Tomorrow, we celebrate International Human Solidarity Day, an observance to honor unity in diversity, raise awareness, and commit to solving global issues.

A dance at a Wikipedia event on the unity-in-diversity theme

If you still don’t believe me that Christmas splatters across December and part of January, today doesn’t have its own explicit holiday that spans multiple traditions, but Saturnalia—a Roman precursor to Christmas that includes Opiconsivia marking the end of harvest season—started on Saturday, and both the Latine Las Posadas and Filipino Simbang Gabi began on Friday. All continue through the week…again, for those times when someone starts complaining that somebody dared to wish them “happy holidays.”

And for the actual reason that most people prefer to wish people happy holidays, sunset marked the start of Hanukkah. While not the most important holiday in the Jewish religion, it has grown in cultural importance, probably for reasons comparable to the ascent of Christmas in Christian culture: People like celebrations focusing on light and togetherness near the shortest days of the year.

On to the software talk.

Social Media

In what I can only imagine required an all-hands processing of thousands of requests, you can now find me on Cohost. Whether I post there beyond new blog post announcements, like anywhere, will depend on whom I find there.

I may talk about this in more depth, at some point—it sounds like a piece for the mailing list—but a lot of the “Twitter replacements” feel disappointing. I like a lot of what I see in the software, so I don’t fault the teams. Rather, I fault the “Twitter expatriates” who don’t have any feel for culture, and post exactly as they would on Twitter: Everything provokes outrage, and everything must have some deeper meaning.

Library Updates

As with last week, this past week has gone primarily to library updates for Picture to Nonogram, Slackup, Fýlakas Onomåton, Bicker, and Scan Data, Renew DB.

Next

Based on the remaining library updates in the queue, I’d expect cleaning those up to take me at least through this week, and a good part of the remaining way to the new year.

Credits: The header image is Unity In Diversity - Opening Ceremony - Wiki Conference India - CGC - Mohali by Biswarup Ganguly, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.