David O'Donnell

@NanoRaptor@bitbang.social I was postmaster at AOL when the floodgates opened and we unleashed the unwashed masses on an unsuspecting Internet. I (and my trusty mostly-queer team!) were ruthless and unyielding in our efforts to blunt the worst abuses, leading to “that user and their account have been terminated” appearing in some .sigs of early Internet anti-spammers. I was also part of the Spamford Wallace lawsuit (he was furious that we manually returned as much of the spam he inundated us with as possible). Small, tiny things from my distant past, but I will always be proud of what we tried to do.

@warandpeas@mastodon.social when viewing on a small screen, one panel per image is easier on my rapidly-aging eyes.

@j_bertolotti When I first joined, I saw a suggestion that I follow Lisa Melton https://mastodon.social/@lisamelton — absolutely guaranteed to result in wicked cool people and topics to follow! Highly recommended.

@Njord@zeroes.ca Because cleaning the cat box is super-fun!

@lisamelton that judgment wasn’t just a burn, it was a rendering into plasma.

@aparrish The level of blind trust in the output of theft engines that are repeatedly shown to make things up is soul-crushing.

@Annacats@mastodon.social My Antonio meows, but also gently taps me (leg or arm, usually) if I don’t respond. If I still don’t respond, the tapping repeats until I do. His sister, Violetta, has learned that this behavior elicits the desired attention from me, so now she does it sometimes, as well. The major difference is that Antonio lets me trim his front claws, while Violetta would rather die than let me bring a clipper anywhere near her paws… so I react to her much more quickly when I see a paw starting to lift. She has trained me well!

@Lana Actually, let me amend that: a *non-white*, *competent*, *female* person probably makes him reflexively shit his diapers.

@Simplicator @j_bertolotti Yeah, it’s not always as easy as it should be. I had to hunt to find the link to her, but trust me, it is more than worth all the little frictions. Lisa is the main reason I stayed, and even though I have found a great few handfuls of other accounts to follow, every post she makes gives me more reasons to stay!

@Lana You beat me to it! 🥳

@MarkAsser@beige.party I have to renew mine soon. I hope they’ll at least offer the option of a pedophile-free edition.

@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer I think it’s more like “defend,” as in “we will appear to defend whichever country or power group we think will serve our purposes right now, and screw the rest of you meat puppets.”