Guess who’s bock? Bock again.

Looks like goat’s back on the menu, boys! Goaty McGoatface returns for another GoatWatch.

Wot? 

Okay, a primer.

The Gävle Goat is a 13 meter straw Yule Goat erected every year in the town of Gävle in Sweden, in the run up to Christmas. And sometimes it’s burned down or otherwise destroyed. Security has become tighter around the goat every year, especially in these days of live streaming - and clout chasing.

Read more about the goat:

Gävlebocken | Visit Gävle - includes a live feed of the goat.

Gävle goat - Wikipedia

I first heard about it on the Hypnogoria podcast, and back in December 2022 I started keeping an eye on the goat, as I got a bit emotionally invested in it surviving to Christmas without burning down. I blogged about that here. The next year I began doing the same in December, and what a strange year for the goat it was! It didn’t burn, but due to there being an unusual amount of seed still in the goat’s straw, it was gradually eaten by local birds over the month.

So this year I’ll be doing GoatWatch again on my Mastodon account either until 31st of December, or until the goat burns down, whichever comes first! I usually just post a quick toot in the morning with a screen grab of the live feed to show if the goat remains unburned. If you’re on Masto, feel free to follow the #GoatWatch2024 hashtag. If you’re still on the hellsite, the goat itself has an X account you can keep tabs on.

It’s the first day of Advent today and the goat has been up a couple of days, but will be officially inaugurated today, with a concert and other fun winter and Christmas themed events. Gävle loves their goat.

May he be safe this year from fire and birds!

My own homemade crochet Julbock, who I call Lumpy.

NaNoWriMo loses the plot

Well it’s come to this, National Novel Writing Month has been enshittified. The whole organisation had been a bit dodgy for a few years, but they’ve finally fully lost the plot with a bizarre defence of the use of A.I. tools, claiming that to decry the use of A.I. in writing is “classist and ableist.” Despite the very real issue of large language models being trained on the work of authors who never gave consent for that. Despite the threat generative A.I. poses to writers, especially freelancers. In what I’m sure is an entirely unrelated matter, they currently have a sponsorship deal with a company, ProWritingAid, that sells A.I. tools to writers. Various writers have stepped down from the board of the non-profit and lots of writers are deleting their NaNoWriMo accounts from the website.

There are plenty of articles if you want to get into the weeds about it. 

NaNoWriMo is in disarray -The Verge

NaNoWriMo Shits the Bed on Artificial Intelligence - Chuck Wendig

NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’ - Pivot to A.I.

NaNoWriMo Organizers Said It Was Classist and Ableist to Condemn AI. All Hell Broke Loose - Wired

My History with NaNoWriMo

I first did NaNoWriMo in 2006, to write my first original novel, Shoot the Humans First. (I’d done a couple of novel length fanfics by then.) And although I haven’t done it every single year since, between the main November event and the April and July Camp events, I’ve done a NaNoWriMo event 21 times.

To give you an idea of how long that really is, let me just say, I wrote quite a lot of my 2006 book on a Palm Pilot, using a portable infrared keyboard. (Yes, I said infrared.) By the next year I had a netbook. La di da! Of course I’ve also used various PCs and laptops, and right now, my tools are a Chromebook and a tablet and folding Bluetooth keyboard, which is sort of circling back to my roots with that PalmPilot!

I’ve sold 13 of the stories first drafted in a NaNo event to publishers and self-published three others. A couple of others are still in stages of being worked on. Only once did I write a fanfic, which is up on my fanfic site.

So it’s been a really important part of my writing life. I am, shall we say, a wee bit competitive, so the deadline and friendly competition aspect was always a great motivation for me. And it was always a good way to do a sort of writing reset, and just get out of my own way and focus hard on writing for a month and re-establish habits that had maybe started to slip. I encouraged others to do the event. I used to participate on the forums quite a lot. I considered the event a generally good thing. And really, I still do. The event that is, not so much the organisation that runs the official site these days.

But all good things come to an end. I’m one of the writers who has deleted my account. Hilariously, the page you see after the deletion hasn’t apparently been run through even that most basic of A.I. tools, a spellcheck.

So what now?

I wasn’t actually planning on doing the event this November. The next draft I’m planning is probably only going to be about 40,000 words, and the timing wasn’t quite right for when I wanted to start writing it anyway. But now lots of people are organising alternative events, some of them with the same parameters, some not, so I will likely take part in one of those, to show support and to get back to the core of the idea of NaNoWriMo the event, which has been lost along the way by NaNoWriMo organisation. Which I think has become more about writing as a product, than about writing as personal expression.

The one I will likely be doing is Writing Month, which is being organised by a Fedizen, since I’m active on the Fediverse through Mastodon these days.

But there are others. Here’s a thread compiling alternatives you might want to check out.

NaNoWriMo alternatives

The NaNoWriMo subreddit is also discussing the whole thing, obviously, and alternative events may be found there.

Me, Mastodon, and the Gavle Goat

 Me, Mastodon, and the Gavle Goat

What is the Gävle Goat anyway?

The Gävle Goat is a large straw goat erected as a Christmas display in the town of Gävle in Sweden. It’s a representation of the traditional Yule Goat - or Julbocken - which features in various Yule and Christmas traditions in Scandinavia.

Back in 1966 Stig Gavlén, an advertising consultant, came up with the idea of building a large Yule Goat display to attract people to the local shops and restaurants. On 1 December 1966, the local fire department erected the first Gävle Goat. It was 13-metres high, 7 metres long, and weighed 3 tonnes. Impressive! It stood through to the 31st of December, when a vandal burned it down.

A Month on Mastodon

It's been a month since I created an account on Mastodon. A few days after I created the account, I decided to lock down my Twitter account and focus on Mastodon.

I am loving it. I found a good instance to be on. I've had a couple of toots go a bit viral, getting several hundred boosts and likes. Have found lots of cool people to follow - by this point probably less than half are people I was following on Twitter. I am building up followers nicely - am currently on 468.

I'm not here to tell you all about how to get started on Mastodon - I'm still a noob myself after all, and still learning basic stuff every day.

But I've got a couple of thoughts to pass on to other new Mastodon users, who are maybe struggling a bit figuring out how to make more connections, especially if not a lot of your Twitter friends have come across.

It does matter which server/instance you're on

We all get told, "just choose any server" when first getting signed up. You can interact with anyone else in the "Fediverse" from any server.

And technically that's true, but I think if you're going to maximise your experience then once you're on and have figured the basics out, see if you maybe want to move to a different instance. Doing it early is best. You don't lose your followers, but the sooner you find your home, the better.

Reasons for this:

• Moderation is variable depending on the server/instance you are on. If the moderation is a bit loosey-goosey and some users are running amok on there, other instances may block that instance, leaving you possibly cut off from some of your follows and followers. It could even be entirely defederated. 
• If you're on an instance with a narrower focus, the local feed becomes much more useful. It will probably not move so fast that you can't catch anything anyway, and it will be a great place to spot interesting people to follow and engage with as they toot about, or boost other toots about, your area of mutual interest. I registered on a general UK instance, but quickly moved over to one focused on Romance novels, and I'm making connections with other writers and readers on there.

Hashtags are your friend

• You can follow hashtags, and will then see toots that have that tag in your home feed. The best use for that I think is to follow something more niche, rather than whatever's trending. So when something does pop up with that tag, maybe you'll find someone new to connect with.
• Daily and themed hashtags are a good way to participate and engage with the wider community. Many of them are picture based. The ever popular #Caturday is big on Mastodon, just as it is on Twitter, along with #ThrowBackThursday and #FollowFriday (another good way to find people to follow!) but there are fun things like #ThickTrunkTuesday - pictures of especially girthy trees and #Fensterfreitag - window Friday, pictures of cool windows. An important one is #BlackFriday - not the shopping fest, but being used by POC on Mastodon to rebuild the communities they had on Twitter.

You can use the T word - in fact you should

• On Mastodon, there is no simple text search. So if you want to toot something critical about Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, or J.K. Rowling, you don't have to obfuscate and use nicknames to avoid having their fans coming and piling on. You can only search on hashtags for text, so don't hash tag them and you're safe.
• Not only can you safely use them, you should use the real name, because if people use filters so as not to see stuff about those people, then if the real name isn't in the toot, the filter won't work. 
• But do use the CW option - that stands for Content Warning, and it's used to hide the contents of the tweet, with a short "warning." It's also useful for things like spoilers about a TV show or movie, or to hide the punchline of a joke. 😉

Use image descriptions

When your toot includes an image, you should always add an image description to it when posting.

• The primary reason to do this is that it helps visually impaired people who are using screen readers.
• But also, if your image doesn't include a description, many people will not boost it who would have otherwise. So it's good for you too.

And images really do make a difference to the amount of engagement a toot gets. I started posting a daily update about the Gavle Goat a few days ago. As soon as I started including a picture of it (with alt text of course!) rather than just a link, I started seeing more boosts and likes on the toots.

Going Viral

And speaking of images - cute and funny certainly does the numbers. Going "viral" on Mastodon is not the same as on Twitter. There's no algorithm to start pushing your viral post to other people. The only algorithm is people boosting it and their followers seeing it and boosting it. Which is great for finding more people to connect with.

But, the way to go viral is not by being controversial, or finding something controversial and stirring outrage. There is no "quote tweet" equivalent on Mastodon. You boost something generally because you like it and think other people should see it so they can enjoy it too. You don't boost something awful because there's no (easy) way to add your own context to it to say "Isn't this TERRIBLE?!"

I've had three toots go pretty viral so far. They've all been images (with descriptions) of things that are cute, interesting or funny. I'll keep trying to hit that sweet spot. 

Well I hope those observations have given you a few more ideas to get the most from Mastodon. 

But really, there's no magic to it. You didn't land on Twitter with a great big following and a curated timeline. It took time. It probably took years. And it's hard to start over. But you've done it before, maybe several times if you've been on the internet for a long time. You can do it again.

See you around the Fediverse!

Bye Bye Birdie

Last word on Twitter

Before Elon Musk took over Twitter I both adored and hated that beloved hellsite. Sometimes I wanted to get away from it, but it was hard to break the addiction. So I guess I should at least thank the muskrat for that, because oh boy, did I go from “I wish I knew how to quit you,” to “Oh, that was easy” in two weeks flat.

I haven’t used Twitter for several days now, since the poll to allow the Orange Menace back on. Especially after it ended at the infamous cursed ratio of 52:48. That was a sign. Now last I saw, Trump hasn’t actually come back to his newly unlocked account and, has said he won’t. (Even Trump thinks Musk is a loser. Let that sink in. Apparently he’d lose money if he did come back anyway.) And I wouldn’t have to see his tweets, cause I’d block him. It’s just the toxic miasma his presence creates through the whole site that puts me off.

To deactivate or not deactivate Twitter

Following the many shenanigans of the past couple of weeks since you-know-who started his mad rampage through the Twitterverse, I've decided to stay off Twitter and focus on Mastodon for now at least. It's a wrench. I both adore and hate that beloved hellsite, which I've used since 2007. But the question is, do I want to fully deactivate the account? Do you? There are pros and cons on both sides depending on who you are and how you use Twitter.