I'm on Mastodon!

...aaaaand I broke it--discordian.social I mean, not all of Mastodon. It's a small instance on a small server, and I liked and retooted too much in a single day for the server to handle, now it's unavailable. Damn.

It's back.

“Well Mr. Columbo—”

“Actually, it’s Lieutenant Columbo.”

“You’re Starfleet?”

“Star who now?”

(thanks for the caption @brookbee!)

This is feudalism. This is literally feudalism. You own nothing and pay a tithe to your landlords.

at the start of every month everyone reblogs some insane poetry that’s like “august has arrived and again I swallow my bones in the burning sun” and every time I’m like damn that makes no sense. but kind of true.

Maybe you're right, maybe we will see each other again. But just in case we don't, I want you to know how much you meant to me.

Bakery 🍞

I looove when food is in a bowl. Frequently plates are being brought out and I’m thinking this could’ve been a bowl meal but nobody gets it

"I won't be tricked into thinking he's finished when the video is only halfway through this time, clearly it will be done as soon as he finishes the tower"

Is that thing structurally complete?! Dang.

The joy of not wanting to go back.

I left twitter more than a year ago.

I left facebook first, three years ago.

I love social media and use it every day. Total honesty? If I couldn't have fun interactions without being on twitter, or facebook I'd probably get over my aversions to those places and go back. I'm not a digital monk, or a data saint. I don't think it's possible for every choice we make to be 100 percent ethical. No choice is.

I'm sharing all this to suggest that you CAN have a real social network and NOT be tied in to these companies. I've been considering leaving tumblr too. tumblr has made many mistakes but unlike facebook and twitter at least they SAY they don't want hate speech on this platform. Do they do a good job of living up to that? No. But, on twitter the owner has said he doesn't care. Facebook hosts thousands of nazi groups where they chat and make plans and they do not care this is going on on their platform. It's unacceptable. (and it make instagram unacceptable by proxy)

So what am I doing exactly? I'm on the fediverse!

I pay part of the server fees for the server I use there every month, but you don't need to pay to use the network. If you are a bug, math, paleo art nerd send me a message and I'll get you on our very active and friendly server.

There are other server for other interests and generic services too. No one guy owns the whole thing and that makes me feel so much better about using it. There are no ads, no bots, and hateful people are very rare. Most of the people are really nice.

IDK. Think about it.

Look, one of the problems related to porn on the internet is monetizing the site it’s held on. We all know this. These sites start out allowing porn, then at some point they stop because advertisers don’t want to be associated with porn. Everyone gets up and moves to a different site, and the cycle repeats.

Sites want advertisers because that’s what makes them money. Running servers for sites that have a huge user base uploading a million images is expensive. As the popularity of the site grows, so do its expenses, until advertisers seem like a good choice to cover the bills… and suddenly porn is now holding them back. We know this. We’ve seen it a million times. Everyone moves to one site because it’s safe, it gets popular, it bans porn.

Two of the problems here are centralization and profit motive. Both of those problems are fixed by the fediverse.

You run a server but don’t want it to get too big, thus keeping service costs reasonable? You can do that. There are plenty of other servers people can go to, so there’s no incentive for you to make your space the Only One.

You’re a user, and the server you’re on is starting to go downhill? You can just leave and go to a new server and keep all your followers and all the people you follow. Moving no longer means starting all over again.

You want a place you know will NEVER monetize its users, that will never shut down, that will have content rules that perfectly match your needs? Get a cheap domain name and host a server yourself for a couple of bucks a month. If you’re tech savvy, you can set up your server at home. If you’re not, you can host online for extremely cheap prices. For less than the price of Netflix, you can have a perfect space with your own branding, and connect it to the wider fediverse.

If Staff ever implements the editing method from Mastodon, we'd be fucked.

Currently, on Tumblr, if you edit a post, all the former reblogs stay exactly the same.

On Mastodon, editing a post changes all the boosts and simply notifies the people who interacted with the post prior to the edit.

Now, can you imagine that on Tumblr?

Surely giving the OP the ability to edit their post after hundreds of thousands of people have reblogged it would be a perfectly balanced feature that I'm sure the Tumblr' userbase has never abused before.

More band posters/aesthetic 🩶

A thorough understanding of the cellular connections inside these tissues is being made possible by technologies that use spatial transcriptomic approaches to revolutionize the study of ligand-receptor signaling in tissues. CytoSignal was created by researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Michigan to use spatial transcriptomic data to infer the locations and dynamics of cell-cell communication at the cellular level. 

CytoSignal offers a basic understanding of the spatial dynamics of signaling connections. It finds differentially expressed genes, measures contact-dependent and diffusible interactions, and locates geographic gradients in signaling strength. Numerous spatial transcriptomic approaches, such as spot-based protocols without deconvolution and FISH-based techniques, are compatible with CytoSignal. The tool’s outcomes are verified in situ using a proximity ligation assay, which shows that tissue locations of ligand-receptor protein-protein interactions closely correspond with CytoSignal scores. The current necessity for cellular resolution detection of cell-cell signaling connections and their dynamics is met by this dependable and scalable method.

In multicellular animals, cell-cell communication is an essential mechanism that requires the dimerization of membrane-bound proteins or the binding of secreted ligands to transmembrane receptors. Differentiation, destiny selection, immunological response, growth, and physiological tissue function depend on this communication. Finding the signaling relationships between cells in particular situations is still difficult, though. Some progress has been made by elucidating the expression of ligands and receptors by cell type within diverse tissues using single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA) datasets. Techniques for inferring cell-cell communication from single-cell RNA data have been reported, such as CellPhoneDB, CellChat, NicheNe, SingleCellSignalR, and Scriabin. However, these methods lack information regarding cell spatiality and cannot be used to infer signaling among cell groups.

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