ceoln @ceoln@qoto.org

Heading back to wintry Europe but with wonderful memories of #Freycinet in #Tasmania. Can’t speak highly enough - stunning landscapes, warm and friendly people.

#котэ #Midjourney #FAIL #NeuralNetwork
Three cats standing on a robot vacuum cleaner, holding earth hemishpere on top of their backs, medieval engraving, ancient map

Оно меня не понимает

When I decided to jump into the fediverse with both feet, I signed up for a BookWyrm account at @bookrastinating. When I tried to import my history/library, there were two big issues.

The first was timing. I joined and started an import at about the same time many, many, many other people did, and the server promptly fell over. The owner of Bookrastinating was helpful and friendly and eventually the queue started moving again, so that's not an issue anymore.

The second was not actually a problem with BookWyrm at all, but with GoodReads! It turns out that a bunch of books I'd previously tagged as read on GoodRead were no longer the books they had been. No offense to Marc Blake, author of “How to Be a Sitcom Writer: Secrets from the Inside,” but I’ve never read that book. When I “shelved” it on January 9, 2017, I assigned it “baroque, cycle, fiction, hardback, series, read,” so it seems very clear that what I actually shelved was a book by Neal Stephenson, and checking now shows that GoodReads only knows I've read the second book in the tagged "baroque cycle" series, but it has lost the first and third.

I'm not sure when the GoodReads database was corrupted, and in a review of my Reading Challenge book lists for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017, everything seems probably-correct. But my 2017 Reading Challenge also does not include the book I mentioned above, the book that caught my eye as clearly-incorrect.

When I look at books *shelved* in 2017, I see many that are definitely not right, although they don't have "read" dates. I'm sure <cite>After the Martian Apocalypse: Extraterrestrial Artifacts and the Case for Mars Exploration</cite> is a perfectly fine book, but it definitely wasn't what I tagged with "fiction paperback series dragon king trilogy" on January 9, 2017. <cite>Love on the Dotted Line</cite> could be a fantastic romance novel, but it's not what I tagged "paperback anthology science fiction" on January 9, 2017. A dual-language collection of Italian women's poetry is definitely not what I tagged as a volume of the "Writers of the Future" science fiction anthology series. And so on. The ones I notice most easily are the titles I would never read, but the date January 9, 2017, stands out. Sorting by date added, I can see that some of the books added on that date seem correct. I know the books, and the tags match the books. Most do not.

I'm sure there's some irony in an import failure on the fediverse alerting me to serious corruption on Amazon-owned GoodReads, and the result stopping me from actually migrating.

I clearly cannot trust GoodReads, as they've broken the first and second rules of a database: they've lost data, and represented data falsely to belong to me when it doesn't. I'm not sure which of those is the first rule and which is the second, but both seem bad.

I also cannot import my entire library from GoodReads into BookWyrm, because I don't want to start with bad data. I think it's time to let most of the past go, and create a cleaned-up import file with just my reading history from 2017 onward.

Good thing I have the day off tomorrow!

#GoodReads #amazon #nerdery #blog #Bookwyrm

This is fascinating - Tapeworms eaten by Acorn #ants secrete more insulin that seems to aid in the ants #longevity. They want the ants to live as long as possible, to increase their chances of being eaten by a #woodpecker 😳.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ants-live-10-times-longer-by-altering-their-insulin-responses-20230110/

Social threat modeling and quote boosts on Mastodon

How to improve tools for preventing, and defending against, harassment and abuse?

https://privacy.thenexus.today/social-threat-modeling-and-quote-boosts/

#QuoteBoost #QuoteTweet #MissedQuoteBoost

Ireland seen from the International Space Station

A sample-return mission that led to big discoveries! ☄️

#OTD in 2006, the Stardust spacecraft returned samples of Comet Wild 2 to the Earth for study. Stardust, launched in 1999, was the first NASA mission dedicated to studying comets.
#NASAhistory

From the person who does the Wandering Warring blog: frosty mountain views in Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada, 14 January, 2023.

Into the Croatan Forest - A Road Seldom Traveled fine art print.

With a simple surface of dirt and grass, this rustic road provides access into the Croatan for National Forest Service personnel.

Find it at https://bob-decker.pixels.com/featured/into-the-croatan-forest-a-road-seldom-traveled-bob-decker.html

#ArtMatters #AYearForArt #blackandwhite #woodland #forest #blackandwhitephotography #art #photography #fediart #mastoart #fineart #fineartphotography #monochrome #buyintoart #nature #photoart

You want to know how I really feel?

https://furbo.org/2023/01/15/the-shit-show/

P.S. That's the tame version.

In conversation today a friend threw out the phrase “So since the pandemic and the cyberattack…” as background to get to the real event and I had to pause and marvel how used we’ve gotten to living in dystopian speculative sci-fi.

Reminder that anyone badging you online w/the phrase "virtue signalling" is full-on, full-stop acting in bad faith, and that nothing of value will be lost if you ignore/mute/block them to preserve your time and energy.