Monica

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case that -- according to most articles I've read -- could upend "Section 230", the law that protects Internet platforms from consequences of user-contributed content. For example, if you post something on Facebook and there's some legal problem with you, that falls on you, as the author, and not on Facebook, who merely hosted it. This law was written in the days of CompuServe and AOL, when message boards and the like were the dominant Internet discourse. While there's a significant difference between these platforms and the phone company -- that is, platforms can alter or delete content -- this still feels like basically the "common carrier" argument. This makes sense to me: you're responsible for your words; the place you happened to post it in public isn't.

osewalrus has written a lot about Section 230 over the years -- he explains this stuff better and way more authoritatively than I do. (Errors are mine, credit is his, opinions are mine.)

When platforms moderate content things get more complicated, and I'm seeing a lot of framing of the current case that's rooted in this difference. From what I understand, that aspect is irrelevant, and unless the Supreme Court is going to be an activist court that legislates, hosting user-contributed content shouldn't be in danger. But we live in the highly-polarized US of 2023 with politically-motivated judges, so this isn't at all a safe bet.

The reason none of that should matter is that the case the court is hearing, Gonzales vs. Google, isn't about content per se. It's about the recommendation algorithm, Google's choice to promote objectionable content. This is not passive hosting. That should matter.

The key part of Section 230 says:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).

The court can rule against Google without affecting this clause at all. The decision shouldn't be about whether Google is the "publisher" or "speaker". Rather, in this case Google is the advertiser, and Section 230 doesn't appear to cover promotion at all.

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not especially knowledgeable about Section 230. I'm a regular person on the Internet with concerns about the proper placement of accountability. Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others choose to promote user-contributed content, while platforms like Dreamwidth, Mastodon, and many forums merely present content in the order in which it arrives. That should matter. Will it? No idea.

Moderation is orthogonal. Platform owners should be able to remove content they do not want to host, just like the owner of a physical bulletin board can. In a just world, they would share culpability only if objectionable content was brought to their attention and they did not act. At that point they've said it's ok, as opposed to saying nothing at all because nobody can read everything on a platform of even moderate size. This is how I understand the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to work, and the same principle should apply. In a just world, as I said, which isn't the world we live in. (I, or rather my job title, am a registered agent for DMCA claims, and I have to respond to claims I receive.)

I really hope that the court, even a US court in 2023, focuses on the key points and doesn't use this case to muck with things not related to the case at hand.

I was at an event this weekend, my first since Pennsic. Pennsic, in turn, was my first event since before the pandemic. I think this infrequency of exposure has made me really notice some things that have been gradually changing for decades. Herewith a long ramble that could definitely use more thought (and probably editing), but this is where I am now.

( Read more... )

We had friends over Saturday afternoon/evening and one of the games they brought, unopened, was The Guild of Merchant Explorers. Players (up to four) have individual copies of a map for exploration. You start in a central city and explore from there. When you explore all of the hexes of the same terrain type in a cluster, you get to establish a settlement there. In future rounds, you can explore from the city or from any of your settlements. Some hexes contain riches (coins), and some of the sea hexes contain ruins (shipwrecks) that hold treasure. There are three randomly-chosen objectives that score extra points; these are things like "have settlements on three continents" or "explore three ruins at the edges of the map". In the remote corners of the map there are towers that you get more points for exploring.

The game mechanic is interesting: in each of four rounds players simultaneously take the same actions (plus one per), which are known in advance but come out in a random order. Actions are things like "explore two grassland spaces" or "explore three sea hexes but they have to be in a straight line". In-progress explorers are cleared at the end of each round, so one of your goals is to complete exploring regions so you can build the settlement. You know what's coming, so you can look ahead and see that you'll be able to fill those last two desert hexes or whatever -- but sometimes you're not yet in position when the card comes out, so you have to plan for that. I can see how you could get mired in analysis paralysis, but it's not a long, complex game -- box says 45 minutes, which feels about right after you learn it. (I didn't time our first game, but I know it was longer than that.)

There's one unpredictable element in each round: a special card that means you draw two cards with more powerful actions, keep one, and use it. You then keep that card for the rest of the game, so the one you chose in round 1 will come out again at least two more times. (In the fourth round, instead of drawing a new card you choose one of your existing ones to use again.) These cards usually let you explore more spaces or more kinds of spaces, like "explore one grassland and all the hexes around it" or "explore one of each type plus two sea" or "explore five contiguous desert hexes".

There are several ways to earn victory points that are always available. The three special goals add more. And the treasures you find can award victory points based on conditions, like "one per mountain settlement". You don't have enough actions to do everything, of course, so you'll choose which paths to pursue based on all of those and perhaps by what your special action cards enable you (alone) to do. The game comes with four maps, some of which have special rules we haven't explored yet, so there is additional variability. I assume this means there will be expansion sets in the future.

The game is not very interactive; what you do does not affect other players and vice versa, aside from the races to the special goals (first person to do it gets more points) and competition for treasures. This won't be enough interaction for some, but it works for me.

We all liked the game a lot. After we'd played twice one of them asked "do you like this game?" and we both said "yes, very much". He then asked "would you like this copy?" -- turns out they'd both been at the same playtesting or preview event and thus each got a copy of the game, so they were happy to pass along a gift. Nice!

On Sunday we got together with different friends to play games and took this along. We played a few times with different people throughout the day, and everyone we introduced it to liked it a lot too.

A friend is traveling (with her housemate) and I offered to go feed her cat and give him some people-time each day. Her original flight was delayed to Sunday, so I made my first visit Monday morning.

It was 39 degrees in her house. The thermostat said it was holding at 60, but...no. I walked around the house checking for open or broken windows (none found). I went down to the basement and stared at the furnace -- no error codes or blinking lights, one steady light (so it had power), and that exhausted my knowledge of furnaces. I fed the cat, cycled through the thermostat programming to double-check things, reset the hold, built up some warm places to burrow, and tried to reach my friend (who was several timezones west of me, so I didn't expect an immediate response). I asked if she minded if I brought her cat to my house if we couldn't figure out the problem.

When she got my message she asked if the power was out (no, there were lights), and we speculated about whether power had gone out and come back on. I said I'd look for blinking or wrong clocks when I went back. Offhandedly, she wondered if a power outage would have somehow turned the thermostat off -- had I noticed if it was on? Um, I assumed it was because it showed me programming and let me set a hold temperature, and my thermostat doesn't let you do that if it's not on, and also it would be dangerously bad design if a power outage killed your post-power-resumption heat. So I went back later, and sure enough, the three-way toggle (cold - off - heat) was in the "off" position.

It's a physical switch, so I suspect my friend and the other person living in that house are going to have Conversations. Ouch. (Also, no blinking or very-wrong clocks.)

I turned on the heat and waited for the temperature to rise several degrees to make sure everything was on track. When I left last night the house was up to 45 degrees and the cat was very friendly. This morning everything was fine -- up to 65. (Yeah, maybe I overshot a little on that hold, but...)

Here's the scary part: originally they were going to leave on Friday, when the daytime high was 3F and the temperature was sub-zero before Shabbat started. When we were making the original plans, she'd said she'd feed the cat Friday so I didn't need to come until Saturday, and I said I wouldn't be able to come until Saturday night and that was fine with her. Friday night was frigid-cold here. I shudder to think what temperature the house would have been on my first visit if her flight hadn't been cancelled.

A few weeks ago I created an account on Mastodon and have been trying it out as an alternative to Twitter (and I suppose Facebook, which I don't use). I'm not leaving Dreamwidth, my friends here, and DW's support for longer-form posts; DW and "social platforms" are good at different things.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the part of the Mastodon community (-ies) that I've encountered so far feels to me like the earlier days of the Internet. It feels more friendly, helpful, and supportive than even pre-Musk Twitter (driven by algorithms and ad sales). It kind of reminds me of some of the more social Usenet newgroups of yore, like the Rialto and alt.callahans.

It's different, and different takes time to get used to, and different is sometimes better and sometimes worse. And getting set up isn't going to be as easy as going to Twitter or Facebook and clicking "sign up".

barriers to entry

I actually looked at Mastodon back in the spring, when the Twitter thing was starting to happen, but I bounced. You see, Mastodon isn't a service, like Twitter or Facebook is; it's a federated platform. The best analogy I've seen to setting yourself up on Mastodon is getting an email address. You can get email services from lots of places and they all inter-operate. Choose Gmail or outlook.com or your ISP's bundled account or your own server or anything else; no matter what you choose, you'll be able to send and receive email. Email providers aren't all the same and you might find your choices have consequences -- Gmail silently nukes certain messages and you'll never know, and aol.com is oft seen as a bad neighborhood. You choose an email provider, follow its rules, and deal with its issues -- and if you decide to move later, with some disruption you can. Your choice matters some, but it's not permanent.

Mastodon servers are like that. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of Mastodon servers out there, and there are lists of recommended servers that you can find with a search for something like "find mastodon server", and from the outside it can be overwhelming. Back in the spring I saw that I had to Make Decisions first, and I didn't know enough to make decisions, and I hadn't seen the email analogy, and I was only casually looking and wasn't invested...and I walked away.

All of that is true today, too, except that more of my friends were moving there so I had a reason to dig a little deeper.

I found one of those pages of "50 servers you might consider" or some such, many of which are aligned to particular interests like Linux or open-source software or furries or art, and started browsing things I wouldn't mind being affiliated with. (Your Mastodon server, like your email provider, shows up in your "address", so there's an appearance aspect to it.) Servers can have their own moderation rules and terms of service and those are things I care about, so I read those pages on short-list candidates, eliminating some by what I found there. I identified a server that aligned well with my interests, my views on moderation, and the expected local conversation (more about that in a bit), and applied for an account.

Yeah, "applied" in this case. Some servers are totally open -- anyone can create an account. Some were but then Twitter started to implode and servers that had had 5000 people were seeing tens of thousands of new accounts and buckling under the load, so they went to a wait-list model. The server I joined asked for a short "why do you want to join this server?" message.

There are some huge, general-purpose, open servers. I recommend against trying to join them now. Across the network of all public Mastodon servers, there were something like a million new accounts in the first week of the Musk era. These servers aren't usually being run by well-funded megacorps but by mostly volunteers trying to keep up with demand.

the fediverse

Mastodon isn't a single site or a single thing. It'd decentralized and distributed. "Mastodon" is the name of the software. Strictly speaking, when you join a Mastodon server you are joining a server that is part of "the fediverse" -- "fed" like in "federated". People talk about being "on Mastodon", and what they mean is "on one of these servers", and sometimes a well-meaning person tries to correct your terminology, and I want to give y'all a heads-up.

The fediverse has other "things" besides Mastodon. There's a whole big set of open-source projects for sharing different kinds of things across a network, with an interface called ActivityPub at the center of it. I don't know very much about that stuff yet.

So, technically: there is the fediverse, and Mastodon servers are part of it, and so are other things. But there's no mastodon.com that runs it all, like twitter.com or facebook.com. Remember: like email, not like corporate social media.

(There is a mastodon.com. Of course there is; every URL you can imagine that consists of a single English word is claimed by someone. This one is a forestry site.)

sounds like a lot of work; how's this better than Twitter?

Still with me?

On the surface Mastodon looks kind of like Twitter, federation aside. You can see short posts from other people in a feed, and you can interact with them (liking them, replying to them, etc). There's a big difference, though, and I think it's an important difference that helps with constructive discourse instead of amplifying the loudest people.

Twitter creates, and Google+ after the early days created, a "feed" for you, curated by an algorithm. I don't know how G+'s worked; on Twitter, a post (tweet) is more likely to show up in your feed if it's posted by someone with a lot of reach (the reach get reacher), or if it has a lot of likes (encourages socks, bots, and echo chambers), or if it's somehow connected to someone you follow. That last seems to be the least important, anecdotally. I almost never use my Twitter feed because it's full of stuff I don't care about. In Musk's Twitter, rumor has it that paid members also get substantial priority.

Mastodon gives you multiple feeds (I'll get back to that), and the "algorithm" is "reverse chronological", like it is here on DW and probably on every blogging site you've ever used. You see stuff as it was posted, not something yanked out of its context from three days ago and pushed at you now, and not yanked out of its context of all the other conversation happening around it. Nothing has priority; you get what you asked for, in order. I've found the things I read and interact with here on DW to be much more thoughtful, nuanced, and civil than what I see on Twitter (granted post length is a factor too), and so far that's what I'm seeing on Mastodon too. (BTW, posts on Mastodon are by default 500 characters, larger than Twitter, and it's a server setting. I've seen one server that lets you use 5000 characters so long as you put most of it behind a cut tag.)

Mastodon also gives you multiple feed options, so you can choose the size of your fire hose. You can see just posts from (or boosted) by the people you follow, or just posts from your local server (regardless of who you follow), or a "federated" view that reaches out to other servers and does, um, something based on the people you follow and their connections. I haven't explored that one much yet. It's big. But it's still reverse chronological, no prioritization, no buying or shouting your way into top position.

I think that local feed will end up being pretty important. If you choose a server that aligns with some of your interests, then that "local" view can connect you with people who share those interests. Because people are usually multi-faceted and the instance is a home, not a topic restriction, you'll see a variety of content from the people there. It's not like Usenet newsgroups or Codidact communities where you can only talk about this thing here and not that thing, but there's a rough sort based on some shared interest, if you want to use that. (Of course, if you want to create multiple accounts on multiple servers, for example to separate personal and professional content, you can do that too.)

I'm being an armchair sociologist here with too few observations and no data, but I think this "local community of multi-faceted people" aspect will act somewhat like physical neighborhoods (back when we socialized with our neighbors, but maybe your barony or congregation is a model too) or like the more social Usenet groups. Because these online neighborhoods aren't bounded by geography or (probably) by culture, the people I see on that local feed are more heterogeneous, more diverse, more "like me in some ways, very unlike me in others". I hope easy interaction with that community will help build connections and resist polarization. I'm game to try the experiment, at least. On Twitter, only the loudest (and probably most extreme) "people not like me" would make it to the feed, the feed that was overrun with topics I don't care about from people I don't know so I never looked at it anyway -- but if I did look, I wouldn't find the "regular people", only the people with big fan followings.

(Aside: a week or so ago I came across a server for my city. So physical neighborhoods might be represented too.)

boosts and retweets

On Twitter, you can "retweet" something, which means "show this to my followers". On Twitter you can also retweet and add your own message. If you've seen tweets that embed other tweets, that's what's happening. So you might see Musk's latest policy flip-flop and retweet to your followers, adding a snarky comment of your own, and your retweet will be its own tweet, not part of the thread of replies to the original tweet.

On Mastodon you can "boost" something, which is like that first kind of retweet. I saw something that I wanted to add my own message to (further support in my case, not snark), and I couldn't figure out how to do it -- the "boost" button doesn't have an option for adding a comment. On investigation, I learned that this was an intentional design choice.

My initial reaction was "huh, weird". Then I thought "ok, maybe if you can't easily snipe at people you'll be less likely to snipe, so maybe that improves the climate?" and that sounded like a good idea. But since then I've seen more cases where it would have been helpful to either add something (as the booster) or comment to the booster not the original poster (as a reader). So I'm not sure how I feel about this now.

You can always do this manually, of course -- you can link to anything, after all. You won't get the fancy rendering, that thing that looks like an embedded tweet on Twitter. But if you decide to just boost something, instead of creating your own post, then people who want to respond to you can't. Like, if you didn't know that that thing you boosted has been debunked or has more context or something like that... no easy way to do that.

mindset

Mastodon, and the fediverse in general, exudes a scrappy "do more for yourself" mindset. There's no single entity making decisions for you -- what you see, how it's moderated, how the software works, etc. Servers are run by ordinary people who make those decisions for their servers only. Norms can vary. I expect that the most successful servers operate by some form of consensus, either up front or emergent (as people opt in or out). Servers can block other servers, so there's some level of shared baseline to operate in polite society. You can set up your own neo-Nazi server if you want to, but you might find that a lot of people don't want to talk with you.

I've seen the fediverse compared to anarchy (you and those with shared goals can do whatever you want), and I've also seen it compared to fiefdoms (somebody controls your server and it's probably not you). I don't think it's a fiefdom in the way that Twitter is; first, you can move to a different server, and second, that you can set up your own server for you and your friends mitigates if you don't like any of the options. A serf can't just say "well I'll take that land over there and do my own thing", because all land is ultimately owned by someone. On the Internet, you can buy a domain and set up shop -- the space isn't wholly owned. But whether you're a serf or an Internet denizen unhappy with the existing servers, you have to do work -- setting up your own place isn't free. And that effort can be a substantial barrier, too. So it's not a complete mitigation for networks with problematic owners, but I think we'll be better off on the fediverse than on Twitter or Facebook, which feels like an even bigger fiefdom to me. Time will tell.

Last night we saw the Broadway tour of Hadestown, a musical retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (and Hades and Persephone). I'll assume my readers know (or will Google) the Greek myths, so in that sense there are no spoilers, but this show puts an interesting spin on it. Narrated by Hermes and with active participation by the Fates, we see both Orpheus and Eurydice "up above" and Hades' realm "down below", which is reached by a train. The train motif shows up in the music, the staging, and (I kid you not) the lighting. The company is smaller than many musicals and put to effective use. I enjoyed the music and don't have a good way to describe it.

Eurydice's and Oprheus's world is harsh from climate change, the program notes, though I might have missed that specific angle otherwise. Orpheus is focused on writing a song that will bring the world back into balance, but it's slow going. In this version Eurydice isn't bitten by a poisonous snake; starving and cold in the midst of winter and unable to find work, she is lured to Hadestown by promises of work and shelter. But the workers there toil away in misery in a factory, building fortifications for Hades' domain. ("Why We Build the Wall" resonates well beyond this show, I assume by design.) When Orpheus shows up to rescue Eurydice, the other workers are taking note too. Meanwhile, Persephone, whose marriage with Hades is rather rocky (shall we say), is also taking note of the power of love.

The story is a tragedy; we know it from the myth and we're told so by Hermes in the introductory stanzas of the show. But it has a positive vibe, too. I don't want to say more about that for people who haven't seen it yet.

Orpheus's music calls for falsetto in some key places -- whole passages, not just a note or two -- and the actor in this production pulled it off very smoothly. At the other end of that, uh, scale, I find myself wanting to catch a glimpse of the score, because Hades has some very low bass notes, also performed well in this production. C2 maybe???

I don't see a lot of Broadway-class shows so maybe this is normal, but I was very impressed by the staging and especially the lighting. There's one set, used throughout, that evokes the different settings just through the movements of small items (by cast members, not gophers) and changes of lighting. The lighting in this show is very active; I commented to Dani that the lighting operators deserved cast credit. It's that integral to the show, and it's not a small effort. One warning, though: there are strobe effects, and there were times when lights were pointed at the audience for brief periods.

There were some sound problems in the show we saw -- engineering problems, not cast problems. When things got loud, they spiked the levels and we got some distortion, making it hard to hear the lyrics in a few places. I'm told by somebody who sees a lot of shows there that this is not uncommon in that venue (Benedum Center), alas.

I enjoyed the show, even with those sound issues. I wasn't familiar with the show and hadn't heard the soundtrack before seeing it; this was very much an "I've heard good things about it" outing.

I've participated in a lot of online communities, and a lot of types of online communities, over the decades -- mailing lists, Usenet, blogging platforms like Dreamwidth, web-based forums, Q&A communities... and social media. With the exception of blogging platforms, where readers opt in to specific people/blogs/journals and the platform doesn't push other stuff at us, online communities tend to end up with some level of moderation.

We had (some) content moderation even in the early days of mailing lists and Usenet. Mostly[1] this was gatekeeping -- reviewing content before it was released, because sometimes people post ill-advised things like personal attacks. Mailing lists and Usenet were inherently slow to begin with -- turnaround times were measured in hours if you were lucky and more typically days -- so adding a step where a human reviewed a post before letting it go out into the wild didn't cost much. Communities were small and moderation was mostly to stop the rare egregiously bad stuff, not to curate everything. So far as I recall, nobody then was vetting content that way, like declaring posts to be misinformation.

On the modern Internet with its speed and scale, moderation is usually after the fact. A human moderator sees (or is alerted to) content that doesn't fit the site's rules and handles it. Walking the moderation line can be tough. On Codidact[2] and (previously) Stack Exchange, I and my fellow moderators have sometimes had deep discussions of borderline cases. Is that post offensive to a reasonable person, or is it civilly expressing an unpopular idea? Is that link to the poster's book or blog spam, or is the problem that the affiliation isn't disclosed? How do we handle a case where a very small number of people say something is offensive and most people say it's not -- does it fail the reasonable-person principle, or is it a new trend that a lot of people don't yet know about? We human moderators would examine these issues, sometimes seek outside help, and take the smallest action that corrects an actual problem (often an edit, maybe a word with the user, sometimes a timed suspension).

Three things are really, really important here: (1) human decision-makers, (2) who can explain how they applied the public guidelines, with (3) a way to review and reverse decisions.

Automation isn't always bad. Most of us use automated spam filtering. Some sites have automation that flags content for moderator review. As a user I sometimes want to have automation available to me -- to inform me, but not to make irreversible decisions for me. I want my email system to route spam to a spam folder -- but I don't want it to delete it outright, like Gmail sometimes does. I want my browser to alert me that the certificate for the site I'm trying to visit isn't valid -- but I don't want it to bar me from proceeding anyway. I want a product listing for an electronic product to disclose that it is not UL-certified -- but I don't want a bot to block the sale or quietly remove that product from the seller's catalogue.

These are some of the ways that Twitter has been failing for a while. (Twitter isn't alone, of course, but it's the one everyone's paying attention to right now.) Twitter is pretty bad, Musk's Twitter is likely to be differently bad, and making it good is a hard problem.[3]

Twitter uses bots to moderate content, and those bots sometimes get it badly wrong. If the bots merely flagged content for human review, that would be ok -- but to do that at scale, Twitter would need to make fundamental changes to its model. No, the bots block the tweets and auto-suspend the users. To get unsuspended, a user has to delete the tweets, admit to wrongdoing, and promise not to do it "again" -- even if there's nothing wrong with the tweet. The people I've seen be hit by this were not able to find an appeal path. Combine this with opaque and arbitrary rules, and it's a nightmare.

Musk might shut down some of the sketchier moderation bots (it's always hard to know what's going on in Musk's head), but he's already promised his advertisers that Twitter won't be a free-for-all, so that means he's keeping some bot-based moderation, probably using different rules than last week's. He's also planning to fire most of the employees, meaning there'll be even fewer people to review issues and adjust the algorithms. And it's still a "shoot first, ask questions later" model. It's not assistive automation.

A bot that annotates content with "contrary to CDC guidelines" or "not UL-certified" or "Google sentiment score: mildly negative" or "Consumer Reports rating: 74" or "failed NPR fact-check" or "Fox News says fake"? Sure, go for it -- we've had metadata like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and FDA nutrition information and kashrut certifications for a long time. Want to hide violent videos or porn behind a "view sensitive content" control? Also ok, at least if it's mostly not wrong. As a practical matter a platform should limit the number or let users say which assistance they want, but in principle, fine.

But that's not what Twitter does. Its bots don't inform; they judge and punish. Twitter has secret rules about what speech is allowed and what speech is not, uses bots to root out what they don't like today, takes action against the authors, and causes damage when they get it wrong. There are no humans in the loop to check their work, and there's no transparency.

It's not just Twitter, of course. Other platforms, either overwhelmed by scale or just trying to save some money, use bots to prune out content. Even with the best of intentions that can go wrong; when intentions are less pure, it's even worse.

Actual communities, and smaller platforms, can take advantage of human moderators if they want them. For large firehose-style platforms like Twitter, it seems to me, the solutions to the moderation problem lies in metadata and user preferences, not heavy-handed centralized automated deletions and suspensions. Give users information and the tools to filter -- and the responsibility to do so, or not. Take the decision away, and we're stuck with whatever the owner likes.

The alternative would be to use the Dreamwidth model: Dreamwidth performs no moderation that I'm aware of, I'm free to read (or stop reading) any author I want, and the platform won't push other content in front of me. This works for Dreamwidth, which doesn't need to push ads in front of millions of people to make money for its non-existent stockholders, but such slow growth is anathema to the big for-profit social networks.

[1]: It was possible to delete posts on Usenet, but it was spotty and delayed.

[2]: The opinions in this post are mine and I'm not speaking for Codidact, where I am the community lead.

[3]: I'd say it's more socially hard than technically hard.

My synagogue has gone through some changes in the last couple years, on top of the changes forced on all of us by the pandemic. Last year we hired a new rabbi and this year we hired a new cantor, and in-person services are more of a thing than they were, so lots of stuff is new together.

The rabbi and the cantor work well together. I already knew this from the morning minyan, but it also carried over to the formal high-holy-day services with all their extra stuff. Later, when all the holidays are over (they aren't yet), I want to ask the rabbi about some of the choices he made, but it was generally fine. It was nice to be together again.

I was asked to read torah, even though I said I'd pretty much have to memorize it because of the vision issues that are why I stopped reading torah on Shabbat. The readings for Rosh Hashana aren't that long, so I could memorize it, and anyway I don't know the special trope for the day so I was going to have to learn the music by rote anyway. That all went fine. I had the last aliyah and I noticed that other people were translating after their readings, so I followed suit on the spur of the moment. Later I realized that most of the others were reading translations, not doing it on the fly. (I'm not fluent in Hebrew, but I knew this part.) Ironically, I did need to look at the scroll for that part and there were some stumbles as a result, but on Yom Kippur several people stopped me to tell me how much they liked my RH reading, with specific compliments. Wow.

We have programming all day on Yom Kippur so you don't have to leave if you don't want to. The "learning" slot had two class options, fewer than in the past but I think this worked together. I went to a very good class on the Vidui (confessional) prayer, taught by someone who used to be our associate rabbi 15-20 years ago. (He moved away for another pulpit and returned to Pittsburgh a couple years ago, taking an educational position rather than a pulpit.) We did a close reading of the text compared to the translation in our prayerbook and talked a lot about the word aval.

In some years I've gotten to the end of Yom Kippur on a high, feeling scrubbed clean and energized and stuff. That didn't happen this year. I think some of that is due to some liturgical choices they made. I wonder how much of it is due to having finally been to a traditional Yom Kippur service (last two years) and now I'm more keenly aware of the differences.

For festivals we combine with another congregation and Sukkot was there not here. "There" is a two-mile walk each way for me, so I went to Beth Shalom, a Conservative congregation that also has an occasional musical Shabbat evening service that I've gone to. The people there were very welcoming, the service was complete and yet efficient, and the leaders and speakers were good. I was surprised to be offered an honor (carrying the first torah scroll). I had pleasant conversations with several people I didn't know at the kiddush after. I wonder if I should try to go there next Yom Kippur.

We've been able to have most of our meals in the sukkah this week, though a couple got rained out. This late in the year I didn't have expectations.

• 1 large green cabbage
• 1 large bunch kale
• 2 medium-large tomatoes
• 1 butternut squash
• 4 Crimson Crisp apples
• a dozen small red potatoes

Weight: about 10.5 pounds.

Yay, more squash!

The cabbage weighs about 4 pounds. Some of it will become cabbage soup (beef). Some will probably become coleslaw. That won't account for all of it unless I make a big batch of soup and freeze some. Which I might.

I hadn't heard of that apple variety before. The wisdom of the Internet suggests it's a good one to eat straight and doesn't talk about cooking with it. I can do that.

The folks running the CSA have kindly agreed to an alternate pickup day for those of us who can't pick up next Wednesday, Yom Kippur. Good; I was hoping to not have to miss the final share.

• 2 bell peppers, 1 medium green and 1 very large half-orange (hoping it'll keep going)
• 1 zucchino
• 1 large acorn squash
• 1 medium red onion
• 8 medium Bartlet pears
• 7 medium-large Macintosh? apples

Weight: about 9 pounds.

I like fall squashes -- butternut, acorn, delicata, all good! I would be happy to get more of those. (And I wouldn't say no to more onions; a singleton surprised me a little.)

The manifest said Macintosh apples. Most images I found are redder than these, but maybe that's an effect of when they were picked.

Last week's apples were very good as apple crisp. I might do more of that, or make applesauce, or maybe it's time to dry some. (I like dried fruit, but last time I made it I had a working dehydrator. Time to learn how to do that in an oven.)

I have had two cats who went into kidney failure. It was a long, slow process, during which we could alleviate symptoms and slow it down. By "slow" I mean a couple years.

Orlando had no symptoms. He'd go through phases of not eating much and then a couple days later he'd be back to normal. His bloodwork showed none of the markers that kicked in for Erik and Embla a couple years out. Everything looked fine in an ultrasound earlier this year. That picture was taken two weeks ago.

Last weekend his appetite dropped a lot, but he was drinking and producing output. He was spending more time sleeping in a closet, a new favorite hiding spot. Otherwise he was normal. I consulted my vet, who concurred that I didn't need to rush to the ER, and she saw him Tuesday. He had a bad tooth, it turns out, and she thought that might be the cause, and she ran bloodwork both because he was due and because it was required before oral surgery.

She called yesterday with the lab results and said he was in kidney failure. This was not the long, slow chronic kidney failure with which I was familiar; this was something else. It was possible that he had an infection and that was causing it ("though these numbers are really off the charts"), and on that hope I took him back yesterday (after a long and frustrating search of the house; he did not want to be found). They started him on IV fluids and antibiotics.

This morning he was worse. He could barely stand and wasn't interested in trying. The infection theory was a longshot, my vet said, and even if it were that, treating it would not reverse much of what we were seeing. I went back, held him, and said goodbye. This is always the hard part -- saying goodbye, but also all the self-doubt and what-ifs and did I do enough and am I doing the right thing and... Orlando wasn't fighting it, and I dearly hope I did what's best for him.

I adopted Orlando from Animal Friends in 2012, along with Giovanni of blessed memory. The people at the shelter thought he was about six years old at the time, my vet thought younger, and another vet (more recently) thought older. He had a good (almost) ten years after a rough start in life. That will have to be enough reassurance.

Elul is the month before Rosh Hashana. It started about a week ago. The season of repentance and introspection that characterizes the high holy days doesn't begin on Rosh Hashana; it begins earlier, in Elul. (The actual work of making amends and improving ourselves is year-round, of course.)

Even better than making amends is acting in a way to reduce the amount needed. In that nanosecond between seeing or hearing something and jumping to the "obvious" conclusion and acting on it, we can sometimes stop to consider other explanations. There's a lot of hair-trigger absolutist judging happening in our world today, and a small anecdote I saw on Twitter during this season struck me so I'm sharing it.

I almost yelled at a woman looking at an iPhone during Kol Nidre, but I just said "This is one of the most beautiful prayers you'll ever hear." She saw me looking, and explained she was checking her blood sugar. I wished her a healthier New Year. I finally conquered my snark! - LibbyCone

Even when we think we know all the context, we might not know all the context.

• 3 ears corn
• 2 largish tomatoes
• 1 large red onion
• 1 large zucchini (zucchinus?)
• 2 peaches
• 9 Bartlett pears

Total weight about 7.5 pounds.

Two peaches aren't enough to make cobbler; we'll just have to eat them straight, or grilled -- so not a hardship! That's a lot of pears; I should look for a pie recipe or make pearsauce, maybe. (Are Bartletts good in pies? I think I've usually baked with Bosc, though I don't have a ton of experience either way.)