I need your help: I'm fighting cancer and raising money for my surgery. I used to organize fundraisers to help victims, details can be found on my website:
https://elpis.ws/cgi-bin/cms/supportbut now I need your support myself. I'm not taking any medication yet, only painkillers (too expensive). I would be truly grateful for any contribution, repost, or kind word.
to support vith PAYPAL
https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=2PYBDTJ6EM54UPayPal account linked to email turboblack@ukr.net
transfer to card
https://send.monobank.ua/6hDcCqG3tcright there through Google Pay and Apple Pay
Thanks for your support or repost
i get paid on friday. i have made a note to send some dosh your way if i have some left over after bills n stuff. i should! i wish i had a social network of any kind i could share this with... you've been in my thoughts, and if life is anything like dragonball Z, my energy should be en route over to you, a steady drip from day to day.
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Thank you so much for your generosity, it was very timely, it will really help me a lot
btw:
I'm not very social either, I only have 4 subscribers on Mastodon))
https://oldbytes.space/@turboblackit's the least i could do. your creative work is inspiring to me, despite little historical interaction between myself & yourself.
elpis, hamster & web 1.0 hosting (even though i don't use either, currently, they instill in me a great oldschool computer nostalgia that always surfaces old joyous memories i have of doing Ludum Dare gamejams and being inspired in IRC by the very kind & far more experienced coders/hackers/gamedevs...), & so on.
maybe i should try to squeeze some community/utility out of mastodon again. i gave up on regular social media, but i miss aspects of it. i've tried mastodon a few times, but it was always just me posting thoughts seen by zero people. one may as well just keep all thoughts internal & private in that case--far more efficient and less prone to turning into a distracting activity on a phone/laptop.
i will sign up again and follow you! as Mastodon attempt number... x+1
Mastodon is a good thing. I only write there about projects or achievements; posting personal thoughts (like on Twitter) too often seems silly to me. At least, that's my opinion. Perhaps it's normal for others and they're successful at it.
Content generation is a pain for me, especially lately. Two years ago, I even managed to write a short book and publish the next issue of the magazine once a month. Now, it's already the fourth month, and I'm really putting it off. The magazine is timeless, but the reader always picks up the latest issue.
And if at the beginning of the summer I optimistically declared that the 15th edition would be at the end of July, and then I went away for treatment, now I’m not sure that I’ll make it before the end of the summer. Irony ))
i miss-spoke a little! i certainly said "thoughts," but what i was imagining in my head was moreso art & art/things from others that i like. also maybe works-in-progress, but i actually think i prefer leaving WIP things in my own hands until i'm totally done with them. i still very much prefer thoughts staying in my notebooks, where they can mingle with other thoughts while i'm asleep.
i have no local community of like-minded creative people, and i work from home, so the idea of being part of a community of creators has always appealed to (& eluded) me. maybe it's silly to desire a small audience & escape creative hermitude, idk. i know mainstream social media isn't for me, but i haven't given up on Mastodon/&c yet, despite nothing feeling like a good fit yet. i believe it might help me find motivation to create if i'm surrounded by other people doing cool things. not a necessary thing, but a creativity enzyme boosting output quality/rate. maybe!?
but, i'm not interested in yet another outlet for news, rage, & complaining, which i think is why i stopped using Mastodon last time??
i spent some time yesterday looking for an instance that primarily revolves around creation. is the instance you are on one you would recommend? i haven't figured out a way to view an instance's local timeline (if that's possible), so i just click a few profiles on an instance and try to get an idea what it's like. will do some more looking this week to see what i can find.
looking forward to the 15th edition, whenever it arrives!
[EDIT: actually, thinking about it more, i don't think i want a Mastodon account. i think i'll stick with smol.pub, midnight.pub, paper & pen, and other less traditional (& timesink-y) forms of (internal/external) communication.]
From time to time I reply to messages on https://bluedwarf.top
This small community is quite welcoming.
it was down the first time i checked, but now it's alive again. it looks like midnightpub-esque? i don't really post here ever, so idk if i need another account on another site i only lurk on. maybe i'll make an account anyway and try posting something. i probably shouldn't complain about having no Internet friends if i never post anything in non-mainstream places. not posting on instagram makes sense. not posting in a smallweb place makes less sense, as activity is more meaningful to those users + platforms... hmm
It’s an interesting place—it’s active, and I like some of the commenters and original posters because they have a vision of what a sensible internet should look like. I rarely start threads myself, but I do occasionally reply to others—provided the topics aren't political.
I dream of a proper internet where commerce takes a back seat to information; one where scripts serve a beneficial purpose rather than causing harm; and one where search engines aren't so driven by profit that they fail to show interesting pages.
i would assume we need different benchmarks before anything plays out favorably for users/individuals, but i'm not entirely sure what would drive that change.
if the goalposts were determined by money & "things," rather than something less obviously quantifiable but more imporant like individuals happiness/freedom/
there are almost 200 countries, and only one measures progress (primarily) in terms of Gross National Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product. is GNH a realistic measurement stick? idk. but i know for sure that GDP isn't either, and it's a measurement stick that inspires the worst in some people.
i don't think "happiness" should be the end-goal, but maybe "human agency"? the ability to determine your own future, with society-wide freedoms and insurances, based on your own self-defined life desires & preferences?
i created an account and will test out Blue Dwarf. so far seems like lots of negative takes on AI, which is something i don't particularly care to see or read about, but i also saw someone share an interesting article about aliens/NASA. maybe i just need to get better at quickly glossing over time-wasting negative commentary and find ways to squeeze some "community" out of whatever fruits of the internet i can get my hand on.
You can filter out topics that don't interest you in the settings and thus avoid negativity—it really helps.
It’s also interesting to read about aliens sometimes; the way I see it, if you’re riding a trolleybus, one in five passengers is an alien.
It’s a shame there are so few gatherings like that.
Well, this might sound strange, but lately, all the communities have been a bit stale. People there occasionally show signs of life, greeting each other, but nothing more. If a year or two ago there were fountains of ideas, now there's calm and silence. I don't know why, but it has a very mixed effect on me. If there's no movement around, it's not motivating at all, I think you know what I mean.
You can chat on forums, but you shouldn't expect it to be part of something big and important. Usually, these are posts (as you said) with complaints, news, or something like that—criticism of progress, and all that.
If you think about it, my friend and I have made a huge leap forward in the last few years, we've done a lot of work, but he and I don't know how to promote all this to the masses. Social media isn't suitable for that; the audience there is simply not ready for such things. They get offended and think we're promoting some kind of archaism. )))
How to unite everyone who sits at home and creates alone is a big mystery, and it's not a given that they'll want to unite. Although there are many interesting projects that I'd like to explore and talk about.
Lately, I've been online very rarely.
i don't live near any friends, and online doesn't fill the void like it used to when i had various friends who were (too) online, so idk what to do. online is slow and/or angry. slow is fine when it's meaningful, though, but that's also kinda lacking. IRL is nonexistant. focusing all my time on learning new skills & improve existing ones, but it'd also be nice if there were an online "home" to retreat to when i want to socialize or take a break. idk
ugh. tried multiple payment methods + multiple different cards, and they all got declined :'(
Did you enter my email address in PayPal? Or did you click the link? It took me a while to respond because I spend more time lying down than walking.
oh frick that worked! i guess i didn't see that option when i first read it, sorry!
also i don't check here super often, so it took me a sec to see your reply.
🙏
The world is set up this way. Not everything turns out the way we want. Tomorrow I'm going to the hospital for a couple of days, again. I hate being there. Sick people depress me, it makes me feel even more sick. But what else can I do.....
I am very sorry to hear this :(
Unfortunately I am not in a financial position to help right now, but I shared this on the Matrix room as well to boost visibility.