As this Captain's transition to Hive rolls on... (Oh hai, Retsuko!)

TL/DR: Cabbages-and-kings alert. (You'll get the joke if you're familiar with Alice and Lewis Carroll.)

• First off, I finished taking care of the street layout of Trouvaille, Rogatia on Friday morning--two days ahead of schedule, and with data for all ten boroughs accounted for. (Rogatia, whose new design I unveiled last month as I left the original Steemit, is the setting for this contributor's forthcoming Sevton Saga. Trouvaille is the capital [and province seat of Shropshire], and the boroughs in question are [in postcode order] the Trouvaille CBD, Welkeston, Lordwell, Levenshulme, Queen's Hill, Cornwall, Glover, Alvernia, Hopewell, and Eberswalde.) Unfortunately, your first look must wait a while because my Bluetooth connectivity is somewhat frail for whatever reason. (Not to mention we're working off a storage-challenged laptop.) No matter--compensation awaits later on in this writeup.

  The hard work isn't quite over yet, though; Weymouth in Elmshire follows in June, and Yorkshire's Maidenhall in July, with select cities, towns, and points of interest up for grabs in the coming months. As for Trouvaille, work on the Metropolitan district's suburbs is not that far away--30 of them all told. 12 years of high hopes, false starts, and R&D across different software and systems will not go to waste this time. The parent books, however, are on the backburner for at least another year. (Did I mention Diane and Wyorst are on lockdown, too?)

  • While we're still mapping what's now the "Bulwark of the Atlantic": After wondering how next to move on, I dug out a two-leaf draft of a land-use classification system originally developed during my Novissima trials in late 2018, a couple of nights ago. (Even reported on that back during the Google+ twilight.) As soon as this goes to press, I am moving ahead with a revamp en route to its test implementation in the Orissen mouth area. (Category numbers in first code level: 0 for Natural, 1 for Cultivated, and 2 for Man-made. For the middle one's inspiration, you can thank this mid-2015 ResearchGate paper [doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.22403.09763] by Prof. A. Balasubramanian; adopting that surname for Elmshire's commune gazetteer in a future update.)
  • In related entertainment news:
    • As Disney+ is not yet available in the Caribbean (save for Puerto Rico and the French West Indies), an HCParadise primetime premiere of The Mandalorian (on May 4, Star Wars Day) had to do--the end result of several months of negotiations between Disney USA and Disney-ABC Rogatia. (HCParadise is carried alongside sister station HCP News on most cable providers regionwide.)
      • The sooner Disney+ comes to Rogatia, the sooner HCP will retire its "DisneyNation" banner for presentations of that family label's movies--but select material will continue to air on a title-to-title basis.
    • Meanwhile, StarzStadium--a new temporary extension of the StarzAntilles suite--replaced the Rogatian feeds of ESPN and the CARICOM SportsMax channel this Thursday. (Little wonder, as COVID-19 has recently upended league after league like no tomorrow.)
    • And thanks to the Erwitz experiment, Elmshire and Yorkshire are getting in on the act come later in May--since the Welkeston facility is too far away from them by car. (Neither had any drive-ins to begin with.)

• A revamp approach similar to small-scale Rogatia's will be in effect for Veritas--and then some--as we revisit the "Bastion of Truth" northeast of the Lesser Antilles in 1-4 days. (Veritas, the gift map dedicated to my Plus contacts from yesteryear, was attempted in 2014 and 2019.) Up next in the lockdown queue, Novissima + Vigesima (south of Jamaica).

• If I don't revive my Patreon tip jar to showcase these projects, it'll be too soon; should've remembered to add that in my agenda. (Dried up after a bio, an intro post, and a sneak peek of a discarded Veritas attempt--all from early last year.)

• In this month's "404 Files": First Orkut, then Buzz, then Wave, then the Plus...now Shoelace. After over a decade and a half, it seems Google's noble social experiment has come to an end--seemingly for good--as of this Tuesday (May 12). Developed by its Area 120 team, Shoelace only lasted all of ten months in a New York City trial run. But once COVID-19 hit the Big Apple hard this spring, the app's fate was sealed--no surprise for the events- and outdoor-oriented successor. To quote Jon Porter of The Verge:

  "Shoelace joins a long list of apps and services that have been shuttered by Google, but the company emphasized that its Area 120 incubator is more about trying out new ideas than setting up new long-term projects. Just last October, 9to5Google notes that the incubator shut down its travel-focused Touring Bird service. However, other experiments like Grasshopper and Pigeon are still under active development."

  • Turning to G+: Last we met, I was unable to locate any one-year-on retrospectives--but this Cake.co discussion from last month has since helped fill in the gap. As writes "JazliAziz":

    "To be frank, Google+ was already on life support well before [its closure]. The influx of bots, lack of a clear vision for the platform, and poor development all marked the end of Google+ even before Google officially announced it would be sunsetting the social network. I anticipated the downfall and started looking for greener pastures, which led me to Twitter. I still needed a place for my long-form writing though, which eventually led me to Cake.

    "It's been a year now since Google+ left us, and I wonder how the other Google+ refugees are doing. I'm quite happy with my Twitter - Cake combo. Twitter is where I go for my news and my own social media posts, while Cake is where I go for my writing and to get into more in-depth discussions.

    "How about other refugees?"

    You're talking to one, right now, on a more advanced platform.

  • Also, whereas G+ had Circles, Shoelace had Loops. (Now you know.)

  • In other news: Vic (Gundotra) and Luke (Wroblewski) have long, long gone. (So is G+ Help assistant John Skeats, who apparently hasn't been seen since last October's closure of its Product Forum.)

• As we pass by Anthro Alley:

  • Some days ago, an offhand mention of DeviantArt.com's more-or-less reviled Eclipse skin (its newly-introduced default) on TV Tropes' COVID-19 forum thread (of all places!) got me thinking: How's "ThisCrispyKat" doing these days? Turns out they're still around in the Care Bears fandom over a decade on; they were among the earliest artists I met on said site. Among recent highlights, this early 2018 fan piece of True Heart Bear ♥ Noble Heart Horse (they from 1986's A New Generation) clearly takes the cake--far more so as a tribute to the movies' art design. (Nostalgia Filter comes into play in the artist's submission commentary.) Sad to say, this true-love kiss never surfaced in the Nelvana era--but if it really did...

    • Caution should be taken once purveying Crispy's work or talking to them--especially if you're in Germany. For starters, Google "Third Reich" without going full-trigger; an all-too-familiar part of that harrowing legacy is occasionally sprinkled throughout their works.

  • Over in the Dixwell universe, nearly two months have passed since Adanson's last Music Time session at Santa Rosa, FL's Celebration Hall. (That's where they also held their belated New Year's feast, a nine-day affair spread out over three weeks thanks not only to Mas Domnik back home, but also a Hurricane Michael symposium in nearby Panama City [their de facto base for over a year].) Adanson, now reunited with their visiting friends from Giraudel's Autrison vinyl label, took all the precautions they could to prevent coronavirus from ruining that edition (#9 on March 13), and their next two (#10 and #11). But, as word spread of the U.S. CDC's gathering guidelines early the following week--no more than 50 in any crowd--and the Deet days later suggested 10, all bets were off for the near future. No Spring Break special, no Easter Ball (for the third year in a row), no Record Store Day, no re.BUILD in Dorian-hit Grand Bahama and Abaco. (But at least they beat the organisers of SandJam 2020 to the punch re: the M.B. Miller County Pier.)

    With very little else at hand, Adanson has been effectively grounded in their Panama City apartment complex base since then--but not without a suite of open-source servers and software at their disposal, part of the plan to salvage (in time for Memorial Day) whatever Upcomers (and more) once lay ahead in the coming weeks. It's just as well, because talks between the Nature Island team and iHeartMedia (the former Clear Channel) to carry those remnants over to radio syndication broke down in late April. Instead, Kino Lorber--taking over from Italy's Mediaset--is calling all the shots till further notice. Further details in our next Notebook entry...

    • ...and as for those first 1,000 words of Unspooled #1's draft--still top-priority--it'll take a while longer to deliver. Once the new and improved Veritas is a wrap, and the ground is laid for Novissima + Vigesima, we'll move back for sure--Writer Sanctum pitch and all.

• As we wind down, saying hello to two guests--recent follower @sidwrites and newly-renamed @hivebuzz (formerly @steemitboard). (The latter recently congratulated this contributor on distributing 200 upvotes since joining the Steem blockchain last year.) I was planning to profile a third one, just for the Pixabay highlight their intro post (from more than a fortnight ago) showcased--but the tab, account name, and original artist have since escaped my memory and my Chrome backlog. Even Google--and Pixabay itself--struggled to fetch me the right illustration. Why didn't I just bookmark that before the incognito cache was literally obliterated to bits?

  • I know exactly what I saw, and had I remembered any concrete bit of the details, I would've remade it with one of the red-panda cub idols who tour along with Sam and the gang (as time permitted); Illumination's Sing is among our many influences for the Unspooled project. Think it had a lamp too, but I could be wrong. In lieu, I've settled for a simpler base (courtesy of Mathias Appel, via Google Images)--out of which a portrait will emanate. (We'll be lucky to complete that by mid-June.)
    
    • And yes, this post's title is referencing The Room/The Disaster Artist. No bonus points for guessing the last cult favourite if you're a furry, a Netflix binger, or (for that matter) both.

• Finally, I'm giving my @partiko install one more week before switching over to the @eSteemApp -- with barely a word on the Hive transition from anyone as of late. Once/if they return, I'll remind you or find out.

So that's all we have to type for now, entering a new week on a new version of Steemit--and don't be surprised if I'm away for another matter of days (resteems, voting, and a chance comment aside); you're more likely to catch me on Reddit in the interim. Until then, please stay safe, wipe everything down, wash your hands...and God bless.

From the one and only #WhatLiesAground

P.S. Happy Mother's Day to the ladies--and their men--chancing on this feed.

P.P.S. I finally mastered text formatting--and how!

P.P.P.S. Happy to report that Hive lets you use up to eight tags, a step up from the old Steemit's maximum of five--albeit still mandatorily lowercase.

P.P.P.P.S. My relatives transitioned to a brand-new 50" Vizio at the end of April, on which I'll tune in to my long-belated New Year's marathon picks only after those first 1,000 words. (Speaking of ABC coverage: No cable box = no Times Square ball drop--and no Oscar rundown this year, either. As we all know, South Korea's Parasite made history with its Best Picture win.)

On a related note: We've unofficially cut the cord by now--no thanks to an array of Fire Sticks. Me, I already have my own entertainment (read: Autrison's archives) to go around.