Not an Island
In my constant feels about Cohost from my Blaugust wrap-up (I know, I know, when will I shut up about the social media future that got away, I get it) another thing I was reminded of was my unhinged 'Not an Island' series.
Cohost had a pretty healthy ecosystem of 'yes and'; early on I encountered someone sharing chosts from a bot by JP LeBreton that simply chosted a basic land card from Magic the Gathering every day.
That's it. Image from scryfall, nothing fancy.
A thing I've been noticing since I started playing Magic in the 90's was that the artist's interpretations of what constitutes an "island" is often hilariously generous or just abjectly fucking wrong - so I started a running chost series that would rechost this bot's post any time an Island card was present and give the geographical analysis to see if said descriptor was up to snuff or not.
Note: Wayback machine has a fair amount of it but not all since the threaded nature of chosts sometimes meant things slipped through.
Now I'm not a geographer by trade but I had this rather complicated Geography professor in college; I needed a science credit, the class fit my schedule and I figured it'd be an easy win. I'd heard rumours about this guy but they paled in comparison to the reality. He was not fucking around.
We'd study landforms and how they came to be via book in class, and our homework would be this: to be given a list of geographical features or phenomena, and before the next week DRIVE TO AS MANY OF THEM AS POSSIBLE AND PHOTOGRAPH OURSELVES NEXT TO THEM WITH A SIGN INDICATING WHAT THEY WERE. Now I don't mean he gives you a list that says "Drive to X lake in Y town", his goal was to provide us with as little information as possible and see what we did with it. "Mountain" - ok, that's easy. Find any mountain, take a photo. "River delta" - well now we're cooking - you have to know where to find one. "Slough" - good luck assholes!! Hope you were paying attention in class!
Now please keep in mind this was the early 00's; years before the iPhone released and my cell phone at the time had maybe snake on it (definitely no camera), digital cameras were expensive (especially for poor community college students) and gas prices were at an all time high (though that doesn't seem to be a trend that's stopped).
Living in California (especially the bay area) did make finding most of the required landforms easier though; he rarely assigned us anything that couldn't be found in a 1-2 hour drive but like, we were all either full classload or working multiple jobs while taking classes so a 1-2 hour drive for one class was a huge ask, and also fuck anyone who didn't have a car I guess? His suggestion to those people was to "make friends in class and do it together".
Bonkers.
I can't believe I could still find some of these. This would have been like 2006?
I forget off the top of my head if these particular ones were tripod or Della; any time I had to drive over the hill to Santa Cruz for these there was a 50/50 chance her work schedule wouldn't line up
Anyway, despite the absurdity and amount of effort these things took for this class, I learned a lot and stupid shit like "wait no that's an estuary" have stuck with me so every time the "island" cards popped up on JP's bot, my fucking neurons activated.
For what it's worth, the lands bot still exists and posts to mastodon! You can check out the bot's homepage and source code here. If I can find a good way to RSS syndicate it and provide commentary here I may kick the ol' project back up because despite the descent into madness, it did bring me joy.
Also (and I have NO way of proving this) I'm pretty sure JP nudged the bot so the final Island card it chosted before Cohost shut down was a card that could not be interpreted any way other than island.
