Cyrus Draegur

When I told my best friend about mastodon, it misimprinted on her brain in a flash as “walrus chat” and now she can’t for the life of her remember its actual name.

yes, that’s what boosting is on mastodon. see how ineffectual their ‘boosting’ nomenclature is? that’s why they should be renamed.

also rebrand it from Mastodon to Trunky.

1. Trochaic meter is more addictive: 2 syllables with accent on the first. just like YOU-tube, FACE-book, GOO-gle, TWIT-ter, TIK-tok, SNAP-chat, RED-dit, WHATS-app, etc; there are a FEW exceptions like Insta, Messenger, Telegram… but they are the clear minority and were propelled in spite of their names. it’s part of why TEEN-age MU-tant NIN-ja TUR-tles and MIGH-ty MOR-phin POW-er RAN-gers was popular.
2. Trunky is full of bright bouncy sounds that pop, the T and the K both hit nice, the R is exciting and powerful, the y ends it on a high timbre, it’s cute.
3. A mastodon is an extinct lumbering beast from the ice age which is the antithesis of anything trying to break out as a hot new service. But this would allow the service to keep its pachyderm branding.
4. While at it, change “favorite” to “trumpet” (as in trumpeting praise), again it’s trochaic (TRUM-pet) and carries less cognitive LOAD than “favoriting” which feels heavy and committed. Just because you LIKE something doesn’t mean it’s your FAVORITE thing you know? this would decrease the friction of interaction (which is GOOD).
5. Also while at it, keep tooting as the analogue for tweeting, rename boosting to re-tooting for brand consistency, and add a bookmarking function called “Remembering” (because ELEPHANTS NEVER FORGET, right? :D)

what a sad country!

[rimshot]

A mall is a private real estate instrument built by speculators to extract rent from businesses and it’s actually rather predatory. This is fundamentally not real estate and fundamentally does not exist to extract rent, so it’s more like “what if you took a mall and removed all the mall-ness from it”.

If malls were collectively owned by the stores that comprise them and pieces of the mall could appear and disappear at will of whoever’s participating… Is it actually even still a mall really???

the only thing I’m hoping for is that this can serve as a proof of concept that human brains might be able to learn to control limbs made of synthetic muscles like that…

Maybe they’re attempting to make it ‘learn’ how to move itself using neural networking instead of programming discrete movement presets.

Feels like a pyramid to me. If I don’t have good sleep and good hydration I struggle mightily to control my food intake, and if I’m eating too much then I’m aching so badly and feeling so sluggish that I barely get anywhere at the gym.