rakyat

Culture wise I’d say that Bluesky feels a lot more like Twitter immediately before Musk took over - there’s lots of shitposting & also a lot of “look at me I’m so irreverent so please follow me” vibe to it. It’s easier to find people to follow but harder to find interesting content (on mastodon you can rely on hashtags). It’s also a lot harder to get engagement if you’re not a Twitter big name, there’s a lot more parasociality going on, with more focus on individual posters than on the actual content, which IMO is exactly what a lot of people are looking for.

Mastodon users tend to feel very earnest to a fault. The whole “you forgot to add a CW to your food pic you bastard” thing is unfortunately real, but I’ve mostly stopped seeing this since I put a warning on what I will and will not CW on my timeline. On the bright side, there’s a lot more friendly engagement from strangers. Politically, mastodon users as a whole lean left with a lot of socialists/anarchists but you can curate what you see. It also depends on what circles you follow, for example, I (as a Chinese speaker) stumbled on a huge community of Chinese users who are feminist and anti-CCP, but will probably not consider themselves leftists.

As a whole, I’ve mostly abandoned Bluesky in favor of Mastodon but that’s a personal preference - both are unlikely to completely replace Twitter & the landscape will likely remain fractured for a very long time so just choose the one that vibes with you.

Sigur Ros’s ex drummer was accused of rape and the band itself was accused of tax evasion.

Oops! I stand corrected.

Not exactly bizarre, but it’s fun to learn that the delicious fragrance of shrimps and crabs when cooked comes from chitin, and chitin is also why sautéed mushrooms smell/taste like shrimps.

And since fungi are mostly chitin, plants have evolved defenses against fungi by producing enzymes that destroy chitin, which is how some plants eventually evolved the ability to digest insects.

EDIT: a previous version of this post mistakenly confused chitin with keratin (which our fingernails are made of). Thanks to sndrtj for the correction!

House plants. Sure a few mass-market plants are dirt cheap, but soon you get into unusual plants, plants with special needs, hundreds/thousands of plants, grow lights, grow racks, terrariums, automated watering systems…