anon6789

“Dear Penthouse…” 😆

He keeps pretty good rhythm!

There are still parts of the world that think owls are bad luck or ill omens and will kill them or drive them off.

That said, anything popping out of the dark or making sudden unexpected sounds is going to startle people pretty good. That’s led to plenty of spooky stories and owl based spirits over the years.

National Review is about the only place I bother to go for an R take on news, and their front page is not very positive about him this morning.

List of Headlines:

Republicans Blame Debate Moderators as Democrats Take a Victory Lap

Debate 2024: Trump Takes the Bait, but Does It Matter?

Trump’s Trainwreck

Harris Was Completely Wrong to Say That There Are No Americans in Combat Zones Today

An Anticlimactic Debate, an Incomplete Grade

‘Childless Cat Lady’ Taylor Swift Endorses Harris Moments after Debate Wraps

Harris Emerges Largely Unscathed from First-Ever Meeting with an Unfocused Trump

Tim Burton’s Stale Hollywood Gothic: Bobbert says new Beetlejuice not nearly as erotic as the musical

Not too many situations that would not be improved with some piano!

I’ve been starting to learn some Afro-Latin jazz as part of my piano study, and it’s gotten me into listening to reggae as well, and I’ve really been enjoying it. There were naturually a ton of repeat references to things I knew nothing about. The Wikipedia page on Rastafarianism was enough for me and a Youtube video about the significance of Haile Selassie to the belief system instantly set off a whole bunch of conspiracy theory alarm bells.

I’m not in the market for any religion, but even if I were, I don’t think this would be in my top 3. I’ll stick with learning piano instead.

Goodbye 9anime. We’ve had a lot of great times together.

I await the coming of 10anime.

This year feels especially brutal for media liberation. 😮‍💨

I still think this is a near perfect movie. I will still watch it every now and then, and I feel it holds up perfectly. The soundtrack is 100% dated, but I think the songs are awesome and I listen to them occasionally too.

Looks nice! I sent a link to the gf who’s on iPhone. She’s always complaining about ads, and I never know what’s out there for her as I’m on android. I installed it too so I can give it a look.

After not looking at Reddit’s front page in a year, it’s a bit of a shock seeing an unfiltered feed! 😮

I agree. In a way, I’d prefer the majority of the bad takes I see to be from bots or paid actors, but from listening to family and coworkers long enough, it’s easy to see you don’t need to script or pay people to get terrible opinions. Just give them a platform and they’ll unfortunately provide themselves to no end.

If it was fake, it’d be easier to write them off. It’s much harder to accept that we share the same reality.

I’d like to see a world more like that, but it feels like something that would require a society much different than the one we currently have.

Even your simplified mention of freeing IP not being marketed, in the Internet age, does having an item listed as for sale but out of stock or for an unreasonable price counted as being marketed? It’s technically advertised for sale at no real cost, and can be done so in perpetuity. Or they could sell themselves product to show legal sales.

Simple rules and judgement operating under the intentof the law makes sense to rational individuals like us, but with scammy business and individuals, that’s why we end up with a complex legal system. If we hate when legal loopholes are taken advantage of, we can’t outright hate when laws get more complex.

I largely agree. I don’t know the best solution for copyright. On one hand, I don’t think that necessarily the creators’ kids deserve rights forever. They didn’t make the stuff. But on the other hand, who does get the money after the creators are gone? The publisher in this case should get something for publishing physical materials or for marketing their wares that sell, but again, they didn’t create it so someone should get something.

I do think that if nobody does anything with a work for x amount of time (maybe 10 years) then it should be fair game for anyone that does.

Even things like old games, if I download a Contra NES ROM, how am I hurting Nintendo or Konami?

If I download LotR, how am I ripping off Tolkien? I’m not stealing a hard copy. I could borrow it from a physical library. Why can’t I borrow it from an electronic library? The person that deserves the rights to the literal story is dead. He doesn’t care.

There’s absolutely a good number of duplicates among the list they shared.

The bigger implication is of the 4 publishers in this lawsuit, 3 of them are in The Big Five publishers, who hold rights to the vast majority of books (60-80-ish % of English language books) from this century and probably a good chunk of the last one. If they win, this is the tip of the iceberg.

Internet Archive post about it

Google Doc List of the books from the IA

It would seem better to pass the torch than leave things in a state where nobody knows if you’re on vacation or dead or what. I hope he finds someone, the movie category seems like it could be a vibrant one.

I know there’s also a few of them. I have them grouped in a multi community to let me browse them all at once. That’s been a big help for dealing with fragmented fan bases.

My pleasure. I’m always willing to lend another perspective to things.

I did see you had Superbowl on your list and I’m always happy to see other people promote it. It’s big enough now that I’ve slowed down promoting it myself so I don’t seem pushy. It’s been a ton of work, but it’s with it to know it makes people a little happier each day.

News, memes, and tech do seem pretty dominating here, and while it’s nice getting notification of all that stuff in one place, I still prefer to go to actual news sites I trust. If I spend too much time doing it here, I feel I read more comments than actual articles, and half the comments seem to be made before actually reading the article, so it’s easy to get misinformed or biased opinions rather than facts

I’ve not sought out any direct help for a few reasons. The primary reason is my content is all stuff that I like. It’s a labor of love and not a job. I share what I do because I like it and I think you might like it too. If I asked someone to help me out, I’d feel like they’re working for me and trying to post what I’d want, but what they’d want. Bigger projects like the long articles and Owl of the Year are also my personal vision, and honestly, I want those done exactly my way, so again, I don’t want to make someone else carry out my vision and be frustrated if they can’t do that

Also, I feel the people that create the communities should be more active in their actual management. I didn’t start Superbowl, so I’m just a guest. I share my stuff and try to make it a better place, and that’s the end of my role. Earlier on, I thought it might be better to join with Birding or some other community, or maybe instead start a Raptors community where I could also do hawks, eagles, vultures, etc. Superbowl had a good bit of Reddit momentum, which I believe helped make things self-sustaining faster than for some other communities. I think combining small groups would be the way to go for a lot of things, but that isn’t my call.

Ultimately for growth though, it can’t be a daily responsibility for anyone. Maybe if you had a group of 5-10 people that can post daily, like those big politics, news, tech groups do, but most communities would be better served by 30 people posting 1 things a month than 1 person posting 30 things a month. It makes it diverse, and that will pull in more people as the flavor of the group will be less one note, and losing one or 2 people doesn’t hurt the group as much.

As much as you like my content, their might be some that like different things than me. Like I don’t enjoy many of the really small owls as much. When I do post them, many love them, but I don’t post them much because they don’t interest me. If someone that did love them shared them passionately, that would invigorate that group more than I could. Also, if you didn’t like my writing style or if I just write too much or too little, a handful of people writing in their own voice would be great.

I do think some instances have communities to try and get inactive communities into new hands, but if they’re dead, they’re probably not big enough to be self-sustaining. I see you post to a few music communities, but it would probably be easier and reach more eyes if they were under a broader scope than synthwave and gothic industrial. People on here seem to have great interest in music discovery in a way that humans can do that algorithms can’t. Perhaps having a broader scope where you can say, hey if you like “popular song x” you should check out “under the radar song y” that might get more attention. I’m into music creation and synths more than most random people, and I couldn’t tell you what electronic music is in what genre, so my chance of stumbling on one of those posts is small at this point even though I’m much closer to your audience. But the principals of being defederated from other groups seems to fly in the face of people seeing they’re not getting traffic, reaching out to each other, and merging control of their communities.

But I think that’s necessary. Just about all of us probably stumbled upon an already established and powerful state of Reddit, where we didnt need to put in as much work to get eyes. We could jump in a sub with thousands or millions of eyes already on it. We don’t have that power here yet. But we’re also small enough but large enough you can get a following relatively quick if you do put in the work.

This is getting long, and I’ve probably given you a bit to think about, so I’ll leave it here for now. It’s given me some things to think about too but having to type out my thoughts. We all want Lemmy to be big and great, but it’s gotta occur naturally. We can’t force it. We’ve got to look and experiment and see what works and what doesn’t. Evolution doesn’t happen in one generation, it takes many trials and errors. We’ve just got to keep at making this place the best we can and the rest will follow when it’s time.

Everyone said it was hard to pick between 2 great owls, but I had to narrow it down to 32 out of 250! 😵‍💫

I’m glad I’m able to entertain, educate, and motivate you. I do really feel that it is a team effort for us to succeed as a platform. I have a bunch more great stuff on deck for you guys, so keep checking back!

I do really appreciate getting to give you guys a smile every day with something fun. I dabble in other comment sections, but so much news seems negative, I mainly try to keep a bit of positivity flowing.

I’m glad you got motivated to participate. I had to fake some enthusiasm to make things every day early on, but now that it’s become a habit I look forward to and I’ve gotten familiar with a number of you, it’s something I really look forward to doing.

I regularly scout to see what people miss from Reddit, etc and I saw a post the other day saying there is a sub that would read research papers together and I thought that would be really helpful as I’ve branched out into trying to ELI5 owl research for you guys. I hope that person can stumble onto that and maybe participate. It’s fun to see where we’ll go with Lemmy.

If you keep commenting and upvoting, I’ll keep posting. I’m already looking forward to this year’s Owl of the Year. It was so hectic for me, but we all seemed to have a ton of fun!