spinflip @spinflip@qoto.org

Meta-post: I think this is the third time I've made an account and tried to commit to mastodon. The others times lasted for about as long as it took for the novelty of tooting about mastodon to wear off: once we all got that point, it turned out that nobody really had much in common and engagement slowly dropped to zero.

This time around, I'm actually genuinely enjoying being here. There's a lot more activity, and a far smaller proportion of it seems to be of the boring "mastodon is good and better than twitter" ilk. Maybe the critical mass to keep people around has finally arrived?

Here's a cleaned version of what I currently have: https://pastebin.com/Tpgqrvdi

I'm working on a project that involves retrieving large (~2-8 GB) .zip files through HTTP and storing them for later processing. I've written a script that uses an API to lookup and generate URLs for a series of needed files, and then attempts to stream each file to storage using requests.get().iter_content.

The problem is, my connection isn't perfectly stable (and I'm running this on a laptop which sometimes goes to sleep). When the connection is interrupted, the transfer dies and I need to restart it.

What would be the best way to add a resume capacity to my file transfer? So that if the script stalls or the connection drops, it would be possible to resume the download from where it failed?

@Send_Lwyds I'm so glad to see you here! Your name/pic combo has been the best thing to see on twitter for like the last year

@freemo looks like there's a guy trying to advertise some sort of reactionary radio show: romegeorgiaman (lots of toots in the federated TL). Is advertising of that sort allowed here?

@InvaderXan after your thread on art nouveau last night: what *is* solarpunk? The concept seems to make sense intuitively, but does it actually exist? Are there any archetypical solarpunk works you can recommend?

Idk. I feel bad for my grandparents spending a lot of time sitting around at home drinking tea, doing sudoku, and watching the BBC in the evenings. They have friends in the village so aren't hugely isolated, but living with such a low level of information flow feels like it would drive me insane (of course, Being Online is hardly a good thing for sanity either).

I can't help but wonder if that's a result of one-time c20th cultural change, or if I'll be just as relatively isolated in my old age.

So much of my life experience comes from being Extremely Online: dumb memes, weird communities that fit into too narrow a niche to ever self-assemble offline in a single location, a faith in my ability to access almost all human knowledge from the device in my pocket. It's genuinely fucking weird to spend time with a guy who sees all that shit as inscrutably alien, but who can talk about the time a V1 flew over his head while he was cycling home and took out the row of houses opposite.

Spent today hanging with relatives, and ended up going to a German beer festival with my 93yo grandfather. I honestly find it hard to deal with the idea of how old he is: he's healthy (if a very slow walker), pretty sharp mentally, and full of stories like going to French Algeria before shit got wild or wandering around a stable, unified Yugoslavia. I really enjoy talking to him, but there's such a gulf between our life experiences that it can feel like hard work to find common ground