Well put.

I get screamed at for attention sometimes, which seems like a pretty good definition of trolling. So yeah.

I picked and ate a leaf of what I thought was wild garlic but it wasn’t. It felt like a bomb had gone off in my mouth. I sprinted home and washed my mouth out with everything I had, including wine and 51 pastis but nothing helped.

No permanent damage afaict.

Any Scottish person who has gone travelling has learnt this lesson the hard way.

No, I think it’s a good assessment.

I swing between A and B and find B to be most healthy and reasonable, because I have no political power as well as for my own wellbeing.

Ive tried RSS for world news but find it even more overwhelming than browsing news sites because it’s displayed more compactly and looks like an avalanche of dystopian madness if I dont open the feed for a day or two.

What I really want is a weekly or maybe bi-weekly roundup of the five or ten most important global events. If anyone knows of a feed like that please let me know!

My advice is to spend more time out of the house! The more I stew in the epicentre of the entropy and problems the more overwhelmed I feel by them and the harder it is to tackle them. Getting out can help to get some perspective and make you appreciate what you do have.

There are probably lists you can search online but I find that adding /feed or /rss to the URL of a page I want to see updates from does the trick. There is also at least one Firefox add-on that indicates if a page has an RSS feed.

Use KeepassXC with Syncthing for maximum autonomy or Bitwarden for maximum ease. Both are FOSS. That’s my recommendation and also seems to be the consensus among those who share your needs.

When we about 10 my friend and I learnt to speak backslang for this very purpose.

Incredibly, it turned out that the teacher had learnt how to speak it too.

I hear that jobs in astronomy don’t pay like they used to.

You know I think just the freedom of people is enough. People will naturally share and talk about what is important and interesting if they can go where they want and say what they want. They move the information as well as filter it for relevance.

The internet as we know it today is coercive; most of it is designed and run with opaque, narrow and self-interested goals. It has penetrated our thoughts, feelings, behaviour and culture, with very limited accountability or critical evaluation. And even just the sheer bandwidth of it on a user level is paralysing.

The internet interacts with the human appetite for information in the same way as processed foods do with our impulse to eat. We’ve freed ourselves from the limitation of supply but do not moderate our demand.

My own imagining of a better and different internet would be based on people and places rather than screens or other abstractions. We would have plenty of comfortable and non-exclusive public places to meet, excellent train services to get between those places and each others homes (trains are pro-social and have unbeatable efficency) and a system and philosophy of education that is based on critical thinking rather than arbitrary tasks.

Information technology would be peripheral to our relationships and experience and would be used as a tool to serve our own free interests rather than being an end in itself.

But then how will they become famous?

They do all sound stupid.

As it’s a complete statement just say “I’m wondering if the monkey can see my ears.”

Because it is ‘the’ monkey, rather than ‘a’ monkey, it is implied that the monkey has already been referred to.

I don’t want to see commercial content. I also don’t want others to see it because it will pollute the culture of the Fediverse.