Mat B

OK, so I messed up here and missed a birthday I definitely remember.

32) Mrs B and I got married a couple of days before my birthday and we went on our honeymoon to Portmeirion in Wales. For those who don't know of it, Portmeirion is a private village/estate, open to the public during the day, where you can stay in either the hotels or some of the houses in the village. For 60s Sci-Fi fans it's where they filmed The Prisoner. It's on the coast and has it's own woodland. An incredible, magical place (see link below).

It was in mid-March (which in Wales is usually cold and probably wet), but the weather was beautiful, spring sunshine, for our whole trip. We stayed in an apartment in the village and at night, beautifully illuminated, when closed to the public, we literally had the whole place to ourselves. Like a personal enchanted village by the sea. Proper magic.

On my birthday. A five month pregnant Mrs B sneaked out early while I was sleeping and wrote a huge message in the sand on the beach, which our apartment overlooked.

We had breakfast overlooking the beach, I saw the birthday message she'd secretly written for me. After breakfast we went back to bed for a bit. Laying there I felt our baby kick for the first time.

https://portmeirion.wales/galleries/photos

Boosting myself like a Fediverse floozy, but the world needs Dennis right now, more than ever.

The Fedi/Mastodon is revelatory, I love it, but the emotional weight is greater and very different.

Honesty is powerful. I'm not even going to talk about Instagram or Facebook, but Twitter was/is a combative place, even if you are passive. Here it's completely different, many people are very open, myself included to a degree, which is refreshing and a welcome humanising of social media, but with that comes with it's own challenges.

I care about people. People share their physical, emotional and psychological struggles here. I empathise, I try to understand and support folks as best I can with my level of understanding. It's a lot though. I'm out of my depth frequently, I want to help but don't have a clue how to, and don't want to say something stupid or insensitive, no matter how well intentioned. But at the same time, I don't want to stay silent, because I want you to know I care.

Often a "like/⭐" means I hear you but have no useful words. It feels lame, but it's probably better than what my awkward brain will come up with as a reply.

An exchange in the last couple of days touched me. I mentioned it to Mrs B and as I read one message out my chin went, my voice broke and my eyes filled.

It's different here, but it's a new (but much better) set of challenges.

Bless you all lovely Fedifolk ❤️ :bb:

TL:DR Encouragement for newer Mastodon users and explanation of my personal follow logic.

Folks who follow me here. I get quite a few followers and I don't always notice or follow back immediately because there's a lot of noise in my mentions, and I'm a bit chaotic generally.

I don't want to offend anyone and appreciate you signing up to hear my bullshit, so as a rule of thumb for a follow back, if you post or boost a lot of politics I'm probably not going to follow, I have way too much already, this is my happy place.

If we've not interacted, then I often don't notice. I'm here to talk, so if people talk to me it's a conversation and if I realise you follow me already but I missed it, often that will prompt me. Don't be shy.

If you just want to silently rubberneck at my ongoing car crash of nonsense then we're all good too.

I say all this because when I very first started here it felt a bit alien and cliquey, but over time I learnt it was ok to join in, and people were accepting, as long as I read the room and got the vibe.

I absolutely love it here, it's a revelation for me personally, and I hope it is for others too.

I was once on the outskirts, looking at the, as I saw them, "cool kids" talking amongst themselves, and it can appear like that, but it's not. If you're polite, and don't get weird (in a bad way, we're all weird here) folks will, in my experience, be nice.

Don't be a dick, join in and you can find your people.

Love to all the Fedifolk, new and old ❤️

We're not perfect but fuck me, look at the alternatives.

Dear Instagram "DJs", "mixing" digital files synced for you. Please stop with the performative knob twiddling every two seconds, explosion hands when you apply a bit of low pass filter on the mixer like you're some kind of musical prodigy. Mug punters might buy it but you look like a tit to anyone with an ounce of knowledge.

So many twats out there.

Watch Jeff Mills instead.

In my village someone owns an ugly Volkswagen Beetle (the MK2 relaunched version) with green, metallic, pearlessent paint. I normally shudder and avert my eyes when I walk past, but today I looked at it and noticed they have a small replica of the car, in exactly the same colour, on the dashboard. This makes me incredibly happy for some reason. Why though? Does the driver have a memory issue and need a reminder of what vehicle they're driving? Or maybe they love the look of the car so much it makes them sad they can't see it whilst driving. I need to know if the tiny car also has a tiny car in its dashboard? I shall have to befriend the owner and see if I can get them to give me a lift so I can sneak a peek at it.

One of my team decided to try and use Copilot (Microsoft AI) to draft a holiday season rota and output it into Excel. The output was chaotic nonsense, but the funniest thing was in the first column, for days of the week, it decided there are days called Seturday, Saturd, Senday and, confusingly, Ocsday.

The film Jo Jo Rabbit is, in my opinion, very underrated. Probably the sharpest satire of the century so far. More prescient than I'm comfortable with.

A postmodern comedy about Nazi Germany that is basically a huge fucking mirror. Conspiracy theories, persecution, cult of personality, groupthink and absurdity taken as fact.

Hilarious, absurd and shocking at points (some of the most outlandish ideas are actually factual from the era). A goofy comedy that speaks hard truths if you're willing to listen, rather than write angry letters about trivialising Nazi Germany.