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ANNOUNCEMENT: defederating effective immediately from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works
  • Doesn't look like I'm missing anything from those instances! I vaguely recall either subscribing or posting to something on lemmy.world but since I can't remember it obviously isn't important to me. Sounds like I can live without it. Thanks for the hard work keeping this together.

  • Why or what do I write?
  • Thank you both (replying to you and @Kwakigra@beehaw.org at the same time) - completely on board with what you're saying. I approach podcasting in that way as well - I make a podcast that I would want to listen to, rather than trying to appeal to other people. That's where I am with my writing - I guess the other side of it is trying to get around feeling like I'm part of the content mill vs. writing something I want to put out into the world.

    I suppose the answer to that is: write what it is I want to write. If I feel that it's something I want other people to read, THEN figure out how to get it "out there".

    I am glad that the break I'm taking from writing feels natural and not forced, and I do feel productive in that I'm actually getting some reading done of books I want to read.

  • Why or what do I write?

    So this post is somewhat introspective but I am curious to how others feel about a similar topic. This is going to be a pretty long post, so I totally understand and pre-emptively forgive you for skipping through it and moving on to another post.

    A quick introduction: I write nonfiction in the form of personal essays; occasionally I write reviews of books/movies/etc. but for the most part my lane is the personal essay. Mostly, I publish my stuff on either my personal blog, or on Medium.

    Lately though, I have felt like I am turning too much to the idea of making everything my life "content". To better illustrate what I mean, recently I decided I wanted to specifically journal my health & fitness efforts because I've been struggling with that lately. My first thoughts after deciding I was going to do that were "what platform do I post this on?" and "what do I call this??" (because I didn't think it was a good fit for my already-existing platforms). I put a stop to that thinking and relegated these journal entries to a Simplenote document and it's 100% for my eyes only. Not everything I do or write needs to be fodder for the online community.

    But I still like to write, and will go through alternating periods of having a lot to push out onto page, and having no output whatsoever (right now is one of those periods, and I'm fine with that, because I'm enjoying getting some good reading time in). My issue is that I don't have a sole focus with my writing, so it's hard to get people to see what I'm writing and engage with said people. If I published a book, I could at least see sales figures or downloads or something. I don't really trust subscriber or follower numbers on WordPress or Medium to mean anything.

    Where I'm going with this - many collections of personal essays that get published come from either celebrities or at least public figures of some sort - they aren't people just throwing a collection of stories at a publisher hoping they'll get a book deal. So what's the point of me writing anything for other people? Nobody knows who I am outside of family and friends.

    I do have one area I'm immensely familiar with: epilepsy. In the back of my head I have a small dream of putting together a short book of my experience since my diagnosis 4 years ago but I turn back to, "well okay, but will anyone care if they don't know who I am?"

    So right now I am in a weird rut. I want to write things, but at the same time I don't feel upset about the fact that I'm not writing (apart from journalling). But I'd like to write something meaningful to me, that other people could be interested in reading.

    Does anyone else feel this way? What are you doing about it? Am I just beating myself up for no reason?

    7
    I'm really enjoying no down votes on Beehaw
  • There are a ton of comments there, but I guess it depends where you're looking. To me, it seems like it's defaulting to "threads" - which are roughly equivalent to posts, as near as I can tell (they have subjects and a body). Whereas Microblog seems to be like posting to Facebook/Twitter/Mastodon. Where I see little activity are on Magazines (their version of communities or subreddits). E.g. kbin.social/m/ELI5 has 4 threads. The default home page shows many, many threads, and some have comparable comment replies to lemmy here.

  • I'm really enjoying no down votes on Beehaw
  • off-topic but since you mentioned kbin: I'm using both platforms right now (beehive/lemmy and kbin)...from what I'm seeing so far I really prefer lemmy's implementation of pretty much everything. Kbin itself is not any more or less complicated to sign up and start posting, but its organization is definitely more convoluted. Speaking of threads vs. microblogs etc. I read a FAQ posted there and it barely cleared things up for me.

  • What helps you decide on picking up a book from an unknown author?
  • Usually word of mouth - but that can be either from people I know (friends, fellow online people), or sometimes it might be buzz from the media. Usually that's in the form of CBC's Canada Reads. I don't often pick things up based on retailer suggestions.

  • Ottawa moves to 'producer pay' recycling, but blue and black box pickups unchanged — for now
  • (but add to product costs).

    That's what I came here to say. Sooo...we're going to start seeing environmental fees similar to electronics and tires? They're not going to be bottle deposits, since we won't get any money back.

    I'd be okay with a deposit system if that means manufacturers used packaging that could actually be re-used (like, say, glass bottles for pop).

  • What's your go to e-reader these days?
  • One thing I've done recently to help battery life is change the settings to have the device power off after 20 minutes of inactivity (I think it's 20 minutes - either way it's the longest time period available in the settings).

  • What's your go to e-reader these days?
  • Battery life

    Maybe I simply don't read as much on my Kobo as you do, but I find the battery life amazing. I rarely charge it. As I type that, I realize that I read quite a bit of paperback books though.

    cases

    I'm not too picky about this. I use the navy blue Kobo case designed for the Clara. It's not the greatest thing in the world but I enjoy it.

    All in all, I don't have much to compare it to other than a VERY old Kobo - like one of the originals I believe. It was incredibly slow and battery life on that one was horrid. Yeah, the screen was bigger than the Clara, but the Clara is leaps and bounds above that ugly thing I was using.>

  • What's your go to e-reader these days?
  • I use a Kobo Clara HD. There's a newer version available (it's a Clara model, can't recall the exact name) but the Clara HD does the job well. Of the reviews I've read, if you own a Clara HD, upgrading to the newest model may not be worth it for you.

    I also use my iPad Air + Google Books, and the Kindle app, for things that are either on those accounts or don't play nice with the Clara HD. For example, PDF advance reader copies do not work very well on the Kobo, and converting them with Calibre doesn't always work either.

  • Favourite Food Scales?

    Hey everyone! I want to have food scales in two different locations (I am frequently at my in-law's house several hours away from my own home), and my solution is to bring my old scale here, and get a new scale for at my own home.

    Does the fediverse have any tips for a good, relatively inexpensive scale. It's important that it displays weight in grams - it would be great if there are decimals for grams, but in my experience it's incredibly hard to find this.

    Bonus if you are Canadian and have recommendations on where to buy in Canada as opposed to, say, amazon.com.

    Thanks! :)

    4
    why I ended up leaving Reddit today
  • An Internet ... problem

    Yeah, that's 100% it. On the Internet in 2023, everyone needs to be right or win with their comment. It's off-putting when you've been on the Internet longer than Gen Z has been alive.

  • another beehaw introduction thread
  • Well, I tried introducing myself via kbin and I was going to reply to that introduction since I have now been accepted to beehaw...but I can't find that reply in this thread. So I'll write again!

    I work in media (behind the scenes...but I also have a few podcasts on the go and I blog), I have epilepsy, and I like to talk about all sorts of subjects. I'm doing a poor job summarizing myself so I'll just copy/paste from my Mastodon page (with some redactions):

    Writer/podcaster; fan of books, podcasts, hockey, baseball, curling & movies. Regional Traffic Manager for [REDACTED]. Views & opinions are my own.

    I was also diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 35 (4 years ago, now). Sometimes I talk about that.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)LW
    lwgrs @beehaw.org

    Writer/podcaster; fan of books, podcasts, hockey, baseball, curling & movies. Regional Traffic Manager for a large Canadian media group. Views & opinions are my own.

    I was also diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of 35, in 2019. Sometimes I talk about that.

    Posts 2
    Comments 14