Joseph Pulitzer: A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. wordsmith.social/protestation/…
The shadows of Baykus oak tree - A short story
Introduction
The following text is a story I wrote yesterday. There are some deep layers of meaning (such as the character's main name, "Baykus", from the turkish word for "owl"). There are some "Lovecraftian" aspects as well (although I'm not really a fan of H.P. Lovecraft, but let's say me and him were inspired by the same... realm).
There is also a defense of Mother Nature (Gaia, Pachamama, Goddess Isis, Demetre, the list goes on), Her relationship with ancient knowledge (hereby represented by the archetype of the owl and the oak tree), and a critique of the way people fear the unknown, especially the darker aspects of the nature (Darkness is not evil; if it weren't by Her dark aspects, there'd be no light).
The story is human-written (i.e. not an AI output), I guess it'll be evident as there are some English grammar errors of mine (I'm Brazilian and my native language is Portuguese, so I'm aware I commit a lot of mistakes when I write English texts, even though I'm capable of writing rhyming poetry).
The shadows of Baykus oak tree
The quietness of the boy made her restless. She noticed that Baykus hasn't eaten since yesterday, preferring to sit below that old oak tree. Every time she tried to approach him, he'd run away somewhere else inside the big yard.
The sky was overcast, it'll rain any time soon. But these dense clouds didn't suffice to scare Baykus, as he continued to sit and gaze at the nothing like a thousand yard stare. As the day became darker and darker, his mother could finally understand what he was looking at. Mesmerized, she went outside and sat by the stair steps.
Days passed and the neighbors started to worry about the absence of both Baykus and his mother. They tried to call, but no one answered. They tried to spy by the window, the kitchen door was open but there was no signal of them. Another day passed and the neighbors called the police. When the policemen broke into the house, they readily started to notice a dark smoke coming out. Initially thinking that it could be some pot that was forgotten by the stove, they found the kitchen abandoned, but there was no lit fire nor pot over the stove, and the smoke was coming from everywhere across the house, letting the agents curious and confused about what was going on.
One of the policemen noticed the opened door that led to the yard and decided to go there. There was no one there, except for the shoes of Baykus' mother at the stairs, and the black smoke permeated the entire yard. Next to the oak, they found another pair of shoes, these from Baykus. They also found the source of the strange smoke inside the oak's trunk, but the oak wasn't on fire.
There was a little hole and they decided to look inside. The policeman put his eye near the hole and then he fell to his knees, paralyzed. Fearing that the smoke could be some toxic chemical, the other policemen readily ran to the car and fetched some masks. Another policeman, masked, tried to look, and the same situation happened as soon as his eye approached the hole: he fell to his knees, with his eyes wide open.
The third and last policeman decided to cut through the tree trunk, so he fetched an ax. When he was going to wave the ax against the tree, the voice of Baykus was heard coming from inside: "Don't!". The policeman tried to talk to him, but this was the only word they heard from him. The policeman, desperate, continued with his idea of cutting through the trunk (if Baykus is stuck inside, cutting the trunk of the tree would help, he thought). As he approached the ax against the tree, the blade got extremely hot, glowing red, starting to burn his hand as he dropped it.
Confused, he tried to put his hand inside that hole, only to be grabbed by a couple hands inside. These hands were cold, like icy cold. As he tried to pull back, the hands started to pull him inside. He tried to fetch his gun, but it was as hot as that axe he was using. He started to panic when the hands let him free.
He ran away thinking of calling reinforcement, but as he tried to enter the kitchen, he noticed something even more weird: there was no street but a black veil all the way from the sky. He looked back, trying to find another exit, but as he turned, he came across the boy and his mother, standing together both staring at him. He looked to his side and saw the two policemen, also standing and staring at him. Scared by the way they were staring at him, he slowly paced backwards, only to find the wall behind him.
Baykus approached him and gently grabbed his hand, taking him to the oak tree, the others followed. As they approached the tree, the man was paralyzed by what he saw: the eyes of Baykus got bigger and darkened.
The smoke surrounded the policeman and he started to hear voices, billions of voices: they were the thoughts of every human alive and dead. They were memories, both good and bad, but mostly dark and shadowy. The grieving from those who lost their loved ones, the woe from those who were alone, the suffering from those who were in pain.
He started to know everything, from the known knowledge to the unknown, and this made he feel the burden. The burden She has had since the beginning of times, the burden faced by Darkness, an unknown entity that he was starting to know. "She is our mother. The mother of all living beings, and She is your mother, too. She was looking for you and now She is looking after you.", Baykus said. Although paralyzed, the policeman smiled.
The smile couldn't be seen by the neighbors: all they could see was three paralyzed policemen, one of which was paralyzed as soon he walked inside the kitchen. The neighbors couldn't understand what was going on and, scared by the unknown, they ran from it... As everybody does... 🦉🌲🌒
First post on Friendica
So I'm relatively new to fediverse, although I have already interacted with federated protocols (such as Matrix, but Matrix is way different from Mastodon/Friendica/Bluesky/Pleroma/etc).
I have been sailing through two Mastodon instances, but Mastodon's character limit is low for my needs. I'm a developer (JS, PHP, Python, etc) that also like to write poetry and chronicles, as well as interacting with AI to create artistic representations of the gothic and the dark supernatural. While it seems that Friendica supports more characters, I'll know it the moment I send this first post. It has 1342 characters in total.
I have a syncretic view over the reality, trying to converge scientific inquiry with the philosophical questioning and the metaphysical spirituality from all religions and belief systems (even when they seem to "contradict" one another; actually, they have more in common than people think, starting from the beginning of the existence from primordial waters from the amniotic liquid to the electromagnetic fields permeating the cosmos, but it's a subject for another future post).
One important thing for me to ask: does the instance allow AI Art (e.g. from artistic representations of daemons such as Astaroth and Lilith to mathematical concepts such as fractals; obviously these AI imagery would be marked as so)?
anubis2814 likes this.
Sorry for the downtime
Housing situation has been a pain, still on the temporary server environment and been hitting major resources bottlenecks.
I'm hoping to get a place sooner, but I've hit some roadblocks that very likely will push it drastically further out... in which case I'll need to spend more money on this environment to return things to stable.
Reminder that I'm covering this entirely out of my own pocket and these constraints are because I'm between homes and can't use my own much cheaper hardware. If you appreciate this instance I would very much appreciate a donation.
Vanessa likes this.
Shiri Bailem reshared this.
Friendica vs Mastodon
I tried Friendica previously, but never figured out what I wanted to do with it, and deleted it after a while. But after I'd read the excellent post @Elena Rossini wrote on her blog I realised I really should give it another chance, and decided to put a little more effort into it this time. So I created this account yesterday, and now I'm trying to decide how I want to use it. Some part of that uncertainty is because I haven't figured out all the bells and whistles of the platform, and I don't always quite understand what the help pages are trying to tell me. This is definitely mostly on me, having some preconceived notions and expectations, and getting a little confused here and there. This is not Facebook or Goggle+, it is its own thing.
For the most part though, just trying things out with one eye on those help pages have solved any questions I've had.
After I had signed up, I initially imported all the accounts I am following on Mastodon, but am starting to regret this. The two networks are obviously very different beasts, and I will act accordingly from now on. My current idea is to use Friendica, at least partly, as a sort of news aggregator, following accounts both on the fediverse and via RSS feeds, so a lot of those Mastodon accounts will be unfollowed here for a quieter experience and left on Mastodon. Just because you can follow everything everywhere on ActivityPub, it doesn't always make the best sense. But that, of course, is also the beauty of this, what doesn't make the best sense for me, might do for someone else. Different folks...
Occasionally I may even post something here, things that require more than 500 words, things like this.
That's what I'm planning to do right now, anyway. Who knows what I'll think tomorrow?
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Jarulf reshared this.
@Jarulf @Elena Rossini welcome aboard! I'm definitely saving that article, might link it or one of the guides it mentions in the getting started welcome panel (... I should review that as well, I haven't looked at it in ages)
Also remember there's a helper group as you're figuring things out, just tag helpers@forum.friendi.ca (not tagged here because otherwise it'll share this comment to the group). I'm also happy to help out my users!
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I'm figuring things out as I go along, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it here. I'll be sure to ask for help when I'm getting too confused
Shiri Bailem likes this.
Long time no writing here
I started to digging into my latest hobby of #bookbinding (but it's not the only one i assure you)
And made several pamphlet, with also some custom design.
I recently made couple of handmade hardcover journals. One using a custom hero-quest character sheet, the other one is just a lined notebook.
More info for who is interested are available here: ko-fi.com/post/Two-more-bookbi… (don't worry all my posts on #ko-fi are free)
It also gave my a nice surprise of receiveing the first donation ever (even if it will be the last it still made me happy! :) ) Any opinion comment is appreciated.
These are couple of pictures of my latest works:
storage.ko-fi.com/cdn/useruplo…
any comment/critics is appreciated.
Shiri Bailem likes this.
Hey there, I'm Kees (they/them/their, ne/nem/nir), a 30-something bug living in California. I'm hoping to make this my public facing account to share my art and generally interact with the rest of the fediverse.
I'm an amateur naturalist (I like BIRDS and BUGS, especially parasitic wasps) and I do art in various media (digital, watercolor, acrylic), usually of birds or original characters from an ARPG I help run. #tokipona li pona. Aaand I don't know what else to put in here so I'll stop ha.
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Hola
Alfred E. Neuman likes this.
Alfred E. Neuman doesn't like this.
I'm an analogue digital hybrid who cares about mental health issues, music, photography and art.
I'm deeply suspicious of ducks (in a less than serious way) and although I exist on Mastodon I'm keen to migrate to Friendica.
Best wishes all.
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Mist and fog clouds over this domain. The thoughts of raceme flowers and pinnated ferns hang over my minds eye as I walk with covered pupils. The hard dirt feels rock like, with an occasional trip over roots.
Pulling me down a pathway of cedar and pine, nesting in its canopy, birds orientated skywards to a plateau of limitless sky. Just out of reac- war̓n̼͚͜i̴͈ng,͈͑̌ l͓̀o̩͋ͬw̦͊ b̵̍a̶͋͂t̫tê̾̍r͉̔͠y
O̪͉p͎e̜̽n̡ ỳ̬o̲ur̘̥ e̫͌yē͌ͅs̵͗̿, O̪͉p͎e̜̽n̡ ỳ̬o̲ur̘̥ e̫͌yē͌ͅs̵͗̿, O̪͉p͎e̜̽n̡ ỳ̬o̲ur̘̥ e̫͌yē͌ͅs̵͗̿.
Shinryu reshared this.
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@Charline yeah, these databases get huge and it becomes a lot harder to restore. a month or two ago I lost a few days to a database crash, this morning's database backup was 4GB. It takes like half an hour to start the database if it's not a clean shutdown (and about as much time to cleanly shut down).
It's kinda a nightmare lol
Charline likes this.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Daemon Silverstein • •@Daemon Silverstein This instance? I allow properly marked AI content, I would also suggest content warnings (in Friendica it's done with
[abstract]content warning message[/abstract]
), but I count that more as a courtesy effort than something I'm going to really demand.Friendica has no character limit set.
As Friendica isn't the friendliest user interface, if you do find you'd prefer Mastodon or Mastodon-like, there are many that have higher character limits.
Daemon Silverstein likes this.
anubis2814
in reply to Daemon Silverstein • • •youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzg…
Pt 3 is still in the works as this is a rework from 2020
Daemon Silverstein likes this.