug report:

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/28828

And I only found that because it was linked from a guide on how to install Mastodon glitch on a raspberry pi. And the recommend fix on that thread is not immediately clear either.

So for anyone having this problem, this is the change you need to make to the docker-compose.yml file:

Replace the following line under the streaming service:

build: .

With this:

build:
dockerfile: ./streaming/Dockerfile
context: .

This is of course assuming you are building in the same directory where the docker-compose.yml is located. If not, then replace the "." in both lines with the path to the build directory.

And you need to do this if you are building off of the Mastodon main branch too, not just glitch. Mastodon introduced this change in the 4.3.0 alpha version without updating the docker-compose.yml so that it would actually work. NOT HELPFUL!

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Good things that happened today:

1. Bayern München and the Portland Timbers both did a great job
2. I fixed my possessed washing machine by retrieving the sock that was stuck in the filter
3. I upgraded Beige Party to glitch and nothing got exploded
4. I ate some really good Mexican food
5. I felt less half-dead tonight than I have since I first came down with Covid

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Ope I cacographed all over myself again

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

...and we're back! Local-only toots seem to work. Hopefully the outside world can still see us too.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

The site upgrade will begin in about 10 minutes. At that time I will be taking the site down to take backup images of the servers. The site will be down for around 10-20 minutes while I make the backups.

Beige-bless :bb:

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Having finally gotten Covid I have to say the most surprising thing has been how long it takes to crawl out of the exhaustion hole. Normally with a cold or the flu, a couple of days after the symptoms start to abate there's this rush of restored health and with all the endorphins kicking in you feel better than you did before you got sick. This has not been my experience at all with Covid. My symptoms started improving about a week ago and still, as soon as the sun goes down I feel completely wiped out and all I want to do is curl up on the couch and pass out. And this is with the benefit of being vaxxed and boosted and not catching it until the milder variants became dominant. It's definitely worse than "just a bad flu."

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Name your favorite movie that features Yeardly Smith casually mentioning that she shits in the bathtub.

I'll go first: Barry Levinson's Toys

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Uhhhhh....Rims Enjoyer!

(me watching the Lisa's Rival episode of the Simpsons)

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

I'm glad to see that Mastodon is now defaulting to closed registrations, but this really should have been the default from the beginning. I know growth at any cost has been the standard for tech companies for the last 20 years, but the fedi model is not for every instance to be like mastodon.social. the reason any of this works is because the vast majority of instances are small, so the moderation load is manageable.

Uncontrolled growth for a small instance really has no upsides, which is why Beige Party has always required approval for new accounts. Unless you have a moderation team in place and are prepared to scale quickly and have funds to pay for all of that, I don't see why any instance admin would want to have open registrations. Does approving each sign up individually seem too overwhelming? Good, it should, because effectively moderating that many accounts is going to be even more overwhelming, and unlike the one-time approval, it will never end.

But that's OK! Small instances are good. Having lots and lots of small instances is a sign of a healthy fediverse. It's also why these recent spam attacks, while revealing a weakness in the structure of the fediverse, are ultimately futile. We've got more moderators per users and a vigilant user base that feels a sense of ownership over the platform, so we'll keep swatting down these annoyances until the spammers get bored and move onto something else.

We're not trying to be internet tycoons here. We're just trying to make nice spaces for people to toot. So hang in there. The spam is really annoying, but we're more invested in maintaining a nice space than they are in being obnoxious assholes.

And thanks to everyone who continues to report the new spam accounts as they pop up. I know it's annoying to have to do constantly but it really does help.

Beige-bless :bb:

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

She was a hot sauce lawyer with an ear for business revenge
He was a basket of eggs
Can I make you any more omelettes?

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Beige Party: Cacographic-attic insane!

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Considering amending my policy of Never Post Ever to Sometimes Post Maybe?

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

I will be upgrading the site to glitch-soc this weekend between Saturday the 24th and Sunday the 25th. For those not familiar, glitch-soc is a fork off the Mastodon main branch (currently on version v4.3.0-alpha.3 for anyone keeping track) that includes some additional features.

For a full list of features, check out the "what's different?" section at the following link:

https://glitch-soc.github.io/docs/

Keep in mind that all of these features involve the UI so you're only going to notice them if you use the web interface. Your apps will still continue to function as normal.

This is a less routine upgrade so I will be scheduling a maintenance window of two hours to give me time to take all the servers down and save full image backups. This means the site will be down for probably 10-20 minutes while I make those backups, but as always please be prepared for the the site to go down at any time during the maintenance window.

The maintenance window will begin at 0300 UTC on the 25th and end at 0500. For those in the Western Hemisphere, that's 2300 - 0100 EST, starting on Saturday night and continuing into Sunday morning.

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to reach out to me directly.

Beige-bless :bb:

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Is the Mastodon versioning scheme ridiculously complicated or am I just an idiot?

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Ok I don't as a rule comment publicly on moderation decisions but whoever (not from this instance) submitted a report on a non-native English speaker with no posts attached and the only comment being, "Cacography." can fuck all the way off. I don't have time for this petty bullshit and if I find out who you are I will be blocking your ass for harassment.

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

Please like and subscribe for more dank Oregon county memes

theropologist, 3 months ago to random

The most effective propaganda perpetrated by the right over the past 40 years has been creating a world so mind-numbingly shitty that even progressives can't imagine a brighter future anymore