Finished Winter Tide for next podcast episode (recording is on Saturday) and have just started Old Soul by Susan Barker. I’m only 30ish pages in but its a strong start - for fans of literary horror akin to Peter Straub’s work.

We’re about a week away from him adopting the title Emperor.

According to a two year old post Voyager can’t create Communities. You can get around this by visiting your instance (lemmy.world) and logging in via a web browser.

I’m no fan of Starmer, even less of the OSA but Grok is literally producing deepfake CSAM and other non consensual images. The UK government, like I would hope the vast majority of people, think that’s appalling and don’t want it to happen. They asked X/Musk to stop Grok producing non consensual deepfakes and all they did was limit its availability to paying subscribers - essentially making the creation of deepfake CSAM a premium service. All Musk really demonstrated is that X can act swiftly, despite the numerous times it said it can’t, but doesn’t want to deprive its paying users of the ability to create CSAM.

It’s totally insane to me that this is being framed, by US Republicans as a free speech issue but I guess a country that can murder a woman driving a car is fucked up in plenty of other ways too.

Agree with one side, not the other.

Could you DM me a link too please? I’ve got no issues paying for something that makes my life easier!

Yeah, things going wrong is a concern. From the very brief look I’ve had at the repo, it looks like PHP and a standard MySQL/Maria DB runs Castopod so I’m hoping that side of things would be minimal and similar to self-hosting a WP instance.

The VPS side, I’m reasonably OK with. I’ve been running static sites for a few years with zero issues so far but I am less familiar with this side of things.

In terms of bandwidth, based on (basic) stats up until now I would guestimate we have about 100 downloads per month and each episode is approx 90-100mb in size so the package I have my eye on, which offers 24TB bandwidth per month should easily cope with that.

Thanks for the info, much appreciated.

For the threadiverse in particular I’d add transferable user created Communities (between instances).

The effort and work you put into making the best choices to keep people safe® is truly inspiring. I’ll add my voice to those who’d love to see a technical document but only if its not going to add substantially to your load.

Slightly related is Jules Michelet’s La Sorcière: The Witch of the Middle Ages published in 1862 in which he argues that Witchcraft and Devil Worship were tools the oppressed classes used against their Christian feudal masters. He makes the argument it was righteous class warfare. Also see the paper The Devil is Red: Socialist Satanism in the Nineteenth Century (2013) by Professor Per Faxneld of Stockholm University.

For the podcast I’m currently reading Winter Tide by Ruthanna Emrys. If you’ve not read it, I recommend it for fans of Lovecraftian Mythos who’d enjoy a redemption of the work whilst ignoring the xenophobic dick who originally created it.

Apologies for pushing stuff I’m involved with but The Devil’s Library fulfils that criteria - it’s a book related podcast with myself and fellow atheistic Satanists talking about books (nothing to do with Satanism, just ordinary fiction). No ads, no sponsors. It is very lightly edited just to improve audio quality and eliminate the odd moment when we talk over each other but other than that, what you hear is what we’ve said.

It is mostly also available on PeerTube but the last couple are missing as the instance we’re on has been struggling a bit, we’re trying to get it sorted in the new year.

I am almost constantly amazed that, given how I lived up to the age of 40, I am somehow still alive. Conversely, I am appalled that I have survived to see the resurgence of fascism.

Constantly having the right-wing views of weapons grade cunts shoved into your eyeballs will do that.

For email, yes. For search, not until the subscription engines like Kagi go open source (maybe Kagi are and I just missed it but I can’t see a link to a repo on their website).

I have no objections to paying for a service but I am long past just trusting software. As for kagi in particular, $10 (plus tax) per month for unlimited search is a ridiculous price.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer for the podcast - the Natalie Portman movie is very loosely based on it - its pretty good so far but I’m not far in.

They’re not happy its true, but they’re still excellent reads and there’s enough light to make them not be morose :)

For the upcoming episode of the podcast I have just finished Carrion Crow by Heather Parry. If you’re a fan of Jane Eyre or The Yellow Wallpaper the similarities are unmissable - its a very good book but you’ll need a fucking strong stomach. It’s like if David Cronenberg had decided to write a Jane Austen novel.

Whilst I wait for our next group read, I’m re-reading one of the ever fantastic Shardlake novels

If you carry on past the first trilogy (which I highly recommend) prepare to have your heart ripped open and stamped on. No spoilers, but that boy suffers.

Koreader is theoretically great. Offers a range of connection settings (e.g. FTP, Calibre over wifi etc) that makes life easier. Unfortunately its (in my experience) pretty buggy. I have a Kobo Clara and after the third time of Koreader simply wiping my ereader I just went back to using the stock Kobo software. Koreader is much heavier on battery use too.