Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
We stayed in two camps in the Serengeti, one in the central section and one closer to the Mara River.
On The Road – swiftfox – Tanzania Safari Part 4 – Central SerengetiPost + Comments (11)
The topi have a unique dark bluish color above the legs.
What happened? Well, the Democrats were the decent caring party. The all-inclusive party. The protectors of immigrants and women's rights (Roe v Wade). The Democrats fought for Blacks, gay marriage, and LGBTQ. The Democrats fought to keep books in schools and free lunch.
The…
— Willie Ross Jr. Knee Deep (@RossKneeDeep) November 12, 2024
The Democrats fought for all these things. Alas, it wasn’t enough. The Republicans ran on hate, lies, bigotry, and racism. They ran horrible racist ads about Hispanic people. They took away women’s rights. The Republicans dogged gay and transgender people. Yet, it was just what America wanted and needed. Make no mistake. There were no undecided voters in this election. They all knew what they were getting.
I’ll never forget my New Testament professor telling me that sometimes God’s wrath looks like just letting people have the reality they demanded. The reality they voted for.
— Rev. Benjamin Cremer (@Brcremer) November 10, 2024
Cool that every single Republican is fucking stupid https://t.co/buqQlfpKy8
— evan loves worf (@esjesjesj) November 12, 2024
IM GONNA LOSE IT pic.twitter.com/S9eE5cgMFP
— thaena (@ppPepoComfy) November 9, 2024
Those who drink tears stay thirsty!…
This is why Truth Social has no juice. There are no libs to own.
— Bene Jesserit (@JessLizBryan) November 10, 2024
Yeah, I keep seeing fewer “liberal tears” tweets and a helluva lot of “liberals are mean for not wanting to speak to us”tweets
Even conservatives hate being stuck being around other conservatives. The conservative craves liberal approval https://t.co/J2mvIwNbxk
— constans (@constans) November 10, 2024
Stark Grey Dawn Open Thread: This Time, MAGAt TearsPost + Comments (233)
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing great. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.
Second, I’m just going to run the basics tonight. It was a long day and I have two more very long days ahead of me.
The Russians have a new way to bring terror by drone to the people of Kharkiv:
Russia hits Kharkiv with new Molniya drones in combat test on civilians
As Russian forces have been testing Molniya on the battlefield since May, the drone now poses a potential new threat to Ukrainian cities.
— Euromaidan Press (@euromaidanpress.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 2:30 PM
From EuroMaidan Press:
Russian forces launched two Molniya drone strikes on Kharkiv on 12 November, hitting residential areas and injuring three civilians, according to the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office.
Today’s attacks on Kharkiv may indicate Russia is testing the drones’ effectiveness against civilian infrastructure. As Russians have been extensively testing Molniya on the battlefield since May 2024, now the drone might represent a new threat to Ukrainian cities.
The first strike hit Kharkiv’s northern Saltivsky district at 1:55 p.m. local time, causing two injuries. A second strike at 3:35 p.m. targeted an eleven-story apartment building in the southern Slobidskyi district, injuring a 70-year-old woman.
Built from Chinese components, including plywood, veneer, foam, and 18-mm aluminum tubes, these low-cost drones can carry up to three kilograms of explosives. While they use similar communication and electronics as FPV drones, their 40-kilometer range—far exceeding that of FPV drones—allows Russian forces to target Ukrainian positions previously considered secure from drone threats.
Despite their extended range capability, these drones have shown limited effectiveness in combat, with only about one in eight strikes hitting their intended targets.
And here’s the Ukrainian air defense tally:
Eight of the Shahed drones that Russia used in its attack on Ukraine last night appear to have wandered into Belarus during the attack. Meanwhile, Ukraine shot down 46 of 110 incoming drones, 60 were brought down by jamming, and 2 left Ukrainian airspace, the military says.
— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 4:55 AM
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 993: Russia Brings a New Form of Terror by Drone to KharkivPost + Comments (23)
Everything that sucked about yesterday did not happen today and it was a great drive. God, panic attacks fucking suck. I was worried that all the trauma from the election would surface during the drive, and boy howdy it delivered. But that was yesterday, and today is today and I arrived in Tempe and was reunited with the missus and of course you all remember this asshole:
He’s looking very svelte, if I say so myself. Joelle took good care of him. I am exhausted and have so much work to catch up on, so just doing an early evening thread and then crashing out. You all be nice to each other.
Harriet Tubman posthumously named a general in Veterans Day ceremony https://t.co/6ALKGqxRoq
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 11, 2024
Petula Dvorak, at the Washington Post — “Harriet Tubman becomes a one-star general in Maryland, 160 years late”:
CHURCH CREEK, Md. — Harriet Tubman, like most Black women of her era and many Black women today, was often dismissed, underestimated and ignored.
That’s what made her such an effective spy and scout. It’s also the reason that it took our nation 160 years to honor her properly for her military service.
They finally did this on Veterans Day, coming in entourages and motorcades to her land — the vast, lonely expanse of the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — to see Tubman posthumously became a one-star brigadier general in the Maryland Army National Guard.
A governor, generals and scores of veterans drove past the loblolly pines and tall saltmeadow cordgrass that Tubman navigated on foot, in the dark, over and over again.
“She walked from there to New York or Philadelphia, just using the stars and the water,” Maj. General Janeen Birckhead, the head of Maryland’s National Guard, said Monday.
Those years as a conductor on the Underground Railroad prepared her for the extraordinary service that the military honored at last…
Her military service isn’t a familiar part of Tubman’s legacy for most Americans. We hear her story in the context of honoring Black leaders or women. But not so much on Veterans Day…
“A general takes care of people, absolutely,” Birckhead said. “But a general is also tactical. A general is operational. A general is strategic. And she was all of those things.”
For many, she was called “Moses.” But Birckhead called her “General.”
At the start of the Civil War, Tubman was known for her talent and bravery guiding more than 70 enslaved people to freedom through the Underground Railroad. She was so good that there were rumors that she was an Ashanti sorceress who could take on the form of a leopard, according to the Army Historical Foundation.
“Tubman was not a commando or a steely-eyed killer, but she was able to do what neither of those types could do: pass through enemy lines and talk to her people about the local situation,” the historical foundation wrote. “She was what intelligence analysts today would call a ‘human terrain specialist’ who knew how to work with the people to accomplish the mission.”
Her most daring raid was in June 1863, when Tubman directed three steamships up the Combahee River in South Carolina.
Because of the intelligence collected by Tubman and her knowledge of the terrain that night, more than 750 enslaved people were liberated…
“We talk about this idea that ‘leave no one behind’ is not just a statement, it is a governing philosophy,” said Moore, who is also an Army veteran. “But let’s be clear about who the original ‘leave no one behind’ was, because there is nobody who defined ‘leave no one behind’ in the way that General Tubman left no one behind.”…
Something Good Open Thread: *General* Harriet TubmanPost + Comments (46)
Glad to see more folks are finally hopping on to the only good large* social network! It’s free, open-source, and federated, but you probably don’t care, so it doesn’t make you care; you’ll never notice unless you go looking for it. It’s ad-free, it’s highly customizable, it’s got an incredible block feature, it doesn’t shove fascism into your eyeballs 24/7 whether you like it or not. And now that everyone sees twitter for what it is–a nazi site for nazis–it’s got a lot of the accounts you know and love, and not just artists, trans shitposters, nerds, and the various intersections thereof.
So I thought I’d share some advice on getting started, plus a few philosophical notes. (Signup link)
After an obligatory cat pic of course. Here’s Momo looking enormous thanks to the power of perspective!
1. Deprogram yourself
If you’re coming from twitter, you’re fucked in the head, but it’s not your fault. An aggressive algorithmic feed, tweaked by a white supremacist, that suppresses links and optimizes for ragebait, has primed you for a fight-or-flight response when you open the app. The promotion of nazis to the top of every thread has you looking for nazis around every corner. Social media doesn’t have to be like that–but it might take you a minute to undo ten+ years of billionaires trying to convince you otherwise.
It’s time to take a deep breath, roll up your sleeves, and get to work defining your experience for yourself.
2. Check out lists and starter packs
Bluesky does offer two in-house algorithmic feeds–“Discover” and “Popular with Friends”–but all they do is identify and track what topics interest you and your network, and serve you that content. (Pro-tip on Discover: if you click the … button next to a post you see there, you get “show more/less of this” options you can use to help train it.) But the main feed is just your reverse-chronological following feed. So it’s probably a good idea to follow a few people. To make this easy, bluesky has “starter packs”–lists of accounts that anybody can make, that you can follow with just one click. You can search starter packs here–sorting by “uses” will show you the most popular ones, such as a list of politics posters by lolgop, journalists, and legal experts. And of course, a starter pack of balloon-juice peeps (and other good accounts) by mousebumples! You can also search for starter packs by keyword for any special interests you might have.
I also recommend Joshua J. Friedman, who some call the mayor of bluesky.
Some people also make lists instead of starter packs, but there’s no search engine for them. For example, here’s a list of BJ peeps. The users on the list are under the “about” tab; you’ll notice there’s also a “posts” tab and a big “pin to home” button, which brings us to our next very important feature…
3. Follow lots of feeds and change one very important setting
Feeds! Feeds are super cool. Under the hood, a feed is an application that takes API requests and returns posts–which means that a feed can be anything the feed designer wants it to be. Most of them just pull from user lists or match certain words, #hashtags, and/or emojis, but there are more sophisticated ones, too. For example, this feed uses AI to locate cat pictures for you. You can find more feeds with this search engine. Popular ones include science, booksky, blacksky, astronomy, and birds. I also enjoy timeline cleanse and dream logs. Also a special shout-out to the gardening feed, which shares posts by opted-in users that include the seedling emoji 🌱. Check out this thread to see how to get added.
Feeds, just like user lists, have a big “pin to home” button on them. This adds the feed to the right column of the app (on desktop), or as tabs on top of the app (on mobile).
There is also a very neat setting that injects selected posts from feeds right into your following feed. Settings > following feed preferences > “show posts from my feeds”. Highly recommended!
4. Engage!
Bluesky won’t build your following for you. You’ll need to post and reply to people to make it happen. (Smaller accounts are a lot more likely to read your replies; big ones are more likely to have “priority notifications” turned on.) Humor is almost always appreciated, too, though do remember that the failure mode of “clever” is “asshole”.
Also, you can probably get your posts on a lot of feeds just by including the right hashtag or emoji, so there’s a cheap way to get eyeballs on them. Following What’s Mid can also get your stuff out there; it reposts popular-but-not-that-popular posts of yours.
MazeDancer also notes:
And may I plead, again, that you spruce up before you do that. Post 3 or 4 things. Put up a banner. Otherwise, people won’t know who you are – or if you are even a person – or if they would like to follow back.
5. Stop worrying and learn to love the nuclear block
Bluesky has a “block early, block often” ethos. When you block somebody, all your interactions are obliterated. If they have quote-posted you, nobody can see what they are quote-posting (and vice-versa). Threads involving the two of you will be chopped up into little pieces, making them nearly impossible to follow, for anybody. This is a slightly controversial feature but I like it. If somebody quote-dunks you but you don’t want to block them, you can also “detach” it to mimic the blocked-quote behavior.
6. A word about labelers
Bluesky supports third-party labeling services, which attach labels to accounts and posts. This can be used for moderation, or for fun, or just generally to improve your experience. I enjoy xblock, which lets you put twitter screenshots behind a warning; and yardcrow, which gives accounts compliments. There are many more but I don’t think there’s a centralized repository yet. Once you’ve added one, you can adjust how it works in…
7. Tweak your moderation settings
Settings > moderation. Here you can enable/disable/tweak adult content labels (might have to do on desktop if you have an iphone), and adjust how your labeling services work. You can also mute words and hashtags, temporarily or permanently. Also going to give a shout-out to my “tankies and shit” mute/block list, which is full of authoritarian communists, Hamas supporters, and other assorted miscreants. The button says ‘subscribe’, but that means ‘so you can mute or block all of these people at once’.
And now for something completely different: what’s under the hood?
AOC is on Bluesky now. Here are the Balloon-Juice Bluesky basics, courtesy of Mousebumples, for anyone who missed them. DougJ is also there.
As Adam mentioned the other day, there are resistance grifters out to take your money and occupy your time. Here’s a blocklist of those folks. Again, choose who to block or mute based on your preferences.