This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

Question to whoever here uses Mastodon and is technically-inclined:

How reasonable an idea is it to run your own mastodon instance for solo purposes? (eg. as one would run their own email server, or at least point a host's mx to their own domain)

How much would this cost, and is it possible to reliably secure an instance to run as a one-person federated instance easily?

I guess how much it costs would scale based on how many individual accounts follow the one account on the instance, yes?

“Losing” can mean a death, or falling out of touch, or damaging a relationship past a point of repair, or anything else you feel fits.

What have you learned?
How did it change you?

Previous questions in series:

What have you learned from...
...being a parent?
...going through a breakup?
...moving to a new place?
...working in tech?
...going through a pandemic?
…being LGBT?

These threads remain open, so feel free to comment on old ones if you have something to add!

Upcoming Dates:

Timasomo Showcase Thread -- Saturday, November 5

Technically all work should be finished before November 1st (but if you're running up on time, that's never really been a hard deadline 😉).

November 1-4 are for putting finishing touches on the project to ready it for the showcase. If you need an idea of what the Showcase thread will look like, here's last year's.

Next Saturday will be the showcase where we all get to show off what we've made!

Update us on your progress so far!

What did/didn't you get done this week?

Anything go according to plan?

Anything go off the rails?

Any successes or struggles to share?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

Named for Reiwa, Japan's current calendar era which began in 2019.

This came completely out of left field for me. I was going down the Internet nostalgia rabbit hole, likely inspired by the ~talk topic. The path eventually led me to Di Gi Charat, the anime series from 1999.

The original anime still holds up today. The episodes—only 4 minutes each, including the theme song—are highly bingeable. They're on YouTube. So quirky and funny. It's about these two small weird alien catgirls landing in Akihabara, Tokyo's anime central, and working part-time at an anime store called Gamers. Incidentally, Gamers is a real store, and these characters are Gamers' mascots.

Reiwa no Di Gi Charat has fansubs which can be found on unofficial sources. 4-minute episodes. Theme song performed by Masami Okui like the original. The art is really polished. It's amazing they brought back the original voice cast for this. I'm floored.

(Listening to Di Gi Charat soundtracks on Spotify as I write this!)