One of the few remaining reasons to remain engaged with the main social media networks is news. Local news is basically dead, consolidated under Sinclair Broadcast Group for television or Gannett/Tribune for print. With almost no paid journalists anymore, and commercial media thus limited to rewording AP/Reuters pieces or even straight-up press releases by other commercial entities, people have been forced to rely on one-another and citizen journalism via social media to find out what's going on whenever shit's going down.

It is vitally important to remember that these "local reports" also fall under the same engagement/algorithm rules as I talked about on my main post on this subject, and more dire or outrageous announcements will "trend" regardless of whether they are true. Given how difficult it is to validate real-time local information in the current environment, with everyone having to rely on whoever says they're familiar with the situation or in the area and no ability to validate or cross-reference those assertions? Basic media awareness regarding misinformation avoidance is crucial to avoid falling prey to those who want to manipulate you towards their own ends.

That said, the "citizen reporting via social media" thing is only particularly relevant when you're talking about local news. Things occurring in your area directly. You do not need to rely upon social media to get national news, and you shouldn't. You don't want to be telling the algorithm what your politics are via what news articles you click on, because it will feed you things designed to upset and outrage you based upon that information in efforts to "engage" you. Again - regardless of whether or not any of it is actually true, hyperbolic exaggeration, or outright falsehood.

Good news is, big corporations do not hold a monopoly on national news information. Once things are put out there into the public sphere, other organizations and entities like WikiNews can take that information and use it in other ways. My personal preference, especially in times such as these, is aggregator sites such as The Morning News and What the Fuck Just Happened Today?. By breaking a bunch of headlines meant to sucker-punch you in the emotions and draw you in down into a much more consolidated and baseline-factual description of the day's events, you get information that you can dive deeper into on an as-needed basis while not being fed a stream of upsetting things that you have no ability to affect. Awareness is important, but remember - once you're aware of something? If you can't do anything about that unpleasant thing, continuously engaging with it and exposing yourself to the thing that's hurting you is basically self-flagellation... and the only thing it's doing is inflating the engagement statistics of some corporation somewhere so they can make money off your misery.

Save your energy for the things you can do. Become aware, then give your attention to more useful endeavors.

Speaking of which - if anyone has other reliable news aggregators or sources of information which can be used outside of the social media bubble? Please do share!

TreeHouse Foods Announces Voluntary Recall of Griddle Products

From the FDA:

TreeHouse Foods, Inc. is expanding its voluntary recall to include all products manufactured at one facility and still within their shelf-life. The recall is expanded to include frozen toaster waffle, Belgian waffle and pancake products, due to the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria monocytogenes is an organism that can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people, and others with weakened immune systems. Healthy individuals may suffer only short-term symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain, and diarrhea.

You can check the recall website for the full list of products, but to make it simple - this is effectively every brand of frozen waffle or pancake aside from Eggo. Amazon/Whole Foods, ALDI, all store brands by markets owned by Kroger, Publix, Walmart/Sam's Club, Target, Kodiak brands, Nature's Path brands, Trader Joe's... if you're in Canada, No Name brand too. Check your freezer against the list of affected brands. Listeria is no joke, it can persist in reservoirs in the body for months before suddenly causing major symptoms once circumstances weaken your immune system enough to allow for a body-wide infection.

BrucePac Recalls Ready-To-Eat Meat and Poultry Products Due to Possible Listeria Contamination

From mamoru on Tumblr:

consumer brands that have at least one item involved in the recall (so far, the recall list is updating daily, consider this list incomplete):

trader joe's, good and gather, boston market, atkins, dole, marketside, red's, little salad bar, fresh express, HEB, whitsons culinary group, rao's, michael angelo's, el monterey, fusia, trader ming's, amazon fresh, meijer, giant eagle, kroger, signature select, taylor farms, raley's, michelina's, eat!, garden choice, jenny craig, great value, udi's, wegmans, 7-eleven, freshly made, a bunch of generic brands, ready meals, amazon kitchen, home chef, racetrack, save mart, bistro 28, and don pancho.

most of the recalled items are ready made foods like salads, chicken tikka masala, chicken and rice, chicken fajita, chicken piccata, chicken fried rice, pasta, pasta salads, chicken lo mein, chicken alfredo, meal kits, pasta bowls, quesadillas, burrito bowls, burritos, tacos, enchiladas, taquitos, wraps, and frozen dinners that you just heat up. refrigerated and frozen foods.

and this is in addition to a TON of bulk food that is in the freezers of restaurants and food industry type places, and ingredients that are used in generic ready made foods across the country.

the recall list is incomplete. all of the listeria meat has not been located, identified, or removed from circulation yet. although a hefty chunk of the recall involves salads that have gone bad by now, many of the recalled items have best by dates into 2025 and 2026.

A continuously-updated list of recalled products is on the USDA/FSIS recall page listed above.

Please Note!

As archive.org is currently down, with no given statement as yet for restoration due to ongoing DDOS attacks, I will be accelerating my plans to copy over content from cohost which I still wish to share. Archive.org's wayback machine was going to be the backup redirect for cohost once their servers go offline, and in the absence of that being guaranteed at this time I'm going to make certain that everything I want to keep/preserve is here sooner rather than later since the date for cohost going dark is "when we run out of money to keep the servers going."

Consider this a suggestion that you do the same with any lingering cohost items you wish to preserve, as the Internet Archive is a non-profit operating on an already-limited budget due to being slammed hard by a publishers' lawsuit over the summer. Cohost content could, conceivably, disappear into the void once the servers go offline.

Video for the "Nobody is Normal" campaign by Childline, a UK children's charity.

(Cross-posted from newcomers)

1.) Markdown Posting

If you miss being able to post via Markdown instead of HTML, the beta features page has an option to opt into the "New Create Entries Page." This allows for creating posts using Markdown, much as the comment function has a Markdown option. Just as with cohost, HTML input into the post will overrule/overwrite the Markdown you're using (if you want to get silly with it).

2.) HTML and CSS Stuff

If you instead want to jump feet-first into the brave new world of all-HTML posts, I recommend w3schools as a reference and primer. They have really good walkthroughs of current-gen HTML5, as well as CSS (and even JavaScript, though that doesn't apply here). I refer to them regularly when Markdown is insufficient and I can't remember what the various style options for an HTML element are.

3.) Your "Dashboard" is Public

I haven't seen any evidence of this being misused here, but it's an old carryover from the LiveJournal days and people coming from cohost tend to be surprised by it. Everyone can see what shows up on your Reading page, unless the original creator of the post has restricted that entry. Not only is it an open HTML link, but it's literally a link on your main page for anybody to click on. If you wouldn't want someone else seeing that you're following something, you might want to use a separate feed-reader and just subscribe to the feed there (which you can also do for actual public dreamwidth journals, as they have an RSS and Atom link on each front page).

4.) You Can Customize Your Journal

Another carryover from the LiveJournal days, but also something which used to be a big deal on Tumblr and wasn't possible on cohost. If you're into the CSS crimes stuff, or just want something which reflects your personality/interests, you can customize your journal's CSS to give it a unique look. You could easily get very in-depth with this if you wanted. Or heck, just make it look (mostly) like cohost did if you'd like - you could pull the CSS off cohost itself as long as it's up, or use their rehosting tool (once it's live). I actually specifically incorporated the "cohost font" of Atkinson Hyperlegible onto my page because I like how easy it is on the eyes.

5.) Tags Don't Work Like Cohost

Yes, you can tag your posts - but unlike cohost and Tumblr, they aren't global. You can't click on a tag and see other people who have used it, unless it's a tag in a community (and even then, those community tags only apply to that particular community). There's no "I enjoy seeing the art people make, so I follow the 'artists on dreamwidth' tag." Interests are the closest equivalent; instead of each post being tagged individually, people list their overall interests and you can either search them or browse through them to find people who've said they like that thing. That said, there's nothing requiring people to post about the things they're interested in.

6.) It Takes a Bit More Work to Connect

This is a very early "web 2.0" system. As in, "web 2.0" was coined in 1999 per the Wikipedia article I just linked and the code for LiveJournal (on which dreamwidth is based) started being written that same year. There's been 25 years of intervening development since then designed to make the "social" part of social media more seamless, and this place doesn't really have any of that. That means you have to do more of the legwork yourself. You can't engage with posts or users without actually engaging with them - there's no reblogging/rechosting, no "likes," nothing on any post except perhaps a comment box. So you're going to have to search, reach out, or maybe just DIY it. There are communities such as this one (newcomers) and addme which make it possible to find other people, and ysabetwordsmith's followfriday is a community meant for recommending other communities. You can also create your own! It looks like someone's already made eggbug_writes as a community for former cohost writers and writing-prompt-makers, and there's nothing that says you can't create some other central meeting-place communities for people to regather and find one-another again.

7.) Protect Yourself

You can turn off or limit Private Messages in your Account Settings under the Privacy tab, which is also how you can turn off anonymous comments and IP logging (which is on by default). You can also ban users directly from commenting on your own journal page there too. I encourage you to liberally take the actions you need to make it hard for other people to make your life more unpleasant. If anybody is actively violating the Terms of Service (section XI - Member Conduct), you can also report them... but there is no sitewide blocking or muting like there was on cohost, so keep that in mind and take proactive steps to make sure you aren't giving access you don't want to people you don't want having access to you. This place is generally more insular due to its old design functions - it takes work to search out others, which limits discoverability of people you want to know and people you don't in equal measure - but it's still possible for you to show up in the Latest Things global feed (which is a true global feed), so please take steps to take care of yourself in advance if someone barging in and being an awful human on your page will be worse than a "sigh, delete, ban" response for you.

I haven't seen anything of the sort happen, but that doesn't mean it can't. I never saw any of the cohost-related issues first-hand either.