I can broadly agree with this article and associated
Twitter thread. LD&R season 3 is not breaking any new ground, and the trend towards horror isn’t something that I really like, personally.
I’d note that two episodes are based on stories by Neal Asher, whom I happen to appreciate for his British nihilism, but they are very gory and masculine.
Having two episodes where US Special Forces encounter a monster and are slaughtered is one too many, even if one of them is played for laughs.
On the other hand, it’s not really LD&R’s job to showcase short SF. It’s more a showcase for innovative animation, and SF tropes are a good scaffolding to hang that on.
I’d really love Netflix to showcase more “low-key” stories, that might be more well-served by more traditional episode lengths and live action.
Update, Mon 06 Jun 2022:
Michael Swanwick (author of the story behind The Very Pulse of the Machine) links to a behind-the-scenes video here.
This used to be the center pieces of my collection. Rare and expensive old games.
Now it turns out I‘ve been scammed and sold forgeries by a well known figure in the Ultima and tetrogames(sic!) community. Along with many others
It’s been a month since I whipped up this blog and started using it as a sort of replacement for Twitter and Mastodon.
So far, so good. I’m enjoying being able to structure my posts however I want, using Markdown + HTML, and the freedom of being able to post everything from a single line to an entire essay is liberating.
What’s missing is a solution where I don’t have to edit the content using a text editor. Some sort of web-based interface, so I can use it from a mobile too.
The situation in Ukraine remains terrible, with continued shelling and rampant human rights abuses, but at least the IANA TZ database has changed the timezone name from Kiev to Kyiv.
Some background: the TZ Info mailing list has had regular messages from Ukrainian activists requesting the change of the timezone Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv. They’ve referred to Ukrainian law, and in at least one case threatened with criminal prosecution.
The maintainers have consistently replied that they’re following the common transliteration used in English-language media, and have also noted that the names within the tzinfo files are to be seen as abstract labels only - applications are supposed to provide correct localizations on top of them.
Now, however, enough English-language media are using Kyiv that the change will be happening soon.
Update, Fri 01 July 2022: I was wrong, the sparks are still flying in the mailing list.
But the history of anti-metric sentiment is truly wild and pricks many conservative sore spots — from fears over loss of political sovereignty, to a general feeling the world is moving on and left you behind. The tories know what they’re doing with this stuff.
I’ve taken cheap shots at Drew’s communication style before, although I don’t have the technical skills to criticize him on his programming.
I have seen him wade in, fists flailing, in a very controversial style, and in a way that I feel is counter-productive to winning friends and influencing people.
That said I have sympathy for his feelings as described in the blog post. I believe is he trying to change. But as can be seen with figures like RMS, Linus and Lennart Poettering, nerds have long memories, and they neither forget nor forgive.
I’ve decided to take a break from social media, IRC, and sites like lobste.rs and Reddit.
My incessant tweeting and chatting was getting in the way of Elden Ring my actual work.
More seriously, the current state of the world is increasingly getting me down, and social media isn’t helping. I’m not giving up, but I need to refocus my energies in more positive directions.
This blog will still be updated but I’ll try to cut down on the snark and negativity.
[…] the ability to think for yourself is Elon Musk’s kryptonite.
Also LOL at this HN comment*
Money, more than anything is an amplifier, and it has amplified a neuro-atypical man with an unbalanced ego and actual political opinions you might not agree with. He is a real person with massive accomplishments who has enough money to firmly grab the wheel on the ship of our country, not some cardboard cutout of good or evil.
I implemented a better format for the permalink fragments based on the post title. So if you have bookmarked anything, sucks to be you. Also the feeds might go crazy. Sorry.
Bruce Sterling (unlinkable Tweet, ID 1527167745040580609):
When you’re a crypto bro, and some online pundit expresses his sincere relief that at least he’s not a crypto bro, you’re supposed to tell him “Have fun staying poor”
Except, when you suddenly lost half your net worth, that’s harder to say
The commuter train is A/C’d to American levels, ie. chilly AF.
I’m going by pendel because it’s more accessible and a bit cheaper. The transfer fee to Arlanda is 130 SEK, which is included in the Arlanda Express fare of 299 SEK, but I’ve already paid for a monthly SL pass.
In flight. Forgot to load the phone with offline media so am actually reading a book for once. I don’t know why the Books app has “goals”. Since when did reading become gamified? Maybe it’s Goodreads.
The book is Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams. It’s classic cyberpunk that I haven’t read before.
And now we’re on the train, but the carriage we’re in does not have working A/C. DB have roped it off, but we’re kinda desperate for seating so we don’t care and sit here anyway.
Allmän info: nya gröna SL-kortet behöver inte skannas optiskt
När jag skaffade det nya gröna SL-kortet så observerade jag den lilla QR-koden på baksidan. Den används för att skanna av kortet i SL-appen, för att köpa biljetter mm.
Dom nya läsarna har en optisk läsare som används för att läsa av biljetter som finns i mobil-appen. Av någon anledning trodde jag att även QR-koden var det som lästes av i spärren.
Så är det inte, kortet har även RFID. Man behöver inte visa QR-koden i läsaren.
Se bara till att inte läsa av kortet från en hållare som också innehåller ett betalkort. Då finns det risk att båda läses av och du betalar resan i onödan från betalkortet.
That might explain why it is the overwhelmingly Russophone East Ukraine is absolutely devastated by this war while the West Ukraine suffered much less. East Ukraine suffered exactly because it was viewed by Russia as “almost us”
I’ve added a bunch of old blog posts that I removed from my main blog. Most of them are from 2005-2006, and when I started tweeting seriously they tailed off a lot. Check the archives if you feel interested.
PSA: unmaintained project channels on Freenode automatically redirect to #freenode
During the management changes at Freenode in Jul 2021, all access lists and channel ownerships were reset. Existing channels that were not reclaimed by projects now automatically redirect to the main channel, which is #freenode.
If you have a specific question about a project, please make sure you’re actually in a maintained channel, and not in the main channel.
If the channel is not maintained, try checking the project’s homepage for their IRC presence. It’s usually under the “Community” section.
Shorter Russia, crying like a wojak behind a smirking mask…
“We pulled troops from the Finnish border to invade Ukraine, which spooked Finland to join NATO, but now we can’t invade Finland to force them to not join NATO because all our troops are in Ukraine getting killed in the invasion we started to force Ukraine not joining NATO.”
“Russia is so weak now they couldn’t risk another humiliating defeat,” Toveri said. If Russia were to attempt to send troops into Finland “in a couple of days they would be wiped out. The risk of humiliating defeat is high.”
“Gamers” has been a wholly right wing captured demographic since 2014. ‘Gamergate’ was nothing but a mainstreaming of white supremacist ideals into gaming culture.
You will now find someone repeating them in almost every mainstream gaming outpost you go.
Interesting submission about a super simple way to blog.
I must say I’m pleasantly surprised how fast this blog setup is. All data (basically most tweets since 2007 plus stuff I’ve written since the end of April) is 1.8MB of text in fortune format, and takes under 3s to render to HTML from Markdown.
Anyway, people should do whatever. I’ve long held the opinion that manually writing HTML/XML (closing tags etc) is a huge pain, and the advent of Markdown was a sweet release from that pain. For some unfathomable reason static site generators have ballooned in complexity. If you just want a frikkin’ site, MD + some perl has you covered.
There are two things that get in the way of blogging: not having an inspiration on what to write, and having too many steps between wanting to write and publishing.
Man it’s hard for me to resist going back to Twitter to snark-tweet.
CZE: should have a flashing light warning
SUI: this is causing depression
FRA: what language were they singing in? - it was Breton
NOR: I am at a loss for words
SPA: ¡muy caliente!
AZE: defeated by ARM in this competition
ISL: The Corrs go to Iceland
MDA: Russia, please invade and put a stop to this
SWE: Go Cornelia!
UK: it’s like the BeeGees and David Bowie had a love child
POL: morbid
SRB: at least they tried
Voting
La Suisse: null points
UKR wins!
What has Putin wrought.
@michel_v: Allemagne ou Royaume-Uni pour la dernière place cette année ? #Eurovision
@gerikson: La France, par chance?
@michel_v: Our Belgian vassals would never let us down.
@gerikson: at least FRA has 1 more point than GER right now, they have 0. But GBR in the lead :D
@michel_v: [Narrator’s voice] Of course the Belgian vassals let us down.
At the same time we’re watching the glittering confection of Eurovision, a racist kills at least 10 in Buffalo NY and livestreams it on Twitch. Sickening.
The Gamergate carrion birds are coming home to roost.
Danish far-right “activist” Rasmus Paludan burnt 3 Qur’ans in Sweden yesterday. There’s a tendency to claim that people who criticize these acts are “against free speech.” That’s not only intellectually juvenile, but shows a lack of understanding about how free speech works.
Critiquing the MANNER in which free speech is exercised isn’t the same thing as saying the right should be revoked or speech banned. For example, I was opposed to the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was also opposed to any bans on protesting against these occupations.
But, if anti-war protesters staged a protest at the funeral of a soldier killed in the war with signs saying the solder deserved to die, I’d critique both the MANNER and CONTENT of their speech. That doesn’t mean I’d ban either their right to gather or their right to speak.
Citizens exercising their free speech rights to question how others have exercised their free speech rights is actually the perfect crystallization of free speech and democratic engagement in action. To suggest hard critique of speech stifles free speech is counterintuitive.
When Paludan wraps his Islamophobia in “free speech,” don’t be surprised if others exercise their rights to then call out what they consider a transparent attack on a religious group. Labeling those who do so as “anti-free speech” is, ironically, an attempt to stifle speech.
Journalists, politicians, pundits forever whine about behavior that’s perfectly legal, but they consider anti-social. The message? Just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right/responsible/democratic decision. Precisely what critics tell Paludan.
It’s amusing to see opinion leaders who spend a huge amount of time telling citizens about the “correct” and “incorrect” way to exercise their freedoms – like, say, telling Muslim women what they should wear – suddenly wetting their pants when Qur’an-burners are criticized.
What this comes down to is how framing of freedoms/rights varies dramatically depending on whose rights are discussed. Paludan? Then it’s the letter of the law that matters. Immigrants? Well, then we begin to critique based on things like “values.” Legal rights less important.
(@bruces tweet, not linkable, ID 1525077147332886528):
The amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of the Milky Way, gnawing hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes
Russian Casualties in the Ukraine Have Reached “6.9 Trillion,” Say Sources; Pentagon Confirms Russia “Has Now Lost More People Than Have Ever Been Born”
Prompted by a submission to lobste.rs, I finally researched Mr. Brian Lunduke and feel fully justified adding his pasty white racist ass to the killfile.
15:05 < gerikson> ok let's see if his fans have some hissy fits
15:06 < Brekkjern> Maybe he should try what angersock did and become Lugnduke?
15:06 < gerikson> badum-tisch
15:07 < gerikson> right now he's Lögnduke
15:07 < Brekkjern> Hahaha
Undrar varför Mullvad känner att det är värt att ta ut stora annonser i t-banan för att kränga sin VPN-lösning. I dagens läge känns det som en hundvissla åt högerextremister.
Back in uni, there was a room in the computer lab with a bunch of Sun pizza box workstations - I believe they were Ultrasparcs.
The naming convention was celestial satellites, so we had names like Callisto, Miranda, Phoebe, and … Moon.
Moon. Not Luna. Not Selene. Not Cynthia. (OK, Cynthia would have been weird.)
Still haven’t gotten over it.
(update 2022-05-13: after this was written, some shitty “algorithmic stablecoin” with Luna in its name went tits-up and disappeared. This post is entirely coincidental to that. Unfortunately.)
Austrian Economics (gold, crypto) is rooted in a desire to make the world work in the way some people think it should work.
The problem is… it doesn’t actually work that way, unless you are a sociopath. And even then, there are limits.
Some examples…
“People will move to where tax rates are cheaper,” they say. But most people don’t choose where they live based on tax rates. Sociopaths do, sometimes. Time after time this analysis never holds up, despite the alarming chatter. https://t.co/HSjMRK1H40
The other big myth is that increasing the monetary supply alone contributes to inflation. In the current moment, we know that cartel influence over energy prices gives the oil+gas industry special leverage outside of monetary supply.
Inflation doesn’t always directly correlate to increased monetary supply; and oil+gas cartels can “juke the stats” to achieve whatever outcome they like. As usual, complex chaotic systems don’t lend themselves to reductive theses. Behavioral economics and complexity theory exist for a reason, to understand actual vs. surmised behavior. Why would proponents go to such lengths to disregard actual behavior and reality to impose their deductive (wrong) ideas about how money works on everyone? Because they think it will advantage them.
It also enables various shady activities and Ponzi schemes; crypto is just playing back every financial scheme ever invented before regulators catch up. Tech often is a medium through which social misfits and miscreants reshape the world in ways that make them comfortable and fit in. Rather than try to adapt to a world they don’t understand, they wish to remake the world in a way that suits their view of it.
We should all resist this. We definitely need to have big hairy messy conversations about money and its regulation. But reliance on poorly conceived and mostly wrong frameworks that make sense primarily to teen boys and sociopaths, and has no bearing on data, human behavior, or reality, is not the way. It’s time to discard this bad hand and move on.
Today we celebrate 77 years since the remnants of the criminal gang that led Germany to ruinous defeat in World War 2 signed an instrument of unconditional surrender.
I am no longer muted in #freenode@freenode.net, which means I can continue to passive-aggressively let confused users know where their favorite projects hang out on IRC nowadays.
“Ban abortion, ban trans people, ban words, ban kneeling during the national anthem, ban books, ban masks, ban vaccine mandates, ban history, ban science, ban math, ban cartoons… TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!”
Oh fuck here come the bad Star Wars puns we’ve all definitely never heard before.
Where we’re at it, what’s the Jedi religion’s stance on abortion? The one example we’ve seen in the movies show that the life of the mother isn’t really a priority…
(context: a draft decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade was leaked from the US Supreme Court. Abortion rights in the US are under concerted attack by misogynist ideologues, closely tied to the global Right)
Oh, and there’s a tired re-hash of “free speech” on Gemini. Here’s my take.
I spent a lot of time last night reflecting on how one of dominant narratives of my lifetime has been that freedom of speech is the most fundamental freedom, and how only a bunch of white guys who have never had their bodily autonomy threatened could have constructed that concept
Welp, looks like Russia wants a fight with Israel. Russian Foreign Ministry says that Israel “supports the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv” and that Lapid saying ““The Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust” is “anti-historical.”
Jag är kluven i frågan om Sverige ska ansluta sig till NATO. Men jag tycker att det är viktigt att Sverige har ett starkt och avskräckande försvar. Om ett NATO-medlemskap är det som krävs för att det ska vara fallet så kanske det är bäst ändå.
This song from Aimee Mann’s solo debut Whatever is really weird. It’s an upbeat pop song about the 1939 World’s Fair. I don’t really know what prompted Mann to write it, but it’s pretty unusual for that subject to be covered in popular music.
That said, I really love Whatever. There are some great songs, like “4th of July” and “I’ve Had It”, along with another left-field song: “Mr. Harris”, about a May-December romance.
