We now have two t-shirt designs on our merch shop! Both are unisex, high quality 100% organic cotton, with screen prints of @dopatwo's awesome illustrations. You voted for these slogans! "I write alt text" and "My friends are not for sale". We offer free shipping over a certain threshold, shipping from Germany.

https://shop.joinmastodon.org/products/mastodon-i-write-alt-text-unisex-t-shirt-copy

#Merchtodon #Mastodon

Sometime around the 2020 era, we lost the right to be mediocre at things we love.

No longer can you just bake bread...you must start a sourdough side hustle lol. Wanna stay fit and go jogging or running? Nah, you gotta optimize your biometrics for a marathon. What my point is that every hobby has been enshittified and gentrified into a brand opportunity.

This strange infatuation with optimization culture is killing the human spirit.

So this new year, starting tomorrow, one of my resolutions is to do something bad but fun. Maybe I write a terrible poem. I like to draw and paint, so perhaps I will draw a horse that looks like a table or sing off-key in the showers or in front of my loved ones. The algorithm driving the mainstream social media wants me to be a polished product, but my humanity lives in these messy, unoptimized, cringe-inducing joyful failures.

I will try to reclaim the right to be an amateur. Will you join me?

#creativity #hobbies #art #depression #socialmedia #newyear #resolution #happynewyear #MentalHealth #Culture #enshittification #creative #design #writing #reading #books #drawing #music #gardening #nature #running #fitness

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

The difference in understanding held even when the marketing researchers made sure the test subjects were presented with identical facts. https://theconversation.com/learning-with-ai-falls-short-compared-to-old-fashioned-web-search-269760

A Scottish tartan memorializing the (mainly) female victims of the Witchcraft Act has been officially registered, created by Claire Mitchell and Zoe Venditozzi, founders of the Witches of Scotland campaign

#WomensArt via Smithsonian Magazine #Scotland

Just be the reason. That’s all. It’s so easy.

#Kindness #GoodPeople

I feel sorry for the people who outsource their writing to “AI”. They will never discover the true value of what writing has to offer: debugging yourself, structuring your thinking, letting your messy thoughts emerge from the depths of your brain, to name a few things.

Even sadder is when people say “I am bad at writing so I use the AI”.

Practice is where the value is! No one is suddenly good at anything! Please, allow yourself to mess up, make mistakes and discover things!