COVID-19 projections assuming full social distancing through May 2020

ill Gates on Trump’s call for quick end to lockdown:

‘There really is no middle ground, and it’s very tough to say to people, “Hey, keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, [and] ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner.‘

Bill Gates, who has recently focused his money and time on keeping poor people from from dying of disease in third world countries, and who was calling for people like him to pay more taxes before the mess we're currently, and who badgers gazillionaires to commit to giving their entire fortunes away, and who has already donated $100m directly to helping with COVID-19, and who has continued to donate to affiliated causes, like schools.

He's wealthy, he's giving, and he actually knows quite a bit about this world we're now living in. We need leaders right now. He's one of them.

And he doesn't want to be president.

Governor Cuomo, far from universally loved by New Yorkers, is the right guy for this moment. He is engaged. People can see it with their own eyes.

Meanwhile, de Blasio is at the gym in Park Slope, which would be totally fine if he seemed engaged, ever. Maybe he’s all over this. He’s a hard person to read.

And just a thought...can you imagine Cynthia Nixon being in charge of all this?

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

#the23eyesobject

Curt Cobain on 'Smells Like Teen Spirit':

"That came from something I used to say every time I used to walk into a party to break the ice. A lot of times, when you’re standing around with people in a room, it’s really boring and uncomfortable. So it was, “Well here we are, entertain us. You invited us here.”

Mark Knopfler on 'Money For Nothing':

"That came from a big meathead working in an electrical appliance store in New York. He was watching MTV while moving boxes. I spied on him through a little gap in the microwave section, and the lines he was coming out with were so classic that I had to write them down as fast as possible. He actually said things like, “What’s that? Hawaiian noises?” and “maybe get a blister on your little finger.” And then he said, “That ain’t workin’” … Little did he know. "

Chrissie Hynde on 'Back On The Chain Gang':

“I found a picture of you.” It was from a little photograph of Ray Davies I found in a wallet. We were trying to work the song out in sound checks for a while, but later when my guitar player died I finished the song off with him in mind."

"Perhaps Americans found that their Uncle Sam, like all good uncles, helped them out: by turning the vast machinery of war mobilization into a family relation, he gave political power a personal face and made sense of the government’s presence in everyday life. On closer inspection, though, Flagg’s Uncle Sam is a puzzling figure. He is at once watchful and protective, personable and authoritative, individual and institutional. And, like many uncles, he is very badly dressed. His formal attire conveys the solemnity of war’s occasion, and his furrowed brow and piercing stare show his seriousness, but his silly hat and ill-fitting suit suggest that Uncle Sam doesn’t usually do this. He reassures viewers that war is not in America’s lifeblood; the nation, like its uncle, would rather be doing something else." [+]

It was hard to watch and it took over an hour, but the RudyBot Pizza Maker eventually produced a tasty, if mangled, slice. Not bad for a beta product. But would it be ready in time for the product launch in September?

It's taking me a lot longer than expected to get RSS import tools working as gear. Rather than wait for all those pieces to be in place I went ahead and released the RSS output for sectors. Look in the upper right corner of the sector banner to find the link.

Ages ago there was the Tuesday Ten. Just put your music player of choice on random and see what the day brought you. I think tomorrow would be a good day for that. It is Tuesday after all

"Click the Markup button in MacOS and there's a new button that will send images and documents over to your iPhone or iPad so you can mark it up with your fingers or an Apple Pencil (and changes are reflected in real time on the Mac's screen)."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/macos-10-15-catalina-the-ars-technica-review/4/#h1

cornpone, 8 years ago:

Last nite while working at the golf range. I sold Old LF user, maggie, a bucket of golf balls.  

I recognized her because fb had suggested her as a friend a while back. the mutual friends were glitch and jones, maybe clu.  

anywho, it's a small small internet."

I'll be continuing on the modernization and quality of life improvements here before returning to any RPG elements. Next up is support RSS feeds for both reading in posts to sectors as well as allowing linkFilter to integrate into RSS readers.

RSS Inbound

The next release will allow sector moderators to subscribe their sector to a number of RSS feeds. Only moderators will be able to see these feeds. They will be able to easily convert one or more items in the feed into posts in the sector. I may also add some auto posting ability, since it's still pretty dead around here.

RSS Outbound

All sectors and views will support an RSS output. Authenticated views like Home will include a token to make it easy to include your customized feed in a reader.

Embeds

With this release you can post embedded images and videos. Images can be posted from Flickr, Imgur, Giphy, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, or any direct link to an image file. Videos can be posted from YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr.

Other embed types like audio and podcasts will be added in a future release.

Release Notes

• Added support for reading oEmbed API calls
• Added support for detecting oEmbed endpoint
• Added support for using oEmbed proxies
• Added video post type
• Added image post type
• Fixed bug where users could not edit or delete their own posts
• Fix XP dropdown so that it won't be empty
• Moved old static images to /imgs
• Added support for multiple types to rating
• Fixed issue where titles would preview long but then be truncated

Watch the whole talk

TSIA, baby! #featureRequest

#the23eyesobject

Bounties

This release of linkFilter introduces bounties, activities that grant extra rewards for completing specific tasks. Bounties typically run for a week or a day and encourage users to explore and interact.

Once acquired you can click the XP bar to track your progress. Be sure to complete your bounties before they expire, and then collect you reward.

Currently only Cando 99-30 in The Archive is offering bounties, but expect to see more soon.

Release Notes

• Adds support for bounties, activities that grant additional rewards for specific actions
• Fixes for nightly and weekly maintenance
• Fix for new sectors not appearing in post dropdowns
• Refactor award for bounties and prep for award log
• Fixes for pagination in sector view

• the life and times of hatepup - part 1: hatepup slept here
• the life and times of hatepup - part 2: the capitol years
• the life and times of hatepup - part 3: baby needs a new set of bahlz
• the life and times of hatepup - part 4: one bahl in the hand is worth two in the bush

The Archive

This release introduces The Archive, moving all the posts from before "the collapse" to a separate section of the site. Posts in The Archive are locked: no voting, no editing, no commenting. Posts can be recovered from The Archive by crossposting them to other sectors.

The Archive also introduces linkFilter's first NPC: Cando 99-30. Cando manages The Archive and will soon start offering bounties for activities involving all those old posts.

Crossposting

This release also introduces crossposting. Any post can be crossposted to another sector. The original post creator gets awarded XP as well as the person crossposting. You can crosspost your own posts too, but you won't get double XP.

Release Notes

• Posts can now be cross posted to other sectors
• Crossposting results in XP rewards for original post as well as cross post
• Posts and Sectors prior to the 2011 shutdown are now contained in The Archive
• The Archive can be browsed by year and month, by sector, or searched
• Posts in The Archive cannot be edited, voted on, or commented on
• Significant improvements to search
• Significant improvements to site performance
• Fixes for avatar selection
• Fixes for mobile site
• Fixes for site sluggishness for users with space in username
• Fixes for search not being updated on new posts
• All users are subscribed to new sectors (for now)
• Fixes for posts that are associated to a hard deleted user
• Support for filtering by date moving forward from linkFilter launch
• Bookmarks will work deleted and archived links
• Fixes for sectors containing "all" in the token
• Purging caches on user preference update
• Recent posts in archived sectors moved to limbo

I wanted to share my thoughts on the next release for linkFilter, because they may be controversial.

Post Reset / The Archive

I'm going to be moving all posts and sectors except for the very latest ones into a new section of the site titled The Archive. A new heading at the top will allow you to delve into the sectors and visit the heyday of the site. Search will return results from the both areas.

This will allow us to start building a series of sectors that are user moderated and focused on whatever you're interested in. When more of the game mechanics start to come into play there will be reasons to visit The Archive and pull posts into the main area.

User Reset

Once I've introduced some more game mechanics I'll be doing a user reset, pulling everyone back to level 1 and 0 XP. I want to give everyone a reason to start posting again since most users who were here back in the day have already unlocked everything. There will be new things to unlock and new mechanics to allow active users to progress quickly. All posts and sectors between now and the reset will remain active.

Thoughts?

Share them here, in the chat, or on the Discord.

Now with Markdown

Out today, Markdown editing across the site.

I don't know about you, but I always found the editing on linkFilter lacking. My wonky CR/LF to html break conversion never worked right. It also made the text edit fields terrible to look at.

I've removed support for editing HTML directly, and now we just use markdown. All the old rules for where images are allowed and aren't still apply.

Refactored posting

I refactored the posting of links, journals and comments to use as much of the same code as possible. Moving forward this should make making changes easier and more uniform. As with all refactors, you will probably find a bug or two, just let me know.

Other stuff / Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug with comments creating new threads when they weren't supposed to
• Fixed mobile mode so you can post again
• Removed support for legacy skins
• Turned off all post-per-day cost multipliers
• Added support for mod deleting and undeleting
• Removed support for mod editing
• Comments use proper user/title/body after post
• Added notification on new sector creation

Now that the first new features for linkFilter have been released in ages, I wanted to share with you some of direction I'd like to take the site.

I want to double down on the gaming aspects of the site. I'll be introducing a parallel alternate universe narrative where the internet is almost entirely a handful of walled gardens. LinkFilter is one of the last refuges of the open internet, and your character comes to share, curate and defend content there.

I'll be introducing character classes, each with its own role on the site. The "mod" class for example, is a curator on the site. They have specialized tools for managing lots of content. All classes will be able to perform all functions, just some functions will be better/easier for your class. I'll also be introducing inventory. Stuff you can add to your characters to enhance their functions even more. Eventually I'd like to introduce NPCs into the mix.

Before I get to any of that, we'll need one more round of bug fixes and quality of life improvements. I'm going to move all the editors to use simple markdown, for example. I'll also be adding in an invite system, so we can welcome other members into the community.

I'm excited to announce some new features to the linkFilter community.

Sectors

Sectors replace categories and can be created by anyone. Journals and Polls are now posted into sectors as well. Anything posted into your sectors can be moderated by you.

CP becomes glimmer

I've renamed CP into glimmer. The function is exactly the same, except instead of getting reset every night you will get additional glimmer on the first visit of each day. You can accumulate up to 1000. I've also tweaked the amount you get each day slightly.

New level up screen

You'll notice a progress bar in the upper right which shows your progress to the next level. Reaching a new level will show a new animated level up display.

My company CARMERA is right around 50 people now. We've hit the point where we need middle management, and that team needs to spin up and get working effectively. It's the least fun part of the startup cycle. Meetings all day everyday. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel though.