Omgggg!! I just discovered that Project Gutenberg has an automated feed on #Mastodon where they post new books they add!

Go follow them: @gutenberg_new

#books #bookstodon #reading

me: the earth isn’t flat

fiat earther: correct

me: huh?

fiat earther: it’s the shape an italian car

me: what?

fiat earther: you read my name wrong didn’t you?

Out-of-context QOTD:

“my best tip for anyone trying to get back into reading is to remember that you can read books to avoid other responsibilities in ur life and it can become a vice if you play your cards right”

I used to mow our lawn every fortnight, like my Dad did, when we didn't have the sheep on it.

Since about 10 years here, I just do it 3x a year - once just before spring, once in summer after the spring flowers and clover die back, and once in winter.

And every day I look out at our messy unkempt lawn, I get a small but vital boost of joy in the day.

Not only is it a lot less stupid work, its much better for the environment - we have a family of bumblebees now under our front door, they are so cute I see them buzzing around every day - and we have a group of birds who visit regularly to poke around in the ground. I'm sure there will be 100s of other species making their home there too.

Just down the road, a farmer has switched an entire field over to "bee flowers" . He'll be rotating 1 paddock every year as usual, but has specifically focused on using insect-friendly mixes, instead of the more common plain nitrogen-fixing plants.

If you want the planet to survive, do what you can, with what you have. Radical change needs small steps as well as big ones. Stop mowing the lawn, & let the life back in.

Following a rich white man to war because you didn’t like the sound of a black woman laughing will go down in American history as one of the stupidest things ever.

We’ve bombed Iran. And dismantled our joint terrorism task force. And sent a third of the FBI to help ICE. And gutted the National Security Council. And a drunk guy is in charge at the Pentagon. And our intelligence allies probably won’t share intel with us. Because people couldn’t vote for a Black woman.

@bookstodon @fantasybookstodon @bookbubble @humour @reading

#Book #Books #BookMemes #Memes #Humor #Humour
#Novel #Novels #Bookshelf
#Mastobooks #BooksofMastodon #Bookstodon #Bookworm #Bookwyrm #Bookstodon #BookLove #BoostingIsSharing

Hello friends! I am excited to (re)share the #mentalhealth project I started two years ago: https://littlebetterzine.com

Little Better Zines are free guides to evidence based coping skills – now expanded and redesigned with new info and improved accessibility.

These are techniques I often share with therapy patients, but I know not everyone has access to therapy. I hope you find these zines helpful, and I’d be grateful if you repost/share the link with anyone who might need them!

#Geograph Picture of the Day #POTD from North #Yorkshire, 2007
#BrackenbottomScar #HortonMoor #hills #geology #landscape #photography
geograph.org.uk/p/583106
Free to share – please credit John Lucas/Geograph

When European explorers first saw the "new" world, they took it to be an "unspoiled" wilderness. In reality, many of these "natural" environments were actually highly advanced agricultural systems that were carefully tended by #indigenous people. The "natural" plenty that amazed Europeans was, in fact, the result of generations of careful tending. Europeans are only now, hundreds of years later, "rediscovering" these methods (and, in typical European fashion, naming it #permaculture , pretending they invented it, and profiting from it instead of sharing it). No only is it being rediscovered in the Americas and South Pacific, but European models are now being rediscovered.

Europeans could not believe the truth that indigenous people in the South Pacific and Americas had developed something so advanced that it took hundreds of years for colonizers to even recognize it as anything but "magic" (any sufficiently advanced technology, and all that).

What's interesting to me is that the Enlightenment thinkers that inspired #socialism and #anarchism, and many European inspired anarchists to this day, do exactly the same thing for the social technologies they observed in the Americas and argued to bring the same to Europe.

Rousseau thought that egalitarianism and liberty were just natural things, rather than things that had to be intentionally developed. The classical anarchist idea that "all we have to do is abolish the government" ignores generations of social evolution, of active development of social technology, by indigenous people. There continues to be an insurrectionary and adjacent trend within leftist thinking that still flows from this fallacy.

I've already talked about how the idea of a revolutionary as a man with a gun is patriarchal because it ignores the invisible labor of building and sustaining a revolutionary culture. This patriarchal element intertwines with Eurocentric/colonizer biases, in both cases I've mentioned. The European men who wrote about the thoughts of indigenous intellectuals in the Americas only recognized men as people in the societies they interacted with. Women who worked in agriculture were, therefore, invisible. Therefore, the entire systems they maintained *did not exist* to the colonizers. They, instead, happened naturally... Like laundry magically being folded and food magically being made.

As we figure out how to move forward from the failure of all elements of colonizer society (social, economic, technological), it's critical that we are aware of the omissions that have lead us to failure so many times in the past.

Chekov's Gun: If a gun is introduced in the first act, it must be fired by the third

Schrödinger's Cat: An unopened box may contain a dead cat or a living cat, and you won't know which until after you've opened it

Chekov's Cat: If a box is introduced in the first act, a cat must sit in it by the third

Schrödinger's Gun: A gun may or may not be loaded and you won't know until after you've fired it.

Chekhov-Schrödinger's Catgun: If a cat is introduced in the first act, it may or may not be fired in the third, and you won't know which until after you open it.

#FelizLunes

#introduction
Hey everyone!

Mo here, onward and upwards as is always the hope and desire.

I'm a fairly atypical Granny living in #Scotland, with an #Iceland photography obsession. I used to do games graphics many moons ago. I love weather photography, long slow walks getting slower due to stuff, my wonderful sons and my lovely patient partner.

Here's a drop-dead gorgeous shot to start this. Lómagnúpur in southern #Iceland.

@photography

#DailyPhoto #WeatherPhotography #LandscapePhotography

Knowledge is power. #grickledoodle #cats #reading #books #cartoon #art #drawing #funny

This is where we are headed. If you don’t believe me, ask what basis the government had to send me and my family to a prison camp in Arkansas. We “looked like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.”

You deserve happiness and nice things.
You deserve castles filled with books and the time to read them.
You deserve enchanted daggers and a tiara of ancient goblin bones to show the townsfolk you mean business when you're at the market on a cheese run.

Love thyself. #grickledoodle #death #horror #pretty #love #cartoon #art #drawing #funny #fashion

This is how to disable the new “AI” chatbot in #Firefox:

• type about:config into the awesome bar
• skip the warning for first time modders
• locate the browser.ml.chat.enabled setting and set it to false

In the #Librewolf fork, a thoughtful person has already done this for you.

(HT to @kuketzblog for the hint!)

#genAI #chatbot #bullshitgenerator #llm #dontCallItAI

You know those comics about an astronaut woman nasa had to delete, likely because of the overgrown cheeto?
You can actually still download them.

I downloaded them for preservation purpose, in case they eventually are removed and become harder to find.

https://nasawatch.com/education/you-can-still-read-nasas-deleted-first-woman-graphic-novels/