BeeCycling

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 mont...

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 ...

  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.

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 i...

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.

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.