Balloon Juice - Major Major Major Major, Author at Balloon Juice

Major Major Major Major has written at Balloon Juice since 2018. He focuses on science, technology, and fiction.

Exciting personal update

by Major Major Major Major| February 10, 20254:03 pm| 138 Comments

Look what we made with the power of science!

Her name is Camille and she is perfect. Even the doctor says so.

As you can imagine, this took a bit of doing for two men, but we did it. It feels like we stole fire from the gods. I wish she could have come into the world at a more auspicious time, but at least we got in under the wire for the year of the dragon. More importantly, we got in under the wire for any legal or administrative changes that might have made modifying the birth certificate difficult or impossible (and there was already the looming threat of DeSantis pulling a Meloni, since our surrogate lives in Florida). I guess we should get a move on acquiring a social security card and maybe a passport before those offices get nuked…

I don’t really feel that much different. Got all my youthful goals out of the way a while ago. And, since this took several years, I guess I was already sort of in dad mode–getting a house, moving near family, gardening, birdwatching… already I hear the siren’s call of learning about the revolutionary and civil wars…

Happy to answer questions people might have in the comments, within reason of course :)

I’m pretty bad at writing about this, but anyway, this and the video game are pretty much what I’ve been up to. Cheers!

Exciting personal updatePost + Comments (138)

And Now A LONG Bluesky Post

by Major Major Major Major| November 12, 20244:57 pm| 90 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology, Tech News & Issues, Tech News and Issues, Technology

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!

Getting started

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?

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And Now A LONG Bluesky PostPost + Comments (90)

*(I say ‘large’ because bluesky’s protocol is about broadcasting your actions widely so they can be seen by anybody, whereas mastodon’s is about instance-to-instance agreements for 1:1 communication; a ‘big world’ vs. ‘small world’ approach that they are optimized separately for. I wrote earlier about the key philosophical differences here, as well as how the architecture reflects & supports this.)

Philosophy: The company is a future adversary

That’s part of their mission statement and baked in to the architecture. At a protocol level, most of this has already been realized, though nobody’s built easy buttons for it yet. You own your posts and your social graph; moving everything to a different host is a simple (to me 😛) cryptographic operation that will become friendlier. Already thousands of daily users are hosting their own data. Since the architecture is broadcast-based, the API is by definition free and open, so anybody can build an app without worrying about needing to pay access fees in the future. (People really seem to like deck.blue, a tweetdeck-inspired site/app, though there are several others.) Each primary layer of the open-source protocol has open-source reference implementations, so in the event that Bluesky LLC goes to shit, there will be alternative ways to connect without losing your content, follows, or followers. Team & community members are currently benchmarking independent hosting costs for these and simplifying deployment.

Bluesky is only a couple years old, and does not have a lot of money relative to most services, so the federation isn’t exactly turnkey, but it’s getting there. (The technology was meant to be developed with twitter’s money as a free and open alternative that would eventually be used under the hood, but they got cut off for obvious reasons, and they’ve ended up having to focus on things like “running a social network” at the same time.)

See my earlier links for more details on this than you probably want.

Hope this was helpful!

Now Buying Stories! (i.e. Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game)

by Major Major Major Major| July 13, 20244:32 pm| 49 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst, Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Popular Culture

Besides gardening and other various home improvement stuff, I’ve used most of my free time these days making a video game with my friend. It’s been a massive undertaking. I’d heard that game development is fractally difficult–every sub-component just as tricky as its parent–and boy did that ever turn out to be true. We’re both pretty experienced programmers, so we were able to manage the scope creep, at least; no features we don’t absolutely need, no matter how cool they would be. Anyway: I’m happy to say we are finally at the point where we can start introducing people to it! Before I do, I’ll note that this is not really shameless self-promotion; we are looking to buy some fiction, but you need context first, and also the pictures are pretty and I want to talk about something I think is exciting. (The shameless self-promotion will come later when I do one (1) post about the Kickstarter.)

So without further ado, here’s our first piece of promo art.

Starspawn is set in the Cthulhu-mythos universe, drawing primarily from the works of H.P. Lovecraft himself. Rather than paraphrase myself, I’ll just quote from our website:

It’s shaping up to be a beautiful spring at Miskatonic University. Finishing your independent study is your only real concern. One night, you dream of a strange frozen wasteland full of monsters and ancient ruins. You wake up shaken, but not worried—until you realize that your classmates, too, seem a little less human than they did yesterday. To top it off, somebody’s ransacked the geology lab, ruining the project you need to ace to keep your scholarship, and stealing something irreplaceable–a deep core sample of very ancient Antarctic soil.

Were the things you saw in the dream real? Was the quest you received more than the hallucination of a stressed sophomore? And what are you supposed to do with the knowledge that your best friend is some sort of fish-monster?

Explore worlds magical and mundane while evading monsters, solving puzzles, and maybe finding love. Starspawn: A Miskatonic Mystery offers a game mode for everyone, with top-down exploration, arcade minigames, 90s-style point-and-click puzzles, dating sim elements, and visual novel storytelling!

This is a story-driven game with lots of point-and-click first-person puzzles, as well as areas to explore in a top-down 16-bit mode. There are also dating sim elements, where you have to manage your free time to develop your relationships (platonic or otherwise) with various characters, each of whom has a side narrative that changes based on the choices you make. We’re aiming for about ten hours of play time. I’m super excited to share more as we work our way towards the demo. It’s been incredibly challenging and rewarding and I have so many thoughts about the development process. And the artists we’re working with are amazing, too. We’re lucky to have assembled a great team.

Later this year, we’ll be doing a Kickstarter to make sure we can afford all the art we need to finish strong, but for now, I’m trying out something a little fun: we would like to do a short story anthology set in the game universe as a Kickstarter reward! Part of the backstory is a cool (imo) Cold War thing, and we thought it would be fun to let people play in that sandbox if they wanted to. I know we have some writers here, and people who know writers, so I figured I would share it with you all. Here are the submission details. They do contain some (marked) spoilers for the setting, obviously, so beware, if you care. We can only afford hobbyist-tier rates, unfortunately, but it is what it is.

Bonus Samwise and Momo, doing their best impression of a synthpop (or folk) duo liner notes pic:

Aaaand, open thread, naturally!

Now Buying Stories! (i.e. Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game)Post + Comments (49)

Gardening, cats, owls…

by Major Major Major Major| June 21, 20248:36 pm| 40 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Garden Chats, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

Long time no see! I’ve been pretty disconnected from politics ever since I left Twitter, and weighing in on any of the threads here has just felt like a heavy lift. Been working a lot, writing/programming a lot on the video game (website btw, more on that soon), house stuff, travel (nowhere exciting). You know how it goes.

But, I have been meaning to drop a note about my garden, so, here it is! For all pictures, click to embiggen; the small versions are a little blurry. I’ll start you off with a picture of these lovely irises that TaMara gave me last fall:

Gardening and what-have-you — My phone doesn’t like focusing on flowers sometimes, but you get the idea…

When we bought this house, it was just surrounded by a dirt lot. The builders put some low-maintenance stuff out front, but the rest has been up to us, which is to say, up to me. I’ve been throwing stuff at the proverbial wall to see what sticks. It’s been pretty tricky—we get a crazy amount of sun in a lot of places, even on the narrow strip between houses because of the way we’re facing, and I’ve been avoiding bluegrass, because it’s boring and so thirsty. So I’ve been shotgunning ground covers around. The creeping thyme and sweet woodruff have been big successes; the phlox isn’t creeping like I’d like it to, though it still has lovely flowers in early spring. So this year, I planted a bunch more thyme, and phlox, and some strawberries for good measure. Hopefully I’ll have a nice jungle going on in the back by this time next year.

I have had pretty good success with my roses. They didn’t do so hot last year, but I did plant them in June, which is not ideal. This year, though, my hybrid tea and top gun roses are looking great. I have a floribunda that’s underperforming–thrips, I realized. Trying to get rid of them. I also planted some columbines this year. Wasn’t expecting any blooms, but it looks like they managed to get one out. Er, ignore the bugs… still figuring everything out!

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Gardening, cats, owls…Post + Comments (40)

Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Club, Anyone? (Open Thread)

by Major Major Major Major| February 27, 20242:31 pm| 68 Comments

This post is in: Books, Open Threads, Recommended Reading

Hey all! Some friends and I have been organizing a book club over on Bluesky, and I thought it would be fun to invite the folks here who want to join, and maybe do a parallel one here, if there’s enough interest. Our previous selections were Neuromancer and A Wizard of Earthsea; this time we’re going for something more modern. We’re picking the book with a bracket, and the voting is happening over there, so if you want a say, please participate! The brackets are vaguely based on subgenre/vibe. Here are the selections:

The polls to vote in are linked below that post, starting here. There are a lot of good options, and a lot that I haven’t read, so I’m hoping one of those wins. Or at least that Foundryside loses because I do not want to read that again. I think that you should be able to vote once without a Bluesky account, but I’m not 100% on that.

And with that out of the way, this can be an open thread. One possible topic: read any good books lately? I’m reading Authority by Jeff VanderMeer, the sequel to Annihilation, which was incredible. It’s… fine so far. Much more normal. I think I’d be enjoying it more if not for the comparison. Next I’ll be rereading Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, in the original American serialization–my dad got me the 1956-57 back issues of Galaxy for Christmas.

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The Disgraceful 2023 Hugo Awards

by Major Major Major Major| February 15, 20243:53 pm| 111 Comments

This post is in: Books, China, Civil Rights, Foreign Affairs

Before I get into this–Chinese science fiction is so much more than the chauvinist, authoritarian “Three-Body Problem” series. A great place to start is the short story collection Invisible Planets, and its eponymous story which you can read for free here. I’m also enjoying the Sinopticon collection right now. If you’d like to support the victims of this farce, you should check these out!

There are a handful of awards in the sci-fi & fantasy world that are considered the Big Ones. There’s the Nebula, where the guild (the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association) votes. Most of the rest are decided by fans–the Locus and BSFA, for instance. The most famous of these is the Hugo, voted on by attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention. The Hugos have been roiled by controversy in the past, most notably by a gamergate-adjacent group called the Sad Puppies attempting to elevate an anti-diversity slate. This led to “No Award” winning several categories, and ultimately, the introduction of some changes to their ranked-choice system to disempower slate voting (discussion in the comments).

One fun thing about ranked-choice voting is that it’s tamper-evident. Which brings us to 2023, where the voting was extremely, extremely tampered with.

2023 Worldcon was held in Chengdu, China. When this was announced, fans of human rights expressed concerns that this might endanger both participants and the awards themselves, in addition to maybe just not being an appropriate venue for a genre that has traditionally opposed oppressive governments. It felt, perhaps, like a cash grab on behalf of the industry; certainly reputation-washing on the part of China. This is far from an unheard-of arrangement; similar things have happened with golf and chess in the Middle East, for example. But it was surprising to see something with such an anti-authoritarian reputation go for this. (Some future hosting bids have come in from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Uganda; a Tel Aviv bid is also controversial. These are now expected to go down in flames.)

So, were we right? Did this seriously damage the Hugo awards? Oh goodness yes. It even seems to have damaged civil rights in China.

The entire process was suspect from the get-go, and it’s only gotten worse as more has been revealed. People noticed three weird things about it right away:

The nominees were announced ninety-one days after the start of the convention, which was the maximum allowed delay. This has never happened before; they’re usually released almost immediately. Figuring it out is a simple process–you count nominations. So why the delay? No clear explanation was given.
A lot of works that probably would have won were declared ineligible, most notably those by R.F. Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, two North American writers who are not always friendly to the Chinese government. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman TV series was also declared ineligible–once because it was eligible for two awards and you’re only supposed to be eligible for one; and a second time for unstated reasons. Gaiman is an outspoken critic of China’s tendency to imprison dissident writers.
The ranked-choice results don’t look right at all.

Hypothesis #3: The math is bogus. That is, the reported nomination statistics include large numbers of nominations attributed to the “top group” that do not arise from an actual nomination process. […] There really aren’t any conclusions other than the ones that were immediately apparent from the raw data. The 2023 Hugo Nomination Statistics are implausible and anomalous and as a result we don’t actually know who should be on the Hugo Long List. (And–based on factors that I haven’t discussed here–we don’t entirely know who should have been on the Hugo Short List.)

The whole thing stank to high heaven. Most assumed this was a case of state-encouraged self-censorship, though there was considerable pushback from the left against the idea that China would ever do such a thing. Well, guess what–some emails leaked, and we were right.

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The Disgraceful 2023 Hugo AwardsPost + Comments (111)

In an emailed dated June 7, 2023 at 6:18 PM and sent to the Western Hugo administrators, Dave McCarty said “Tomorrow I have a 4 hour meeting with my chinese counterpart to look at ballot detail and determine if any ballots are to be voided (which happens with frequency so that it’s not *really* that controversial if we determine we need to do it) as well as what things we need to move categories.” The identity of this Chinese counterpart remains unknown at this time.

McCarty then added “The chairs and the administrators will review the items we’ve highlighted in research Friday evening if we have enough time after the ballot review…otherwise we’ll be looking at it on Saturday (China time, of course, so we’re about 13 hours ahead of you).”

This statement, along with McCarty’s earlier email saying the administrators will “determine if it is safe” to put finalists on the ballot or “if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it,” shows that the research the Western administrators did on Hugo Award finalists was used by the Chengdu convention chairs and administrators to determine who would be on the final ballot.

Lacey confirmed in an interview that this is what happened. “We were supposed to identify any issues and pass them on,” she said. “The decisions were above our heads.”

As Lacey explained in more detail in her apology letter, “We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China and, to my shame, I did so. Understand that I signed up fully aware that there were going to be issues. I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn.”

Were the unnamed interlocutors representatives of the Chinese government, or just citizens concerned about getting in trouble with the Chinese government? Does it matter? This is how state censorship works. The CCP can’t control everybody’s thoughts, but they can take enough high-profile enforcement actions that people end up controlling their own thoughts. Such control doesn’t only weigh on citizens; whether the Hugo administrators were worried for the safety of their Chinese counterparts, or willing to do whatever it took to hold the event in China, or any other hypothesis, the fact remains that they chose to do this. It’s a complete disgrace. I feel so sorry for the winners.

I also feel very sorry for the Chinese organizers, who were almost certainly stuck between a rock and a hard place, and are hopefully not in any danger. The government is clearly embarrassed; Chinese commentary on this farce has been disappearing from the Internet, and the organizers are unwilling to speak up:

An explanation for what might be happening came from Pablo Vazquez, a traveling genre fan and former chair of the 12th North American Science Fiction Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Vazquez is also well known for his connections with genre fans around the world.

When Vazquez was asked if he could help connect the authors with any fans in China who might comment for this report, he said “I’m sorry. They do not want to speak to the media even anonymously.”

As Vasquez stated in a follow-up comment, “I have a lot of love for Chinese fandom and my friendships and connections there run deep. That’s a real and vibrant fandom there that is, like us, wanting very little to do with their government being involved in their fandom. They definitely don’t think it’s their government and instead think it’s corporate interests or, even worse, a fan/pro organization. Honestly, they seem more scared by that than anything else which saddens me to see and despite multiple attempts to get them to share their story they seem really hesitant.”

He elaborated further: “They don’t seem to fear official reprisal (the CPC seems to want to find who’s responsible for embarrassing them on the world stage actually) but rather ostracization from their community or its outright destruction. If I were to hazard a guess, the way we blew up this affair in the international media has now put this fandom in very serious trouble. Previously, it was one of the few major avenues of free speech left in China. Now, after all this, the continuation of that freedom seems highly unlikely.“

And there you have it. The game was rigged from the start–heads the CCP wins a PR coup, tails free speech in China loses.

I don’t really know what we’re supposed to do about all this. Holding Worldcon only in ‘free’ countries will restrict the ability of people in repressive regimes to participate. But holding it in repressive countries will endanger the citizens, and the attendees, too. Inclusiveness is very important, but so is the message you’re sending to the world.

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)

by Major Major Major Major| February 6, 20243:16 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News & Issues, Tech News and Issues, Technology

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! I’ve been writing posts keeping track of Bluesky development for you all. If you haven’t been following along, Bluesky is a social network, roughly in the style of Twitter. It was hip and new last year. Maybe it will be hip and new again now! Why? Because you can finally sign up without an invite. While it lacks some of the features that more mature services have, like video uploads, it is also not thoroughly saturated with nazis and crypto scam bots, and does not promote the posts by the biggest dumbasses in the world everywhere you go. I think that’s an acceptable trade-off.

More importantly, it has what I think is a true killer feature–custom feeds. Anybody can make one, and you can subscribe to them and have them live natively in the app, and have their posts inserted into your chronological feed. At their most basic they’re just posts from a list of users, but more advanced ones surface content via hashtag or emoji, or an AI recognizing pictures of cats or flowers, etc. There are even several good algorithmic recommendation feeds to choose from, in addition to the default one run by Bluesky itself.

It’s also allegedly going to open to federation this month; click the link at the top of this post for details on how that will work.

There’s a lot more great stuff in the pipeline. Composability will be the name of the game–choose your algorithms, choose your moderation services, choose your host, choose whatever you want. Here’s what WaPo has to say:

That system is a work in progress. So far, Bluesky is the only social network using its protocol. But it already has some features that set it apart. […] For instance, users can subscribe to feeds where algorithms prioritize the most popular posts overall or the posts most popular among the people they follow. There are also options for feeds geared to their specific areas of interest, such as science or art. And users can toggle personal moderation settings that either “hide,” “warn” or “show” categories of content such as nudity, violence, spam and hate-group iconography.

Along with today’s public launch of Bluesky, the company said it will roll out in the coming weeks a step toward its broader vision, inviting some outside developers to host servers that plug in to the main Bluesky network. It also announced a new feature that will let users and organizations begin todevelop their own content moderation services, which other users can then subscribe to. For instance, a fact-checking organization could apply “false” or “misleading” labels to certain posts, which would then be seen by users who opt in to seeing them.

With that out of the way…

A guide to getting started at Bluesky

Sign up at bsky.app!
Give yourself a profile picture and bio. Anything will do, really; it helps set you apart from other users and makes you more approachable.
Find some custom feeds. It’s in the left column on desktop, or the hashtag icon on the bottom on mobile. I recommend:
- For You, a third-party recommendation algorithm
- Discover, the official recommendation algorithm
- Popular with Friends, an official feed of… things that are popular with your friends.
- Gardening
- Food
- Science
- Cats and Cat Pics
- A few dozen folks are reading A Wizard of Earthsea for book club this month, you can see some posts about it here, and add your own thoughts by posting about Earthsea, #bskybc, or Gontishmen.
- And, of course, Newskies, where you can see the first post by every new user in real time.
Under Moderation -> Content Filtering, you can set your preferences for showing/warning/hiding NSFW stuff, hate group iconography, gore, etc.
1. Note that they’re still working out the, ah, kinks, and you might see some NSFW stuff slip through the filters.
2. If you signed up on iOS, all mature content is removed from your feed by default; this cannot be changed from your iPhone. Log in at bsky.app and change your preferences there.
Speaking of changing your preferences: I recommend this at Settings -> Basics -> Home Feed Preferences. It will show all posts by people you follow, including when they’re replying to somebody. The one at the bottom is important too–it inserts select posts from your feeds into your chronological following timeline. I also recommend Threaded Mode at Settings -> Basics -> Thread Preferences.
Almost everything you do is public on Bluesky, but you can set it so that people have to be logged in to see your posts under Moderation (not in preferences) -> Logged-out visibility, which includes some important caveats in the description.
I maintain a large moderation list of authoritarian communists, Russia simps, etc. I recommend subscribing to it, which will block or mute everybody on it.
Post, post, post! And reply to people, politely of course. It’s the recommended way to get noticed.

You can find me at @thearchduke.bsky.social. Many other jackals are there, please share in the comments. Plus:

Happy posting!

Bluesky is now open! Sign up today! (A guide to getting started)Post + Comments (63)

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Second rate reporter says what?

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

No one could have predicted…

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Usually wrong but never in doubt

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Exciting personal update

And Now A LONG Bluesky Post

Getting started

Philosophy: The company is a future adversary

Now Buying Stories! (i.e. Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game)

Gardening, cats, owls…

Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Club, Anyone? (Open Thread)

The Disgraceful 2023 Hugo Awards

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