Joel @cincodenada@cybre.space

Oh, also the original video is as seen through the telescope and thus upside-down, which is why it is moving downwards in the frame even though this was at 9am and the sun was very much rising. The still frame is flipped to match the orientation of the sun in the sky, and the last (blurry) photo is as seen through the scope again (but maybe rotated 90 degrees because that's how I was holding my phone up to the lens)

Here's a still frame, and also a cool accident from later in the day, with the sun out of focus but the pinpoint of Mercury still sharp.

The latter is from the way back to return the car, I stopped at a gas station and took another look while filling up. I offered the station attendant a peek, and he was super psyched about it, which kinda made my day 😄

Yesterday morning I got up and grabbed my telescope. Finding it cloudy in town, got a ZipCar and drove south until I could see the sun. 45 minutes later, not far from the 45th parallel, I was rewarded with this: Mercury transiting the sun! It's that small black dot in the lower right, the gray wispy bits are clouds passing in front of the sun 🔭 #astrophoto #astrophotography #mercurytransit #space #astronomy

Hey indie game Mastodon, you should go check out Umbra! I got to meet the devs and try an early demo at PRGE, and can confirm they are lovely people working on a clever, beautiful game. They're almost to their goal with three days left, consider helping put them over the finish line, I want to see this game in its final form! #gameing #indiegame #kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flaggames/umbra-1

Oh, another thing I'm realizing about it I really like: it involves building proficiency in a tool and getting noticeably more efficient in my task, feeling increasingly like a wizard with all my keyboard shortcuts and the like, splaying building outlines all over the place like magic. Shoutout to #JOSM for being well-built for the job, and having a robust plugin system!

Also, on the crooked buildings, it is actually usually more helpful to have buildings outlined sloppily than not at all, so even the sloppy outliners are genuinely helpful! And often are just learning how to do things, which is awesome as well.

The mapping is sometimes mapping out new stuff, and sometimes doing a lot of "why are none of these outlines rectangles?!", which is something the tooling makes very easy to fix very quickly, and it's quite satisfying!

Also, if you want to help classify things without having to have any mapping experience, check out #MapSwipe - it's a great way to kill a few minutes on your phone and help us out! https://mapswipe.org/

For those not familiar: various humanitarian organizations can ask #OpenStreetMap to help map an area (e.g. MSF wants to do a population survey and map before doing an anti-maria campaign), and #OSM will deploy their task force of volunteers to find residential areas via their MapSwipe app, and then task folks like me with outlining building and roads and such.

I've been on a #HOTOSM (https://tasks.hotosm.org/) kick lately, and it's at a really great intersection for me: open source, making maps, doing good/helping people, and fixing up sloppy work done by other (often well-meaning!) people. And it's short bursts of intense focus, as many times as I like. It's actually, uh, really great.

And coming next: Maine, who already uses #RCV to elect in their US Senate and House elections (!), will be using RCV in their presidential elections (!!) in 2020. Very exciting!

But also very exciting to me is that New York City overwhelmingly approved (by an almost 50-point margin!) of ranked-choice voting for primaries and special elections. It's by far the largest constituency in the nation yet to use RCV, and I'm excited to see 5 million voters added to the RCV rank. It's another big step on the (long) path to dismantling the first-past-the-post nonsense, and it's heartening.

Also, on the other end of the spectrum, Easthampton, MA - a city of 16,000 - also approved RCV 🙂

In national news though, dems flipped both chambers of the VA legislature which is an excellent turn of events, especially when things have been so messy there recently, and we likely unseated a (deeply unpopular) governor in Kentucky of all places!

Really nervous about I-976 in WA State, which if passed will gut transit funding and make Seattle's ambitious transit plans much more uncertain. It's pretty far behind right now, not unrecoverably so, but it doesn't look great

Ref 88, which would un-ban affirmative action, is in a similar spot. Blargh.

(Yes, I live in Oregon now, but I still have a lot of connections to WA and want Seattle to be a livable city in the future please)

On that note, anyone have any socket 1150 #motherboards they like? I don't give a shit about overclocking, I just want it to have a non-terrible interface (keyboard-driven is fine!) and have it keep a consistent boot order, really.

I should probably just upgrade the processor while I'm at it but ugh I don't wanna deal with all that.