The GlitchCat #SundayPost offers news and updates from our corner of the fediverse to yours.

§ Special Note :—

It’s been almost a year since I’ve done one of these, which I am blaming on starting a new job last December (🎉). GlitchCat has been chugging along fine in that time, and even been upgraded once or twice!

§ Instance News :—

• In a belated embodiment of the American Dialect Society’s 2016 Word of the Year, Elon Musk has finally finalized his purchase of Twitter, resulting in a predictably large influx of new users to the fediverse. You can catch some of them on the #introductions hashtag, and hopefully a few actually stick around this time to invest in our infrastructure—in contrast to all the ⁜other⁜ times that large number of users have claimed to be leaving Twitter and then returned once that gesture ceased to have performative weight. (New users who are reading this: Welcome; reach out if you have any questions; and ⁜please⁜ get off mastodon.social & mastodon.online!!)

• Mastodon is nearing a release of version 4·0, which will come with some significant changes to the appearance of “static” (non·web·app) areas of the site—by which I mostly mean they are being removed. Local users: Please do reach out to me with any feelings about these changes and the direction you think we should go with our fork. We will probably be having more indepth conversations about this in the weeks to come.

§ From Our Users :—

• @Lady: I have released version 0·2·0 of my Ecmascript library for dealing with custom, userdefined character sets, Kijch. This version contains notable improvements in processing and laying out strings of text, in anticipation of future work to automate this with H·T·M·L Custom Elements.

• @aescling: Usage by white-supremacists in online memes led the Anti-Defamation League to list Pepe the Frog as part of their “Hate on Display” collection of hate symbols. Although the A·D·L acknowledges that “many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature” and even teamed up with creator Matt Furie for a Pepe reclamation campaign in 2016, the potential for antisemitic and white-supremacist connotations in the eyes of users make its use in a project’s branding, at the very least, a highly questionable P·R decision. Nevertheless, the popular adblocking extension ‘Twitch AdBlock’ decided to do just that, so this week æscling created a Pepe·less fork for those users who don’t want to be reminded, in the midst of a Twitch stream, of a meme wot significantly gained prominence through its association with hate speech and platforms where hate speech is common.

• @Satsuma: This week Satsuma gave a presentation on Weeks v. United States (1914). Although they claimed this achievement was “color text mostly”, I’m trying to pressure them to get it on the internet for the rest of us to see 😈.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• Last Sunday marked the official start of the Hallowtide season in the KIBI calendar. Set at the end of autumn, Hallowtide is the season for acknowledging strife, reckoning with debility, and remembering the dead.

• The month of November is widely observed among writers—sometimes derisively—as NaNoWriMo, the National [nation unclear] Novel Writing Month. While this author believes that the ethos of NaNoWriMo fundamentally fails to comprehend literature—akin to a game review wot uses “play time” as a proxy for “complexity” or “value”—I do encourage you to give writing a shot anyway. I’ll happily review whatever you have written!

• For those in the United States and Canada who recognize the ending of Daylight Savings Time, today is the day it ends!

• 🌺 11 November is Poppy Day, a day of remembrance for those killed or debilitated by global warfare. This topic is likely already in everybody’s minds due to the ongoing war in Ukraine; let us use the relatively comprehensive coverage of that European struggle to help nurture our empathy for the impacts of military conflict in the rest of the world. (Please do note that GlitchCat opposes the nationalistic use of the red poppy on this day, and advocates a white poppy instead.)

That’s all for this week!
— @Lady