Malaria has spread to areas of the southern continental USA. Decades ago I predicted that would happen; as climate change got worse, tropical diseases are expanding towards the poles. I expect Dengue fever to follow, along with other diseases of the tropics.

Sorry to post something so depressing! But god damn it, I PREDICTED this. The role of Cassandra really sucks.

What's the story with this? I'm getting it every time I log into Beehaw over the last few days. And Beehaw keeps crashing without warning and going straight to that same warning. Should I worry?

This isn't happening on any of my other Fediverse accounts, by the way.

Taken near Comicopia, Kenmore Sq. Boston, MA.

P.S. - They made it safely across. Last I saw them, they were fine.

Taken near Comicopia in Boston, MA.

I downloaded these every week from The Onion. They're incredibly funny. There are 40 files available. These are generally unavailable online, apart from some which can still be found on the Internet Archive. As far as I know, this is the most complete archive available anywhere.

I had no idea of the size and variety of the Fediverse! It has me feeling a bit overwhelmed. I'm enjoying BookWyrm very much; it's the GoodReads/LibraryThing replacement I've been looking for for years.

I love the simplicity of Paper.wf for blogging. It's truly elegant; I just click the link and start typing. But as far as I can tell there's no way for others to find my blog or for me to find other blogs on the site. There's no browse or follow feature. Nor can anyone comment on my posts! Those seem to me to be HUGE omissions.

Have you used any Fediverse blogging options? What are they like? And what other Fediverse services would you recommend? Other than Mastodon, I've already tried that (it didn't excite me).

Do you think that Reddit management are monitoring the number of people coming over to alternatives? And watching or even possibly participating in conversations here on Lemmy?

If so, what would you like to say to them?

I'm looking for a way to sort of blog on Lemmy. On Reddit I could do it by posting to my own profile (note: not editing my own profile, rather literally creating a post and assigning it to my profile). I doubt anyone ever read them, but they were just stuff about what I was doing that didn't really belong in any particular subreddit.

For example, I want to write about my take on the different Fediverse iterations I've set up, on what works and what doesn't. I could post that to a Technology community, I suppose, but I don't think it really belongs there. This is more of a status report on my thoughts than anything else.

I've heard that kbin allows microblogging, but kbin is INCREDIBLY laggy so far. I'm more comfortable here. So...is it possible?

Just a working list - feel free to add to it. I realize that some of these might already exist, and I just missed them. Here's what I've got so far:

• Book suggestions
• Obscure Media
• New England
• Massachusetts
• separate communities for every other state too
• Mildly interesting
• Antiwork
• Anti-Amazon
• buy it for life

Did anyone else have the experience that two downvotes on Reddit hurt more than the good feeling from getting100 upvotes? Or was that just me?

I'm thinking of starting a hybrid campaign online, a live weekly session by video with a Discord forum for 24/7 sideplay. Has anyone tried anything like that? Any tips?

I'm an old reader who loved older books even when I was young. As such, I was horrified to discover that older books are almost totally unknown to younger readers. As best I understand it, Amazon and the remaining booksellers of the world focus mainly on new books; perhaps they don't make as much money on older literature.

But there are so many great older books out there. And I love those books. So I started recommending them over on Reddit. In the field of fantasy, for example, there are a million people recommending Brian Sanderson and nobody recommending the works of Lord Dunsany, Michael Moorcock, or Barry Hughart - among many other wonderful older fantasy authors.

Lord Dunsany in particular wrote a short piece that touches on this point:

THE RAFT-BUILDERS

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.

When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion's sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else.

They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up.

See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things—small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings—and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships.

See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis.

For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.

The way I see it, recommending an older book to a new reader is helping a raft to float a little longer. What great old books do you like to recommend?