Exploring other systems after the Muskocalypse

No important changes -- I expect to do most of my all-too-infrequent diarizing over here -- but in the wake of my skepticism of Twitter growing even more this week, I'm trying out a couple more services.

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On the more-established side, I've finally set up a profile on Mastodon. I expect to use that the same way I've been using Twitter: to post links to interesting stuff, with relatively light commentary. Probably little content per se, but I'll likely use that to tie together my posts from here, Medium, and elsewhere, along with other things that catch my eye.

For those who haven't encountered it, Mastodon is a social network, but one designed in the good old-fashioned way: a federated network based on common protocols, rather than a huge corporate monolith. So instead of being a walled garden, it's a whole bunch of cooperating systems, each with its own ethos and focus -- you can join one and still follow stuff from the others. (Within some limits: for example, many servers explicitly ban content from servers that are focused on white supremacy, child porn, etc.)

If you're curious check it out; if you're already there, feel free to follow me and let me know you're around.

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On the more-experimental side, I'm also checking out Cohost, which is Yet Another Posting Platform. We'll see whether it goes anywhere -- it looks nice, but at first glance may be too similar to DW for me to actually do much with it. But if you're over there, say hi!

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Any other recommendations folks have? While I'm not sure that Twitter is going to melt down, I strongly suspect that Musk has no idea what he's doing, and the panic seems to be driving some healthy churn. Time to encourage folks towards less-sucktastic platforms...

Intercon U -- Hopefully Third Time Lucky

For those who don't know it yet, Intercon is one of the oldest and largest LARP-centric conventions in the world. I've been involved with it since 1989, and it's still one of the highlights of my year: a weekend packed with dozens of games in all genres. You can easily play five games during it; some do as many as eight or nine.

Like most conventions, Intercon has had a hard couple of years of it. Intercon T managed to run in 2020, coming in just under the wire before the world shut down. 2021 just wasn't in the cards, so we instead held Extracon, a surprisingly successful experiment in online LARP. 2022 was supposed to happen, but Omicron had other ideas.

Things are still fingers-crossed, but things are moving along well to finally run Intercon U this coming March, and now is the time to go check it out! The initial schedule is up, and signups for games will begin on November 3rd. Intercon signups run in rounds, letting you sign up for one more game each week so that things don't completely fill up instantly, but a few games from the most popular GMs will fill quickly anyway.

(As to the usual question -- "Why letters, instead of numbers?" -- suffice it to say that it used to be numbered, but the organization was rather split between the Boston-area and DC-area folks. We eventually decided to reorganize, with the DC area continuing to run numbered conventions, and us in Boston restarting at Intercon A.)

Anyway, check it out, and I hope to see you there!