Strypey @strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz

I just watched A Life on Our Planet, a film that Sir David Attenborough describes as his "witness statement". Since I was a small child, this man has been enthusiastically explaining the natural world to me through his many nature films. Hearing him describe the destruction humans have done to the wilderness - in his lifetime alone - literally had me in tears. He ends with some aspirational stories about what we can do to fix things and create green civilizations. #SolarPunk FTW!

#documentary

Source code for NZ COVID contact tracing app finally released publicly, under the GNU AGPL license:
https://github.com/minhealthnz/nzcovidtracer-app

This is good news, but I'm wondering why it took so long, and whether the code can be checked against the binaries on app stores, using Reproducible Builds tools.

#Aotearoa #nz #ContactTracing #COVID19 #ReproducibleBuilds

#ShowerThoughts In the last few months I've been doing a lot of experimenting with which topics are OK to communicate in text-based messages and chats, and which ones are much better saved for in-person conversations. Or at least a phone call (or *maybe* voicemails) where the other person can at least hear your tone as well as just receiving the words with no context. I've made a lot of mistakes around this and I'm learning a lot.

"Just as we perceive selective disinterest, we recognize selective attention. Recognizing the spectrum of explanations for social avoidance, most of which have little to do with you personally, frees up valuable time to pursue healthy relationships with people who demonstrate authentic, selective enthusiasm about spending time with *you*."

- #WendyLPatrick, J.D., Ph.D, 2020

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/202012/is-someone-avoiding-you-might-be-why

#psychology

"This was probably the first study to show the regions of the brain that are associated with a perceived slowing down of time during a threatening situation [the Matrix effect]."

- #MarcWittmann Ph.D., 2017

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sense-time/201707/the-matrix-effect-when-time-slows-down

#psychology #StudyResults #MatrixEffect

I was just listening to Gollum's Song from Lord of the Rings and every time Emilíana Torrini sang "We are lost/ We can never go home" I sobbed for all the ways we've lost homes this year 😭

Can anybody recommend any good grieving songs/ albums? I've been listening to 'Everybody Hurts' by REM and the Counting Crows album 'August and Everything After' (showing my age here 😉) to try to connect with my sadness and frustration, and express it. But it would be good to have a wider selection.

#music #EmotionalFirstAid

Like a lot of people, I've been going through a really challenging and sometimes distressing time this year. I have been finding it harder and harder to relax, due to the knot of anxious in my chest, which over the past few days has grown into full blown panic attacks. I think I really need a good cry, but that's something I struggle to do.

Are there plans to add a function to @delta Chat to allow users to listen to recorded voicemails, and choose whether to send or cancel them? Like we can with taking photos.

#DeltaChat #voicemail

DT plays through 0AD, a realtime strategy game with all source code available under free license:
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=gFkgurFnrQ4

#0AD #DT #gaming #videos

Autocorrect just tried to turn "pouch of miso" into "pouch of misogyny". That's a whole different cup of soup 😅

Having run out of Mandalorian episodes for now, I've moved onto Rebels. I have some gripes with the gagginess here and there, but I like it way more than the Clone Wars series, which I just found consistently painful to watch and had to stop. Original
Star Wars was as much about the conflict between allies as the battles between enemies. Rebels captures that. Clone Wars lacked that and was sickly sweet as a result.

#StarWars #Rebels #CloneWars

#ShowerThoughts: Perhaps because I got online in the 1990s, the net still feels like a place I can hold whispered conversations with people under cover of darkness, even on publicly archived mailing lists, web forums etc. Whereas it seems to me that for people who got online more recently, saying anything online feels like yelling in a public theatre, even in an encrypted, private channel.

Finally started watching the new season of The Mandalorian. Ep1 was pretty disappointing. Essentially a rehash of 'Sanctuary' (Ep4 from season 1). But swapping out Cara Dune for Cobb Vanth (Marshall Not-Actually-A-Mandalorian) and the AT-AT walker for a bantha-eating, acid-spitting sandworm.

Why did the scriptwriters think yet more heavy borrowing from Dune was a good idea?

#StarWars #TheMandalorian