Personal

Moving away from Mastodon 1

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For several years I’ve had an account on Liberdon, a Mastodon instance. Recently they announced that only paid accounts, at a minimum of $3 per month, will be allowed, starting in December 2025. That’s perfectly reasonable, but it’s not worth it to me. Expect my posts to disappear soon.

I could move to another instance. However, I haven’t been getting much value out of Mastodon. Most of the people I personally know and follow haven’t been active for a long time. What’s left of my feed is mostly organizations. Discovery between different instances is awkward. If I find an instance I really like, I might move there. Suggestions in the comments are welcome. My account is archived to keep my options open.

This doesn’t affect the Fediverse feed of this blog or my Filknews account. They’ll stay active for the foreseeable future.

A week in Germany

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged conventions Europe Germany music spohr on by

On Wednesday I returned from an eight-day trip to Germany, one day longer than planned. I was nervous about leaving and re-entering the US, and if I’d known when I made my reservations how fast things would get worse, I might have changed my mind. The US border has long been a Fourth Amendment-free zone, but now it’s First Amendment-free as well. Fortunately, I seem too obscure to bother with.

Delayed flights have become common. The closest airport to my destination was Hannover, which is relatively small, so I had to change flights both ways within Germany. In retrospect, I should have found a direct flight to a major city and taken the train the rest of the way. Trains are also horrible for delays, but there’s almost always a next one the same day if you miss a connection. If there’s an ICE train (Inter-City Express, no relation to the US gang) to your destination, it will get you there quickly without airport annoyances. Fortunately, there were no problems with changing planes in Munich.
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Discovering my past

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This post deals with old events, almost as old as I am, but I hadn’t known some key facts about them until a couple of weeks ago. They’d been kept secret from me. I was deceived without actually being lied to. I still don’t know all the parts of the history, and maybe I never will.

Several years ago, I went searching for information about my father. He died in 1954 in a traffic accident, or so I was told. I was less than three years old at the time, but that’s not the only reason I have no memory of him. My surname is rare, making an Internet search easier. It wasn’t too hard to find confirmation of his date of death. The surprise was that he died in Shasta, California. I grew up in Manchester, New Hampshire, and my mother always lived there. He might have been there on a business trip, I thought. His family was from the west coast, so maybe he was visiting a relative.
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Abolitionism tour: Boston, Cambridge, and Portsmouth

This entry was posted in History Personal and tagged abolitionism history Massachusetts on by

Sometimes I overdo things. When I visited Boston on Wednesday for the next part of my abolitionism tour, I walked to exhaustion and had to skip one destination. It was worth the effort anyway. Here’s the start of a Flickr album for the tour, which is incomplete as I’m writing this.

The first post about the tour is here.
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An abolitionism tour?

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged abolitionism history Massachusetts New Hampshire on by

After my enjoyable tour of the libraries of Rockingham county, I started thinking about doing something similar to follow it. My first thought was sites relating to American independence; there are plenty of them in my area. Then an idea that’s more off the beaten track came to me: a tour of abolitionist sites. William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport and conducted much of his activity in Boston. John Greenleaf Whittier was from Haverhill, just across the border from me. Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford after escaping slavery, and today I’ve learned how much other anti-slavery activity was based in New Bedford. (Sign up with Captain Ahab, and you’ll be out of the slave-catchers’ reach!) Also today (that is, Sept. 11, when I’m writing this), I found out the MBTA has renamed a ferry after Frederick Douglass. It isn’t obvious how to tell where the boat will be at any time, but it’s at least worth knowing.
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Reclaiming liberalism 2

This entry was posted in Commentary Personal and tagged liberalism liberty SanityProject on by

There’s no hope for a near-term turnaround in the US. If there were any decency left in America, Trump, Rubio, Homan, Leavitt, and the rest of the crowd would be climbing out of the Potomac, covered with tar and feathers. I’ve done what I can, pointing out one outrageous act after another. Nothing helps. The United States is a nation of cowards with a large minority that favors thuggish central rule and controls Congress.

Concentrating only on the short term leads to despair. Avoiding tyranny in the US — or recovering from it — requires understanding its causes and changing the intellectual climate. There can be a resurgence of the liberal ideal in America, but it will take time.
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My library tour

This entry was posted in Personal and tagged libraries New Hampshire on by

Somehow I thought I’d posted about this earlier, but I hadn’t on this blog. As a little summer project, I’m visiting every public library in Rockingham County, New Hampshire. Rockingham is in the southeastern part of the state and includes all of New Hampshire’s 18-mile seacoast. There are no big cities. Portsmouth, which I think is the only city in the county, has about 22,000 people. Three towns are bigger. The difference between a town and a city in this state is the form of government, not the population. Derry, the biggest town in the state at about 34,000, has two libraries, and the people at the smaller one in East Derry firmly say it’s not a branch library.
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A silent movie failure

This entry was posted in Movies Music Personal and tagged music silent movies on by

I failed terribly last night when showing The General. I don’t know what I did wrong.

As I’ve said before and told the audience before the showing, The General is a complex movie. It’s a comedy, but it’s also a war movie. A train collapses into a gorge. Soldiers die on screen. I expect people to laugh at the funny parts. I don’t expect them to laugh at the deaths. I tried to underscore the mood of each scene, as I always do. It didn’t work.
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