John West @jsbw@internaut.club
- website
- http://beebe-west.com/john
Admin
news + code: wsj
formerly: mit media lab + quartz
book: lessons and carols (2023)
Joined Nov 2022
It is absolutely surreal to see a review of my book in the wild. Publishers Weekly calls it "searing," "affectingly raw," "often lyrical," and "touching if imperfect." It dwells on those imperfections, but what a gift that someone engaged with my book like this!
John West
boosted
Mastodon meta
My least favourite sharp edge of Mastodon is the fact that when you view someone else's post you only see replies to it that are known to your server - so there's actually a good chance there will be replies that are completely invisible to you, especially if you run your own instance
I'd love it if tapping a post kicked off a request back to the original server that fetched the current reply count and provided a "view all replies" button if there were replies not yet visible to me
This year, I read 100 books, and almost half of them were romances. Here's a little essay on the joys (and perils) of reading romances. https://johnwest.substack.com/p/the-year-in-books-2022
And here's a network graph of my favorite books this year.
John West
boosted
[Untitled]
From the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration Black-and-White Negatives, here: https://www.loc.gov/item/2017716531/.
John West
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– We met on Mastodon. Not on the same server, but we saw each other’s toots on different federated Mastodon servers. And Hamilton got up the courage to migrate his account one day and DMed me.
– Yeah, I’d seen you online before. And I know that sometimes I’d be on one server and then you’d be on the other server, and then I’d think, maybe I should migrate over to that server the next weekend. And then you’d be at the other server. So we kind of crossed… I know. It sounds so stupid now.
John West
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[Untitled]
From the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration Black-and-White Negatives, here: https://www.loc.gov/item/2017715297/.
John West
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[Untitled photo, possibly related to: Flood toll. Household debris to be destroyed by board of health. North Hatfield, Massachusetts]
From the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration Black-and-White Negatives, here: https://www.loc.gov/item/2017734310/.
John West
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From the Library of Congress's Farm Security Administration Black-and-White Negatives, here: https://www.loc.gov/item/2017717272/.
John West
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#meta post
I had a minor quibble with something @jeffjarvis wrote on here. Were this Twitter, I would have quote tweeted him, and posted *about* him. Since Mastodon doesn't have a quote tweet, I just replied, meaning I was speaking *to* him.
It might seem small, but it's differences like these that, all together, make this particular communication technology conducive to a different, much more pleasant, kind of discourse—and I'm 💯 here for it.
John West
boosted
Appropriate first Mastadon post: https://wapo.st/3TtNnMr (Editor's note: This was my first tweet 11 years ago.)
Here's a fun #ai #art #project for y'all. Using Stable Diffusion, a couple home-brewed Python scripts, and Svelte, I illustrated Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" from LEAVES OF GRASS.
It's not complete yet, but here's a proof of concept: http://beebe-west.com/viz/leaves-of-grass/index.html.
Each stanza looks like this, in the style of the artist John Singer Sargent.
What should I do with this?
considering writing a play about web3 called waiting for crypdot — is that anything?
Hey #fediverse I upgraded my servers, and it seemed to break my public profile page... Any thoughts?
- website
- http://beebe-west.com/john
Admin
news + code: wsj
formerly: mit media lab + quartz
book: lessons and carols (2023)
Joined Nov 2022
