As Twitter changed hands at the end of October, another very similar social media site was experiencing something of an influx.
Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging site named after an extinct type of mammoth, recorded 120,000 new users in the four days following billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, its German founder Eugen Rochko tells TIME. Many of them were Twitter users seeking a new place to call their online home.
Those users, whether they knew it or not, were following in the footsteps of Rochko, 29, who began coding Mastodon in 2016 after becoming disillusioned with Twitter. “I was thinking that being able to express myself online to my friends through short messages was very important to me, important also to the world, and that maybe it should not be in the hands of a single corporation,” Rochko says. “It was generally related to a feeling of distrust of the top down control that Twitter exercised.”
Pew Research Center has a very interesting report with several maps and charts that show differences among cultures. The report begins:
People in Central and Eastern Europe are less accepting of Muslims and Jews, same-sex marriage, and legal abortion.
The Iron Curtain that once divided Europe may be long gone, but the continent today is split by stark differences in public attitudes toward religion, minorities and social issues such as gay marriage and legal abortion. Compared with Western Europeans, fewer Central and Eastern Europeans would welcome Muslims or Jews into their families or neighborhoods, extend the right of marriage to gay or lesbian couples or broaden the definition of national identity to include people born outside their country.
These differences emerge from a series of surveys conducted by Pew Research Center between 2015 and 2017 among nearly 56,000 adults (ages 18 and older) in 34 Western, Central and Eastern European countries, and they continue to divide the continent more than a decade after the European Union began to expand well beyond its Western European roots to include, among others, the Central European countries of Poland and Hungary, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. . .
Grooming Dept Vertu is quite a shaving soap. The label shows a work from Picasso’s Guitar series. The soap’s fragrance is “Chocolate, Osmanthus, Cognac, Castoreum, Patchouli, Tonka, and Vanilla” and its list of ingredients:
My Green Ray brush did a great job on the lather, which had a slightly brown color, something I’ve noticed in other vanilla-containing soaps. The lather itself was fragrant (see above) and also extremely thick, rich, and slick.
Maggard Razors V2 open-comb is a clone of the Parker 24C/26C, but the Maggard handle I’m using is superior to the Parker handles. This is an excellent razor, extremely good in both comfort and efficiency. Three passes produced a perfectly smooth face, to which I applied a small splash of Lenthéric Tweed cologne and a small dab of Hermès Eau d’orange verte Moisturizing face lotion to balmify the cologne.
The tea this morning is Murchie’s Hairy Crab Oolong, an extremely tasty tea: “Named for its leaves, which are serrated like a hairy crustacean, this oolong is delicate, refreshing, and incredibly fragrant. An excellent introductory oolong.” Oolongs are brewed at a lower temperature than black tea. Murchie’s offers this guide:
Later On 