People saying mastodon won't replace twitter are right. It won't. It's weird & smaller & frictiony and it will only replace twitter for a subset of people who are a good fit. Which is great, for that subset and for Mastodon, because replacing twitter en masse would be awful. Which is true more generally for literally any "twitter alternative", because most of the problems with twitter--even pre-Musk--are problems of scale, and anything operating on the same scale as Twitter will be just as fucked, because it's scaled beyond ethical workability.

The epilogue on the stained glass piece is the same as for almost every big art project I tackle: I’m emotionally and physically worn out and experiencing a sense of sudden withdrawal. Having pushed and pushed to keep my own momentum up, now I’m done and coasting on empty. And part of why I pushed and pushed is that I know full well that if I’d lost momentum I might have just ended up with an unfinished piece and substantially that same emptiness. Between the two scenarios I’ll choose this one. But it’s still a wave that’s been cresting for days.

Alright. Okay. My long-dead grandpa Milt’s unfinished stained glass menorah piece. It’s been in my basement workshop for literal years now. I keep not tackling the job of picking up where he left off. I want to get past that block. I got this, along with all his other remaining stained glass stuff, out of the blue back in 2019 when my parents heard I'd taken up stained glass. I had no idea. I did my first blush documentation of it at the time here:

https://twitter.com/joshmillard/status/1099546329221480450

Doing a proper batch of lino printing for the first time in a while, want to reprint some out of stock favorites. First up, tearing down some big sheets of Arnhem to the 8x8 and 6x8 pieces I need. Tearing down paper per se is a little tedious but not hard or time-consuming. But it always makes my back sore, between our dining room table being a little too low and the necessary bending and reaching. I'd knock out ten sheets a time if I didn't think I'd hurt myself.

fantasy is when krull, sci-fi is when skrull sci-fi is when laser, fantasy i when braizer

Finally getting myself in motion to pull down and number/title/sign a bunch of lino prints that have been hanging in my basement for months, getting them sorted into my prints folder. Creek don’t rise indeed. Also unearthing my early folder of test prints when I first started carving lino and didn’t have any kind of printing process or sales. A lot of these I made one test print of and moved on to the next thing, never pulled any extra prints at all. Should fix that.

Shoe Thieves have decided once again that blaseball games are not supposed to actually ever end All good things, etc. Was hoping would could play a full double-header, but our batters got excited in the bottom of the 17th. Main vibe in the Shoe Thieves discord right now is disappointment that we didn't lose and therefore are not yet in Party Time.

every time I think about NFT art I just get angry again at how stupid the whole thing is, not like stupid as in "new faddish stuff may not hold water", stupid as in literally the entire premise is fucking idiotic, you're paying for a receipt that says "i paid money" and that's it ME: "give me twenty dollars and I will say the word 'the' to you"
YOU: deal
ME: "the"
YOU: great, thanks man

~ LATER ~

YOU: so now I own Josh saying "the" that one time
THEM: so he can't say "the" anymore?
YOU: no he can, but
THEM: but he can't say it for $?
YOU: no he can, but

New thread because new day + progress. My Fogleworm configuration search is now pretty darned working-ish. Here's three stages for N=3: finding unique candidates, generating valid configurations of candidates, and filtering that down to unique configs. N(3) = 2, as hoped! The same output for N=4 looks like this. I'm expecting N(4) = 96. I got...97. Here's a fun game, find the two grids among the 97 in that last pair of images that are congruent under transformation. [screams in math] But this is CLOSE, which is GREAT.

Good news is my Fogleworm NxN tile search is kind of working! Bad news is "kind of" is doing a lot of heavy lifting; fundamentals are there but it has huge mysterious problems. Worse news is I have to kill -9 the WolframKernel process from a term because of infinite loops. Well, shit, this stuff is almost working now. I had to break my code a bit by having it bail early to resolve the whole infinite loop issue, so this is just a subset of the 96 solutions N=4 should actually produce, but, by god, it's quickly producing valid solutions now.

dangit, @FogleBird got me thinking about these dang worms and trying to iterate them by hand invariant to rotation and reflection is probably not the best plan for a tired brain but they're fun little monsters. I think I got 88 of 96 on this first attempt, will save for morning.

https://twitter.com/FogleBird/status/1349576100666609664

I find these kinds of problems attractive in significant part because it's an excuse to muss with generating specimens and letting a process to formally organize that generation cohere as I go. Lurching toward "a ha!" moments where a way of thinking just...materializes.

Weird niche gripe of the day: was looking for stop sign SVGs for an art project, search landed at wikimedia page, so far so good but the S looks off. Note says: "I slightly modified the 'S' because the one in the PDF isn't symmetric as it should be."

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stop… So someone took the sign image from a DOT regulatory document that is literally specifying how the sign should look, peeps that Highway Gothic Narrow "S", and says, nah, I'm pretty sure everyone except me is wrong about this. Better make the S look how I think it should look.

Ted Wheeler getting gassed and being appalled by the situation reminds me of the occasional right-wing chickenhawk who would volunteer to be waterboarded to prove...something...which generally turned out to be "I do not like being waterboarded, it's bad actually!" Which, my dude. You're the mayor and the police commissioner and you've been presiding over EXACTLY THIS part for like two months now. Your cops have been gassing your citizens. Showing up and huffing it and being taken aback by the lawless horror of it is fucking cheap.