Voyager is a great app but this is something that’s been a minor gripe of mine, the current location of the account switcher makes one handed use on large screens like the iPhone Pro Max line difficult. As a long time Apollo user I feel this change would make Voyager feel like the perfect lemmy app and a true Apollo replacement.

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — What would Bob Ross think?

The artist who brought painting to the people, with works completed for PBS viewers in less than a half-hour with little more than a large bristle brush, putty knife and plenty of encouragement, certainly wouldn’t have envisioned one of his works going up for sale for nearly $10 million.

But that’s the price a Minneapolis gallery is asking for “A Walk in the Woods,” the first of more than 400 paintings that Ross produced on-air for his TV series “The Joy of Painting.”

“It is season one, episode one of what you would call the rookie card for Bob Ross,” Ryan Nelson, who owns the gallery, Modern Artifact, said of the work created in the show’s debut, which aired Jan. 11, 1983.

Growing up in a small town, Nelson said he was introduced to art through Ross’ show and loves his paintings. He doesn’t expect a quick sale given the high asking price, which he sees as an opportunity to display the painting for a larger audience.

On that first show where he painted “A Walk in the Woods,” Ross — sporting his beloved perm, full beard and unbuttoned shirt — stressed that painting didn’t need to be pretentious.

“We have avoided painting for so long because I think all of our lives we’ve been told that you have to go to school half your life, maybe even have to be blessed by Michelangelo at birth, to ever be able to paint a picture,” Ross said. “And here, we want to show you that that’s not true. That you can paint a picture.”

Ross, who died in 1995, hosted the show from 1983 until 1994. In each episode, he would speak directly to viewers whom he encouraged to paint with him as he created idealized scenes of streams backed by mountains, waterfalls and rustic cabins and mills — all done very quickly.

None of Ross’ paintings, including “A Walk in the Woods,” would be confused for masterpieces. But that wasn’t the point.

“What this piece represents is the people’s artist,” Nelson said. “This isn’t an institution that’s telling you that Bob Ross is great. It’s not some high-brow gallery telling you that Bob Ross is great. This is the masses, the population in the world that are saying that Bob Ross is great.”

The first season of “The Joy of Painting” was filmed in Falls Creek, Virginia, and the painting from Ross’ first show was sold months later to raise funds for the local PBS station. A volunteer at the station bought the painting for an undisclosed price and hung it in her home for 39 years until getting in touch with Nelson, who has bought and sold more than 100 of Ross’ works.

Nelson bought the painting last year and then gave it a “not for sale” price of $9.85 million, said publicist Megan Hoffman.

Hoffman said the asking price is far more than any other Ross painting has sold for, but “A Walk in the Woods” is unique and Nelson isn’t looking for a quick sale. She notes that Ross’ popularity has soared in recent years, with 5.63 million subscribers to a YouTube channel featuring his shows.

“Ryan would prefer to take it out, tour it around to museums and things like that so people can enjoy it and appreciate it,” Hoffman said. “He will take offers but he’s not in a hurry to sell it.”

Climate scientists and activists have since fled the platform now known as X since the Elon Musk takeover last year.

A report released on Wednesday by Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD), a coalition of more than 50 environmental groups, scored several social media platforms. The company with the most points ranked the highest in fighting climate misinformation.

The platforms could receive up to 21 points from a combination of categories including transparency, advertising, policy content, and enforcing their rules on climate misinformation. X only received a single point for “lacking clear policies that address climate misinformation, having no substantive public transparency mechanisms, and offering no evidence of effective policy enforcement,” the report said.

All other platforms ranked higher. YouTube came in second to last with 6 points. Meta and Instagram tied at 8 points, TikTok received 9 points. Pinterest came out on top with 12 points.

“Pinterest has been pretty proactive with working with our coalition in regards to having a content moderation policy that addresses climate change misinformation,” Erika Seiber, a spokesperson for Friends of the Earth and Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition, told Earther.

Though social media users can always log off, researchers reasoned that it is important to hold these platforms accountable for their lack of climate misinformation policies, or for the lack of regular enforcement. Americans are increasingly getting their information about breaking news and social issues from social media apps. A 2021 report from the Pew Research Center outlined that almost half of U.S. adults regularly received their news from social media.

“[Platforms] have a substantive impact on the way that we talk about climate change, climate solutions, renewable energy, and climate policy as a whole,” Seiber explained. “All the extreme weather events that have happened over the summer, whether it be the heat waves or the wildfires in Hawaii, misinformation has created a lot of confusion around the cause of the fires.”

Before Elon Musk purchased the platform last year, the app had once banned advertisements that contradicted climate science. But now it’s not clear how new leadership has addressed this, if at all. “Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company has created uncertainty about which policies are still standing and which are not,” the report said.

The Climate Action Against Disinformation Coalition reached out to X and the other platforms mentioned in the report while compiling the information but did not receive a response from X. Seiber explained that before Musk purchased the website, environmental justice organizations like Friends of the Earth had a reliable contact with X when it was still Twitter. But Musk stripped down the company’s content moderation team which led to less insight into how the company handles misinformation.

The Musk takeover of X, formerly Twitter, has had other consequences. Environmentalists and experts who once used the site for education and community building began to see a shift in their online interactions. This sparked an exodus of climate voices.

“There’s been a massive change. I get so much abuse and rude comments now,” Mark Maslin, a climate scientist professor at University College London, told The Guardian this year.

A young woman walks down a street in Tehran, her hair uncovered, her jeans ripped, a bit of midriff exposed to the hot Iranian sun. An unmarried couple walk hand in hand. A woman holds her head high when asked by Iran's once-feared morality police to put a hijab on, and tells them: "Screw you!"

These acts of bold rebellion - described to me by several people in Tehran over the past month - would have been almost unthinkable to Iranians this time last year. But that was before the death in the morality police's custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been accused of not wearing her hijab [veil] properly.

The mass protests that shook Iran after her death subsided after a few months in the face of a brutal crackdown, but the anger that fuelled them has not been extinguished. Women have just had to find new ways to defy the regime.

A Western diplomat in Tehran estimates that across the country, an average of about 20% of women are now breaking the laws of the Islamic Republic by going out on to the streets without the veil.