Peppermint Mocha Latte @Lady@cat.family

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

§ From Our Users :—

• @Satsuma and @Lady have beeen watching ‘Guardian’ (cdrama) at a very slow pace of one episode a week (in a discord group with some other folks).

• @Lady also published a pornographic pokémon oneshot, but I’m not sharing the link to that here so you’ll have to be enterprising if you really want to read it.

• @Lady also also has been working more on her indie website publishing workflows but there haven’t been any real releases of anything yet.

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

§ From Our Users :—

• @wallhackio built a PC (technically last weekend, but I was lazy and so we’re celebrating it now)!

• @Satsuma visited a lot of museums, which I know because I am subscribed to their Photo Journal™ of it all.

• We’ve all been playing lots of pokémon, although only some of us are doing it for furry reasons. This is now a Meowscarada fan‐instance. Send fanart to @aescling.

#SundayPost: we’re all playing #pokémon

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

§ Current Events :—

• cybre.space has switched into read‐only mode, as was the plan for the new year.

• The American Dialect Society has announced the 2022 Word of the Year, and it’s -ussy. A·D·L writes “now everything is either a cat or a cavity”, but of course we all know which of those is the affix’s usual referent.

§ From Our Users :—

• @aescling is playing Pokémon Scarlet and enjoying the poképussy so far (Meowscarada).

• @Satsuma is now in a different time zone, so expect favs from them to come a few hours offset from when they were before.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• ⏳ 11 January is Carmentalia. This is a Roman festival we know very little about, except that it was celebrated on two dates (the other was 15 January), observed primarily by women (Carmenta was a goddess of childbirth and prophecy), and invoked Postvorta and Antevorta, aspects of Carmenta pertaining to looking back (into the past) and forward (into the future). As a date near the new year, it’s a good opportunity for reflection and resolution; I really couldn’t care less otherwise regarding the original Roman meaning.

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

This update covers the past two weeks, since I didn’t bother with one last Sunday!!

§ Current Events :—

• It is Public Domain Day here in the United States, and there are some very cool things which are now unencumbered with copyright here!

§ From Our Users :—

• @Lady continued work on her shrine-xslt static site generator, giving it rudimentary support for generating Atom feeds.

• @Lady also published a playlist of her favourite songs released in 2022.

• @aescling came out to her family and, semi‐relatedly, is in the process of moving, so be tolerant of any disruptions on the sysadminning side of things here.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• 🍻 05 January is Twelfnight. In the Catholic tradition, this is the night before Epiphany, but in the English tradition, it is a night of partying to close out Yule. Great time to use up any partying leftovers from the holiday season!

• 👼 06 January is Twelfday, if you need a day for eating your king cake 🍰.

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

§ Current Events :—

• Twitter has started banning journalists as well as anybody who ever links to another website, so lots of people are now saying “maybe this place isn’t great” and uh, leaving lmao. Some of them are coming here. Be nice; enforce boundaries.

• Some publication reporting on this misheard some details (I can only imagine they were communicating over the phone) and interpreted “the Join Mastodon account, run by the person who made Mastodon” as “John Mastodon’s account, the maker of Mastodon” (this post has a screenshot), so anyway that’s a meme. I expect it to be up there with Lance Ulanoff/William Shatner RPF in popularity for the forseeable future.

§ Instance News :—

• We’ve done some re·organizing of our emojice; the blobcat emojos now all start with blobcat_ instead of no underscore; satsuma is now catsuma and filed under “Cats”; the most recent dragn emojim have been added. All the old shortcodes still work; they’re just not listed in the emoji picker or suggestions anymore.

§ From Our Users :—

• @Lady has been working on some improvements to her shrine-xslt static site generator in the hopes of maybe one day using it to build an e·zine. More about this in the coming weeks, maybe.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• 🌌 21 December is Longest Night, a·k·a the Winter Solstice. Get cosy, tell ghost stories, and drink warm beverages!

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

§ Instance News :—

Not much news to report today; @aescling finished Breath of the Wild and is now playing Super Mario Odyssey; @Lady has a few things she’s working on but nothing to show for it yet.

Many of us are continuing to use the #DecRecs hashtag to share things we enjoy!

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• 🍵 December 15 is Tea Day. Although the United Nations tries to celebrate this day on May 21 instead, December 15 is the day chosen by the countries where they actually produce the tea. Here are some of the resolutions from a 2008 Tea Day conference in Sri Lanka, and here is what the United Nations has to say regarding the importance of the day.

sprint reviews? oh you mean the glitchcat #SundayPost

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

§ Instance News :—

• A lot of people on this instance have been participating in #DecRecs, a hashtag for recommending whatever you want to recommend in the month of December. I’ve been using it mostly as an excuse to reshare some of my old fanfiction bookmarks, but you can rec anything you like!

§ From Our Users :—

• @Lady had a p·r which was recently merged to GlitchSoc. This is a slightly revised version of code which we’ve been rolling here on GlitchCat for some time; at some point I will need to port over the changes.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• 🥾 December 05 is Clauseen, the final day of Hallowtide in the KIBI calendar.

• 🧑‍🎄 December 06 is Clausmas, a·k·a Sinterklaas Day or the Feast of St Nicholas. Basically nothing is known about St Nicholas, and this day epitomizes the KIBI practice of using fictitious or legendary saints’ days to reappropriate Catholic/Christian traditions away from their religious underpinnings (in this case, Christmas; compare St Valentine). In this case, the recentring on 06 December is especially apt, as Saint Nicholas is actually the template from which we got a lot of our (quasi‐secular) Christmas traditions from, e·g Santa Claus. My take? Celebrate Santa on Santa’s day and leave Christmas in the dust.

• December 06 also marks the beginning of Yuletide, a·k·a “the holiday season”.

• 🕊 December 10 is Nobelmas, also known as Alfred Nobel Day or, per the United Nations, Human Rights Day. If ever you wanted a day to celebrate peace on earth and goodwill to men, this is a great day for it.

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

Short post today because I’m exhausted after a long weekend with family, but I wanted to at least get the holidays and observances in.

§ Instance News :—

• @aescling finally played Breath of the Wild meaning the amount of Zeldaposting on this server may increase. Or it may not, because they really only played it to critique Sonic 🤷🏻‍♀️.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• 🪨 November 28 is Thingstaken, a counter·observance to American Thanksgiving. It is also co·incidentally Cyber Monday, making it a good time to reread The Cybre Manifesto, I guess, or not, I’m not a cop.

• 👿 November 29 is Witchnight, a day marking the beginning of the darkest time of year, in which vampires, demons, ⁊·c are said to thrive. This is a great opportunity to put up your winter lights, tell spooky stories, and generally wish the fall a fond goodbye.

• 🌐 November 30 is N·30, a day of remembrance for those dead or debilitated as a consequence of globalist economic policy. N·30 commemorates the 1999 Battle of Seattle; for background and further context, Kit Oldham did a history of the event in two parts (Part Ⅰ; Part ⅠⅠ).

• 🩸 December 01 is Aidsmas, World Aids Day, or Day With(out) Art, a day of remembrance for those dead or debilitated as a result of the aids pandemic. As December 01 is also the day that the covid “Patient Zero” first began experiencing symptoms, I also endorse using this day to think about globalist responses to pandemic and illness in general.

• ⛓ December 04 is Barbiemas, a day of disguise and secret‐revealing, because Halloween and Witchnight evidently just weren’t enough for me. The name of this day comes from the Catholic St Barbara, but she wasn’t a real person so it might as well be the plastic doll instead. This is a great time to be unflinchingly honest with your loved ones before we hit Yuletide and you might be expected to spend all kinds of time with them. It’s also a great day for DnD campaigns.

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

§ Current Events :—

• The World Cup is happening, which many people have predicted will be the death knell of Twitter. We’ll see.

• Of probably more relevance to the fediverse, Elon Musk erpragyl qrpvqrq gb erfgber gur nppbhag bs Donald Trump gb gur cyngsbez, which may cause additional people to leave there for here. Mastodon was already facing heavy strain after Elon bssrerq gb cnl frirenapr gb nalobql jub qrpvqrq gurl qvqa’g jnag gb jbex sbe gur pbzcnal nalzber, juvpu zbfg crbcyr npprcgrq, guebjvat Gjvggre’f bcrengvbaf vagb punbf naq yrnivat gur shgher bs gur cyngsbez hapyrne.

• For those of you who have not yet checked the news today, it is with sadness that I must acknowledge ng yrnfg svir crbcyr jrer xvyyrq naq gjragl‐svir bguref vawherq va n fubbgvat ng n tnl avtugpyho—Club Q—yngr ynfg avtug. Qrgnvyf, ng guvf cbvag, ner fgvyy hapyrne.

§ Instance News :—

• We have a new member! Everybody welcome @wallhackio to the fediverse!

• We have updated the server to GlitchSoc as of PR №1875, which is just before the new user interface was added. I’m currently working on drafting acceptance criteria for moving past that point; thanks to everyone who responded to my posts asking for feedback on the new changes.

• Dealing with constant Mastodon things (new users, security patch, gathering feedback, new users part two) over the past two weeks has honestly left me pretty exhausted so please be understanding of any delays in responses.

§ From Our Users :—

• @aescling played the new Sonic game and had thoughts and this is me pressuring them to record those thoughts somewhere.

• @Lady is playing the new Pokémon game.

• I·d·k what games the rest of you are playing but feel free to tell me in the replies.

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• Orange Week continues through 25 November. As a reminder, Orange Week is a weeklong observance recognizing the cost of genderbased violence in lives and debility. As noted last update, today is Transmas, a·k·a Transgender Day of Remembrance.

• 👗 21 November is Day of Red Dress, a day of remembrance for indigenous people dead or debilitated as a result of genderbased violence. The name of this day comes from the notable REDress Project by Jaime Black, aimed at drawing attention to the large number of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. The success of this project has lead the colour red, and red clothing in particular, to be widely recognized as a symbol of genderbased violence against indigenous people, especially women and girls.

• ☂️ 22 November is Umbrella Day, a day of remembrance for surviors of intimate partner violence, who are now dead or debilitated as a result of (the same, or subsequent) genderbased violence. The umbrella connotates simultaneous meanings of shelter, unity, and selfdefence. It has been used in an antiviolence context by, for example, the U·N·E·S·C·O “Orange the World” campaign, which states: « Under an umbrella, we stand united to fight physical, verbal and emotional violence, both online and offline and SAY NO TO VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN. »

• 🚼 23 November is Flissmas, a day of remembrance for reproductive labourers, including care workers, dead or debilitated as a result of genderbased violence. In the Catholic tradition, 23 November is the Feast of St Felicity, of whom we know basically nothing about. According to (improbable) tradition, she was the mother of seven sons, who she comforted through their torture and death before being executed herself.

• 💪 24 November is Rosiemas, a day of remembrance for productive labourers dead or debilitated as a result of genderbased violence. The shortage of male labourers during World War I and World War II led to the employment of a large number of women—popularly known as “Rosies”—in jobs which had traditionally been seen as mens work, such as manufacturing. These jobs were frequently hazardous, underpaid, offered little security, and after the wars ended, the women who held them were quickly forced back into lower‐paying work or the home.

• 🗣 25 November is Cathemas, a day of remembrance for political activists dead or debilitated as a result of genderbased violence. Cathemas is formed from the union of two observances, which happen to share a date of 25 November. The first of these is the Feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, who was probably not a real person, but has been nonetheless popularly venerated on this day since mediæval times. According to tradition, she was an educated woman who spoke out against Emperor Maxentius and was subsequently put to death, perhaps after refusing his hand in marriage. The second observance is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, established by the United Nations General Assembly in memory of the assassination of the very real Mirabal sisters, activists in the Dominican Republic who organized against Rafael Trujillo, the man in control of the government at that time.

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

§ Instance News :—

• In light of the recent flood of new users from Twitter, concerns about the moderation capacity of some larger servers, and increased concern on my part regarding the potential for boosts of posts from our server to reach instances which do not share our values, I am currenty planning to upgrade silences on several large instances to suspends. These blocks will be open to revision, but only if the servers in question can demonstrate they have their moderation act together. Expect them to be carried out imminently.

People on other servers: This is a good time to remind that moderation on GlitchCat isn’t about what content ⁜we⁜ can see, but who can see ⁜us⁜. We trust in our users. My hope is for people here to feel comfortable posting on the public timeline without fear of it getting boosted into the wrong hands. Preventing federation with large, poorly‐moderated instances is essential to cultivating this environment, as those instances form the hubs through which others might encounter our posts.

We will continue to federate with large instances which ⁜do⁜ appear welmoderated, like mastodon.art and scholar.social, and look forward to working alongside their moderation teams to resolve any issues we might have.

• We have modified our robots.txt such that even the root page of glitch.cat.family will not be indexed by search engines. This website is now entirely part of the “deep web” 🌊😱.

• We have added a new feature to Kibicat Mastodon—the fork of GlitchSoc that we run—vayvar fcbvyref! This feature is only available in the H·T·M·L and Markdown content modes: Wrap text in a <spoiler-text> element to make it require a clickthrough, like on Discord. This feature ⁜does⁜ federate, but considering no other instance has implemented it (yet), everybody else on the fediverse will see Rot·13, which is the fallback.

• We’ve optimized the settings for GlitchCat to make it run smoother. We weren’t experiencing any problems before, but now we’re extra not‐experiencing‐any‐problems.

We also recently upgraded the amount of RAM this server uses, so now is a good time to mention that you can support this instance financially if you have the means.

§ From Our Users :—

• @Lady and @aescling: See above. We’ve been hard at work improving this instance!

• @noracodes: Recently @noracodes did some great work helping our friends at weirder.earth to scale their instance in the face of the current migration of users from Twitter. She also wrote about it!

§ Holidays and Observances :—

• 🟠 19 November–25 November is Orange Week, a week of mourning and activism focusing on genderbased violence and its impact around the world. The colour orange is used to symbolize the spectrum of antiviolence work, from 🟥 emergency response to 🟨 education & advocacy, and is the official colour for the United Nations UNiTE campaign to end violence against women.

• 🤍 19 November is White Ribbon Day, a day for recognizing the cost of genderbased violence in terms of human lives. The White Ribbon Campaign was formed by a group of profeminist men in London, Ontario in response to the École Polytechnique massacre on 06 December 1989. This is recognized at various dates depending on location, but we do 19 November because it is six days before Cathemas.

It so happens that 19 November is celebrated in some locations as International Men’s Day. It also so happens that men are disproportionately the instigators of genderbased violence, so this observance could be seen as a counter·observance of sorts.

• ⚧️ 20 November is Transmas, a·k·a the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day of remembrance for trans people dead or debilitated due to genderbased violence. Transgender Day of Remembrance was begun in 1999 to memorialize Rita Hester, a transgender woman, who was murdered on 28 November the previous year in Allston, Massachusetts. Although the original organizers solely emphasized remembering those trans people lost to murder, we also recognize those dead or debilitated from other violences, such as systemic violence and suicide, on this day.

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

Been a hot minute since i’ve done one of these so here you go!

§ Instance News

• It was a while ago, but the configuration bug which was leading our WebFinger to sometimes go down due to a logging error has been fixed!

• Daylight Savings Time has ended in North America! Set your clocks back, or don’t out of protest. 🕚

• Some of you may have heard rumour of some accounts mentioning a bunch of users and generally being harassing. Far as I know, nobody here has been affected, but if you ever have any problems let me know!

• Relatedly, I’ve recently gone and blocked a fair number of instances.

• Relatedly relatedly, while I haven’t silenced any instances solely for having open registrations ⁜yet⁜, it’s a factor which I will likely take into account in the future.

#GlitchCat #SundayPost

§ Instance News

• We had a temporary federation outage LAST sunday due to issues with the technology which manages our WebFinger redirects.

• Earlier today we upgraded the server with the latest changes from GlitchSoc; for the most part these changes shouldn’t be noticeable. If you DO notice anything breaking, let us know!

#GlitchCat #SundayPost

§ Instance News

• No major updates! There was a problem with Let’s Encrypt certificates? Didn’t seem to affect us! 😄

• It’s the spooky season!! Feel free to join in the celebrations with a spooky avatar or username (if you want).

• A reminder that October 8 (Friday) is International Lesbian Day!!

§ From Our Members

• I finished my work on https://www.u2764.com, an archive for various things I have published on the internet.

• @aescling is working on refactoring httpd.execline (which powers our WebFinger and her website) but it isn’t done yet!

#GlitchCat #SundayPost

§ Instance News

• No major updates! Everything seems to be running smoothly!

§ From Our Members

• @Satsuma created caramels! You can see pictures here: ‹ https://glitch.cat.family/@Satsuma/106994905207340823 ›.

• In the process of re·organizing/consolidating my internet presence, I wrote an XSLT ‹ https://github.com/marrus-sh/u2764/blob/master/Atom.xslt › which can be used to generate index pages like ‹ https://www.u2764.com/XRPT/ › and ‹ https://www.u2764.com/OFIC/ › from linked Atom feeds/archives! See the source code for those pages, or @ me for an explanation of how it works.

#GlitchCat #SundayPost

§ Instance News

• We’ve set up a new fork for the instance, derived from GlitchSoc, at ‹ https://github.com/kibicat/mastodon ›. For now, the name of the fork (subject to change) is “Kibicat Mastodon”. We haven’t committed much code yet, but there has been a great deal of discussion about goals and direction via the GitHub Discussions pane.
Kibicat Mastodon is not presently looking for individual outside contributors, but we ⁜are⁜ interested in working with other communities / instances to meet mutual goals. Contact us (by which I mean me) if you’re interested in collaborating with us!

• A bunch of new cat‐ and pokémon‐themed emoji have been added to the instance! Use them to your heart’s content .

• The server was upgraded for the first time without any issue 🎉!

• It is not feasible for me to personally vet every instance that GlitchCat federates with, but I have begun doing so for the larger instances and applied mutes or blocks as appropriate. I’m hoping to push some changes to the fork soon which will make future bookkeeping simpler in this respect.

§ From Our Members

• I published another episode of my pokémon fanfiction, can you believe it?! You can read it from the beginning here: ‹ https://archiveofourown.org/series/2377408 ›.

[Accomplish something cool? Tell me about it and I’ll be happy to give it a feature!]

#GlitchCat #SundayPost