SoylentNews

Are you a creative genius that has more dollars than sense? Well, you are in luck! Say hello to the iStand:

https://www.cnet.com/news/1000-apple-mac-pro-display-stand-sparks-angst-the-ultimate-middle-finger/

The stand will hold your new monitor perfectly elegantly and is simply amazing. Invite your friends over to show off you new monitor stand while you drone on and on about how Apple is superior to everything else.

Here's a link to his statement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWzzMlMIRI

It's a Fox News youtube channel. Take a look at the comments too.

Here is a written story from the CBC:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/dc-mueller-statement-1.5153877

Here's the story.

Note: I submitted this article as a regular story, however the editors ignored it for quite some time. So I have deleted it from the submissions queue and present it here in my journal instead. Given the interest in book of the month and the many other references I see to books and movies here on soylent, I thought it might be of interest to some of our denizens anyway. So, then:

I should first point out that I didn't have anything at all to do with the above-linked article; but when I read it, all I could do was nod — a lot — and try not to allow my temper to get the better of me.

I have a longstanding (about 50 years) direct business connection to high end science fiction & fantasy publishing. I can confirm that this has become a significant problem in the industry — and also that this did not use to be the case. Resistance based on perception of characters as that relates to "author validity" is increasing, and is now a major factor in what ends up getting published. Or doesn't.

I don't have a solution (at least, not a solution that doesn't involve lining people up against a wall and shooting them), but the issue definitely has my attention.

If we can expect a work to fail in the marketplace because it will be attacked in such a manner, we simply can't see it through to publication. Doing so would kill our business.

Capitulation? Yes, essentially that's exactly it. It's either that or get jobs at McDonalds. This is one of those ways that the world is changing, and not for the better.

Here in Calgary, summer is like a fart in the wind. You spend all year looking forward to it, then it's over in the blink of an eye. The season of summer starts June 21, and runs through September 21. That is the warm season here -- only 3 months. In Calgary, there are really only two seasons, winter and summer. Fall lasts for the month of October, and spring is mid-May until summer. From November 1 until May 15 it's winter.

Everyone here tries to make the best out of our fleeting summer. Despite being cold most of the year, we have a ton of outdoor patios to enjoy. My mom's house is FULL of plants that she can't wait to get into her gardens. The leaves on the trees are finally popping out. The grass is more green than brown. Last week, I had the street cleaners come by and take the gravel away.

Summer here is a fevered frenzy as everyone tries to book and plan their vacations. Here in Calgary, that usually means going to one of the many lakes in B.C. I've got my first vacation booked. My wife, daughter and I are going camping at McDonald Creek Provinal Park. We have 5 nights booked there in early July.

I've been busy getting ready for summer too. My campervan stopped working last Fall --technically Summer -- after a scary-ass snowstorm near Bow Lake (seriously look at this picture. I think it's prettier than Moiraine Lake or Lake Louise) We were coming back from camping near Jasper and it started SNOWING. Like fat flake spring snow. I was in my van - a 1985 dodge - and it was terrifying. When I'm in my car with my winter tires, I LOVE driving in the snow. In a heavy-ass van with summer tires and no ABS/ASC, it's not fun. The snow packed down and created sheer ice on the mountain highway. Traffic was moving at 20km/h and I gave us a 50/50 chance of ending up in the ditch. We made it home safely, but after that the van woudn't start.

For the last few weeks, I've been trying to get the van going again. I'm not a mechanic. I'm not handy, but I'm learning. I asked my Uncle to come over and help me out one day and together we found that the starter relay wasn't grounded properly. I fixed that, but it still woudn't start. I replaced the starter, and it started(!), but the second start had a not-good-sounding grinding noise. Turns out I got a defective replacement starter. I got it swapped out for another and the van is working great! I was really proud of myself because I've never done actual car work like that before. I'm sure replacing the starter is just about the easiest part to replace, but I'm celebrating my victory.

With the van running well, I'm ready for summer. Like I said before, my first trip is first two weeks of July. I normally like doing things in September when people are back at work too, so hopefully I can get something lined up there as well. I'd also like to try 'random' camping on crown land here. Apperantly there are hundreds of free camp sites all over the place. I've never done that before, so I'd like to try a couple nights like that this year and see if that's my thing.

That's the plan! I can't wait!

A few days ago while wasting my life on reddit, I came across this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok

Two high school (?) kids are given 4 minutes to figure out how to dial a number on a rotary phone. It's adorable.

I love how they 'reset' the phone between tries. The dial tone impersonation also cracked me up.

Damn kids these days...

Right now, I'm surfing the Soylent waters using this procedure:

1. Go to my user preferences / comments page
2. Assign an automod of -6 to foes
3. Assign an automod of -6 to anonymous posters
4. Save my user preferences
5. Set the viewing threshold to 0 and [✓] Save and then click change in a story's comments
6. Assign trolls as a "foe" by clicking the little face by one of their posts
   • Repeat #6 as needed

So what the above should do is bury comments (stop them from being expanded in a comment listing) posted by the trolls I have placed in my foes list, and also all anonymous posters, which also should keep the trolls who use anonymous posts to get past the foes list automod (and those who are simply trolling anonymously) buried as well.

The annoying downside of this approach is that anonymous posts from non-foes also get buried, because the Soylent code doesn't know who the anonymous poster is, so it cannot determine if the anonymous poster is on my foes list.

That lack of knowledge could be addressed for logged-in users, as the Soylent code does know who it is when logged-in users [✓] Post Anonymously, but short of requiring log-in to post, that isn't possible.

Having actually tried the above -6,-6 setup now, I have found the general burying of anonymous posts to be less painful than accidentally reading the various troll garbage (I read very fast, gulping down whole paragraphs at a glance... so to even glance at a post is to peruse a good chunk of it, no matter how troll-ish and/or awful it is.)

Further, I know that anonymous posters could just as securely create a unique pseudonym and post as logged-in users with no loss of anonymity, other than that people would know both post A and post B are both from the same author (a total win, frankly.) Considering this, I see no decent excuse for posting without logging in anyway, and so feel quite justified in brushing off those who can't be arsed to log in.

I could live with the above -6,-6 setup, except... it doesn't actually work.

The Top-Level Comment Bug

Soylent's "Apply automod" feature does not obey its settings when a comment is at the outer, or "top" level of a story's comments. Not if the commenter is anon; and not if they're in my foes list. Top-level comments appear no matter what the automod is set to. Ouch. Garbage out, ...garbage in.

But it's even worse than that. If you click on a comment link (for instance, one that has replies on your user page, or on the replies notification page), then first-level replies in the resulting comment subset also don't obey the automod(s.) It doesn't matter if the comments aren't actually top-level in the entire comment stream; if they're first-order comments to the comment one is now looking at, then the bug manifests again.

I humbly submit that this should receive dev attention ASAP; the whole point of automods is made moot by these behaviors.

--
I'd agree with you, but then
we would both be wrong.

I'm not sure we actually have any mothers here... I can only think of one cis-female (Azuma) and one noncis-female(can't remember the name... not sure if they even post here anymore). Oh, and cafebabe. I don't think that any of them are mothers yet though.

Nonetheless, maybe there is a lurker mom. Azuma might be a cat mom, but if so, her cats wont get her anything because cats are selfish like that.

I do want to make a special call out to Mrs Gaaaaark, because she is a fucking saint.

And to all you ungrateful sons who still have moms with us, CALL YOUR MOM this Sunday. She would love to hear from you!

Any good children have special plans for you mom? If so share them below so all of us late planners can steal your idea.

As for me, my lack of planning was able to successfully delay Mother's day until next weekend. My siblings are taking mom out Sat and Sun, so she is fully booked this weekend. My plan is to take her and my daughter to a local petting zoo. My mom can parade her around like a proud grandma. Maybe I'll make some sandwiches for a picnic there... We'll see.

Not sure what to do for my wife. I might make my daughter make a card for her tonight so we can present it on Sunday.

Anyways, post your plans below so I can steal them if they are better than my ideas!

Right now, the only way to effectively block a logged in time waster is to::

1. Make them a "foe" by clicking the little face by one of their posts
2. Assign an automod of -6 to foes and save the prefs
3. Set the viewing threshold to 0 and ✓save and then click change in a story's comments

Now, no foes show up (except at the top level of comments, because top level comments are broken, apparently on purpose, but that's a different complaint, I guess.)

The main problem with this is that many AC posts get unfairly modded to -1. Those will also disappear. That's a loss.

Further, if a registered user decides they're going to post anon to get around this, you could assign a -1 mod to anons... which will work, but also cut off the anons completely unless someone mods them up. And of course, some of our trolls are using sock puppet accounts to mod themselves up. So that's not foolproof either. But it at least requires them to work harder.

So what to do? It would be much, much, much better if we could say "foes are -10" and threshold is -1, the lowest a post can normally go with a hand mod — that's assuming the points system is still used to do this. That would really go a long way towards solving the problem, because anons would not be penalized by this, we could keep our reading threshold at -1 without a problem, because foes would be automatically submerged below -1.

Might not be that easy. TMB could throw an oar in here, codewise.

Or, just "if in foes list, collapse the post", which would be much better — and at some level, the system's already doing most of that, because presence in the foes list is the only way it knows to assign the automod.

The troll anon posts would still be there, but remember, there's always that little [-] button in the subject bar of each comment. You can nuke those exceptions pretty easily.

But I still don't want to ever see some of these registered users. Any time at all they take is a waste.

So anyway: the site would be much improved if we could mute at least the registered user trolls. Of which we definitely have a few. So for now, foes are -6 and my threshold is 0, which almost works, barring the loss of mis-modded anons (sad face) and the top level comment hiding being broken.

Since the story has already hit the HoF, I assume you lot are relatively aware of what went down with aristarchus and myself regarding his "control the narrative and push other discussion down the page with lots of top-level AC posts that nobody can tell are all by the same person" tactic and me modding the posts Spam for it.

Well, martyb/Bytram gave me a good chewing on and reversed the mods because that particular type of spam isn't covered in the moderator guidelines. And he's absolutely correct. I maintain that it definitely should be and something covering it may very well be added to the moderator guidelines soon but it was not there when I did the moderating.

We'd barely finished discussing it in a private, unlogged staff channel when Azuma Hazuki was out in the main channel assuming that I did the moderating and that I wouldn't be held accountable for it even though she got mod banned for misusing the Spam mod by myself earlier. She actually had something of a point mixed in all the angry. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. So I mod banned myself.

Feel free to have a good laugh at me and look for a story on the moderator guidelines in the next month or two.

One of the gifts that Jasmine gave to me was introducing me to The Arkells. Her parents got her tickets to see them live and I was forunate enough to be invited to go see them with her.

I had never really listened to them before meeting Jasmine and she was a big fan of them. Initially I thought they were only so-so. I went to the concert and they blew me away. I started listening to them at work, and I freaking love them!

They are currently on tour for their Rally Cry album, which can be listened to here: YouTube.

I think these guys deserve to be the next Tragically Hip. They are great representitives for Canada and I think they make great music. Just putting this out here because I think they are underrated and awesome.

My favourite song at the moment: Show Me Don't Tell Me.

Check them out! You might like them too.