I wish you luck saving them. its been an interesting year.

make sure to remove any blooms before you spray if you havent used the stuff in the past. neem oil and every fungicide ive seen screw with reporoductive cycles of friend and foe alike. i say that as much for anyone else stumbling onto this thread.

alternating neem oil and "Bonide Captain Jack's Copper Fungicide". the fungicide was just the cheapest one i saw on amazon when it became clear neem oil wasnt gonna be enough this year. my 4b winter was weak, closer to 6a, so fungi have been going crazy. all the lilac leafs turned black and fell off in july across the whole region. like they decided to nope out of summer and start fall right away.

almoat lost a couple roses to that early this spring so i've been spraying obsessively. mildew seems to be under control so far.

there had been beans and corn in there early on. the pumpkins had other plans. they'd even made it onto the plum tree but a storm yanked them off last week.

the article ends on a pitch for an ai bot making your paid posts. it's trash. the article itself is the kind of lazy trash you get when you start leaning into monitization. you're right, the fediverse isnt a monolith, not even inside distinct cultural regions.

for me at least. the answer to more media like this article appearing. so we grow an have more content and grow more. will be finding somewhere else to be. thats just the social media cycle. something cool gets made. a community starts forming. someone says "look at those idiots. dont they know how money works? a few of them could be making so much of it. i'll show them how and make some myself too". the rough edges of the space get smoothed out because if you want to make the site sucessful it should look more like how the sucessful spaces look. and a bunch of people move on to make something new again while bots have arguments with bots.

because being excited about a new hobby isnt cool. actually starting a new hobby is an insult to all the people who'd been real fans of the hobby before you. this is the internet.

creators are welcome to post in the fediverse and tag their paid platform so long as they respect the rules of whatever community they post in. everyone has to eat. turning the fediverse into a tansactional platform is just coporate social media with extra steps. the articles getting downvoted because its one step shy of a linkedin ad disguised as a post. if i wanted to read posts about the beauty of the grind or some other nonsese, i'd be on fucking twitter or facebook. this place exists specifically to not be those places.

oh i had to go biological warfare on the masquito larve twice in the first three weeks before i add the duckweed and small solar fountains.

theres a little one in the back that creats a dorky waterfall to keep the water circulating. so far the duckweeds kept evaporation down and the toads keep the misquitoes in check.

couple beams to sit on and watch bees visit. the beams and the planter shade half the pond to help keep the temp down. so now i have a couple toads hanging out. the planter bottom slopes so water runs off the sides instead of into the pond. but i didnt get enough sand an rock in the bottom layer of it. so the soil in the planters been too wet for most things this season.

late diagnosed millenials are like the spiderman meme. finding out most of their close social circle was neurodivergent. not hard to predict self sorting like that. who wants to exhaust themselves trying to maintian connections with people who wont understand them and often get upset at being asked to try?

well damnit now i need that koolaid pitch in my life and my bank account is angry.

guys at work comlaining about their divorce to anyone entering an enclosed room. four different times when i was forced to work in an office and twice so far in slack. mother fucker i dont known you but i already get why she left. stop trying to force random people to be your therapist.

It's this uninvited commenting on the bots part that has me downvoting it. It's presenting itself at an authority here. If a user in the comments called the bot to fact check something and the bot did a bad job, i'd just block the bot. I'd even be able to look over that users history to get an idea of the bot's purpose. But this bot comes in and says "here's the truth", then spits out something i'd expect to see on twitters current itteration.

If the problem you're trying to solve is the reliability of the media being posted here. Take the left/right bias call out and find a decent databse on new source quality. Start the bots post out with resources for people to develop their own skill at spotting bad news content.

If the problem you're trying to solve is the visibility of political bias in content posted here. So the down vote button isnt acting as a proxy for that. Adding a function for the community to rate left/right lean like rotten tomatoes sounds interesting, so long as you take the reliability rating out of the bot. You can't address both media reliability and political bias in one automated post. nyt and npr being too pearl clutchy for my taste. and some outlet that exists only on facebook having the same assumed credibility as the associated press. are wildly different issues.

*stupid phone, i'll live with the spelling but not repeated words.

been using Darktable for years now. had the same trouble with it as people going photoshop to gimp have at first, because my brain was all in lightroom. once i sat down and watched some videos of people explaining their own darktable process and experimented new workflows. it became everything lightroom was, but without the constantly scolding me about bumping my subscription adobe did.

nazis learned alot from the klan and the jim crow era. for the purpose of brick throwing targets, they are the same.

I'm in the same spot and 95% settled on moving to debian.

xubuntu has been good to me the last 10yrs. But its been about xfce, ubuntu got be part of the relationship because it was easy when i knew very little about linux. that and it can run well on a potato with a bunch of computer parts just duct taped randomly onto it. which is basically what my dumpster dived laptop was 10 yes ago.

thats just a short term fixes too though. the ads will get more intrusive and annoying. and at some point pro ads will just turning themselves back on. because this is a company and it wants to sell things.

cotton, wool, leather, modal and denim for me. found a tshirt i liked and just order 10 in the same color online when they wear out. same for jeans, socks, underwear and hoodies. rather dress like an npc than decide how annoying i'll accept my clothes being day to day. leather boots, havent owned sneakers in 15 yrs. leather jacket for cool weather. merino wool sweaters and a long heavy wool coat for thundersnow season.

modal beats out cotton sheets to me, but unblended cotton is still pretty comfy. layers of merino wool blankets. finally managed to get leather furniture this winter and my livingroom is usable even when im having a bad day.

also ereaders and stone paper. after gritting my teeth and feeling gross because everything is written on dry scratchy hateful paper. being able to read or just write down a quick note comfortably was kinda life changing.

"it's possible i buried a self delete timebomb in one of our repos years ago. enjoy looking for it just incase assholes"

was a bit of a running joke for years even before our son was diagnosted. but covid times offered the perfect period to hyper focus on researching his diagnosis. which led to reading all my old school records. finding all the vaugue language being used to dismiss my childhood behaviors that in his records, were used as the basis of a diagnosis. was an interesting "oh son of a bitch!" moment.

At this point in my life, i only put effort into maintaining two friendships. Both of which are a couple decades old now. One is ND at the very least. The other was diagnost as autistic about six months ago, to absolutely no ones surprise. We really do tend to drift into our own little social circles of peace.