FWIW the number of Active Users on Lemmy + KBin has levelled off recently: fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse(i.e. maybe we’ve stopped losing users from the summer influx? Or maybe lurkers are now commenting more?)
Day 68. @empireOfLove still hasn’t replied to the “deez nutz” joke I replied with on c/memes. Morale is low and despair is welling but a tiny sliver of hope remains. Will today be the day that @empireOfLove comes through?
It’s worth noting that Lemmy only had around 1000 active users for the first half of 2023. (Kbin had fewer than 40 active users until May 2023!) Currently Lemmy + Kbin have about 38,000 active users.
Well, this conversation inspired me to finally read The Colonel, which reminded me of how great some of Watts’ ideas could be. Guess I’ll have to get a copy of Echopaxia next.
Yeah, when I read that book I was like: this reminds me of that time I freaked out in high school!
I admire the fact that the author put it online for free, and it’s a pretty good book, but it could have been better… Watts could have taken all those ideas about consciousness and humanity and produced something like 1984 or Catch-22 that embodies ideas that might otherwise get lost in abstractions. Unfortunately the ideas all get a little muddled.
you can only focus on about 10 percent of what you actually see in front of you,
I read about this when I was in high school and it freaked me out because I convinced myself that there were Cthulhu-like eldritch abominations inhabiting the spaces I could not see RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME and I couldn’t concentrate on school for the rest of the day.