I'm currently blogging regularly at @rmiddleton@dotart.blog right next door to where we are now :)

Hey-o. Been a minute (hasn't it always.) I originally wrote this short back in undergrad. To be honest, it probably changed the trajectory of my life. That's a... that's a long story. Anyway, the short version is I was supposed to write an essay about physics and decided to be a little contrarian and turn this in instead. That somehow worked out for me.

—

People cleared the streets when the gunslinger came. They shuttered their windows and glanced through the cracks, hoping the sheriff died quickly so they could get back to what they’d been doing beforehand. The townspeople stayed out of the way and the gunslinger left the town more or less alone. It was the sheriff he was after, and the townsfolk had long agreed that it was best to avoid the ricochets.

And so it went—on the first of the month, every month, the government sent another shiny new sheriff to clean the place up. The gunslinger came at noon, and then the town went about its day, scuffing the dark stains into the dirt. The townsfolk learned to work their schedules around it. In fact, it was kind of more of an inconvenience than anything. Everyone agreed that the gunslinger wasn’t so bad, since he never really bothered anyone important, after all. (Hey, that’s not very nice.) (Then increase your skill.)

This view was not held by the government. They insisted on sending more bodies to fill the graveyard, a new shiny sheriff to be dented and broken and shuffled under the sun-baked dirt.

And so, no one had said a word to the new sheriff in the time since he’d arrived. He’d come early, in the hopes of teasing out information about the mysterious gunslinger, but the townsfolk had been less than helpful. They walked past him as if he was a ghost, no more than a gust of wind in a dirty Stetson. He supposed he didn’t blame them, but the stony silence was lonely.

If anyone was curious, they did their best to hide it. A few of the bolder townsfolk watched him when they thought he wasn’t looking. The sheriff caught a nod at the mail post, a few sideways glances at the saloon, but was largely left to contemplate his whiskey in peace. The only person in town who’d introduced themselves was the undertaker and the sheriff was getting sick of tripping over him and his measuring string.

He eavesdropped on the whispered conversations at dark windows, the loose tongue in the early hours of the night, when the saloon keeper herded the patrons out with a broom and a kick. He waited by stables and in the general store, where the dusty women huddled and carried out their gossip with religious gravity. He wrote secret letters to the widows of the sheriffs that came before him. When he received any response, their words came hollow, strangely devoid of emotion as they related what the government had told them about their lost loves.

(Could you at least try to sound sad?)(This is highly melodramatic.)

From what he could tell, the gunslinger rode from the west on the first of every month, shot a sheriff and finished up with drinks at the saloon. It seemed like he didn’t want anything else. The sheriff had to admire the consistency of it, surely a man ought to have a routine, but enough was enough. Tomorrow was the day of reckoning, and the gunslinger was getting a surprise this month.

He hitched his belt and surveyed the empty streets. They baked to dust in the noon sun, a russet river of dirt and emptied spittoons, wavering against the yellow-grey sky. Somewhere in the distance an eagle screamed, cutting the heavy hiss of summer cicadas for only a moment before they blanketed the town once more.

“Sheriff.” The voice rang out behind him, flat and metallic. The sheriff stiffened slightly, but did not turn. What made a man ring so hollow, like an empty tin drum? He fingered the ivory handles at his hip.

“I am. Might you be the gunslinger?” The sheriff felt the bored eyes of a whole town glancing at him from their windows and doorways. Get on with it. Their impatience was infectious. (Yeesh. We’ll change up the setting next time, alright?)(Whatever makes you happy.) He rested his fingers on the holstered revolvers.

“Yes.” Again the voice rang out like steel against stone. It was alien, mechanical, a sound that made his skin prickle. “You know why I have come.”

“For a drink, I recon. Then you’ll be on your way to jail.” The sheriff held the waver from his voice, but just barely.

Shifting tone quite suddenly, the gunslinger trilled in a pleasant voice, “We’ve arrived at the location set by the course program. Awaiting instructions.”

“Stay in character, dammit!” The sheriff spat, turning to face the scowling giant. To say an air of menace surrounded the gunslinger would be to say a river was wet. His face was deep lined and rough, indistinct beneath the shadow of the wide brimmed hat pulled down low on his brow. His eyes held a strange light, the angle of the noon sun glinting off of them like unholy hellfire. The man stood two heads taller than anyone the sheriff had seen. A dirty leather duster flowed out behind him, flapping in a breeze that no one else felt.

His voice returned to its flat, tinned growl. “Draw, Sheriff.”

The sheriff’s fingers flexed for the holster, but stopped short.

“Eh, you know what? You’re right. This setting is kind of getting old.”

“You cannot change the setting in the middle of a match. To do so would be to forfeit.” The gunslinger slipped his revolver from its jet black holder, a black steel nightmare glinting in the noon sun. The sheriff held his hands up.

“OK, fine. Hold on a minute.” The sheriff scrunched his face and squinted into the distance, mouthing something for a minute or so before declaring “That should do it, give or take.”

With a sharp snap, the sheriff pulled a blade from the air that sent ozone rippling through the air, dripping plasma onto the dry baked streets. The gunslinger’s form became fluid, melting and twisting. Two red eyes flared from the shadow of his face, locked in a permanent metal grimace under his jet black hat. His arms grew wires and pipes, steam pouring from his hinged joints. A deep whir emanated from his chest, his leather duster ripping cleanly down the back where a series of sharp exhausts grew from his spine. With an evil crackle, the black revolver rippled and reformed, dripping into the shape of a long black blade, an empty void like a rent in the very fabric of reality.

“That is your last allowance, sheriff. The rules of this world are now locked.”

“Ha. I’d like to see you stop me.” The men charged, blades singing, their electric screams slicing the heavy summer in their wake and the townsfolk peeked from their windows with new interest. They shrunk back from the lightning thrown from the crashing blades, deep scars forming in the wooden structures from the fury of the blades’ collisions.

The sheriff threw his weight into a wide swing, cursing as he overbalanced. He dropped to his knees, ducking the elegant arc of the gunslinger’s blade. With a sharp jab to the robot’s torso, the sheriff rolled left and promptly lodged his sword into the tavern hitching post. He cursed again.

“Without your tricks you are but a novice,” growled the gunslinger. “Admit defeat.”

<>

Somewhere far away from the gunslinger, the sheriff, and the town, a proximity warning light flickered to life. Then another. Then another. The woman at the console blinked at the swarm of lights in front of her. She punched the monitor to life, flicking through the screens with mounting horror. In twenty years on the job, she had never seen the subsystem readouts return... nothing. What she was seeing was insane. What she was seeing was not possible. She slammed open the ship’s coms.

“Bridge! Come in, bridge!” Her speakers replied with only a faint crackle.

The engineer ripped off her earpiece and leapt for the door. She was gone before the headset hit the ground.

<>

Tugging uselessly at his blade, which had now set the front of the tavern ablaze, the sheriff slumped against the smoldering building and sighed.

“Best of three?”

Quite suddenly, the ground heaved beneath their feet, throwing the sheriff off-balance once more. His sword dislodged itself, crackling on the ground like an injured snake.

“That probably wasn’t normal. Hey, where did you say we—” The gunslinger drew his blade down heavy on the sheriff’s shoulder, sending a fountain of sparks and blood streaming to the dirt. With a pained grunt, the sheriff fell to his knees. “Hold it, Ship. I think we—”

“Denied. Staying in character. Pick up your sword.” The gunslinger growled, looming over the fallen man with the tip of his blade poised to on his throat.

“First law of robotics, asshole!”

“Asimov is fiction.” The metal scowl deepened. “You got two hands, Sheriff. Pick it up.”

“Oh, nice! You watched The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. You’ve really been doing your research lately.” The sheriff let his gaze wander off into the distance once more as he spoke, quickly shifting numbers in his head. It took only a second; the gunslinger wouldn’t have enough time to catch it if he was distracted. Just a few decimal points here or there, the wrong variable in the right place. “Did you like it?”

“Yes,” the gunslinger said, hitting the sheriff again with his blade. “I will put a cactus on your grave too.”

Except, whoops. That was definitely the wrong variable in the wrong place. Eh. Good enough.

The sheriff smiled up at the grimacing robot. “This time, right between the eyes.”

The sky cracked in half, a brilliant pillar of nuclear fire evaporating everything in its wake, stripping the buildings, the streets, the huddled townsfolk. The shock on the gunslinger’s face could be seen for only an instant before he too melted to white.

<>

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The helmet flew from the pilot's head, skittering across the bridge floor. The sudden brightness seared her eyes and she squeezed them shut. Peeking between her lids revealed a seething engineer. The pilot fancied rage looked most natural on the older woman's face, although she had only even seen 'annoyed' or 'harried' for comparison.

“You crashed us!” she shrieked. “Where are the safety overrides? What have you done?”

“Crashed…?” Slurred the woozy pilot. She rubbed her forehead and sneezed. Perhaps she'd gone a little overboard. They say that you shouldn't play for more than two hours at a time, and she'd started sometime after lunch. It was well into first shift sleeping hours, if her complaining stomach (the most accurate time piece she'd yet come across) was anything to go by.

“The space ship that you were SUPPOSED to be flying. Do you know what happens when you crash a space ship? In space?” The engineer opened her mouth to continue, but froze at the sight of the control panels.

Pilot override: Standby

“YOU turned the subsystems off?” The engineer slammed into the panels, searching for life among the screens. “ALL OF THEM?” She shrieked, eyes bulging. Not even the life support had power, a system that had so many safeguards that before today the engineer wasn’t sure someone could turn it off. “How...?”

“Not off, just diverted. Moved a few blocks around in the system controller, no big deal. I set the ship to ping life support every hour. And—-oh, whoops. No, actually I turned it off. It’s fine, the system’s got enough air for like 12 hours.”

“WHY??”

“It lets ship focus on amping up the realism in our campaign. I’m going to be tasting dirt for weeks, haha.”

“You do not play fair.” The ship’s AI whined. “You change the rules every time I’m winning.”

The engineer sputtered with rage.

“OK, OK. Calm down. Ship, return to full auto. Status.”

She recoiled from the sudden explosion of alarms.

“Hull breach in Reactor 2. Reactor failure. Hull breach in 18. Bulkhead failure, oxygen critical. Hull breach in 37. Bulkhead failure, oxygen critical. Hull breach in 45. Bulkhead failure—”

“Oh. Well, shit.”

Inspiriert von den Maker Skill Trees findet sich hier die Antwort auf die Frage, was eine erwachsene Person so tun muss.

CC-BY-SA Piko / Steph Piper Makerqueen

Ich habe hier gesammelt, was ich für sinnvoll halte – im Mastodon-Thread, in dem ich nach Ideen hierfür gefragt hatte, gab es beispielsweise zu den Versicherungen sehr unterschiedliche Meinungen. Nehmt das als Inspiration.

Das ist auch die Antwort auf die Frage nach Formulierungsunklarheiten: Ist mit „Freunde finden“ gemeint, ich soll die Fähigkeit haben, Freunde zu finden – oder soll ich direkt Freunde finden? Wer bestimmt, welche Themen wichtig sind, sodass eins dazu Allgemeinwissen haben soll? You're a grown-up now, you decide.

Die Baum-Icons weisen darauf hin, dass es bei den originalen Skill Trees eigene Skill Trees für die jeweilige Aufgabe gibt.

Anders als bei den Maker Skill Trees sind die Aufgaben hier teils nicht gut quantifizierbar. Ich vermute, dass das in der Natur der Sache liegt. Wenn jemand trotzdem versuchen möchte, den Skill Tree entsprechend anzupassen, würde ich mich sehr freuen, das Ergebnis zu sehen.

Falls hier Dinge fehlen oder Ihr ähnliche Projekte kennt, dann teilt sie mir bitte per Mastodon an @piko@chaos.social mit. Vielen Dank an alle, die beim Sammeln mitgeholfen haben!

https://codeberg.org/Piko/Adult_Skills/

Weiter unten finden sich die Aufgaben als Liste – diese Liste ist aber auf mehreren Ebenen nicht allgemeingültig: Sie bezieht sich auf ein relativ privilegiertes Leben in Deutschland. „Deeskalierend mit der Polizei reden“ zu können wird beispielsweise für viele Menschen unter “Muss” und nicht unter “Sollte” fallen. „Zähne putzen“ muss nicht für jede Person einfach sein. Please don't make me tap the sign.

Der Squishy Stuff von ganz unten fehlt größtenteils im Ausmal-Skilltree. Ich empfehle, die zehn Punkte in Ruhe durchzugehen und die, die ihr für Euch haben möchtet, in Euren Skill Tree zu übertragen – dafür sind die vielen leeren Bubbles!

Muss

• Zähneputzen, Körperhygiene
• Vorratshaltung
• Steuererklärung
• Krankenversicherung
• Rentenversicherung
• Personalausweis
• Bankkonto, Geldkarte
• Dokumente wiederauffindbar aufbewahren
• Kalender
• Wissen, wie mit Krankheiten umgegangen werden soll bzw. wer dann gefragt werden kann

Sollte

Vorsorge

• Testament und Vorsorgevollmachten (Vorsorge-Set)
• Versicherungen (alle paar Jahre überprüfen, Lebensituationen verändern sich, mögliche Vertragsbedingungen auch. test.de)
  • Haftpflicht-V
  • Hausrats-V
  • Berufsunfähigkeits-V
  • Unfall-V
  • Rechtschutz-V
  • private Altersvorsorge
• Notgroschenkonto
• Backups machen

Arbeit

• Zeitmanagement (verschobenes nicht vergessen)
• Erwerbsarbeit
• Gewerkschaft
• Budgetieren

Körperliche Gesundheit

• Bewegung/Sport
• Gesunde Ernährung
• How to Arzt
• Eine Ärztin finden, die einen ernst nimmt
• wie gehe ich mit Medikamenten um (z.B. wie und wann nehme ich Schmerzmittel)
• Krebsvorsorge
• größerer medizinischer Check-Up, mit großen Blutbild (Menschen empfehlen, das bei einer Blutspende machen zu lassen)
• Blutspenden
• Impfungen regelmäßig auffrischen
• Organspendeausweis ausfüllen (da lässt sich auch „Nein“ ankreuzen)

Lebenssinn

• Freunde finden
• Hobby/Interessen haben
• Engagement, siehe auch Civic Skill Tree
• grundlegende Kenntnis der Dinge, die unsere Gesellschaft und unseren Alltag bestimmen (z.B. Erde=rund, Homöopathie=Placeboeffekt)

Haushalt

• Richtig Wäsche waschen können
• Richtig Aufräumen und Saubermachen können; siehe auch Cleaning Skill Tree
• Werkzeug haben: Akkubohrer, Metermaß, etc.
• Handwerkskills (Knopf annähen, Bild aufhängen, knarrende Tür fetten), siehe auch Renovation and Repair Skill Tree
• Umgang mit Lebensmitteln

Skills

• Deeskalierend mit der Polizei reden
• Grundlegende Jura-Kenntnisse
• Erste Hilfe (regelmäßig auffrischen)
• Um Hilfe bitten können
• Sich entschuldigen können
• Eigene Gefühle deuten und steuern können
• Bewerbungen schreiben
• Umgang mit Computern

Squishy stuff

• Finding Peer groups
• Healthy Communication Patterns
• Healthy Relationships
• Handling Conflicts
• Managing Emotions
• Setting Boundaries
• Coping with whatever Brain Issue you have, Therapy
• (Sex Specific) Body Maintenance
• Consent and Communication about Sex, Safer Sex
• Setting / Reevaluating / Questioning Life Goals

Januar 2024

Edit aus dem Mai 2024

Die Frage, welche Versicherungen sinnvoll sind, wird in dieser Podcastfolge erörtert: https://geld-ganz-einfach-saidis-finanztip-podcast.podigee.io/189-perfekt-abgesicher-so-klappts

Ganz allgemein ist der Podcast und finanztip.de empfehlenswert für alle, die mehr über den rechts-unten-Teil des Skilltrees wissen wollen.

* Alternate titles: I Roll With It, I Make It Tea, I Break Bread With It, I Befriend It, I Comfort It, I Coddle It, I Cuddle It, I Kiss It, I Ride It, I Surf Its Waves, I Embrace It, I Endure It, I Accommodate It, I Hang Out With It, I Tell Ghost Stories Around A Campfire With It While Making Smores

This Blog Is Changing

I cannot say for certain from what into what. Writing this should help me figure it out. In good news — for me; this is all for me¹ — I can say that I have made decisions! New for 2024 I'm moving my messy thoughts into piles. They aren't going to get organized suddenly but this initial classification is progress. I hate the word piles so I'm moving to a rooms metaphor. To start I have to go back. (It's always been that way since Winnie-the-Pooh.²)

Prior to beginning this blog I started other fediverse (WriteFreely) blogs using the free instance Paper.wf. Well, here is where greater sponsorship would be so nice — cue my When I'm fully funded dreams! Paper.wf sometimes goes away from the internet for a while, and since I'm not paying and have no relationship with its maintainers I certainly cannot complain about that. So I started writing here. I gave it the name Humanissome because that's “one of my brands” and I do desire to explore my humanist philosophy in writing. But is that what I've done at this URL so far? Not much.

I talked on Mastodon about my multi-blog cravings, to which a reasonable person replied that I would do well to use tags on a single blog. Well... I'm not doing that! I've done that before and it just isn't sufficient to tame my disordered brains. I am going to physically carry my boxes of words into different rooms, with the goal to assemble... new metaphor alert Yes this will do nicely:

Ideas come quickly, in from all directions, unannounced and at any time. Some ideas are minuscule. Some are quite large. Some come in clusters, pieces already put together. I have a strong sense that I can combine many of these idea pieces into bigger and maybe better creations. As of 2024 I am — I got carried away into enjoying metaphors that may take over the meaning. But I want to push through. Editing comes later. Let's imagine my ideas are some of my favorite building toys of childhood: Rig-A-Jig, wooden blocks, Legos and Lincoln Logs. (If these are unknown to you, think of IKEA furniture parts, electronics components, anything at all that can be combined to make bigger and maybe better things.) The separate blogs I'm maintaining are separate rooms and I'm putting all the Rig-A-Jigs in one room, all the wooden blocks in a room, etc. Because like ideas are designed to go together. But the thing is, you see, I do like playing with many of these concepts together. My Lego men like to walk through the world of wooden blocks. Maybe I could make a cool Rig-A-Jig canopy atop one of my buildings made of blocks. And then there are the Matchbox cars! And of course I put my grubby little hands (and, let's be honest, mouth) on all the toys; and I often customize them with stickers or by coloring them with markers. Phew! It's a lot. Let's get out of this lavender square.

My ideas interrelate, if only because all my ideas have me in common. My ADHD has typically been great at receiving ideas and terrible at whatever-the-next-step. These Fedi blogs are the next step. I am not planning to abandon any of them. I may try to re-title some to make them more accurately labeled. This one in particular would be better to be named after ME as it has veered quite far from thoughts on humanism into thoughts on just one human. I am hoping that I will figure something out.

The other place I'm excited to be compiling writing currently is:
https://paper.wf/how2b/ · @how2b@paper.wf · RSS feed
In that room I'm pouring out the pieces that assemble into an account of my journey to mental wellness. [3] In other spaces coming soon I plan to collect my thoughts on humanism and, finally, one new room will be the nursery for my first attempt at solarpunk science fiction!

---

1. If you're reading this you're an absolute nut. A doll. Welcomed graciously. I'll make you some tea if you'd like. Or a glass of wine? Well I'm having tea. The wine is from a box, I hope that's alright. I think it's fine. But this particular creative state I'm in thrives on putting aside any concept of an audience.
2. “Oh help, I'd better go back. Oh bother, I shall have to go on.”
Having the Winnie-The-Pooh stories read to me at bedtime by my mother are some of my earliest happy memories. I choose this quote to accompany my senior year high school yearbook entry. I carried the hardback The World Of Pooh (complete stories) with me to college where I read at bedtime to a couple girls who lived the floor below me in my dorm. Sweetness 3. No reason to comment anything at all as to whether I've made a journey to wellness or not! I will say instead that as cute as colored suprascript is for notes I think barebones footnotes are just as good actually better. Now to hit Publish and see how all this actually looks.

Americans do not eat the fruit on their trees.

Most Americans do not walk anywhere daily.

Bakeries in walking distance where every American regularly can grab fresh bread is not a thing.

This post will be updated continually.

Always with the updates!

In classic blog fashion I might begin, “Sorry it's been a while since I posted...” I recently have considered a secondary blog for more fragments and keeping this one to my original vision of posts I put some work into, edit, add photos to, etc. This post is not that. Maybe it's ok to have a mish mash blog. Whether it's ok or not for the long haul, that's what this will be for now.

This is a joint statement from all of mastodon.art's moderation team.

2.3M people are currently being genocided as the State of Israel withdrew water, food, and electricity from Gaza, while the IDF targets civilian infrastructure, refugee camps, schools, and hospitals with munitions. This is being done with support from big Western countries like the US and UK who have sent military aid to the State of Israel with no conditions on how that aid is used.

If you wish to help, here's who we recommend donating to:

Medical Aid for Palestinians: https://www.map.org.uk The Palestinian Children's Relief Fund: https://www.pcrf.net

However, since aid into Gaza is being limited by the State of Israel and there's currently no guarantee of if or when any physical or financial aid will reach them, it's equally important to attend rallies and protests, and to pressure your local politicians via letters or phone calls for an immediate ceasefire.

We will moderate as follows:

We won't tolerate any arguments about whether words like genocide, apartheid, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, nation-state, ethno-state are accurate or not. What's happening to the people in Gaza is a genocide and what the State of Israel is inflicting is colonialism.

Regarding Zionism: defending an ideology that is currently justifying killing over 2 million people is not a place to find nuance. We will take into consideration who is posting, what power disparities are at play, and who is being oppressed when people post about Zionism, but will be on the lookout for antisemitism.

'From the river to the sea' is a restorative call for the land and its people to live and thrive together. We are aware that it can be used as an antisemitic dog-whistle and will moderate against antisemitism but won't otherwise moderate against use of the phrase.

We will try our best to fact-check reports of propaganda and fake news. We'll always focus on protecting people's lives over spreading misinformation that encourages hate, violence, and oppression. We will ask people to include sources for any claims made, if none were given.

We will defend people over states/nations/governments/countries. The situation is not black and white, and you can support the people in Palestine without wishing harm on the people in Israel, and vice versa. We will moderate against anyone wishing harm on people, and in a way that protects the vulnerable and oppressed.

We have a diverse moderation team, and where we receive reports regarding the I/P conflict, we will wait until several of us have had a chance to look at the report before discussing action.

I had a chat with some of our community in our Discord server recently, mostly in response to us defederating furry.engineer, why we chose that action, and the general way masto.art approaches instance blocks. I've paraphrased some of the questions I was asked, and copied (and edited for clarity in a few places) my responses to them. One of the people I was talking with expressed a greater understanding, and acceptance of, our practices around moderating things like hate speech and bigotry after we'd talked through these things, so I figured I'd share it in a more accessible place if it might help with a paradigm shift around how individual people on fedi respond to instance actions around things like racism.

Q: Can we unsuspend furry.engineer?

If the admin's actions renew our faith that they will properly moderate racism and harassment yeah, but that will take time. Our trust in them has been eroded to the point that we feel it's safer not to expose the BIPoC people on our instance to that potential abuse knowing their admin is so reluctant to actually handle racism. It's not on US to excuse that behaviour for the sake of preserving connections – doing that does not help make fedi any safer for BIPoC folk. It's on other instances to do better and take reports of racism seriously – any blame for way these events unfolded is theirs.

Q: Can't we block connections with specific users rather than blocking a whole instance, which feels like punishing both communities?

We can, but if we can't trust the moderation team of another instance to properly handle reports of their users, we defederate, for the safety of our marginalised community. Take this up with furry.engineer and ask why they didn't find it necessary to deal with the racist abuse and harassment coming from their instance for weeks. We're not punishing the BIPoC folk on our instance by shielding them from racism, and no-one's convenience of accessing people on a social media network is more important than protecting marginalised groups from targeted harassment. Being able to exist on social media without being a target for harassment is a privileged position that not everyone enjoys and that most people don't have to think about.

Q: Re. restoring faith in the admin/mod team, are you waiting for them to acknowledge their mistakes and say they'll do better?

This could be one thing yes- acknowledging the harm caused, taking steps so that it doesn't happen again and communicating what those steps are, and rebuilding a reputation for good moderation which will take time. But we have unsuspended instances that have done this and demonstrably improved their moderation. Diversifying their mod team is another thing they could do, taking anti-racism training, etc..

General rambling on .art's moderation/defederation practices:

https://dotart.blog/dotart-blog/dotarts-moderation-policies-and-racism I made this post a little while back that kinda talks about that aspect of it – that we're an instance of working artists who need access to an audience, and balancing that against protecting the most marginalised people in our community that we exist for in the first place to provide a safe community where they're protected from harassment.

We know it's difficult to balance that and we think hard about decisions involving defederating sizeable instances because we know it's cutting people off from income sources, whereas if we don't, that establishes a precedent where racism/transphobia/etc. is tolerated above the rights of people to exist without abuse.

masto.art is not the best instance for someone who wants unfettered access to the whole of fedi without risk of some of that being taken away. We are very strict. We serve a particular community. We're big, which implies we might be the 'best' art instance to join for a big audience, but that's not necessarily the case and why we try to make it very clear on our /about page that we do defederate more harshly than other instances.

We're also pretty clear on our /about page that we proactively moderate; when an instance gets to a point where we expect harassment to come from there, we will defederate to spare people having to go through any abuse and harassment, rather than wait for that to happen and have to clean up afterwards.

Instance admins/mods represent the kind of content they'll allow unchallenged on their instance. So even though some of the SilverEagle posts were deleted, and the account actually migrated to its own instance, it took weeks for anything to happen at all, and the admin posted about not caring to moderate those reports. So we know that that's the kind of environment the admin is happy to have on their instance, that racism and harassment and abuse will go unchallenged for weeks, and that makes it an unsafe instance for us to federated with.

Yes, technically, we can do other instance's moderation work for them – ban the admin, individually moderate their users – but that shouldn't be our job – managing masto.art is enough work in itself and I'm not going to ask unpaid volunteers to start manually moderating all the other instances where the mod team has fucked up and we don't trust them to moderate themselves.

Q: But the problem with furry.engineer has been corrected?

Just checked our reports. There were four accounts reported from furry.engineer, SilverEagle is one of them who has moved, three others are still there. Those do not include the admin, who was giving all of it a free pass. So no, it hasn't been corrected.

The posts on furry.engineer included targeting several Black fedi users over the course of a few weeks, directing racist abuse and harassment at them, creating and pushing racist conspiracy theories about them with no foundation in truth that weren't being challenged by the instance admin at all and were allowed to exist and propagate in the face of the harm they were causing and being reported by several instances, which led to more people joining in with the abuse and lies – it was horrid. It made Black folks on fedi feel unsafe – not just those who were directly targeted, but those who were watching it all unfold without being moderated by the instance admin – and a lot of folk stepped away from fedi for a while because of it.

It was horrible, and that kind of thing has long-term ramifications on fedi as a whole and why Black folk have to continuously fight for themselves here, and continuously stress that fedi has a racism problem. The several BIPoC on our mod team, who are all struggling artists barely managing to scrape through each month, emphatically did not want to federate our community with that instance because of the behaviour from some of that instance's users that the admin didn't moderate. Our BIPoC community on masto.art no doubt feel the same – in fact we've had people move to our instance away from their own because we're safer for them than the instances they were on, because we take a hard stance against stuff like this.

We know it's stressful and anxiety-inducing being cut off from a paying audience and your source of income. We have to balance that with the severity of things other instances allow to happen and the impacts they have on the people in our community, and their safety – even before their ability to earn a living, just their ability to exist online without getting harassed off.

It is really tough. The ideal solution is that racism would not be tolerated on the source instances that it's coming from and those users would immediately be suspended.

Failing that, when racism is given a pass on those instances, the ideal solution is that people who oppose that would move off those instance to ones that takes racism (or whatever bigotry is going un-moderated) seriously.

If people did that, the bigoted instances would either cease to exist or would be left only with a tiny group of bigots that would get defederated into their own little voids, and the communities of masto.art, and other instances, could just carry on without losing anything of value.

What I would like to see, in an ideal world, is that instead of people on here going 'masto.art suspended this instance for racism so now I have to move to another instance' is, rather, 'masto.art suspended this instance for racism, so if you want to keep following me, and if you oppose racism, and want to support a fedi that's safe for BIPoC, I expect you'll be moving to an instance that doesn't give a free pass to racism'.

The people on fedi have the power to shape what kind of social media experience this is. If your instance, or the instance your friend is on, is letting its community harass Black folk, move from that instance, tell your friends to move. Tell them to stand by their principles. Don't support it. Don't make your online home in a place that allows racism.

Most people don't bother, and when we do, like when masto.art takes a hard stance against federating with instances that allow hate speech, we're the ones that get the flack for it. Which seems the wrong way around.

Part 1:

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3553040/us-flowing-military-supplies-to-israel-as-country-battles-hamas-terrorists/

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67095846

Both the UK and US governments are supplying military aid to the State of Israel, and both talk of defending civilians against Hamas' violent attack (and Hamas is a militia, and has killed civilians): “We will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself and respond to this attack” from Biden, and “humanitarian concerns and protection of civilians are very important” from Sunak.

Meanwhile, the State of Israel continues targeting civilians in Gaza, attacking refugee camps:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/1/a-wake-up-call-world-reacts-to-jabalia-camp-attack

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/3/israel-kills-at-least-seven-palestinians-in-occupied-west-bank

Reported casualties and damage of critical infrastructure in Gaza is huge in a humanitarian crisis that is ongoing:

https://ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-26

Helping Israel to take care of its citizens is, of course, a good thing. However, the UK and US are a bit one-sided in their support of 'protecting civilians' as they aren't helping Palestinian civilians in the same way. While they are supplying military aid to the State of Israel, and the State of Israel is using that aid to continue attacking civilians in Gaza, the UK and US are complicit in aiding the State of Israel to that end.

Part 2:

Two things that are simultaneously true:

1- Hamas is a militia and their attack on Israel, where civilians were killed, and their continued threats and actions that endanger people's lives, is horrific.

2- The State of Israel inciting genocide of Palestinians, imposing an apartheid state, ethnic cleansing, and their continued attacks on civilian people and infrastructure in Gaza, is horrific.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/2/a-genocide-is-under-way-in-palestine

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/3/unsafe-in-own-home-israeli-settlers-spread-terror-in-south-hebron-hills

https://www.972mag.com/intelligence-ministry-gaza-population-transfer/

https://www.972mag.com/susiya-settler-soldier-militia-displacement/

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-warns-new-instance-mass-ethnic-cleansing-palestinians-calls

Take the side of people. Call out colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. Acknowledge that oppressed people have a right to respond with violence against their oppressors, while also acknowledging that that violence should be targeted at their oppressors, not innocent civilians. Recognise that oppressors are states and governments and militaries acting independently of the citizens that live in their states and governments and countries. Call out antisemitism, anti-Arab racism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, terrorism. Criticise the State of Israel, the Israeli Government, and Hamas, for crimes against humanity. Defend Palestinian civilians, defend Israeli civilians. Acknowledge the right of Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Arabs, and Muslims, to live free from oppression.

Well, this is the first post on a blog. I've never had a blog before so I'm unsure what to do. I suppose I will just write some short stories here every now and again. Some passing dreams that aren't quite worth adding to the novel or making their own book can exist here.

White dog, blackened south, Millions dead to reason. Burning but not sign from God, Thinking the new treason.

(poem / prophecy I wrote in 2003)

I took over as Curator in Feb 2021. I'm the third Curator. I've been on Fedi since 2016, and on .art since 2017. Because we've been around so long, we're pretty big by fedi standards, and until the first Twitter wave in April 2022, we had open registrations but were still fairly quiet (our active users count is MUCH smaller than our total users count).

Because I've been on fedi so long, and because of the company I kept from my personal account, I've been around for the conflict. Some of that conflict – probably the biggest thing – was when a few PoC span up their own instance as a means of setting their own boundaries and moderating against harassment themselves, without having to rely on the server admins of individual instances to take their word on what was or wasn't racism, etc.

They were around until 2020. December 31st, actually. Are0h's last post is still cached on our instance – https://playvicious.social/@Are0h/105476726720269350 (you'll have to load that internally through masto's search bar).

They closed because they were harassed off fedi by a huge, disgusting wave of racism, abuse, and harassment against their admin Ro, some of their mods (one of whom who is now a mod on .art), and their users. The harassment was vicious. All the instances that participated in it are blocked from mastodon.art because of the part they played.

Some of them left fedi for good, some of them (like Ro) came back on single-user instances, some of them moved to smaller safe instances. So again, PoC are back to relying on other instance admins to create spaces for them that are safe, where racism (and any form of bigotry) isn't tolerated, where Black folk can exist – just exist! – online without facing constant micro-aggressions in their mentions.

.art had already been working to that goal when I took over, and already had a team of mods committed to taking a very hard stance against bigotry and racism. Since then we've expanded our mod team to include a great deal of diversity and breadth of marginalized voices. We provide a safe space for all of them; for BIPoC, disabled people, neurodiverse people, queer people, nonbinary people, Jewish people – anyone who faces marginalization.

But we're also big. We're by no means the biggest, but because of our domain name, because we're what comes up when you search for 'mastodon art instance', because of the Twitter exoduses that have happened, because we already exist and joining an existing instance is a much lower barrier to entry than creating your own, people join us, and we grow (not indefinitely – we have a cap of 12k active users, as that's when our local timeline becomes too busy to be useful).

This gives people certain expectations of what we are, and what we can provide for them. Recently we've edited our /about page to be clearer about this – to be clearer that we defederate from instances that break our rules, that are inherently unsafe, and that we aren't an open-federation instance and we DO have strict rules.

We also have to acknowledge that we are big, and until there are more options on fedi for places artists can be among their own and still get widely seen, we have to (to some extent) strike a compromise between safety and still being able to provide working artists access to an audience.

This is why we still federate with mastodon.social, but defederate other instances that one would think, at a glance, are safer than mastodon.social. Some of the instances we've defederated from have a history of intentional decisions that resulted in marginalised people being harmed and their safety not considered. Their mods and their admins are complicit, perhaps not deliberately, but complicit by enacting their intent in a way they felt fit, but the consequences of which were harmful.

Mastodon.social, on the other hand, are passively bad. They're not, actually, terrible – their moderation has improved. They do remove racism, they do remove antisemitism, they do block blatantly bigoted accounts (but sometimes they need to be reported a few times before getting actioned). They're still problematic, but they're also hundreds of thousands of potential art buyers. So we weigh that, and for now, the risk for us is manageable and they haven't acted in a way that, with intent, harms marginalized communities.

We know that this won't be acceptable for everyone, particularly for people who signed up expecting an experience closer to Twitter and weren't expecting that their reach would be cut down based on the needs of the community around them and the moral principles of the people who manage that community.

But we won't stop doing it, because that goes against the primary reason our instance exists – dotART, first and foremost, above all else, is a safe space for marginalised people. That is very clear on our /about page, and it's the main reason a LOT of our users join us – because this, the defederating from instances that we don't feel we can trust the moderation of, is exactly what they want.

We, the mod team, don't care if that leaves us with a couple of hundred active users who exist in a little isolated bubble in some small cut-off corner of fedi, if that corner is providing those couple of hundred people a space where they can exist without bigotry and harassment.

The Bad Space exists because its creator, https://ubiqueros.com/@Are0h / Ro, once set up an instance by and for Black folk after seeing the racism that got a pass on other instances, and then that instance – PlayVicious – got harassed off fedi by racists. Everyone involved in that instance got extreme levels of racist abuse and harassment, and a couple of the other people involved – a mod of PV, Marcia (https://scholar.social/@CaribenxMarciaX), with the help of Ginger (https://kitty.town/@gingerrroot) – started a hashtag, Fediblock, for calling out racism and other shit behaviour so that other instance admins were aware of it, and could block the sources of it, and thus save themselves from being targeted by the same abuse.

A few years later, we now have instance-level blocklists, and the ability to export and import those lists. A bunch of people have started their own blocklist repositories that function in different ways, like combining the blockists of several 'trusted' instances and then finding the common denominators that appear on a majority of blocklists and creating a new blocklist that only has those majority-blocked instances on it.

Where receipts or reasons are not provided with the collaborative hosted blocklists themselves, the sites providing them tend to link to receipts sources that are hosted elsewhere. This is a deliberate choice that comes from hours and hours (literally, I've been privy to these conversations happening behind the scenes with multiple of the public blocklist hosts) of deciding how to approach this with a focus on minimising harassment of the instances providing reasons and receipts, and of the people hosting the blocklists and receipts, and minimising the risk of people threatening litigation for block reasons they don't like (this happens a lot, and while some instances/people are fine with being threatened and know that not much – if anything – will come of such threats, they can still be scary and understandably some instances want to prevent that from happening).

Popping back momentarily to PlayVicious, when the people who were being harassed provided receipts, they were accused of 'screenshot dunking'. The people who were harassing them sought any reason, however tenuous, to dismiss their receipts or to call into question their credibility or attack and bully them into eventually just not posting receipts. This was deliberate, and it happened extensively, and the result is that many folk on fedi are now understandably reluctant to share receipts because of the abuse and backlash they received for doing it the first time.

Speaking as the admin of a sizeable fedi instance with a pretty big blocklist, I can tell you exactly what happens when both our block list and the reasons are public – we still do it, because I don't give a fuck, but here's what happens:

• If an instance doesn't publish their blocklist, they are chastised for lack of transparency and insinuated in misdeeds against their users who deserve to see who their instance blocks.

• If an instance DOES publish their blocklist but without listing the reasons (which is a very valid thing not to do because of the harassment and legal threats it generates), they are chastised for being untrustworthy.

• If an instance publishes their blocklist AND their reasons, the reasons are debated and discredited, constantly, without fail. The only people who debate and discredit reasons like racism, transphobia, alt-right, free speech, etc. are people who are defending those things, whether they've realised that's what they're doing or not.

If you've spent any time scrolling through the Fediblock hashtag you'll see the same instances pop up time and again, usually mentioned by new instance admins who've had a run in with one of the 'worst of the worst' instances who discovered they weren't blocked by that particular instance and went on a harassment field day. This has, many times, resulted in people being doxxed and harassed to such an extent that they shut down their instances, deleted their online profiles, moved house, even moved country – and that is the main service that public shared blocklists provide; an effort to minimise the harm that those known terrible instances cause when they are not blocked.

And now back to The Bad Space. The currently public version of The Bad Space is meant to function as a receipts repository, but when Ro launched it, the decision to list every entry there even before receipts were available was informed by Ro's personal experience of harassment spanning years on the fediverse, knowing the harm it causes, and knowing that mitigating that harm by identifying its sources was the most important thing, and the missing receipts would come later (and for the people arguing against the existence of The Bad Space, the receipts wouldn't matter anyway – they argue against it because they know it's coming for them and the spaces they inhabit).

The alternative would have been not to release The Bad Space – not to release any of the blocklists or the receipts sources or things that help fedi admins improve moderation and safety on their instances – until they're 100% perfect, and in the time that would take, how many more marginalised people would be harassed off fedi?

Yesterday, an instance ended up on another instance's block list for what came down to unchecked anti-trans sentiment, which led to it getting a listing on The Bad Space (accidentally, explainer to follow). While parts of fedi exploded with outrage over this, talking around the issue but not bringing it up directly with Ro, theorising and and angry-yelling and ultimately decrying the entire existence of The Bad Space and blocklists as a whole and warning entire communities off using them, a few folk quietly approached Ro directly, Ro discovered a bug in The Bad Space that he fixed immediately, the source instance removed the instance from their block list, the problem has been fixed, and The Bad Space functions better because of it.

The damage caused here is not that an instance accidentally ended up on a blocklist – that IS problematic, especially given the provided reason, and it IS unfortunate – but the bigger damage is that now communities doubt the integrity of a tool that functions to make fedi a safer space for marginalised identities and in doing so makes fedi a safer space for everyone who's not a bigot, that can prevent thousands of people from experiencing the kind of harassment that the tool exists to protect against.

If there are sincere concerns brought up to Ro and other blocklist or receipts repo. maintainers in good faith, they will listen and address them. I have seen them do it. They WANT these tools to be the best that they can be to protect marginalised fedi – that's the entire point, minimising harassment and protecting the people who are most often the targets of that harassment. Nobody is more invested in doing this than the people who experienced that harassment first hand and know the damage it causes.

So if you have an idea for how The Bad Space can be improved (but first check the Version 2 edition (https://ubiqueros.com/notes/9jd9d0e46p) that, while not fully public yet, already addresses the concerns I've seen raised these past couple of days), bring it up with Ro. Bring it up directly with Ro, who is the creator and maintainer, and will engage with you in good faith if you approach him similarly.

But please, please, consider the implications of loudly decrying a tool that exists by and for marginalised people. Consider whether you're punching up or punching down, consider who you are serving by telling people they shouldn't trust it, consider which voices you are elevating and which voices you are ostracising, and consider how you can effect positive change and help make these tools more effective to combat harassment.

It also needs to be repeated that these public shared blocklists are not shared without extensive warnings for admins to DO THEIR DUE DILIGENCE and not thoughtlessly import blocks without checking that the blocks align with their own instance's practices. The more absurd thing to me is that someone would thoughtlessly import a blocklist – or look at The Bad Space and see that there are entries there without receipts and thus no clear way of knowing why they're there, and then decide to download the CSV of all entries and import that as a mass blocklist – without doing their due diligence as an admin to check that they agree with all of the blocks.

Some day they will all find out and know they were always right.

Some day they will all find out and won't settle for shunning.

Some day they will all find out but the day is not today.

I pray it is not today.

#SmallPoems #Poetry #MicroFiction #SmallStories

“I feel like people use me as a special tool. Forgotten in a box until my brain or skills are needed, used and put away again.” I said, checking my files for the requested piece of info.

Ty looked up at the screen, somewhat startled. “You said something? Sorry didn't hear, I was chatting with Mia.”

“I was just muttering to myself…” “Yeah ok. Did you find it?” “Yes, I'm sending it now.” “Thanks! We got to go out for a coffee or something, I'll call you!”

Ty didn't wait for my answer before ending the call.

“No, you won't”, I sighed, “You won't “

#MicroFiction #AutoFiction

The dust hadn't yet settled, but hearing “Im one man failure rate!” said with a tone of being accompanied with a sheepish grin told me there were no casualties.

I assumed my usual role in situations like this and said: “I don't think the term works like that. You are thinking of 'disaster zone'...”

Kay groaned, theatrically: “SEE! Didn't get THAT right, either!”

“And you're not a man.”

She collapsed on the floor, laughing.“Ann, you're KILLING me!”

#MicroFiction