• 7 Posts
  • 348 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle


  • The Jubilee is a time of celebration for Catholics.

    Traditionally, the Jubilee is held every 25 or 50 years and is a time to celebrate progress, free slaves (back when slaves were legal), forgive sins, etc etc.

    In a great celebration, it makes sense to add a bit of pop culture flair. It’s also common to focus on children and youth outreach during the Jubilee and an anime character does a lot for that.


    As for Luce herself. The Jubilee is also a time of great pilgrimages. It’s recommended to get your 'once in a lifetime’s visits to Vatican City (or other local holy sites: Santiago de Compostela, Fatima, Guadalupe). As such, Luce is modeled after the image of Pilgrims: Pilgrim staff, raincoat and dirty boots.

    Her eyes are of the seashell, a Catholic sign for pilgrims. The seashells guide pilgrims to holy sites (if you’ve ever been on the Camino, all the next locations are marked with Seashells).

    I’m expecting that Luce (thanks to the seashell eyes) will count as an official signpost for the next year of pilgrimages. She’s got incredibly well thought out symbology here.


    Edit: I should also note that the raincoat has the 2025 Jubilee of Hope flag on it.

    In case you didn’t get what that green spot on the raincoat was.




  • I’m cancelling too but I’m not convinced on NYT or The guardian yet.

    NYT strikes me as horribly inept at technology. Guardian is foreign (granted: UK is barely foreign lol but foreign anyway). I’d like to support an American paper if at all possible.

    Guardian is good material though. It’s a top contender for now but I’m still looking for American papers. Surely something in this big country is worth supporting?


    I mean, maybe I just support aftermath.site (aka: Kotaku before they quit/were replaced with the new writers). Video game news + politics is kinda what I’m interested in, but Aftermath.site (and Kotaku of old) didn’t even pretend to be neutral or facts based.

    I guess the modern Internet means that I need to pick and choose a-la-carte.






  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldWhy is Mastodon struggling to survive?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    arrow-down
    4
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    My post above is 376 characters, which would have required three tweets under the original 140 character limit.

    Mastodon, for better or worse, has captured a bunch of people who are hooked on the original super-short posting style, which I feel is a form of Newspeak / 1984-style dumbing down of language and discussion that removed nuance. Yes, Mastodon has removed the limit and we have better abilities to discuss today, but that doesn’t change the years of training (erm… untraining?) we need to do to de-program people off of this toxic style.

    Especially when Mastodon is trying to cater to people who are used to tweets.

    Your post could fit on Mastodon

    EDIT: and second, Mastodon doesn’t have the toxic-FOMO effect that hooks people into Twitter (or Threads, or Bluesky).

    People post not because short sentences are good. They post and doom-scroll because they don’t want to feel left out of something. Mastodon is healthier for you, but also less intoxicating / less pushy. Its somewhat doomed to failure, as the very point of these short posts / short-engagement stuff is basically crowd manipulation, FOMO and algorithmic manipulation.

    Without that kind of manipulation, we won’t get the kinds of engagement on Mastodon (or Lemmy for that matter).


  • dragontamer@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldWhy is Mastodon struggling to survive?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    120
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    Because Threads and BlueSky form effective competition with Twitter.

    Also, short form content with just a few sentences per post sucks. It’s become obvious. That Twitter was mostly algorithm hype and FOMO.

    Mastodon tries to be healthier but I’m not convinced that microblogs in general are that useful, especially to a techie audience who knows RSS and other publishing formats.