My next silent movie night will be on Wednesday, March 13, at 8:00 PM Eastern US time. Once again, I’ll provide live, improvised keyboard accompaniment. Live accompaniment is what makes silent movies special to me. You can react in real time in chat and even (gently!) criticize my playing.
The main feature will be the 1925 The Lost World. It’s based on the Conan Doyle novel of the same title, and he makes a brief appearance at the start, effectively putting his stamp of approval on the movie. The main character, Professor Challenger, is as smart as Sherlock Holmes but his opposite in temperament. Holmes is always calm and analytical, but Challenger has an explosive temper, especially when anyone doubts his claims. His present claim is hard to believe; he says he’s discovered a land in the upper Amazon basin with living dinosaurs. He organizes an expedition to go back there with two aims: to bring back proof and to find the missing member of the earlier party.
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A lot of people have lately been complaining that Substack has only narrow restrictions on the content it allows. Some aren’t just complaining but are leaving the platform. The issue is “racist or bigoted speech”, and in some cases, “explicitly Nazi” material.
It wouldn’t bother me if Substack had somewhat broader restrictions on content, but it’s a dangerous path to go down, and I’m sure they know it. Deciding whether something violates content restrictions is often tricky, and sites with lots of user-generated content rely on software and people under time pressure to decide. They generate a lot of false positives. On pre-Musk Twitter, I was suspended for making a joke about the health hazards of Krispy Kreme, for recommending a sharp blade to separate uncut book pages, and for objecting to an endorsement of mass murder. The innocent were punished more severely than the guilty, since reinstatement required admitting to a violation of the rules.
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On Wednesday, January 10, I’m going to try something new: presenting two short silent movies on Zoom with live keyboard accompaniment. This will be at 8 PM Eastern US time. It’s going to be an experiment; Zoom has all the components necessary, and I’ve tried them out, but performing for a live (well, real-time) audience always brings surprises. I’ll post the link here a couple of days before the event. User capabilities will be locked down so that Zoom bombers shouldn’t be able to do anything more than be annoying in chat, so sharing the link will be OK. (But I’ll still ask not to share it on Facebook or Xitter; no sense pushing my luck.)
For this one I’ll use my free Zoom account, which limits the event to 40 minutes. If it goes well, I may revive my paid account to allow more time. Or maybe I’ll learn how to use Twitch. The movies will start about 5 minutes after the event opens, since the time will be tight.
Update: After some experimenting, I’ve decided Twitch is a better platform for the purpose. The audience can’t do more than type into chat, so I don’t have to worry as much about who shows up. The presentation will be on www.twitch.tv/madfilkentist, and you can follow me on Twitch if you’re so inclined.
The program will be two short movies of the early silent era: Edison Studios’ Frankenstein and George Méliès’s The Impossible Voyage.
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Mastodon was supposed to be the answer to many social media problems. Instead of being one site under the control of one group of people, it’s many independent instances. If administrators on one became troublesome, you could move to another. You could find an instance that reflected your values and had the kind of people you like. It’s become something different.
Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon, recently boasted:
I’d like to get it out there that the onboarding experience changed a fair bit this year. We don’t force people to choose a server anymore, so getting started shouldn’t be any more complicated than on any other site.
In the strict sense, no one was ever forced to choose a server. As far as I know, no court has ever ordered anyone to get a Mastodon account. But everyone who uses Mastodon has to choose one, and that hasn’t changed. It’s just that people now are herded into the big servers and have to make an extra effort to pick any of the others. That’s a step backward, toward monolithic social media.
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I just received the following email from the MIT Free Speech Alliance, regarding the malicious email that I discussed in a recent post. It came just a little while after I submitted an inquiry on the subject, but unless they can write really fast, I don’t think there’s a causal connection. Here’s the message, with their email redacted since I like to be cautious about posting addresses on the Web. (The address of the perpetrator doesn’t merit any caution.)
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UPDATED 8:10 PM EST, November 21, 2023. Sorry, I misread the mail headers. I’m out of practice.
UPDATE 2, 4:48 PM EST, November 22, 2023. Got a statement from the MIT FSA. See my new post.
Yesterday I received an odd email purporting to be from the MIT Free Speech Alliance, but attacking it. The headers in the mail seem to say it originated from the usual source, suggesting that either an insider sent an unauthorized message or the account’s security was compromised. CORRECTION: The message comes from a Yahoo account unrelated to the usual sending account. Even so, the sender was able to get hold of at least some of the addresses on the organization’s mailing list. The mail said “Ask them to remove your name from the MFSA membership list they claim to represent as they advocate to destroy the diversity that helps make MIT the great world-class institution it is today.”
I’m trying to figure out what happened, and I’ll provide more information when I have it. Meanwhile, treat any email you receive from mit_freespeech@yahoo.com with caution. Note that that is not the address from which legitimate MIT Free Speech Alliance emails come. The situation suggests that even if the mail server wasn’t compromised, a malicious party got hold of all or part of the list of subscribed addresses and could make further use of it.
We’ve all run into the vicious nastiness which pervades the Internet. If you make public posts, there’s a good chance you’ve been its target, if only from occasional potshots. Sometimes it’s seriously painful. Anyone who’s had a loved one die of COVID needs to think carefully before mentioning the fact publicly.
An Atlantic article by Kaitlin Tiffany, “How Telling People to Die Became Normal”, looks at the kind of people who try to increase other people’s pain. Referring to a Facebook group dedicated to this kind of malice, she writes:
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I run the Filk News account on Mastodon, providing information about concerts, filksings, and other items of interest for the filk music community. Normally I don’t write much about filk here, but the story has relevance to anyone who uses Mastodon to distribute or gather information or just to connect with friends.
The first part of the story is in my earlier post, “The petty tyrants of Mastodon.” You may want to read it first if you haven’t already. Since then I’ve gotten no satisfaction from indieweb.social and found it necessary to move Filk News to liberal.city, which I think will be a better home for it. (Another post which I made, “The impending strangulation of Mastodon,” reflected a user error on my part, so I’ve removed it from public view.)
As I said in “Petty Tyrants,” my personal account is on Liberdon, which is included on a “Tier 0 Blocklist”. It simply lists domains to block without giving reasons. When I noticed trouble interacting with Indieweb from Liberdon, I reported the issue to Indieweb’s admin, Tim Chambers. He said he had changed Liberdon’s status from “blocked” to the less restrictive “silenced” while looking into the issue.
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Having a federated system like Mastodon guarantees that no voices can be completely suppressed. Intolerant people can still try to silence others within their sphere, though, and some have wider influence than others. There are blocklists that many Mastodon sites use, and certainly some sites deserve to be blocked. They spew intentional falsehoods, advocate violence, or dump pornography on those who don’t want it. But once the lists get acceptance, their managers can start adding sites which they simply don’t like.
My personal Mastodon account is on Liberdon, a libertarian-oriented server. Its policy says:
Liberdon’s community adopts a “good neighbor” policy, as one of our goals is outreach to the other communities. As such, “ostracizable” (non-tolerated) behavior includes spamming, scamming, nudity* / pornographic / sexual / graphic / NSFW content, advocacy of the initiation of violence, ethnic/racial/homophobic slurs, harassment, or other content/activity that could get this site shut down by state agents with guns. Offending content will need to be removed by the user, and repeat offenders will be banned from the community.
Even with these limits, much of what is posted on Liberdon (including my own posts) will outrage many on both the right and the left. That’s why I like it. However, some people express their outrage in blocklists. At some point, Liberdon got put on a “Tier 0 blocklist” which seems to be widely used. As I’m typing this, it includes 417 servers. There’s no explanation of why they’re listed, only a claim that the list is “a combined blocklist of only the worst actors, and it exists to provide one blocklist to which surely no one can object as a baseline for others.”
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