Mailing lists are not exactly fashionable nowadays, but some of them remain relevant for some communities. The Lua community is one such example. As of 2017, a lot of what goes on in the Lua module development world still resonates in lua-l. With over 2500 subscribers, it’s a good way to kickstart interest in your new project.

Mailing list users tend to be somewhat pedantic about etiquette guidelines for posting, especially for announcements and the like. So, I usually follow this little formula for writing release announcement emails, which has been effective for me:

• Email subject - this is important; I use a format like “[ANN] MyProject x.y”
• Summary - The first paragraph explains what is the project
• Links and installation - Then a link to the project website, and a one-liner instruction of how to install it (that is, the incantation for the appropriate package manager — in the case of Lua, luarocks install myproject). More detailed instructions and documentation should be available from the project website.
• Description - Finally, a more detailed description:
  • If the announcement is for a new version of an existing project that was previously announced on the list, I include a summarized changelog, essentially “What’s new in version x.y:”
  • If this is the first announcement of the project, then a longer description of how the project works. For Lua modules, for example, this may include a really short “hello-world”-type example for the library. This is information that should be in the README.md file for your repository, which in future announcements will be reachable via the link for the project website (often a Github repo URL) mentioned above.
• License - Users should be able to figure out the license of your project easily, so especially in new projects mentioning can be a good idea — but watch out if you’re using a license that’s not the majority option in a given community. You may be unnecessarily flamed for your choice by people who don’t even want to use your project in the first place. If you’re not going with the “majority license” (and remember, license choice is your call as an author, not the community’s) it might be a better idea to avoid mailing list noise and mention the license only in the project website and sources. The goal is not to hide it (interested people should find it easily; do mention it in your project’s README.md and include a LICENSE file) but just to avoid licensing flamewars. Of course, using the majority license has major pros, so if it’s all the same to you go with it, but if you’d prefer another one, don’t let yourself be bullied by a community into picking one free software license over another. It’s your freedom too!
• Be nice! - Finally, remember to sandwich all this technical info with greetings at the top, kudos to contributors, requests for help and feedback, etc. A mailing list is a social medium, after all. :)

An example of an upgrade announcement is here:

[ANN] LuaRocks 2.4.2

Hello, list!

I'm happy to announce LuaRocks 2.4.2. LuaRocks is the Lua package
manager. (For more information, please visit http://luarocks.org )

http://luarocks.org/releases/luarocks-2.4.2.tar.gz
http://luarocks.org/releases/luarocks-2.4.2-win32.zip

Those of you on Unix who are running LuaRocks as a rock (i.e. those
who previously installed using `make bootstrap`) can install it using:

   luarocks install luarocks

What's new since 2.4.1:

* Fixed conflict resolution on deploy/delete
* Improved dependency check messages
* Performance improvements when removing packages
* Support user-defined `platforms` array in config file
* Improvements in Lua interpreter version detection in Unix configure script
* Relaxed Lua version detection to improve support for alternative
implementations (e.g. Ravi)
* Plus assorted bugfixes and improvements

This release contains commits by Peter Melnichenko, Robert Karasek and myself.

As always, all kinds of feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thank you, enjoy!

-- Hisham

An example of a new project announcement is here:

[ANN] safer - Paranoid Lua programming

Hi,

Announcing yet another "strict-mode" style module: "safer".

* http://github.com/hishamhm/safer

Install with
   luarocks install safer

# Safer - Paranoid Lua programming

Taking defensive programming to the next level. Use this module
to avoid unexpected globals creeping up in your code, and stopping
sub-modules from fiddling with fields of tables as you pass them
around.

## API

#### `safer.globals([exception_globals], [exception_nils])`

No new globals after this point.

`exception_globals` is an optional set (keys are strings, values are
`true`) specifying names to be exceptionally accepted as new globals.
Use this in case you have to declare a legacy module that declares a
global, for example. A few legacy modules are already handled by
default.

`exception_nils` is an optional set (keys are strings, values are
`true`) specifying names
to be exceptionally accepted to be accessed as nonexisting globals.
Use this in case code does feature-testing based on checking the
presence of globals. A few common feature-test nils such as `jit` and
`unpack` are already handled by default.

#### `t = safer.table(t)`

Block creation of new fields in this table.

#### `t = safer.readonly(t)`

Make table read-only: block creation of new fields in this table
and setting new values to existing fields.

Note that both `safer.table` and `safer.readonly` are implemented
creating a proxy table, so:

* Equality tests will fail: `safer.readonly(t) ~= t`
* If anyone still has a reference to this table prior
  to creating the safer version, they can still mess
  with the unsafe table and affect the safe one.

About
-----

Licensed under the terms of the MIT License, the same as Lua.

During its genesis, this module was called "safe", but I renamed it
to "safer" to remind us that we are never fully safe. ;)

-- Hisham
http://hisham.hm/ - @hisham_hm

Hope this helps!

I just remembered an interesting tidbit from my childhood.

Around 7th grade in school I invented a pen-and-paper version of Street Fighter II for people to play during classes.

I don’t remember the exact details, but basically I drew a grid for the screen and then I drew stick figures in it, and passed the page around.

People would write-in their moves and then I played CPU: I’d erase the stick figures and redraw in new positions, update hit/miss, update the energy meters.

I remember trying to keep it balanced and true to the game: Dhalsim’s punch and kick could hit farther but were weaker, etc. I had all of the “sprites” with the character movements pre-determined on my notebook.

The game went on sneaking a page back and forth along players and me at the back of the class. I imagine how bored out of our minds we must have been in school to enjoy playing “Street Fighter II at 0.05 frames per second”.

One of my least-favorite American English words is “latino”, for two reasons:

First, a linguistic reason: because it’s not inflected when used. When you’re used to the fact that in Spanish and Portuguese “latino” refers only to men and “latina” only to women, hearing “latino woman” sounds really weird (weirder than, say, “handsome woman”). Even weirder “latino women”, mixing a Spanish/Portuguese word and English grammar. “Bonito girls”? :)

Second, a sociological reason: because using a foreign loanword reinforces the otherness. Nobody calls the Italian community in America “italiano”, although that’s their name in Italian. The alternative “Hispanic” is not ideal because it doesn’t really make sense when including Brazil, which was never a Spanish colony (plus, the colonial past is something most countries want to leave behind).

I can’t change the language by myself, so I just avoid the term and use more specific ones whenever possible (Colombians, Argentines, Brazilians, South Americans, Latin Americans when referring to people from the area in general, etc.)

After writing the above, I checked Wikipedia and it seems the communites in the US agree with me:

« In a recent study, most Spanish-speakers of Spanish or Hispanic American descent do not prefer the term “Hispanic” or “Latino” when it comes to describing their identity. Instead, they prefer to be identified by their country of origin. When asked if they have a preference for either being identified as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” the Pew study finds that “half (51%) say they have no preference for either term.”[43] A majority (51%) say they most often identify themselves by their family’s country of origin, while 24% say they prefer a pan-ethnic label such as Hispanic or Latino. Among those 24% who have a preference for a pan-ethnic label, “‘Hispanic’ is preferred over ‘Latino’ by more than a two-to-one margin—33% versus 14%.” Twenty-one percent prefer to be referred to simply as “Americans.” »

I think the awkwardness in the grammar from point one actually reinforces point two, because it strikes me as something that no Spanish or Portuguese native speaker would come up with by themselves. So it sounds tacked upon.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully identify as a Brazilian, a South American and a Latin American — travellling abroad helps a lot to widen your cultural identity! — and I have no problem when people wear the term “latino” proudly, but I always pay close attention to the power of language and how it represents and propagates ideas.

It’s impressive to see David Bowie’s foresight on the cultural impact of the internet back in 1999, and how the interviewer was completely oblivious to it:

« Bowie: [When I was really young,] it still produced sighs of horror from people when you said “I’m in rock’n'roll”. Now it’s a career opportunity. And the internet now carries that flag, from the subversive and possibly rebellious, and chaotic, and nihilistic… Forget about the Microsoft element: the monopolies do not have a monopoly — maybe on programs.

Interviewer: What you like about it is that anyone can say anything, or do anything?

Bowie: From where I am, by virtue of the fact that I am a pop singer and writer, I really embrace the idea that there’s a new demystification process going on between the artist and the audience. If you look back at this last decade, there hasn’t been a single entity, artist or group that personified or became the brand of the 90s. It started to fade in the 80s… in the 70s there were definitely such artists, in the 60s… the Beatles, and Hendrix… in the 50s there was Presley.

Now it’s sub-groups, it’s genres: it’s hip-hop, it’s girl-power, it’s a communal kind of thing. It’s about a community, it’s becoming more and more about the audience. Because the point of having someone who led the forces has dissapeared, because the vocabulary of rock is too well-known. It’s a currency that is not devoid of meaning anymore, but it’s become only conveyor of information, not a conveyor of rebellion, and the internet has taken on that, as I said. So I find that a terribly exciting era.

So, from my standpoint, being an artist, I’d like to see what the new construction is between artist and audience. There is a breakdown, personified I think about rave culture, where the audience is at least as important as the person who is playing at the rave. It’s almost like the artist is to accompany the audience and what the audience is doing. And that feeling is very much permeating music. And permeating the internet. »

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June… If it were only the other way!” — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

A while ago I realized that, as we live more and more of our lives online, many of us have turned into a sort of reverse Dorian Gray.

We create accounts in service after service, uploading our avatar images. Some of them are periodically updated for various reasons (Facebook in particular), but many of them stay unchanged for years. When was the last time you changed your GMail avatar?

As it happens, our online self keeps that perennial smile, that youthful face that’s sometimes years old by now, while our physical self, the one that’s locked in a room, sitting on a computer as the online self strolls around in cyberspace, ages day by day.

I have friends here on Facebook whose avatars I’ve known for years. Professors are known for having outdated pictures in their websites, with black hair that has long turned gray.

I met a guy at a conference who I expected to be a youthful long-haired dude in his 20s, and was a short-haired man in his late 30s. When I said “oh, you have short hair now!” he smiled, a bit confused, and then remembered his own picture. What is striking is that I should have known, since I knew that picture for over ten years myself, back when I was a dude in my 20s.

As for me, I have one nice pic of myself that I uploaded as an avatar in many services (Twitter, Github, etc) that I’m just too lazy to switch. I like the picture and I actually used it once as a reference at the barbershop when getting a haircut (was I trying to chase my “Dorian’s picture”?). Still, when switching back from my child picture here on Facebook back to my “current” picture, the thought that my usual profile picture is actually from 2011 came to mind. Hence, this picture.