Calamity Jan 🐍 @vjgoh@octodon.social

@starbreaker I only want to get through it—or some portion of it—because I have friends that like it, and literally every excerpt I've read has made me want to buy the book for the express purpose of throwing it into the sun.

@starbreaker That's 10000% legit.

@starbreaker The hate-read format is literally the only way I'm going to get through it. The reader is an appropriately angry feminist nerd, and her cries of outrage at both the content and the form make me feel like I'm not alone.

I've been watching someone hate-read Ready Player One on Facebook live and I can't believe that a) this book was published; b) this book was popular; and c) this book was made into a movie. Such unrelenting garbage.

@Damage I give this selfie an A+

"As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism."

I think I really need to read more Feuerbach.

@susannah Nah, it's not bad advice!

Part of the question to me is whether it's possible for Mastodon to even be capable of matching Twitter—for all its faults, Twitter is where the reporters are. Like, I can read what Paul Krugman thinks *right there*.

I think I have to stop treating Mastodon like it's gonna be my Twitter replacement and figure out what its role is for me. What am I getting here that I can't get somewhere else?

I don't even look at the federated stream anymore. I actually just have one person in that column so I can follow what she's tooting without it getting lost in the mix

Okay, how am I gonna manage this mastodon thing? I think part of my problem is that I AM interested in politics and news, and so much of this place is politics and news free for good reason.

Anyway, more of the people I like from twitter are showing up here, so that should help.

So...

I find it really baffling how so much of the great political insight I get is on Twitter, in 140 character snippets. The long thread format has really caught on despite it being the exact opposite of what the site was intended for.

I am still alive and here! That means you get pictures of my hair!
https://octodon.social/media/hxQw_A6ZihPUjpSZJbo
https://octodon.social/media/UhOG73NL26Qo3szrVX4

Yay, Hermeowne visited! #nekoatsume
https://octodon.social/media/qcyQxUwx4Nd3Fil5zp0

@Damage I thought part of it for me is I've seen many fish die for many reasons over the years, and I have assassin snails in my tank, which are weird little predators (that I put in specifically to eliminate the pond snail problem I had—it worked!) so I've seen what aquarium ecosystems can be like. But if you get them too, maybe it's just a thing? Maybe the brain is good at extrapolating that sort of potential future? (If that's true, how do polluters sleep at night?)

@Damage Yes, these dreams exactly! They're really distressing. I usually get used to the mutated fish and spend time watching them, but I always feel bad and need to clean the tanks.

@Damage I have two kinds of stress dreams: failing university classes that I've obviously already long since been done with, and my aquarium being overgrown and overcome with fish I didn't put in there that have mutated and eaten all the old fish.

Yessss
https://octodon.social/media/5QOyKWYFqI2Kwi_P01A

@Averly I'll try to be more of the content that I want to see here, I suppose. This is the advantage of a smaller network—you may be able to draw people that are like you into you because you're somewhat more visible in the crowd.

@NFG And maybe part of this is just that I'm using it wrong. Maybe I shouldn't be looking for those things here because I already have those things there. I need to figure out exactly what it is that I want to get out of this experience.