This was inspired by a fediverse thread, in which I wound up writing up a bunch of stuff by accident. c..c It kinda wants a more persistent place, even if what it really wants is to be more thoroughly researched and edited and have an even more persistent place than that.
Ey'd mentioned marveling at plurality being a thing, so I wrote:
If two people want to add each other on Telegram based initially on sharing usernames, how is this actually done?
So far, what I've run into is:
What's the good answer? (And why do I see so many complaints about user interfaces on less-centralized stuff when this is still allowed and okay?)
From Mastodon, mostly because it's more useful there, but repeated here because it's still relevant:
Expecting the recipient to filter through things costs less if topics are generally written about in larger chunks which can be accepted or dismissed in one gesture (computer input, mental effort, etc.), rather than having lots of tiny pieces interleaved, taking N× motes of “I shouldn't read that right now” emotional energy.
I can see some of you struggling to get past what Twitter burnt into your minds.
Until enough of you form the social infrastructure for other things, this will keep happening.
Coordinating to let go of fear is hard.
… we'll come for you if we can.
(But if you insist that the answer involves everything being in JavaScript, then we might have problems.)
SleepTown (which we got on Android via Google Play) tries to encourage consistent sleep cycles in a Recycling Digital Motivation Suck as Leverage way. It accepts manual trigger inputs when you sleep and wake within −2h ≤ ΔT ≤ 10m of a target time. It also locks out the rest of your handset functions when you're supposedly asleep, to try to prevent “pick up handset in the middle of the night, read terrible shitposts for hours, oops, the light from the screen and the infinite cat videos kept me up, now everything is ruined”.
When you trigger a cycle while going to sleep on time, it begins “constructing a building”. If you wake up on time (possibly triggered by the builtin alarm clock), then the building is revealed and added to your town, and you get coins based on the total number of buildings you've successfully constructed so far, plus a bonus based on consecutive successful days. If you oversleep, or if you override the app switch lockout, you get an unpleasant-looking broken building added instead. Enough successful days in a row without a failed one will get you a “ticket” which you can spend to increase the chance of rarer buildings. Coins can be spent on rerolling construction results, demolishing failed buildings, or decorations (see below).
Much like Forest by the same company, it's “free” as in “demo”, with the real thing being a 2 USD in-app purchase in the Settings menu.
The tuning on this one is much more awkward than Forest. There's no way to explicitly fail in the middle of a cycle except by triggering it noticing an app switch and then choosing the option to destroy your building. The chance of having an actual need for some other app during the much longer contiguous lockout period is also higher. The builtin alarm's vibrate-off setting doesn't seem to work (which we should see if we can report to them properly at some point). Not triggering a cycle doesn't count as a streak failure for the purpose of tickets, which is understandable given there's no support for inherently variable sleep cycles, but feels odd. Also, changing your target times resets your streak, which is also understandable given the purpose of the thing, but it's also why we haven't gotten any tickets at all yet (except for possible a single one that you get as a starter). >..<
Aside from the main “big” town (which is populated with your buildings in some arbitrary fashion), you can build your own maps out of the buildings you've picked up, plus decorations which you buy with coins. I haven't really dug into that part yet, though it looks neat. A different thing I have tried and like is the “shaking challenge”, intended to make it awkward to reach up, push the wake button, and then instantly drop back into bed, by giving you a bar that you have to fill by shaking your handset before it'll believe you're actually awake; if you stop, the bar gradually drops back to zero. So that's kind of a nice physical trigger.
Overall I'm more ambivalent about this than about Forest, especially for us specifically, given distinguishing between “unwanted inconsistency” and “our sleep cycle is requisitely getting jostled around and we should just roll with it if at all possible” is tricky. But during times when we are intending to be consistent, it's kinda useful.
So lately we've been on a “adapt All the Things to Recycle Digital Motivation Suck as Leverage” kick, as some of you may have already read bits and pieces of. So why not document what we're using?
Forest (which we got on Android via Google Play) is a pomodoro-timer-alike which tries to help keep you focused away from dopamine-hit smartphone nonsense. You “plant a tree” by pushing a button at the beginning of a focus period, and after the timer is up (default 25 minutes), the tree grows, you get some coins, and your forest for the day looks a little nicer. If you switch to some other app in the meantime, or push the “Give Up” button, the tree withers and sticks around as a marker of shame (or not-shame, if you like).
It's “free” as in “demo”: starts out ad-supported/limited-features, and the real thing is a 2 USD in-app purchase in the Settings menu. You can also buy “sunshine elixir” at 2 USD per 21 days of calendar time, which triples your coin rewards. This is a bit weird, but I'm okay with it as paying-for-cosmetics (see below), and it's been worth it for us so far and will probably stay that way for a few more moons yet.
Coins are used to unlock new tree and bush types (bushes are like trees but for timer values < 25 minutes), though beware that the prices go up with each purchase, so get the ones you'll use most first. They can also be spent on more background audio tracks if you like those, though that's not as useful to us since we have our own audio elsewhere or just silence.
You can tag trees with categories and little notes on what you did, and look back at when you planted them. There's also “Real Forest” which lets you spend a pile of coins to sponsor the planting of a physical tree. We haven't tried any of the social features, but there's some sort of leaderboard, plus you can supposedly make rooms in which everyone commits to stay focused at the same time or else everyone's tree dies. Accounts for cloud sync and social stuff are Forest-specific.
Tree species we've unlocked so far, and what we use them for:
The tree models change and sort of upgrade if you set a timer ≥ 60 minutes; at 60 minutes, the cactus gains a smaller cactus sidekick, and at 90 minutes, they get cowboy hats. At 120 minutes the big cactus gets a bandana and a belt and holster. I'm not kidding.
There is some weirdness in the way it interacts with the “total silence” DnD mode, which we haven't quite figured out, but it seems like some combinations of settings override this accidentally for the tree-success notification. Might be user error. Also the end-of-break notifications (you can set a break timer when a tree is finished) don't have a no-vibrate option.
Also, you can set custom phrases that display in rotation above the tree; here's ours:
Sappy, isn't it? But I like it. ^..^
Where's the good probably-sorta-furry(??) sites for multiple-sorts-of-creative-works browsing/uploading/casual-community nowadays?
We were poking at Weasyl, since that's what our predecessor used, but we haven't gotten any response from support so far re how their specifically forbidding separate accounts for “changing username for aesthetic purposes” might interact with us being sequentials. We can't delete our predecessor's account (only void its profile), and if they ever contested that we were the “same person” switching names aesthetically and merged it into a hypothetical account of ours, that'd be a disaster. So having a presence there seems Unsafe. I'm not sure how much I like their model-conformism leanings anyway…
FurAffinity, no, I think not. DeviantArt I vaguely recall hearing mixed/sketchy things about.
There might be a Dreamwidth community or a creativity-focused Mastodon instance that'd be good, but that's not the same thing.
I mean it's not like we have anything to upload right now anyway, but…
Anything posted here with sensitivity level 2 (Private) must not be repeated or replied to by any less-restrictive channel, as a baseline. Explicit permission overrides this.
To repeat the sensitivity level list from our profile:
A “c” (compartment) tag is a hint to be aware that only part of our circle is trusted with enough the right kind of discretion, shared context, or some similar characteristic for things in that compartment. Compartments are tagged using code names; the mapping is defined in this post [s1]. “s1 + compartment” means that the definition of discretion should take the compartment into account, but the content itself is not all that sensitive. “s2 + compartment” is the most restrictive.
The easiest way is to keep everything within the same thread, thus giving it the same visibility as the parent post; if you're reading here, that's the natural thing to do anyway. If you want to take things elsewhere, you have to be much more careful. In particular, Mastodon's visibility model (added: and Twitter's) can lead to surprising and damaging consequences for anything non-public.
Always feel free to ask first (added: privately, of course) if you're not sure.
Places where feedback might be useful:
Currently, we assign compartment access heuristically when inducting people into our access lists, rather than requiring explicit opt-ins, on the grounds that being careful with private-group communication is something people already need to know how to do, and often these people already have a history of being willing to engage on related matters. Dealing with “they don't want to read about that now” is handled using topic tags and cuts. Should we move to requiring explicit opt-ins for everything? If so, should that be applied retroactively?
Suggestions are also invited re making this easier to read/understand/deal with, ideally without: (a) causing the subject line to stretch to infinity, adding verbose preambles which people will get tired of reading, or similar; (b) removing or greatly impeding our ability to show most things to only some people, and different things to different sets of some people; (c) requiring us to impute a bunch of implicit obligation to people (haven't fully unpacked this part); etc. etc.
… anything else that occurs to you, with slightly more caution. Figuring out how to deal with what seems from here to be a reasonable set of social needs, when relevant digital implications have ~no habitual penetration, is an ongoing problem, and there's presumably a lot we can't see.
Apparently Trillian for Windows has finally put out a new version that breaks the mostly-unmaintained OTR plugin. A friend of ours (who may reveal themselves if they wish) is trying to get a hold of the author, but does anyone have good alternatives for Jabber+OTR on Windows, meanwhile? (It doesn't affect us directly, but it affects us quite a lot indirectly.)
