📖 Peggy: A Brave Chicken on a Big Adventure by Anna Walker

Read Peggy: A Brave Chicken on a Big Adventure by Anna Walker (Clarion Books)
Peggy the hen is contented with her quiet existence and daily routine. When a powerful gust of wind sweeps her up and deposits her in the midst of a busy city, she explores her new surroundings, makes new friends, and cleverly figures out how to get home—with a newly kindled appetite for adventure. Evocative full-color paintings follow Peggy’s journey, offering comical details that reward repeated viewing. This reassuring tale and its unruffled heroine invites discussions of exploration, safety, and resourcefulness.
Peggy, a chicken, is given such a lot of character by some excellent writing (including cute reveals), fantastic mixed media artwork, and a whimsical plot which was almost too sparse and short for me. I was left wanting more.

And what a great ending:
“Every day, rain or shine, Peggy ate breakfast, played in her yard, chatted with the pigeons…
and sometimes caught the train to the city.”

Peggy on camera

🎞️ What If (2013) CBS Films

Watched What If (2013) from CBS Films
Directed by Michael Dowse. With Daniel Radcliffe, Zoe Kazan, Megan Park, Adam Driver. Wallace, who is burned out from a string of failed relationships, forms an instant bond with Chantry, who lives with her longtime boyfriend. Together, they puzzle out what it means if your best friend is also the love of your life.
A cute enough movie. I might suggest that this is a slightly new flavor of romantic comedy flavored by a dash of the Millennial generation. It took a bit to get past the melange of accents of the characters to realize that the story was set in Toronto, but in general there were some reasonable performances by all involved. The plot was a bit too vanilla and no one really took any chances to up the ante of the concept which could have made this much more memorable. In general, it was entertaining enough to sit through once, but I wouldn’t give this a second screening.

The dreadful release date gives me more of a clue why I’d never heard of this. I suspect it’d have done better as a limited release in the Spring or late Fall instead. This wasn’t a great movie, but was better than it’s box office performance indicated. The studio left some money on the table with this one.

Better UI for status update cross-posting option

Filed an Issue Mastodon WordPress Autopost by L1am0 (GitHub)
A Wordpress Plugin that automatically posts your new articles to Mastodon https://wordpress.org/plugins/autopost-to-mastodon/
Given that I suspect most use Mastodon for short status updates (under their 500 character limit), it would be nice if there were an option for posting the_content from WordPress’ main body editor along with the URL and/or any hashtags. This way people could post short updates from their blog as status updates/asides and have the full post (or an automatically shortened version if too long) sent over with a link back to the original.

Currently the posting of Title/Link/Hashtags or Title/Content/Link/Hashtags is better for cross-posting longer blog articles which tend to have titles whereas status updates often don’t have titles.

From a UI perspective, it would also optionally be nice to have some type of character counter for the primary text box to fit into Mastodon’s guidelines. I recall there having been a plugin that did just this which might be repurposed: https://wordpress.org/plugins/character-count-for-post-content-excerpt/

To be able to switch between the various modes Title/Link/Hashtags; Title/Content/Link/Hashtags; and potentially this new Body/Link/Hashtags it would be nice if the Mastodon Autopost meta box had the option to also select between them in addition to the “Post to Mastodon” checkbox.

Replied to Support for importing syndication links for Mastodon Autopost · Issue #75 · dshanske/syndication-links by Chris Aldrich (GitHub)
Now that SL has the Mastodon icon (#66), I'll also note that the latest version of Mastodon Autopost plugin should now also support importing the URL for the last successful toot to allow the closure of automating the POSSE loop.
I’m verifying, for the tape since I know you don’t use Mastodon Autopost, that this works as expected now.

Just for fun I’m testing out syndication to Mastodon (using Mastodon Autopost) and syndication to Plurk.

Just for fun I’m testing out syndication to Mastodon (using Mastodon Autopost) and syndication to Plurk.