literature.cafe chat

I read a bit more of the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and it's really good so far.

The CSAM spamming happened again, and unfortunately a local user had to witness it and report it.

I myself did not see it, but from what I gather it was basically an innocent looking tiktok video at first glance that would transition into CSAM. Utterly vile.

The content is being reported and admins across lemmy are handling it. I am hopeful this is an isolated incident but what the fuck man. What do we do from here?

She didn't look forward to going out to meet her friend for lunch. It was two degrees, and wasn't the fire inviting?

She went, though, out of a sense of social duty, out of the knowledge that she should have friends of her own, out of the memory of a day last winter, when she had canceled the lunch, because of the cold, because of the fire. Her friend had not been amused, nor had the friend's co-worker been amused; abused, perhaps, they had felt abused in the lawyer's office, where there was no fire, and no lover reading it.

Over lunch they talked about her friend's project, a one-woman play using only selections of Emily Dickinson's letters. The question of a title came up: Emily Unplugged; A Taste of Emily (they laughed for the connotations of it). Papers. Emily's Papers. The friend said, “Vellum”, and she said, “That's it!” The friend said, “What?” “Vellum, Emily, that's it, Velemily, something. It's the word, it's the right word, better than Emily Verso and Recto — Vellum.”

The table erupted into textures. The napkins, suddenly, were thick and writable. It was a question of the bite of the paper; how lovely it seemed that paper should have teeth, that Vellum may have the strongest teeth to go with the sword of a pen. It was better than tongues of fire.

— From The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8.

Do you use Goodreads or something similar like Fantastic Fiction?

One word is busy constructing the others. It is a carpenter creating props for a play. It takes a rock and makes it a hat. Thus there is now a rock-hat. This stuff becomes real. All that is real becomes props while all that's not becomes the play. And somewhere in the performance the words start whispering back to us a permutation we hadn't planned. Strangely, as we, the actors, speak our parts, we grow another body. It is suggested our other body is living under the stage, reciting words of another play which we are simultaneously enacting. And we can feel the floor of the stage about to collapse.

— Douglas Blazek, “The Metaphor”, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, vol. 8 (1999).

I found an account dedicated to spam posting "enlightened centrist" talking points and pundits. Their name itself is part of the advertising. They even would post the same content across multiple communities, without cross-posting. And not just political stuff, they posted the same meme about 4 times without linking them.

I know this sort of thing happened all the time on Reddit and essentially it was hopeless because of how the corporate power structure worked.

"Politics" and "News" communities seem especially "apolitical" (that is to say Neoliberal) and hands-off "free speech to the end user" about what is posted. I'll frequently see a lame article, sensationalist headline, instead of the first source or the most informative one. Or I'll see a great thread about a great news story - and someone reposts the same content the next day with better timing, and it will be weaker journalism with weaker comments - yet more people will see it. Now this doesn't constitute abuse, but it will be just as permissive of abuse of the system as Reddit was.

I've also seen threads asking about where to find good sources, how to find accurate journalism... without much great advice. It's sort of an acquired skill, but we have the potential to help people acquire it.

In another conversation about the server literature.cafe potentially defederating from the Hexbear server, I found this comment chain by @Janvier to be a worthwhile read. He makes the case for smaller servers to defederate from many large servers, and not only Hexbear, as a way for smaller communities to grow organically. It is an interesting and different vision of Lemmy; many smaller ‘islands’ that are only marginally connected, instead of one big platform that is tightly connected between the different servers.

When posts are made on lemmy they can be federated over to any instance so long as the instance is federated with ours and the community is federated onto that instance as well. It's awesome! But for community building sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming.

Since the lemmyverse is so big, sometimes posts on our own instance communities can be drowned out by others on other instances. That's fine in most cases! We want discussion! More the merrier! But for the growth of communities such as this with a specific hobbyist focus, it can kind of stunt the creation of it's own community identity sometimes.

Hence, local only communities can aid in that. Which is why when that feature comes to lemmy I will be making one in hopes of encouraging more local community general discussion as this instance grows. The purpose will be a general all purpose chat, similar to this but for those who want discussions focused on users in our instance only or don't feel comfortable posting something that will get federated into the rest of the lemmyverse.

Some very important things to keep in mind with this:

• Lemmy does not currently allow private communities, this new community will still be viewable for users who are logged out and browsing that specific community. It will simply prevent the community from federating over into other instances. Be mindful of this fact.

• The purpose of this community will not be to shut people out, but as a way to make a more cozy space when users who want to talk with just literature.cafe users. Like a safe haven away from the chaos.

That's it, nothing much.

I am the person with the federation issue, hopefully this will be fixed with the next bot's post.

Thank you so much @[email protected] for setting up this instance!

Gonna start posting this weekly :)

I'm finishing up the third Percy Jackson book, and it's absolutely lovely

I'm currently knitting and listening to my Percy Jackson audiobook

It may be Monday but we will get thru the week together 💪

13 novels, 2 novellas, 1 short story in the John Decker thriller series, and I blew through all of them in three days. Those things are like popcorn. In a year I probably won't remember them, but they are a fun way to spend a commute or kill an evening.

Hey, there's been a bunch of new users so I figured it might be a good idea to make this thread. Feel free to post your introductions, as well as any links to socials (only if you want to!) such as storygraph, goodreads, or bookwrym etc. I am hopeful to set up a bookwrym instance eventually but its still very much in early early early development.

Also be aware that there are alternative UI front ends, as seen from here. https://literature.cafe/post/315847

I've been quite busy this past week so still reading The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida and listening to Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Both are excellent!

I'm reading and knitting. It's super hot out here, hoping that it cools down more soon.