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
@eli_oat Thank you!
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
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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/.
@huaxixyz Yeats today: "Tweeting Towards Bethlehem"
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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@datasette @simon just sent this to the colleague ( @noslouch ) who introduced datasette to me… brace yourself for a whole lot of somethings cool…
#meta post
@jeffjarvis Yes, totally! It really is interesting to see how things I took for granted about the Twitter experience—both for better and for worse—when tweaked even a little bit and put in combination with social norms can nudge discourse into very different patterns.
@adamdavidson imo the fediverse is far too pleasant a place for this kind of scorched-earth take.
@adamdavidson those are definitely fighting words
@jeffjarvis (I guess what I'm saying is that ymmv on appeals to historical concerns about communication technologies.)
#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.
- website
- http://beebe-west.com/john
Admin
news + code: wsj
formerly: mit media lab + quartz
book: lessons and carols (2023)
Joined Nov 2022
