Some weeks ago I was reading Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" aloud at bed-time to my son, who of course does not understand it but appreciates the sound of the words all the same, when I discovered that its famous title was in fact not the original! The original title was significantly more radical: "Resistance to Civil Government." It's quite short, and I would encourage everyone here to read (or re-read) it. It is still tremendously relevant. Re-reading it with the original (un-sanitized) title in mind, it lands even harder. These days, Thoreau would probably get his door kicked in. Here's a free link to the Project Gutenberg copy:

The Project Gutenberg eBook of On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau

Share your favorite quotes, after reading.

People are just nicer here.

Good day to check out nostr again. The primary reason I'm not here more often is I connect through a very jank VM. Elon is working hard to incentivize me to fix it.

can't use twitter without sensitivity training

The bad news: Twitter's insanely puritan algorithm just massively deboosted my tweets because I posted a baby picture. The good news: nostr still works just fine.

This is the happy place.

Do you think the CIA still does this?

My wife climbed higher on the ranked ladder than SBF. With a touchpad.

Ok, so we failed to topple Venezuela or Syria, have lost any meaningful control over the festering wounds of Iraq and Libya, witnessed 20 years of relentless, gold-plated coalition conquest in Afghanistan get spanked and sent to bed without supper, and now we're supposed to be lining up for war with China? Do I have that right? Does that sound like a good idea to you? Anyone?

Test to see if nostr has more linux people than Twitter: Is there a linux photo editor that lets you a/b compare images? Specifically what I want to do is be able to hotkey a "master" photo that I can overlay/dismiss with a tap of the spacebar or whatever while browsing a directory of different (but similar) images. This is to say I always want the hotkey to overlay the same image (the "A" image), but the comparison ("B" image) gets replaced by left/right pgup/pgdown whatever as I browser the directory.

i once had a friend whose dad had that real charlie munger energy. you know what i'm talking about, that bondholder swagger. he stood out, often forgetting to put pants on in front of guests, and would get into shouting matches with birds that would nurture a grudge each time that he lost. he resented the television, which he called the devil box, and yet could not free himself from its gravity. any child in the neighborhood could give you the measure of the man from a hundred paces, little eyes keen for one haunted by the mungie dungies. it is only now, with the benefit of so many years' distance, that i see how these two men have always shared a common soul, aside from the fact that my friend's father never tried to persuade us to thank china for banning whatever he had read about with his breakfast. and so i do not expect that our sweet charlie, that poor mister munge, may never find it within himself to voice the unspeakable longing he feels toward the technology that so arrests him, but neither will i hold it against him, for sure as the graven marbles of praxiteles, TICK TOCK HERE COMES THE NEXT BLOCK

Something that would be cool to see in later versions of nostr front-ends would be different "views" that basically crib social feed styles that different audiences like. For example, an Instragram type photo view (which you just swipe over to from the standard tweetstyle pane, or whatever). This is not just a raw dump of every photo on the nostr relay spool (which are as of right now mostly tweet-style), but only the ones people metatag to appear on this pane (for example, indicating they match a fixed aspect ratio, or are just intended for the photo-scroll, or whatever). By supporting different ways to tag user posts to display in different views (or just handle it invisibly), front-ends can enable Nostr to become basically the "master" social media site that doesn't just replace Twitter, but replaces everything. There's no reason Nostr can't queue up short-form TikTok style videos for you, or long-form YouTube style ones, or Facebook-style event planning, or hell, even a LinkedIn style feed of CVs. All of these sites are just a collection of tags, content refs, and views. Users can just check and uncheck the panes they want to be able to swipe through. Nostr can be anything to anyone.

I saw some people on Twitter complaining about seeing Chinese writing on nostr, and saying they uninstalled because of it, and my reaction simply COULD NOT BE more different. Is there anyone in the *world* who faces more aggro network-filtering than the Chinese? If nostr works for Chinese folks, it'll work for everybody. I hope I see more Chinese on here, not less. (But a "translate" button would be nice)

Is wss://relay.damus.io Tor blocking, or just down for me? Haven't been able to get a connection for a while. I'm not using the damus app, but coming from open web. 🤔

Welcome to nostr, new friends.

Welcome to nostr, new friends.