sj_zero

joined 2 years ago
 

Some people think that "Mastodon is too much about just tech all the time", and that's really missing out on a lot of what the fediverse is. It's a grand tool, but one you have to use with intentionality and find the things you want to interact with, because there isn't some omnipresent algorithm trying to drag you into addiction.

People who want to follow certain topics can follow hashtags, or they can also participate in lemmy communities (I think? I tend to use lotide to interact with lemmy communities since they're kind of the same sort of thing).

@realcaseyrollins for example has done a fantastic job of consistently posting on a wide variety of subjects to lemmy communities. He used to be on lotide but unfortunately that project ceased development earlier this year so he decided to officially move to lemmy entirely.

I believe you can subscribe to communities on lemmy (I'm looking at his history for examples, which is why they are where they are) as if they were users, so for example if you wanted to see all the posts about celebrities from thelemmy.club, you could follow @celebnews or if you wanted to follow the movie community on lemm.ee, you would join @movies. There's tons of options out there, and lots of things being posted and discussed on a regular basis.

I also believe subscriptions to magazines (communities) on kbin also are compatible with mastodon, so if you wanted for example to see a bunch of stuff about industrial design, you could follow @[email protected] and see a bunch of discussion on that topic.

With Mastodon, the ActivityPub support means you can also do cool things like subscribe to your favorite Peertube channels (assuming you have favorite peertube channels). A lot of them are tech related, but for example on makertube.net there's @thegiddystitcher whose channel is about sewing and knitting. Having videos from this platform show up in your posts is pretty exciting, it's an example of how something completely different than mere messages can integrate using the ActivityPub protocol.

There are also other parts of the fediverse that are relatively new but may be quite unique and different. For example, you can follow people on minds, which is a fairly large social media platform in its own right with some media personalities having active accounts there. Threads is a big corporate site, which means that some instances block them by default and some instances are blocked by default, but if you're on a mutually friendly instance it has a lot of users as well that aren't likely to hang out on smaller instances.

It's not as straightforward, but you can also follow and interact with people on nostr through the mostr bridge. There's a lot of bitcoin and the like on mostr, but it's still another option. You can follow former twitter CEO Jack Dorsey at @82341f882b6eabcd2ba7f1ef90aad961cf074af15b9ef44a09f9d2a8fbfbe6a2 (just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?)

There's also portions of the fediverse that you won't know about unless you actually know about it -- for example, journa.host hosts many journalists, as well as the fediverse pages for a number of news organizations. I follow @winnipegfreepress because I used to live in Winnipeg for example.

There are also a number of notable celebrities on the fediverse. American idiot George Takei, famous for saying "oh my!" provocatively, has a very active account. Fascism advocate Robert "Third" Reich also has a very active account. A wide variety of other celebrities also have accounts, for example famous genocide activist Greta Thunberg and red painted doll head collector Kathy Griffin, but typically many of these accounts were created during hissy fits about something or other, and like most political hissy fits by celebrities they gave it up once they realized nobody cares. The fact that they can't just hire someone with thick glasses to game the algorithm was probably a major factor in leaving since they're not special on the Fediverse.

The fediverse really is like the old story of two wolves being inside of you. Whichever ones you feed are the ones that will grow. If you're doing it right, you can have any kind of feed you'd like and you'll find it really enjoyable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The Thief and the Cobbler is one, it was massively expensive and destroyed the studio, but it was the animator's magnum opus he worked on for 30 years.

Showgirls was one of the movies Paul Verhoven pushed for as a personal project, and it literally destroyed the careers of some of the people who were part of the project (and gave many of us a chance to see tits on basic cable at 15, so your sacrifice will not be forgotten)

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a first of its kind, a photorealistic movie, but the cost and the fact that the movie just wasn't very good basically destroyed the studio after one picture.

Disney's Treasure Planet was intended to be the magnum opus of its creators, but ended up being a nail in the coffin of disney animated movies.

Cameron's Avatar is an example in the other direction, where it was this weird movie about blue aliens he really wanted to make that ended up making all of the money. His movie Titanic is another weird one, where you have a 3 and a half hour historical romance that became the top movie on earth.

Christopher Nolan's Inception was also mind bendingly popular, and one of the films he used his clout to create.

I also heard about a movie from 1980 called Heaven's Gate which destroyed the director, the studio, and essentially ended the era of director-led movies because studios were too gun-shy after that bomb to let that happen again.

So as you can see, these sort of risky auteur films can either be the biggest flops or the biggest home runs, it really depends on the film and the world around it in that moment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I think for someone like that, it isn't about the money, it's about making your artistic vision happen, using the clout you built elsewhere to push through a project that was never financially viable but it's your dream as a filmmaker.

Sometimes those stories end up becoming some of the biggest movies of all time, but often they just end up being a big waste of money except for the guy who gots to make his dream movie.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

I'm making a distinction between the rank and file and the media, I don't really believe most rank and file are really like whatever the media or the like claim.... I mean if they really did flip 180 like that then it makes them incredibly disingenuous people...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (13 children)

I strongly suspect that most Democrats don't actually want to fund a bunch of forever wars either. I mean, that's what Obama was elected for, he just turned out to do the opposite of everything he was elected to do. "Help the poor, end the wars, shut down gitmo? I agree but let's tweak it to help the 0.1%, keep the wars going forever, keep gitmo going!"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

When people say getting onto mastodon is hard I assume they must mean setting up an instance because even if soapbox and rebased are easier to use, it's still just signing up for a website.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I feel like our focus on the 20th century really limits our understanding of the depths of human depravity.

This is an image of two Assyrian soldiers forcing a captured Babylonian to grind the bones of his family.

And you might say "Wow, that's a really mean thing to say about the Assyrians!" No, this is them bragging about doing it in immortal stone form.

This wasn't printed out on a laser printer, it wasn't etched using a laser engraver. It probably took weeks or months to lovingly create this work. They were really proud of their depravity and wanted to share it with the world.