Random Thoughts & Other Things

By Phil Rees

His fans say Elon is playing 5D chess. I think he's playing 1D dominoes against himself and losing.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

It's not even New Year yet and I'm already thinking of doing things with a purpose. Now all I have to do is come up with a purpose.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

My aim with Mastodon is to turn off the Home column. I follow a lot of people with a lot of interests. To listen to them all at once is deafening. I'm going to add them to lists instead and pay attention with more focus to lists and hashtags.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

Really liking the WriteFreely interface. I have it on a link on my favourites bar. One click and I'm in and writing. Nothing to configure. Not messing about with metadata and SEO. Nothing getting in the way of my popping in a few notes. Just straight into typing. No distraction. Nice.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

Think I've found a decent Minetest workflow for the tiny games I want to build.

  1. Add SpawnBuilder and Modgen to a vanilla game.
  2. Create a custom mod for game specific stuff.
  3. Build the setting in the generated world.
  4. Export the setting with Modgen.
  5. Copy vanilla Minetest removing unused mods and adding metadata.
  6. Copy the Modgen export into the custom game together with the custom mod.
  7. Test and revise.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

I took a peek at Twitter. Elon was waiving a pirate flag while his QTs were mobbed by K-Pop stars and RIPTwitter was trending.

Closed tab.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

The thing I've noticed about Mastodon is that without an algorithm I'm seeing more of myself. I'm not distracted by news and trends. I'm just rediscovering my own interests and getting more time to follow them.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

Nice transition between block based programming like Scratch and actual code. You build web pages and programs by dragging and dropping blocks but still get to see the code that you're writing and the results it produces.

https://app.edublocks.org

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

In 2018 Elon Musk tweeted:

Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda …

Even if some of the public doesn’t care about the credibility score, the journalists, editors & publications will. It is how they define themselves.

And today:

As Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism, media elite will try everything to stop that from happening

Mainstream media will still thrive, but increased competition from citizens will cause them to be more accurate, as their oligopoly on information is disrupted

Elon's vision has remained consistent. He wants to destroy journalism and replace it with citizen apophenia, encouraging his followers to do their own research and find patterns that simply aren't there.

Twitter's official Twitter account, @twitter, hasn't posted since the 13th of October. It's remained silent through the whole of the upheaval. It's terse profile text poses the question:

What's happening?!

The answer is simple.

Pravda.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees

“There is only one thing in life worse than being tweeted about, and that is not being tooted about.” – Fake Oscar Wilde

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Phil Rees