I’ve been using the new Reeder for a while now. Started back when it was TestFlight only and then bought the one year subscription when it was out of beta. It’s really polished and well done but I think I prefer having seperete apps for my feeds and social media. It’s too much having it all in one

Man blames bellyache on street food — but no, it’s a live cockroach

Cockroaches are known as hearty insects that can survive just about anything: sewers, decapitation, radiation after a nuclear war. And to prove the point, one cockroach was just spotted alive and well while wreaking havoc inside the stomach of a 23-year-old man.

Dude wuuut 😳

BlueSky knocked offline after mass exodus from Elon Musk’s site

Elon Musk, X’s owner, announced that the site would be changing how its “block” button works. That option previously allowed users to hide their profile from certain accounts – but will no longer do so.

“One of the biggest functions of blocking is giving women the ability to stop weird men from constantly making them uncomfortable and scared,” one user wrote. “So of course Elon had to change that.”

Always heartwarming to see more people leaving Elon’s Hellsite

My favorite things about omg.lol so far have definitely been the community itself and the little statuslog thing you can embed. I scrapped the idea of starting another blog over there just for the sake of starting another blog. Although I do like how it’s all set up. But Micro.blog already does everything I need it to do. Just the wrong timing on my part, I think. At $20 a year, it’s worth it just for the statuslog and mastodon server imo

Jerry Seinfeld No Longer Believes the “Extreme Left” Is Ruining Comedy

“I did an interview with The New Yorker, and I said that the extreme left has suppressed the art of comedy,” Seinfeld said. “I did say that. That’s not true."

“Does culture change, and are there things I used to say that I can’t say [because] everybody’s always moving [the gate]? Yeah, but that’s the biggest, easiest target…The accuracy of your observation has to be a hundred times finer than that to just be a comedian.”

He had a terrible take and realized it was terrible. Good for him

Micro.blog and the Tiny Theme are a powerful combination

7/11’s seltzer water is much cuter than Liquid Death

A can of 7/11 brand Lemon & Lime sparkling water. The backdrop of the can is white with yellow and green text. It has some cute doodle art like a little duck, a lemon, and a smiling sun. There's a cheap decorative rug in the background.

Maybe It Should Be Illegal To Instantly Delete A Website’s Archives - Aftermath

A few months ago GameStop wiped Game Informer off the face of the earth without notice. This kinda thing is why the Internet Archive is so important.

How Digg helped invent the social internet

So many of Digg’s features, from its voting mechanism to its commenting system to its occasional teeming toxicity, are omnipresent on the internet now. But in 2004, when Kevin Rose was working on the first versions of his new news platform — back when he was best known as a host on the TechTV network — it was all brand new.

Awesome interview with Digg’s founder Kevin Rose. They recently rebooted Diggnation and he says he’d be open to buying the website back if he could get in touch with the current owner.

I spent a lot of time there back in the day 🫡 I doubt there would even be Reddit if it wasn’t for Digg paving the way.

One personal website is enough for me – disassociated.com

Not everyone wants to post content on social media though. In that case then, I can see the point of something like Micro.blog. I don’t know a whole lot about the platform, but it seems similar to the likes of Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky: it’s basically for micro-blogging. But even with something like Micro.blog, you still come back to the problem of content ownership, and the concern such platforms, like the social media channels, could close-down just like that.

I battled with that idea at first but you can definitely export all of your data in a matter of seconds if you ever wanted to go somewhere else. And it’s based on Hugo so it’s possible to export everything and convert it to a self hosted Hugo setup if you wanted to.

It’s kinda like a hosting provider in itself, in a lot of ways. You get a website and a micro blog platform all in one.

What makes WP Engine different from Bluehost?

This might sound dumb but I don’t get the difference between something like WP Engine and other hosts that specialize in Wordpress, like Bluehost which literally refers to itself as a Wordpress Hosting Platform and Dreamhost, both of which are recommended by Automattic?

I get that they have “WP” in their name; that makes sense for being easily mistakable for an official part of Wordpress, but the revision history thing just doesn’t seem like it’s as big a deal as Mullenweg is making it out to be. I know he criticized them for not contributing enough to Wordpress.org development but isn’t that kind of arbitrary? Like what is enough?

I do think being owned by a private equity firm is a little greasy for a company that offers hosting for open source software but Bluehost is owned by one too.

Is it just a matter of how big they are? Is it just a personal thing between two rich guys? I feel like it’s probably that.

I’m pretty good at starting a post, going off on a tangent and then forgetting what I was even writing about in the first place

I was originally planning on making my root domain a static landing page/hub kinda thing but I changed it back to my Micro.blog site since I’m most active here. Instead of an about page, I added a link in my nav to the “hub” subdomain where my socials, bio and a longform blog live on omg.lol.

I really liked this video essay. The author draws parallels between simulation theory and our always connected, perpetually online world.

I still think about that time Jack Dorsey called everyone on Bluesky “Very, very common”

Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off.

DOODAD.dev - a sick pattern generator for web design

screenshot of doodad.dev. There are a few various windows where you can choose different patterns and manipulate the parameters to get a custom tiled pattern

Tools for making websites fast, accessible, expressive, and green. These tools are mostly for helping web developers build small websites (sites that use fewer bytes) without sacrificing expression.

I randomly stumbled across this a few minutes ago when I was trying to find a way to generate Memphis design patterns. You can choose from a ton of different SVG patterns, manipulate the size, shape, color and angle and generate an image from it. Love this kind of thing! Feels like a desktop app on a website.

What's valuable to you?

I was just reading this Reddit thread about a blogging platform that launched a few years ago. It's grown into a successful space with a thriving community by now, but the comments were kind of cracking me up.

The #1 thing people were focused on back then was how to monetize it.

There's no built-in advertising options and it's really not even set up to run something like Google ads. SEO, maximizing engagement and clicks are not baked in. It's simply a place where indie bloggers can go to share their stories and hang out with other bloggers.

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WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

WordPress.org has taken over a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced today.

Wow that must be pretty serious huh?

It’s not clear what security problem Mullenweg is referring to in the post.

Oh 🤨

Rumors on X Are Becoming the Right’s New Reality

A curious set of claims has recently emerged from…X: FEMA is systematically abandoning Trump-supporting Hurricane Helene victims; Democrats (and perhaps Jewish people) are manipulating the weather; Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio.

I remember when conspiracy theories used to be shit like subterranean lizard people and hollow moon theory. No one took it this seriously and it definitely wasn’t part of anyone’s political campaign. I think RFK’s brain worms must be contagious 🤪

SSRI Withdrawal, Brain Zaps [psychiatrist.com]

In SSRI Withdrawal, Brain Zaps Go from Overlooked Symptom to Center Stage

A sensation unofficially known as “brain zaps” has caused concern in patients stepping off of their SSRIs. Until recently, physicians have widely been unaware or dismissive of the symptom. 

“There was an emphasis both within the [psychiatric] profession and pharmacological companies to make these medications sound not addictive,” [Alexander Papp] told Psychiatrist.com. Therefore, when SSRIs first became popular, very few systematic studies were conducted on antidepressant discontinuation effects.

I went through opiate addiction when I was in my 20s and that was nothing compared to how… off I felt when my doctor pulled me off of Cymbalta cold turkey a few years ago. She switched me to a completely different class of antidepressant and said I shouldn’t have any noticeable side effects or withdrawals.

I felt fucking insane after about two days. I was getting brain zaps every time I’d look in a different direction and I literally did not know who I was at times. I spent most of a week in bed and quit my job. The absolute worst thing I’ve ever been through. Needless to say I found a new doctor.

They really do downplay all of the negative side effects and withdrawal symptoms of antidepressants. Glad to see people are starting to take this stuff seriously. Finally.