On the Needles 9

Knitting

This week, I did some work on the Desert Bus belt, but not enough for a picture. I also made myself a fancy decorative belt and cast on a dice bag.

Drawing

Today is Pokemon day #488. Today's Pokemon is Cresselia. I've almost run out of pages in my journal, and plan to start a new one when I start Generation 5.

On the Net 2: Introduction to Mastodon and the best Mastodon mobile clients

I have been using the newish social network Mastodon (not to be confused with the band, which gets more Google search results) for about a year now, and I gotta say, it's a nice place. Mastodon was created as an alternative to Twitter, and it does things that Twitter can't or won't, like enforce codes of conduct, ban Nazis and other harassers, and let users hide sensitive or stress-inducing posts behind content warnings.

It's designed around small, close-knit communities that each have their own rules and administrators and can decide which other communities to interact with. It's aggressively open-source and anti-corporate. And it's meant to be, and to remain, the kind of place where you can find people you fit in with--that feeling I got when I joined Tumblr in college, or that the Geek felt about Twitter when it was brand-new, the way older members remember IRCs and BBSes. By and large, it's the nice parts of the Internet.

***

Note for people who want to join Mastodon: You have to choose a community to make your first account in, and there are a lot of communities. joinmastodon.org and instances.noct.zone are good places to start filtering through them, but if you want recommendations on top of that, leave a comment here and I can ask around. (Note that witches.town, which shows up frequently on these lists, is closing at the end of April.)
Once you have an account, feel free to follow me at dialmformara@wandering.shop and say hi.

***

Since Mastodon is open source, it has a lot of mobile clients. Fortunately, it's easier to pick one of these. Let's start with one not to use: Tootdon was a popular client on both iOS and Android until very recently, when users discovered that the app was saving a copy of every post it saw to its own servers without permission from the authors of the posts. This is not cool, and especially not coming as it did on the heels of all of us learning that Facebook was selling much more personal information than anyone had previously thought. So users of Tootdon (including me, because I used it on my iPad) are looking for a replacement. Here are my recommendations.

Android

I never actually used Tootdon on Android, because I found two apps I liked better early on for my phone. Mastalab was my go-to for a while, because it's most similar to using Mastodon in a browser, but it doesn't let me share posts from Tumblr, and it has a bug that occasionally makes it crash in the middle of posting replies. When that happened, I used Subway Tooter as a backup. It's much more stable, but I can't quite customize it to look more like Mastodon than Twitter. It never really felt like Mastodon.

For me, Tusky solves both the functional problems with Mastalab and the look-and-feel problems with Subway Tooter. It is, however, missing a couple of features that I like but aren't strictly necessary. It doesn't make autofill suggestions for hashtags, and it doesn't use push notifications. The second one is an upside for some people: push notifications are annoying when you don't want them, and they often use APIs like Google's that are designed to monetize data. I can live with that, but I would much prefer to get notifications for conversations I'm part of in a timely fashion.

iOS

Tootdon was the highest-rated iOS client that was optimized for iPad. There's one called Amaroq that's supposed to be very good, but it's optimized for iPhone, which means I can't turn it sideways to use my tablet keyboard. I did, however, go through the App Store's list of iPad Mastodon clients the other day and test several of them.

• Oyakodon and Pawoo both crashed repeatedly when I tried to log in.
• Tootle seemed fine, except for an annoying encoding bug that displayed apostrophes as the number nine. I9m thinking it9d be more trouble than it9s worth.
• GON let me log in with one account, but crashed repeatedly when I tried to add a second one. It was also not fully localized into English.
• Mustor is the one I liked best. It looks and feels like browser Mastodon, it has display language and font size settings, it let me add my alternate accounts, and it carries over content warnings to replies. This last one is a standard feature of Mastodon and its mobile clients that Tootdon did not have for some reason, so I'm glad I don't have to worry about it anymore. The one thing that bugs me about it is that it doesn't show custom emoji.

Conclusion

No Mastodon app is going to fully replicate the browser experience, but Tusky (Android) and Mustor (iOS) come closest for my purposes, so those are the apps I recommend as replacements for Tootdon.

On the Net 1: This or That

Today's post is about a small personal victory. Something creative that I did that felt good, and that worked, and that other people enjoyed.

I've mentioned LoadingReadyRun before, at least on my podcast recommendations list. They're a Canadian Internet comedy group based in Victoria. In addition to podcasts, they do daily Twitch streams, semiregular sketch comedy, and the annual Desert Bus for Hope fundraiser for Child's Play, which I'm making that belt for. One of their regular Twitch shows is LoadingReadyLIVE, a variety show they do every other Saturday (more or less) for which they sometimes take suggestions for segments from viewers.

One segment that's gotten more popular recently is "This Or That," in which Graham, one of the main LoadingReadyRun cast members, reads a panel of three other cast members a list of names and challenges them to guess whether they belong to one category or another, inspired by a game of Magic Card or Metal Band in a sketch from 2013. Other topics have included Magic Card or Wrestling Move, Star Trek TOS Episode or Christian Metal Band, and Paint Color or New Age Song.

Which brings me to my submission: Pokemon or Star Wars Legends Character, which Graham read on the March 24, 2018 episode of LoadingReadyLIVE, and he and the panel enjoyed it. And were genuinely confused by it, which meant I'd chosen the names well. The Geek, who loved the Star Wars Expanded Universe as a kid (the Expanded Universe became Legends when nearly all of it was made noncanon after Episode 7 came out), thought it was really clever when we watched the segment together after the fact.

Anyway, that was something I did recently that made me feel proud of myself.

On Webcomics: Recommendations

Here are some webcomics I enjoy, that you will probably also enjoy if you've been following my blog for any length of time.

Ongoing comics (alphabetically):

• Freefall: A long-running space opera of AI rights, starring Sam the Sqid [sic], his naive robot buddy, and Florence the engineer, who is also a wolf. Very funny, but also makes you go "hmm" occasionally.
• Girl Genius: Phil and Kaja Foglio bring you gaslamp romance in a post-Enlightenment Europe ruled by mad scientists. I love this one in spite of the fact that its plot moves extremely slowly (I think it's written for print publication). The art and the dialogue are more than worth it; you won't feel bad if you lose track of the plot and have to reread from the beginning.
• Leif & Thorn: Thorn, a heroic Ceannic knight with PTSD from killing a dragon, has been assigned to guard the Sonheic embassy in Ceannis. Leif, the embassy gardener, thinks Thorn is cute but speaks zero Ceannic. This is probably the cutest comic I've read in a long time (and, if I'm honest, also the queerest). It's by ErinPtah, who also writes But I'm a Cat Person (Lesbians! Battle monsters! Impending apocalypse!), which I find less compelling but just as cute and still definitely recommend.
• Questionable Content: A slice-of-life about millennials who like obscure music, and their robot companions.
• XKCD: This is the webcomic that introduced me to webcomics, and if you haven't heard of it before, then you're one of today's lucky ten thousand. It's gag-a-day with stick-figure art, but it's best known for reasonable social commentary and awesome science trivia.

Finished comics (also alphabetically):

• A Miracle of Science: Humans have colonized the solar system, and mad science is a communicable disease. This one is also cute and thoughtful. I hope you see the theme here.
• Alice Grove: A sweet short story by the author of Questionable Content, set many centuries post-apocalypse, about two siblings from space who get lost on Earth and the witch who ends up taking care of them.
• Digger: Ursula Vernon's Hugo-Award-winning story about a wombat who gets lost in her tunnels and ends up in a very strange place.
• Dregs: A slapstick comedy by one of my personal creative heroes, Alex Steacy, about a couple of sanitation workers and their repeated encounters with a sewer-dweller. Be careful with this one if you hate poop jokes.
• Homestuck: I'm not really comfortable calling this a webcomic; while it is presented mostly in webcomic format, it's really more of an epic multimedia novel. Let me tell you about Homestuck.
• Narbonic: This is the first comic the Geek recommended to me. It was only the second time we met, but he already had an uncanny grasp of what I like in a story. Narbonic is about mad scientist Helen Narbon Beta and her henchpeople, who include the I.T. guy and a sapient gerbil. It has a sequel, Skin Horse, which is ongoing but has uneven pacing.
• Ozy and Millie: If you like Calvin and Hobbes, but wish it represented the 2000s better, and/or that Susie were a more sympathetic character, and/or that Hobbes wasn't the only talking animal, and/or that it had more dragons, this is exactly the comic for you.

Happy reading!

On the Needles 8

Knitting

I've made some progress on my belt, and it's starting to look like a belt now, not just a weird pillow. The belt part is in seed stitch, because even though I don't like seed stitch, it is one of the least stretchy stitches I know of, and that makes it useful.

The good news is, I talked to the guy who I want to wear the belt at Desert Bus, and he was impressed and gave me his waist measurement. The bad news is, I've committed to that much seed stitch, so I might need to cast on another couple of small things for when I get bored.

Drawing

Today is Pokemon day 481. Today's Pokemon is Mesprit.

Deckbuilding

Wizards of the Coast just announced a new format: Brawl, which looks like a cross between Standard and Commander. It's a sixty-card singleton deck, and all cards must be Standard legal. Your commander can be a legendary creature or Planeswalker.

I've put together a Tishana, Voice of Thunder deck, solving the eternal problem of which of my Standard decks (Merfolk or Pirates) to play on any given Standard game night by making my Merfolk deck a Brawl deck instead.

On the Stack 5: My Masters 25 Drafting Experience

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original release of Magic: the Gathering, Wizards of the Coast has released Masters 25, a compilation of the best parts of all previous sets. I got to draft Masters 25 last night, and I think it deserves a post of its own.

Going into the draft, I really wasn’t sure what I was doing. The sets I’d drafted most recently, Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan had strong tribal themes; I could take a powerful rare card or a two-color uncommon and just build around it by taking creatures from the right “tribe” (Pirates, Dinosaurs, Merfolk, or Vampires) and spells that worked well with those creatures. Masters 25 wasn’t designed to have strong tribal or mechanical themes, so even though I’d read the card list, I didn’t really know what kinds of decks I’d be able to build. Going with the flow would be the most important skill here.

And then things got weird. By which I mean the draft went better, and less complicatedly, than I could have anticipated. My first pick was Ruric Thar the Unbowed, a red/green rare, and then I just kept seeing red and green cards that I could use. I even picked some really big creatures that had Morph, so I could play them early on if I had nothing better to do. The deck ended up looking like this:

The Forest Is Patient (and so are the mountains)

Creatures

3x Ambassador Oak

Arbor Elf

Chartooth Cougar

Courser of Kruphix

Elvish Aberration

Krosan Colossus

Krosan Tusker

Ruric Thar, the Unbowed

Soulbright Flamekin

Wildheart Invoker

Woolly Loxodon

Noncreature spells

Ancient Stirrings

Cultivate

2x Epic Confrontation

Giant Growth

3x Kindle

Lightning Bolt

Utopia Sprawl

Lands

6x Mountain

11x Forest

This deck and I won six games in a row, beating all three of my opponents in two games each. I'm not sure how; I think this is the first time I've ever gone 3-0 in a draft. And I won under all kinds of circumstances: against aggressive decks and control decks, with too many lands in my opening hand and with too few lands (Arbor Elf plus Forest plus Utopia Sprawl is four green mana by turn 3), and I always had removal when I needed it, and I felt like I always knew when to use it.

The best moment was probably in round 2, when I killed my opponent's Niv-Mizzet the turn after he cast it. His response was along the lines of "That's kinda mean, but also the right choice. I could have beaten you next turn."

I was all set to write this essay about how hard it is to draft unfamiliar sets and how I'm learning to not get frustrated when things go badly. This was a very nice surprise.

On Work Environments

Of the last nine months, I have spent six working in an office and three working at home, and I can't decide which I prefer.

The office belonged to one of those tech companies that has finally figured out that happy employees are productive employees. It had an open floor plan, which made it easier to talk to my team about important things, but also meant that I could be distracted by something happening fifty feet away. There were great views everywhere and the cafeteria was amazing, and it was really nice, after spending most of the previous six months at home looking for work, to be out in the world with people and doing things, and to be able to leave my work at work when I went home.

The downside to being in an office was mostly the commute. It took forty-five minutes and two buses to get to work, and the same or more to go home. And the air conditioning was always turned up too high, and when I got home I was always too tired to do anything.

At the end of December, something happened to my contract which meant that I, and one other member of my team, had to start working from home. Now I no longer needed to commute, and I have even more freedom to set my hours, so much so that I could reasonably spend a week at the Geek’s place any time I wanted. And now that it’s spring, I can run errands over my lunch break and actually spend some time in the sun.

But now the structure of my workday is basically gone. I don’t have work as a place to go to and come back from, so it’s harder to get into and out of work mode, and it’s not nearly as easy to talk to the other remote workers on the same project as it was to talk to my team in the office. I feel like I’ve been stuck in a box for the last three months, isolated from whatever meaning my work (which is mostly manipulating spreadsheets of language data) has.

I really hope a lot of that isolated feeling came from where I was living, which was a tall narrow townhouse where I wasn’t very comfortable around my housemates or spending time in the common spaces. I moved across town over the weekend, to an apartment that’s much closer to places I actually want to go, and that gets more sunlight, and so far I get along well with my new housemate. I hope all that, plus the ability to visit the Geek whenever I don’t have other things going on, will make working from home less depressing.