Tootfinder

Now, I don't especially like the term "church" so I may use something else... like "coven." You can do what you want. But I happen to have already mapped out an example. (It is exactly that, just an example, so take if it's useful, change if you need, and don't stick to anything too closely.) Oh, this mapping also means that you would, for religious reasons, only be allowed to work under capitalism 4 days a week instead of 5.
Given the increases in productivity over the last 100 years, a 4 day work week is a completely reasonable expectation. If we have to annex Monday for the weekend by force of religion, so be it. It is rightfully ours anyway. If enough people try it, this will probably work. If it doesn't work, it just needs more people.
The Practice of Worship:
It is recommended to break down worship in to three sections: the functional, the communal, and the spiritual. It is also recommended to break these across multiple days. A common structure for some Christian churches is to take 10-15 minutes for announcements (Functional), an hour or two for services (Spiritual), followed by (Communal) coffee, tea, and cookies for an unspecified time up to two hours after. When starting or working with limited time a single compressed model like this may work, but it's not optimal.
- The Functional
The purpose of this section is to address the functional needs of the coven. Block out time (less than 90 minute blocks is recommended) to go through reports and updates from those involved in the Dispensary, Library, Works Committee (infrastructure), and Services Committee (providing services internally and, potentially, externally). Talk through any additional announcements, including those from other covens you may be federated with.
It is helpful to include unstructured communal time, such as shared meals, during or after functional meetings. As the federation grows, more time will be needed. It is recommended to break functional meetings, work parties, and such across multiple days. When a federation becomes sufficiently large, it is recommended to take every Monday, on top of Saturday and Sunday, as a third day of community and worship.
The scope of the functional spans 3 realms (which may be more-or-less fluid): the personal or family, the coven and federation, and humanity itself. It is up to each coven and individual to negotiate how to allocate the three days of the weekend once we have liberated Monday from the work week, but it is important to reserve it for one of these three. However, some people must work on weekends. Medical personnel, for example, cannot conform to a standard work week. While the work week should be universally restricted, which specific days are used will be up to the specific coven and their members.
A functional meeting can start with an agenda like the following:
Functional Invocation
Announcements
Report Backs
Dispensary
Inventory Check
What is low
What is empty
What is expiring
What is needed
Funds status
Library
Inventory Check and Items needing return
Library acquisition requests
Funds status and budget check
Works Committee
Upcoming projects
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Services Committee
New capabilities announcements
New needs requests
Subcommittee updates (Following the Works Committee agenda)
New committee formations
Funds status
Task Check
Breaking the Circle
This agenda is a suggestion for those who don't know where to start. It can be adapted or ignored as appropriate.
- The Spiritual
Spirituality is necessarily an undefined space. It is deeply personal. Each individual taking time to share their own personal spiritual experiences can help each connect with each other. This experience of connection can itself be a spiritual experience. It may also be useful to read esoteric, mystical, or philosophical texts together as type of "book club" and share thoughts. Others may draw from their own knowledge or traditions. This is something that must be defined together within a group.
- The Communal
The communal aspect of the practice of worship bind the coven and federation together. Within the community we find joy and release, connection and comfort. The coven is where we turn in times of need, and where we share our hopes and dreams.

I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars: We are here. We are waiting in Ganderkesee.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbOZpmrj2R2/

Got an unsolicited automated security warning email for an old website with advice for a "Strict-Transport-Security".
A little angry at this, as I am well aware that a standard STS header has the capacity to completely mess up an organisation's internal operations.
(eg An org has their internal services using http on their registered domain, someone scoped to the external website suggests STS with subdomains, organisation basically ceases work for a couple of days t…

Job loss? That one really seems weird. The numbers are not adding up to the stories we hear yet. But the numbers are not dire yet. Of course, our actual tracking of those numbers is increasingly suspect because of the US fascist project.
The big tech companies are absolutely pulling shenanigans, and using "AI" as an excuse for layoffs in a great number of cases, and in many cases, openly admitting they don't have any good ideas, so they'll lay people off instead of allocate them better. We are absolutely seeing the shifts in what are viable careers in tech though. And that was underway before AI: the UX bootcamps, for example, destabilized those job function, devaluing the workers, and the resulting shifts absolutely wrecked those job titles and the pay for them, leaving a bunch of people in the lurch.
But behind that too was our broken education system in the US: it was a shortcut around the massive debt that going to college can produce for people. But it didn't last, because it was vocational training being used purposefully as a wedge to change the labor market. Similar, sometimes intentional effects have happened in other aspects.
A huge amount of the "AI" problem is actually labor problems coming home to roost. We can blame Reagan for a lot of this.

I've finished reading Simon Winder's "#Germania" a while ago, but I've been slacking with the review. This is a book about the history of #Germany, in the wide meaning of word. However, it's not your boring detailed history book. The author takes us on a deeply personal journey across German landscape, across tiny towns and great forests, Schlosses, churches and monuments, and uses that as a context to bring the country's surprisingly interesting history to light. And honestly, it works — it is deeply enjoyable, to the point of making me wonder if one day I should actually move to Germany, get a Bahncard 100 and start exploring myself.
I didn't quote the book here, but if I were to choose one quote that really resonated with me, it would be:
"""
Solitary tourism is something that everybody should indulge in. Of course it is a fraudulent solitude because its enjoyment comes from its limited duration and having a cheerful, only very temporarily abandoned main base area. […] And then, suddenly, I am in Vienna, standing in the shadow of a monstrous, derelict flak tower, and completely alone. The virtue of solitary tourism is its infinite ability to absorb boredom. I often find myself almost crippled with anxiety that the companion or companions on a journey might be finding everything wholly without interest, would rather be eating somewhere else, are secretly angry that we have wound up walking down this street rather than that, are contemptuous of my own interests. Solitary tourism cauterizes all this: if a museum is boring beyond all measure there is no pressure to feign interest, you just leave. I am perfectly happy, in a zoned-out way, to crisscross a town, walking for hours, just for the off-chance something curious might be round the next corner – indeed in the confidence that there will always be something curious (there always is). But for each street, each bar, each folklore museum to be converted into an inter-human negotiation creates an entirely different dynamic.
[…]
Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century – a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. Everyone must have at least a part of them that wants to live in a stairless, doorless tower as a sort of intellectual Rapunzel, setting aside, at least in part, the complicated sexual frisson laid out by such an idea. Germany really is thick with ivy-covered turrets and the promise of solitude (Kepler staring at the planets above Prague, Faust conjuring demons) – the great majority presumably built in the nineteenth century in response to the whole literature devoted to the subject. There is one turret in Lübeck, built onto a city guard tower of just outrageous fakeness, which would do me for life.
"""
(Simon Winder, Germania)
And if you follow me, you have evidence that the part about crisscrossing towns is so true: the best things I've posted here I found by complete accident, especially the murals.
#books #bookstodon

Appalachian Power can’t keep the power on during a few days of rain, but repeatedly claims that the proposed Google data center won’t be a problem.
We lose power multiple times a year. In a rural setting, it’s going to happen - above ground power lines are vulnerable to tree strikes. The vast majority of customers have small generators accordingly. But it seems both inevitable and ludicrous to think they are capable. Residential customers will suffer.

Republicans are all abuzz about socialism because the party’s political prospects look dire this fall.
Donald Trump’s approval ratings are in the thirties,
Americans are experiencing surging energy prices,
and Trump and other Republicans are engaged in open corruption while cutting vital government programs.
They need something, and in a pinch, socialism has always been the go-to emergency button for the right to push.

Why the GOP loves to use ‘communism’ as an attack
Explaining the Right this week explores why Republicans keep trying to scare people into thinking Democrats want communism.

Playing Terra Nil right now, and it's funny because from the promo stuff I thought I wouldn't like it much, yet I'm enjoying myself a lot. There's definitely a game design lesson to be leaned here.
I was absolutely correct in my assessment that the game feels like it's actively trying to make suspension of disbelief as hard as possible with its completely ridiculous mechanics that make absolutely zero sense. "That's... Not how that works at all!" Is basically playing on repeat in my brain.
Furthermore, the entire technosolutionist tenor of the game rubs me very much the wrong way. This compounds with the physics- and biology-defying (or perhaps -spiting) fictional layer in cases like the convenient magical radiation-absorbing buildings so that you can reverse radiation contamination with a few simple clicks to be extremely bad politics actually...
But... The mechanics do work together quite well to make interesting puzzles with good gameplay that includes satisfying variety and challenges. The art is wonderful, and the music and audio design are spot on. The the result of each level is immensely satisfying, and the pacing is excellent.
I guess the lesson I'm taking away from this is that really solid fundamentals can triumph over an absolute cacophony of ludonarrative dissonance. That doesn't mean that in every decision between ludonarrative harmony (or just straight up believability) and neat mechanics you should compromise towards mechanics, but it reinforces the idea that if you make the mechanics enjoyable in the abstract, players (or at least, players like me) will be willing to compromise a *lot* on whether it actually makes any sense for things to work that way.
I'm still bothered by the "use technology to fix everything" politics, which prevents this game from being one I'll enthusiastically recommend, but despite myself I am having a lot of fun with it.
#GameDesign #SolarPunk

The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.