#navelgazing — Public Fediverse posts

@petergleick
Dear Mr Musk,
IF I were a frog and IF I could fly, then I wouldn't need to bump my ass so much.
More of Musk's predictions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Predictions_for_Autonomous_Tesla_Vehicles_by_Elon_Musk
https://www.ibtimes.com/elon-musks-bold-predictions-10-milestones-he-says-will-happen-2030-3797986
https://www.technobezz.com/slides/failed-elon-musk-predictions
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-sure-made-lots-of-predictions-at-davos/
#ElonMusk #NavelGazing #FlyingFrogs

🎉🎈 Wow, a #dashboard to track how you waste your life on Claude! Because who doesn't need a spreadsheet to calculate their existential dread? 🙄📊 Clearly, the ultimate tool for those who enjoy navel-gazing about their AI usage instead of just, you know, using it. 🚀🤦‍♂️
https://www.anthropic.com/news/reflect-with-claude #existentialdread #AItime #managementtools #navelgazing #HackerNews #ngated

There is something a little creepy about your brain (which is you) contemplating a picture of itself. #Selfregard #NavelGazing?

Journalist and #NavelGazing podcast host, #JohnDickerson, talks about the #SupremeCourt ruling that struck down most of #DonaldTrump 's #tariffregime, and how the MAJORITY opinion broke it down in the simplest of terms. Keep watching for more with @[email protected]! youtu.be/ESHxqnmg60k?...

John Dickerson: Justice Gorsuc...

🎉 Ah yes, the annual tradition of navel-gazing and self-congratulation, now with 25 whole questions to ensure your self-obsession is comprehensive! 🧐 Because nothing says personal growth like asking yourself when you last felt "alive" while desperately trying to remember what you even did last year. 🙄
https://gourav.io/blog/yearly-review #navelgazing #selfreflection #personalgrowth #introspection #humor #HackerNews #ngated

Oh, joy! Another AI-driven attempt at #herding the cats of Hacker News into a neat little package of summaries and heatmaps, because clearly that's what the #tech world was missing 🙄. Let's add contrarian picks to ensure everyone is equally unimpressed by this digital navel gazing 🤦‍♂️.
https://www.whathappened.tech/ #AI #NavelGazing #ContrarianPicks #HackerNews #HackerNews #ngated

🚀 Ah, the classic "AI is taking over" #panic attack, now with a side of falafel! 🌯 Remember folks, the real danger isn't the machine uprising—it's the endless navel-gazing about our digital overlords that nobody asked for. 🙄 #FalafelFlavoredNonsense
https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html #AI #DigitalOverlords #Falafel #NavelGazing #MachineUprising #HackerNews #ngated

Yearning. For who-knows-what. Feeling unfulfilled, thinking maybe you can fix it with the right food, the right drink, the right relationship, the right job... it's not just me, right? Other people must have these waves come over them.

I try to remind myself that, so far in my life, I think this feeling

1. Just happens sometimes, no matter what I do or what my circumstances are
2. Happens a lot less if I have at least one satisfying relationship in each of a few categories that seem to matter (e.g., family, friends, romantic/sexual partner)
3. Happens a lot more if my job is unsatisfying
4. Happens quite a lot less if I am actively doing things to help others in ways I find meaningful
5. Almost forgot: Creating something and/or doing art (e.g., music) usually takes the edge off. Doing it with other people is even more effective.

Some of those things are not directly under my control, so getting a good bundle of them at once has been challenging, some decades.

#navelgazing #life #void

The Sydney Review of Books unleashes a deliriously pointless parade of self-important #buzzwords and endless lists, all in an attempt to transform navel-gazing literary criticism into an art form 🎨📚. Spoiler alert: it doesn't work. 😆
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essays/the-aesthetes-progress #literarycriticism #artfail #navelgazing #SydneyReviewofBooks #critique #HackerNews #ngated

Feeling supremely helpless. Got a call from my sis-in-law. My brother's latest scans shows mets in his lungs and other areas. They are going to try a different chemo regime. But radiation and surgery aren't possible right now.

I want to rage and cry at the unfairness of it all. His 59th birthday was last week and my niblings are turning 13 and 15 very soon.

Please spare a kind thought, a prayer or good vibes for my brother and his family.

#personal #self #navelgazing

🚀🎩 Behold, the self-important musings of Keyhive's #localfirst expedition! As they boldly go where no one has gone before, they get lost in a labyrinth of #buzzwords and navel-gazing 🎉🔍. Who knew access control could be this much fun—oh wait, it can't! 😂
https://www.inkandswitch.com/keyhive/notebook/ #expedition #accesscontrol #navelgazing #fun #HackerNews #ngated

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Reviewing

RPG reviewing is hard. It’s not simply a matter of reading, taking notes, forming opinions, and writing the review. It’s trying to say something meaningful about something when you can’t take the time to play the game and challenge your opinions. I have heard people say that this is why reviews are meaningless or that you should only review RPG products that you’ve been able to play. My issue with that is, almost no one that covers RPGs can review RPGs in the same way that, for example, video games get reviewed.

We’re Not Like Other Reviews

Some RPGs have beta versions that someone could play, giving them a head’s up on how the game is going to play, but not all. Very few people that cover RPGs make the money to do it on a full-time basis, and even if they did, actually playing an RPG to get meaningful table time doesn’t just require the reviewer’s time, but it requires several people able to take part in playing the game. If you wait until you have hours of play and feedback from players, it’s going to be months after the RPG before you can put out a review, and, and with the time that playtesting takes, you’re going to put out very few actual reviews.

I think there is a great value in someone providing an opinion of a product after reading through and evaluating the material, even if they haven’t played. People will get a general idea of what the game is, what the mechanics are, what the game looks like. Readers can find out the tone and readability of the text. I think there is some value to a reviewer looking at a game and pointing out similarities to other games with which they are familiar.

Artificially Constructed Hierarchies

That’s part of why I moved away from using star ratings almost immediately after I started reviewing. Seeing a star rating is providing an absolute. There is a danger that someone only looks at your star rating, or absorbs nothing in your review except the star rating. Unless you create multiple vectors to rate, you lose the nuance of a game that may be a joy to read, but feels unwieldy in play, or a game that looks gorgeous and may be a good sourcebook, but may not be the best at providing actual statistics for characters. But once you open the floodgates of multiple vectors of star ratings, where do you stop? Readability, presentation, physical product, electronic product, value for price, enjoyability of gameplay, ease of gameplay, ability to teach the game to someone not reading the book? Where do you draw the line? Because everything you want to talk about that feels meaningful could probably have a star rating, and there may not even be the same vectors that apply to every game.

That’s why I pivoted to Not Recommended, Tenuous Recommendation, Qualified Recommendation, Recommended, and Strongly Recommended. Even with a rating hierarchy, my scale prioritized broad appeal over the product’s inherent quality of writing and design. But even that scale made it hard to express when I loved a game and thought it did a great job exploring new avenues of roleplaying in engaging ways, but was definitely a niche product that would not be for a broad audience. 

I always said that I wanted people to know that I have preferences and biases so they could weigh those into what they were reading in the review to know if I was looking at the product from the same angle that they would. But that was hard to translate back into the new scale I created. No matter how amazing a D&D product is, can I really give it a Strongly Recommended? Because that means I’m telling people that dislike D&D at all that they would find some value in checking the product out. If I give a narrative roleplaying game whose mechanics are more about emulating and enforcing the tropes of genres of storytelling, filtered through a character archetype, and I think it’s great, can I give that a Recommended when that means it may be a good purchase for someone that really likes more granular or tactical games?

The problem with my scale was that I had to assume an “average” reader of my reviews, and given that I like a wide range of games, and talk to a wide range of gamers, that means my hypothetical reader vaguely likes everything but is always be excited about any specific genre, and only lightly engages with licensed material, they can’t be a ravenous fan. That’s making a lot of assumptions. 

Reexamination

The world hasn’t gotten any better since I felt too overwhelmed to continue doing regular reviews. In many ways, it has only gotten worse. That I feel inured to being a citizen of a country that is actively destroying the lives and erasing the rights of every marginalized community it can conceive. Every branch of government is complicit, makes me more functional, and also makes me worry about how much of my soul is dying. But on that happy note, I’ve had enough moments where my anxiety hasn’t been so high that I shut down. I want to write things again, just maybe not on anything that feels like a real schedule.

I don’t know that I want to go through the stress of trying to summarize things with a hierarchical list of ratings. It’s literally stressful to get to the end of the review and think where it should sit for that hypothetical reader. It gets even more confusing when you factor in whether my blog has a different hypothetical reader than Gnome Stew. I always said that I think the value of reviews isn’t the ratings they provide, but the insight into what is being reviewed, and the perspective of the reviewer measured against the reader’s own preferences.

In the future, I would like to do things that are more like my first impressions, across the board. I can talk about what works for me, what I think is new or innovative, what I think will be problematic or isn’t put in enough context, and how easy or enjoyable the thing is to read. I can talk about what it reminds me of regarding other games and how I think that will translate at the table. But it’s all me applying my knowledge, my experience, and my preferences to what I’m writing about. I hope that will be useful to people reading those articles.

Also, writing a review felt “final” to me. If I wrote a review and gave it a rating, and then later disagreed with myself, I didn’t want to edit the review. I wanted to record for posterity what I thought when I wrote that article. I want to feel more free to revise opinions, not only considering gameplay at the table, but considering how a line develops and what support materials it receives. If my initial article is effectively always my impression of reading and interacting with the product, it leaves room for me to come back and write about what the game feels like after playing a one short, or a short run of the game, or long-term campaign. If the initial look at the game or the game product isn’t a review, and doesn’t have any kind of rating, it only makes sense that follow-up articles will be an evolved view of what I’m talking about.

Does it Matter?

I still think RPG reviews, and any kind of meaningful analysis of RPG products, is useful. It can provide context to people that want to know what the product is. It can help people to know if there are any topics that it may or may not handle well. I may even tell people that a product exists when they previously didn’t know. But I also know from my perspective, I want to evolve how I look at and write about games. I don’t want to construct a hypothetical reader, I just want to talk to other gamers. Hopefully, this will still give people what they want from the articles I write.

It’s going to be weird describing myself as a “First Impressionist.” 

#NavelGazing #reviews #RoleplayingGames #RPGReviews #rpgs #TabletopGames #TabletopReviews #ttrpgs

@Daojoan T renamed the Gulf of Mexico, while reducing the influence of the country in the rest of the world.

Soon no one will even care to know were the US is: who would want to go to that place to be mistreated?

#navelGazing

A rant:

Someone just boosted into my timeline a post from a thread by some social media mucky muck (on mastodon.social natch), proclaiming how Mastodon will never be the new Twitter and how he spends all his time on Bluesky because of all the usual well documented issues with Masto and all the cool features that Bluesky is shipping... et cetera.

Just wait until Bluesky starts shipping advertisements, my dude. But more to the point, why can't there be both? Everything doesn't have to be for everybody, and Mastodon can be its own nerdy, weird thing.

Cool that Bluesky is figuring out moderation/quoting features. They seem useful. I'm genuinely glad for the users, and that people are thinking these things through. But Bluesky, since the app is one and the same with the protocol atm, can adapt its federation protocol as necessary, whereas Mastodon can't force its will onto ActivityPub if they don't want to break Federation with a bunch of other software. It's slow and frustrating, I guess, but it's not like their aren't people on here enjoying whatever it is they do on here.

Anyway, I'm not trying to sell anyone on anything. This doesn't have to be for everyone. It's just these kinds of posts are my least favorite genre of Mastodon navel gazing: people who try to force their expectations on the platform and castigate people for not Mastodoning the way they think they should and/or gripe about what they think are essential missing features. And because it doesn't meet their expectations they declare it a failed platform.

For sure, it's a bummer when people whose posts I like disappear. But new people show up, old mutuals check in now and again, and the rest of us all just keep on keeping on. Devs can poke and prod at ActivityPub and it can contribute to its maturation, its possibilities.

Have fun with Bluesky, genuinely. But, frankly, fuck marketshare and exponential growth. I, for one, hope there remains an ecosystem of social media that can resist the need to please Silicon Valley VCs idea of what success is.

#Bluesky #Mastodon #NavelGazing

A woman of seven and twenty

A woman of seven and twenty,said Marianne, after pausing a moment, can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.”
~~Jane Austen

https://pywacket.org/wordpress/a-woman-of-seven-and-twenty/

#Age #Angst #vanity #aging #NavelGazing #SelfIndulgence

#TheMetalDogArticleList
#punknews.orgpunknews.org
Navel Gazing for April 21, 2024
Welcome to Navel Gazing, the Punknews.org commenter community's weekly symposium, therapy session, and back-alley knife-fight. Chime in below with your latest playlists, record store finds, online time wasters, and site feedback....

https://www.punknews.org/article/82638/navel-gazing-for-april-21-2024

#NavelGazing #PunknewsOrg #WeeklySymposium #TherapySession

If I’m lucky, there will come a point where I’ve been married longer than I’ve been not married, or that I’ve kids longer than I’ve not had kids. That’s weird to think about, but weirder is the fact that I’m soon crossing (or have already crossed) the point where, if something new comes into my life, there’s no way it will ever be in the majority of my years lived. #NavelGazing

It didn't take much before Livia discovered her own website. I am wondering what will happen when she'll visit it...

#navelgazing

Why do arseholes always win?

Why are there so many of them?

#Philosophy #Karma #NavelGazing #Sad

If you were Joan of Arc, gifted and cursed with glimpses of divinity, and there was a doctor or mystic who could "cure" you, would you let them?

(multiple choices allowed: check all that apply | fit for you)

🧐 #Philosophy
and | or
🤔 #NavelGazing
🔁 #BoostsWelcome

FIRST FULL PASS EDIT COMPLETE. 20 minutes of awesomeness (I hope). But it feels good to get to this point.

Now I need to take a break and have a late dinner.

#navelgazing #youtube #video #editing #oversharing

I'm beginning to wonder if, for my mental health, I should not look at YT videos from content creators whose content closely resembles mine. Granted, I'm in an extremely niche topic, but that just means the other folks are HIGHLY visible.

My stuff doesn't duplicate theirs, but they are PROLIFIC. A video a week, and they're long and they have a studio and and and. (and a lot more subs than I do).

I'll succeed on quality, yeah, that's the ticket.

#youtube #navelgazing #ennui

Haven't even *lurked* on Twitter in over a week now. There are a lot of people who have ended up here (a little bit) and at bsky (a little bit). Really do miss seeing some folks who haven't made the leap away yet. #navelgazing

@gnosticdaemon Aside, as you say, the people who control media outright by owning it, I've noticed that what drives the media is simply conflict. And anything that is based on ad-driven revenue will eventually sell you story rather than information. And many things like that feel like a conspiracy when they're really just an inevitable consequence. And I guess that is a fundamental indictment of capitalism. #USPOL #NavelGazing

QUITE INTERESTING
RE THE #TwitterMigration

"To the Twitter people it feels like a confusing new world, whilst they mourn their old life on Twitter. They call themselves "refugees", but to the Mastodon locals it feels like a busload of Kontiki tourists just arrived, blundering around yelling at each other and complaining that they don't know how to order room service. We also mourn the world we're losing." @shug

https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/
#QuiteInteresting #witty #TyreKickers #NavelGazing