Most interesting read before 5 a.m. (yes, I'm up that early these days):

BoingBoing: At 40 Years Old, Dungeons & Dragons Still Matters -- Ethan Gilsdorf looks back on four decades of pen-and-paper role-playing tradition

Did I play D&D "back in the day"? A little bit. Would I play it again? I might.

I'm not big on Facebook. Or Medium. It would be a different story if I were getting paid to write for one of those services, but since that isn't happening, I'm indifferent.

But in the face of interfaces that are inviting to authors, plus the promise of exposing your work to a potential audience of millions, a la Medium and the Huffington Post (why I pulled that one out of my unmentionables I don't know, but I just did), Facebook is releasing a mobile app called Paper that promises to remake the way you (and you) interact with the service, especially when it comes to shoveling your content into their always-burning furnace:

Re/code: Meet “Paper,” Facebook’s New Answer for Browsing — And Creating — Mobile Media -- By Mike Isaac

An extremely cautionary tale on broken iMacs, Apple's relative indifference, and how barbaric this all seems in relation to hardware from other vendors:

Readwrite: How I Fixed An iLemon -- Repairing a Mac is no simple task — take it from someone who worked at Apple for 20 years by David Sobotta

(Photo by Hans Gutknecht)

(Photo by Hans Gutknecht)

I feel for Evan Prodromou, creator of Pump.io and Status.net before that -- both software platforms for his vitally important Identi.ca social network, which started as a free, open Twitter-like service when one was badly needed in 2008-9.

Running Identi.ca under Status.net required a whole lot of resources, and Evan was doing it for nothing (I think). Then he wanted to change everything about the software and hardware running the identi.ca service and did. So Identi.ca lives. But Identi.ca is not as feature-rich as it was when Status.net was the software behind it.

What's missing from the Pump.io version of Identi.ca for me are a search function and the tags and groups features of the original Identi.ca. I also miss being able to access Identi.ca in most mobile clients, especially Mustard. The new Pump-powered Puma -- with development led by Macno, the same developer who created Mustard -- is coming along, as is the desktop Pumpa client. Like Pump.io itself, neither client is terribly feature-rich at this point.

But what I miss most is the community of the original Identi.ca. I'm not sure how much of that community has scattered since Pump.io, but it sure looks like a lot.

Things that are great about the Pump.io-powered Identi.ca are the ability to do so much more in posts -- more than you can do with Twitter and the original Status.net-powered Identi.ca. But I've found that short Twitter-like posts work for me. It's all about the people ...

I like pump.io's Identi.ca, and I really like Evan. He's given a lot to the community in the form of the Identi.ca service itself and both of its platforms (Status.net and Pump.io).

Today I got a nudge from somebody (ironically via Google Plus) that there's a big #fediverse movement out there centered around the Status.net software.

Read the rest of this post