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denise posting in

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

mellowtigger

Yesterday, there was dense fog in Minneapolis. I could see almost (but not quite) a full block away. Later that afternoon, there was some rain. Overnight we got our first snow. It was light snow at my house. I got only about 2.5cm/1in deep, but I still had to go shovel the sidewalk and alleyway to move some snow-and-leaves combo that would be unpleasant if allowed to stay. They got significantly more snow farther north around Minnesota.

The temperature in Minneapolis is just slightly below freezing right now. We're expected to get -17C/1F low temperature over the weekend. Winter is here.

mellowtigger

It's that time of year again. Today is Minnesota's annual virtue signaling spectacle. We call it "Give To The Max" day. For recurring visitors like me, their website offers a convenient "Add previously supported causes to your cart" option with a "Give Again" button. Very convenient! Even without it, their search engine makes it easy to find organizations and causes of interest to you.

See the table of groups I'm supporting in 2025...

Help within my small very local portion of the warzone
Youth Farm MN	I've mentioned them before, but for some reason they are prohibited this year from receiving funds. Did they lose their non-profit status or fail to file a form? I'm keeping them here as a reminder for next year, though.
Good in the Hood	I've mentioned them before too
Pillsbury United Communities	They fund local groups, including My North News
Jordan Area Community Council	my local neighborhood of north Minneapolis
Nonviolent Peaceforce.org	They help around the globe... and here in north Minneapolis
Help the nearby people and their environment
Autism Society of MN	help autistics in MN
Fraser MN	They help people with disabilities with developing self-care life skills
OutFront MN	help queer folk in MN
Quatrefoil Library	preserve queer history in a library
Migizi	help native people in MN
Avenues For Youth	help youth in the local community
Minnesota Renewable Energy Society	encourage MN to migrate to renewable energy
Metro Blooms	encourage MN to migrate from grass yards to native prairie
MN350	encourage MN to reduce CO2 to 350ppm
Animal Humane Society	help domesticated animals when their former owners cannot
Repowered	provides training, employment, and tech to local people, formerly known as Tech Dump
Sources of truth in a culture of lies and misdirections
Unicorn Riot	They show on-the-ground interviews with locals
Minnesota Public Radio	local non-commercialized news
My North News.org	Jordan neighborhood and Minneapolis city news
Pioneer PBS	MN stories for broader distribution
Sources of justice in a culture of authoritarianism
Legal Rights Center	The organization that agreed to represent me if needed when I was jailed for nonviolent protest.
ACLU of Minnesota	An organization that helps many people fighting government overreach.

I'll do a separate giving spree after a few months, focusing on news sources and technology projects. With costs spread throughout the year, it'll make it "hurt" less financially for a given month. For this event, I'm focusing more on local support and registered charity causes. I gave a total of $1,529.09 this time, which is significantly more than usual. That total includes a donation to GiveMN itself to cover financial processing (so charities get the full amount I sent to them) and keeping the website functioning. I added more causes this year. I also added more money than usual for those organizations providing direct food and shelter, since I expect the need to soar during the next year.

I know other places offer similar mass donation drives. At my employer in Pennsylvania, they're doing it right now for the holiday season too. I very much appreciate this very Minnesota way of making it easy to do good things, which is what every society should strive to achieve with its infrastructure and politics.

mellowtigger

I don't know how to trust anything I read or see online any more.

Just a few days ago, I started reading an article talking about archive.org and how it stopped doing some sort of widespread page collection in 2024 around the time of their DDOS attack. The article also mentioned Google stopping its "cached page" collection as a related event, leaving us now without any easy and trustworthy reference to past online experiences. Actual published information can now simply be made to disappear... gaslighting anyone who thought they remembered it.

I think the article intended to tie this chain of thinking to our current control by a few plutocrats over our broadcast and online media, providing them ample opportunity to manipulate our societies and politics for their economic benefit. It was a very long article, and I stopped reading it halfway through, intending to come back to it later. Today, I can't even remember which website it was at. It was an important article, but I've lost it in the aether. I really need a convenient replacement for Pocket, which is what I used for a long time to store webpages into categories for easy recall.

With AI videos, audio, and images all being so realistic, I just don't know how anyone can know anything beyond what they see with their own eyes. And our brain's memory is itself famously faulty. There are important political events happening on the world stage, and it's difficult to know for sure where to direct one's attention.

The only option that I can see is for everybody to record everything around them at all times. Then any disputed event can be compared against multiple data sources for corroboration. But I see people online freaking out about any recording of anything because you didn't ask permission of everyone in field of view. I'm so tired of this obligate ownership of everything everywhere. Can we stop thinking in capitalist terms?

I'm not sure where I'm going with this train of thought. I know that somehow this topic is related to technological telepathy, in this dystopian world where we suffer the manipulation of reality by forced control over recording and recall of events. Once again, I advocate total freedom instead of compartmentalized "ownership" of any experience, perspective, or opinion. The one thing I argue against is lies... the presentation of one thing as something else that it is not.

mellowtigger

For easier searching later, I decided to make a brief post today just about some HTML tags that I use.

For pre-formatted text, I discovered in yesterday's post that long lines of powershell code were not wrapping to new lines. I eventually got it working as intended by formatting the HTML tags like this:

<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Text goes here. blah blah blah.</pre>

I wonder, though, if I should switch to monospace font for computer code? In the past, there was the TT (teletype) tag, but apparently that's another technology that has been deprecated. Here's an example of the new KBD (keyboard) code instead. I don't know. It looks exactly the same to me, except for the change in vertical spacing. I'll stick with PRE instead, I guess. I could use KBD inline within a paragraph if needed.
<kbd>this is a test. blah blah blah.</kbd>

Far more frequently, however, I use the HTML tag to display a little sideways-arrow which users need to click to "open up" a section of text. Using this tag liberally helps keep long posts from flooding other peoples' blog feeds. Readers can choose whether or not to read the long diatribes (or see the large pictures) in the main part of the blog post. Here is the code I use to accomplish that feat:

<details>
<summary>Click the arrow to read the blah blah blah...</summary>
All of the usual blog content goes here.
</details>

There. Now I can find these tag details again when I click the HTML tag on my blog. Bread crumbs to help a failing memory.

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Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

first snow of the 2025 season in Minneapolis

GiveToTheMax day 2025 in Minnesota

unreality

HTML tags: PRE, KBD, and DETAILS

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December 2020

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