Random link from the archives: "INTERFACE LOVE. – Researching UI in Games, Cinema and anything else thats interesting." https://web.archive.org/web/20181023113838/https://ilikeinterfaces.com/ originally retrieved Tue Oct 23 11:38:38 EDT 2018

what's the current odds on the polymarket trump assassination deadpool? like, how many days do they think he has left?

oh hey, it looks like amazon sign ins are dead

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200617041921/https://scribe.rip/p/why-online-dating-can-feel-like-such-an-existential-nightmare-8729486aaaac originally retrieved Wed Jun 17 04:19:21 EDT 2020

Just a moment... https://medium.com/modern-mythology/the-phantom-is-structured-like-a-language-the-symbolic-economy-of-high-strangeness-92179366a304?sk=3cdcd048f9c161d1620cf34ba198ea4e

you know, i'm not liking world war three so far. particularly since the country i live in is acting like the country that tends to get bombed to hell and carved up for neighbours in the last two

when the bubble pops, assuming the computer industry isn't just fucking gone, there will be as much money in finding and removing LLM-generated code from important projects as there was in y2k mitigation, and it'll have to be treated like getting rid of asbestos

there are a billion dracula adaptations, some of them great but most shit. somehow, there are only like four nosferatus and they're all bangers. how?

does ningyo as in doll have the same kanji as ningyo as in mermaid? like, is ningyo basically the equivalent of the english mannikin (something that looks human but isn't)?

it seems like every time i come across a cool idea with interesting and useful potential, a couple years later a bunch of ghoulish capitalists promote the hell out of something they pretend is the same thing but actually sucks and is evil

Random link from the archives: "The Alan Parsons Project - I Wouldn't Want to be Like You - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20191201170311/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOwFVowEugQ originally retrieved Sun Dec 1 17:03:11 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "Deadpool is an Unlikely Social Justice Warrior" https://web.archive.org/web/20211031201913/https://scribe.rip/p/deadpool-is-an-unlikely-social-justice-warrior-afb699b53958 originally retrieved Sun 31 Oct 2021 08:19:13 PM EDT

Band name of the day: sounds like science

people keep wanting to swap music recs with me but the only music i can talk intelligently about is the stuff i had to research in order to appreciate so i'm stuck being that asshole who's like: moondog, sun ra, mort garson, devo, emergency broadcast network. nobody wants that. that's homework.

Random link from the archives: "How games like Minecraft and No Man’s Sky help players connect to their worlds - The Verge" https://web.archive.org/web/20190925102356/https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/24/20880104/minecraft-no-mans-sky-building-games-new-perspective

i find the economics of 'cloud' computing darkly hilarious. like, because the web didn't have encryption for the first couple years, direct sales were not secure; because the w3c never properly developed the URI standard, hosts with popular content get expensive; so we settled on a model where in exchange for the ability to post stuff on someone else's website, the things we post are used as the basis for ad targeting. but then these companies themselves are renting all their computers from amazon. ad revenue is way flakier than rent. basically, it's a chain of companies scamming & being scammed completely avoidably -- all you have to do is not hand your business to amazon & google. (would you make money? probably not -- but most businesses fail, and more ought to.)

for all i could complain about tiktok, this recent bullshit is beyond the pale. like: a foreign company's product becomes popular and so it's taken away by presidential fiat and given to a major campaign donor? how does anybody, with a straight face, claim that's ok?

Random link from the archives: "Something went wrong" https://web.archive.org/web/20211024183409/https://scribe.rip/p/to-me-that-looks-very-much-like-a-randomly-self-organizing-chaotic-system-7582142229be originally retrieved Sun 24 Oct 2021 06:34:09 PM EDT

whenever the horror genre comes up, people will say 'i don't like horror, and these aren't REALLY horror, but' and then list off like 20 horror movies they love. because people don't know what the horror genre is, but thinks it must be more hardcore than whatever they are into

legitimately saw somebody this morning suggesting that, to counteract GAN-generated images, every photograph should be cryptographically signed with the serial number of the device used to take the photo and every device used to edit it. and, like... was that the plan? is that why this is a thing? the surveillance shit?

Random link from the archives: "Game Studies - I'd Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines" https://web.archive.org/web/20200317102639/http://gamestudies.org/2001/articles/jessmorrissette originally retrieved Tue Mar 17 10:26:39 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "No Future Got Me Like" https://web.archive.org/web/20211104083053/https://scribe.rip/p/no-future-got-me-like-e449aef0f734 originally retrieved Thu 04 Nov 2021 08:30:53 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "Introduction - Roguelike Tutorial - In Rust" https://web.archive.org/web/20200115081749/http://bfnightly.bracketproductions.com/rustbook/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 15 08:17:49 EST 2020

it's deeply weird to be on the internet rn. people who were saying 'information wants to be free' 15 years ago are now like 'the problem with AI is not the environmental impact but the copyright infringement'

Random link from the archives: "The Alan Parsons Project - I Wouldn't Want to be Like You - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20191201170311/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOwFVowEugQ originally retrieved Sun Dec 1 17:03:11 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten..." https://web.archive.org/web/20200128150430/https://www.crummy.com/writing/speaking/2017-Roguelike%20Celebration/ originally retrieved Tue Jan 28 15:04:30 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "'Computer bots are like humans, having fights lasting years' | University of Oxford" https://web.archive.org/web/20170607111920/http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-02-24-computer-bots-are-humans-having-fights-lasting-years originally retrieved Wed Jun 7 11:19:20 EDT 2017

Random link from the archives: "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist" https://web.archive.org/web/20231231133238/https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/ originally retrieved Sun 31 Dec 2023 01:32:38 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200616134223/https://scribe.rip/p/shows-like-due-south-will-forever-be-amazing-because-we-cant-watch-them-on-netflix-e8cdfa603950 originally retrieved Tue Jun 16 13:42:23 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "Why do Americans like it to be 72 degrees inside?" https://web.archive.org/web/20201116082435/https://www.fastcompany.com/90574686/why-do-americans-like-it-to-be-72-degrees-inside originally retrieved Mon 16 Nov 2020 08:24:35 AM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201008144707/https://scribe.rip/p/think-like-no-one-else-58d5485a9975 originally retrieved Thu Oct 8 14:47:07 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190820114650/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-62-no-1/pdfs/think-like-an-intelligence-analyst.pdf originally retrieved Tue Aug 20 11:46:50 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - robpike/ivy: ivy, an APL-like calculator" https://web.archive.org/web/20200213091728/https://github.com/robpike/ivy originally retrieved Thu Feb 13 09:17:28 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200613045238/https://scribe.rip/p/why-medieval-cats-look-like-that-b6f49deae43c originally retrieved Sat Jun 13 04:52:38 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "“A Sloppy Machine, Like Me”: The History of Video Synthesizers" https://web.archive.org/web/20180110081654/https://wearethemutants.com/2018/01/09/a-sloppy-machine-like-me-the-history-of-video-synthesizers/ originally retrieved Wed Jan 10 08:16:54 EST 2018

Random link from the archives: "The First Church of Space Jesus: If people gave car advice like they gave dating advice" https://web.archive.org/web/20201125143456/http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2020/11/if-people-gave-car-advice-like-they.html

i feel like whichever boutique label figures out how to get a blu ray complete box set of all the extant paul naschy movies is gonna make bank

my insurance rep is trying really hard to sell me on handing out referrals. like, i've gotten several calls and texts this week about it

Random link from the archives: "It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters" https://web.archive.org/web/20180806115351/https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/its-looking-extremely-likely-that-qanon-is-probably-a

i always used to think criticism of 'academic style' was overblown. i read a lot of academic literature, and the stuff i pick up is often literally beautiful (ex., a thousand plateaus) & only occasionally reads like a high schooler bullshitting at 3am. then i realized, doctoral candidates have to actually survey the field & read the shitty papers that i immediately drop...

i don't like the false dichotomy of social vs technical. language is a social technology and anything downstream of it is both social and technical, and so subject to both kinds of concerns at once.

there's been a lot of talk about whether to recommend prometheus rising / cosmic trigger (and if not, what to replace it with) today. RAW's misguided characterizations of women's lib in particular have led to some troubling tendencies in discordian & psychonaut communities. a lot of the science hasn't held up, & he's inherited some eugenic taint from his sources. it occurs to me that while i got some mileage out of the general ordering of the circuits, mostly what i appreciated about prometheus rising was the detailed description of circuits 1-4 and how they interact -- really 'this is how to tell when you are feeling unsafe versus oppressed, and here are things you can do about it, and here are some tells for when someone is feeling that way'. the core stuff there is still present in modern personality models like OCEAN and modern developmental psychology (at least as I was taught in psych 101 a decade ago) so somebody could probably do another book with the same general structure and have a funny typology of types of neurosis. i still find prometheus rising worth reading and returning to, despite incorporating some really heinous shit (like betelheim's refrigerator-mother-autism thing).

eventually somebody's gonna tie up Elon and put him in an empty rocket headed for Mars with like 3 hours oxygen supply, right? like, this is how all this is gonna end, right?

saw a post where somebody was like 'they should make a video game where the hunger mechanic makes you send bitchy emails' and it's a real shame that gamergate overshadowed shit so much that he doesn't seem to realize he's describing depression quest

honest question... does trump actually know that a 100% tariff doubles the price of a thing instead of making it totally unavailable? because it doesn't seem like he knows that.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209124704/https://scribe.rip/p/i-was-sued-for-sounding-like-myself-da089f34d953 originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 12:47:04 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200920053704/https://scribe.rip/p/like-a-demagogue-wework-the-doublespeak-advertising-philosophy-of-silicon-valley-89efe0300a05 originally retrieved Sun Sep 20 05:37:04 EDT 2020

'george washington carver is known for his huge peanuts' seems like the kind of joke they could have KILLED with in clone high but almost certainly didn't

whenever i see a 'i bought this before elon went crazy' sticker, my reaction is 'i don't believe you'. like, he was getting news coverage for bizarre own-goals a full decade ago.

astrology tiktok is great. like, leo sun is going to cessina squared my anus, yes, tell me all about it.

is the database of, like, names of characters from particular shows used by MAL something i can download? i'm interested in graphing trends in anime character names over time...

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190823093049/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/programming-a-computer-is-nothing-like-building-a-car-and-everything-like-changing-your-oil-390bf0b4ed0 originally retrieved Fri Aug 23 09:30:49 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "'The Wake' Is An Unlikely Hit In An Imaginary Language : NPR" https://web.archive.org/web/20190328090101/https://www.npr.org/2015/08/27/434970724/the-wake-is-an-unlikely-hit-in-an-imaginary-language originally retrieved Thu Mar 28 09:01:01 EDT 2019

love that the internet archive gets a coordinated suit right before an administration that really needs reporting on it permanently archived at a granular level. just like anti-LLM rhetoric was spun into pro-copyright rhetoric right after the steamboat willy expiry.

debbie does dallas is in the public domain so nothing is stopping some VJ from making, like, a 15 hour hip-hop mix of it

Bad idea of the day: sort a video's frames by a randomly selected pixel. for videos that have strong color symbolism, like suspiria, this will jumble thematically linked frames together in a way that doesn't quite flow

are there any good archives of retro pictures of libraries? i like library architecture.

isn't it great when you come back from a long weekend to find out that like 10 people are quitting or being laid off simultaneously

we haven't milked the juice out of gimmick wish fulfillment isekai. like: what about isekai for people who do memory sports? what about a villainess narrative where the mc never played the vn but won a trivia competition about it? the only guy in a medieval fantasy world who half-remembers calculus? isekai into a pirate world as a guy whose special interest is shibari rope suspension? you could go on.

people are gonna, like, just use VPNs and jailbroken phones to use tiktok after tomorrow right? like we always do when the government tries to ban part of the internet?

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20210505092149/https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-s-and-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos originally retrieved Wed 05 May 2021 09:21:49 AM EDT

What did Music Videos Look Like in the '30s? - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4YnR8qH6yw

Random link from the archives: "Big Pile of Vim-like" https://web.archive.org/web/20191204100652/https://vim.reversed.top/ originally retrieved Wed Dec 4 10:06:52 EST 2019

Random link from the archives: "Analogue Mega Sg Review: Sounds Like a Winner" https://web.archive.org/web/20190328102340/https://tedium.co/2019/03/26/analogue-mega-sg-review/ originally retrieved Thu Mar 28 10:23:40 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "The First Church of Space Jesus: If people gave car advice like they gave dating advice" https://web.archive.org/web/20201125143456/http://firstchurchofspacejesus.blogspot.com/2020/11/if-people-gave-car-advice-like-they.html

i really want an oral history of Young Einstein. like, how the fuck did that movie get made?

you like DanDaDan because hot grandma. i like DanDaDan because the manga author has clearly read Passport to Magonia. we are the same.

Random link from the archives: "Why your Netflix thumbnails don't look like mine - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20181122084836/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axCBA3VD5dQ originally retrieved Thu Nov 22 08:48:36 EST 2018

people are making a big deal about Mangione's privileged background but like... that's what privilege is? like, you don't have the context to fully understand problems until you experience them. a back injury can teach you a lot of empathy very quickly, taken the right way.

NYT is trying to spin Mangione's popularity as a result of his attractiveness, but it's because most regular americans relate to him & would like to commit exactly the same crime.

Random link from the archives: "Game Studies - I'd Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines" https://web.archive.org/web/20200317102639/http://gamestudies.org/2001/articles/jessmorrissette originally retrieved Tue Mar 17 10:26:39 EDT 2020

today in things that make me sad: in an ND facebook group, somebody asked for exercises that wouldn't feel like dedicated exercise & thus not hit PDA, & got 300 people telling her to diet instead. like wtf

Random link from the archives: "'Computer bots are like humans, having fights lasting years' | University of Oxford" https://web.archive.org/web/20170607111920/http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2017-02-24-computer-bots-are-humans-having-fights-lasting-years originally retrieved Wed Jun 7 11:19:20 EDT 2017

i feel like there's a 'trump cabinet pick' / 'wayfair' meme that almost makes itself

i'm not going to be auditing my post history to make myself look like a lib; that shit has sailed. i don't recommend you do so either.

Random link from the archives: "Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole But It's Island in the Sun By Weezer - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190921140416/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIVFmC9EsUM originally retrieved Sat Sep 21 14:04:16 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR" https://web.archive.org/web/20181022105817/https://longreads.com/2018/10/18/review-of-winners-take-all/ originally retrieved Mon Oct 22 10:58:17 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Editions" https://web.archive.org/web/20190129100556/https://qz.com/1533143/the-best-way-to-use-social-media-is-to-act-like-a-19th-century-parisian/ originally retrieved Tue Jan 29 10:05:56 EST 2019

bounty hunting in cowboy bebop is this perfectly contingent carceral labor. the guy who's best at it, zen badass who singlehandedly defeats like a third of the mafia, immortals, and experimental weapons, can barely afford to eat. get their news from a talk show with tiddies in.

i hear people talk about the loss of the anime canon, but it didn't hit home until i saw a tiktok today that was like 'hey, trivia fact! super obscure old anime Ranma 1/2 exists'

Random link from the archives: "The Logic of the Like | The Point Magazine" https://web.archive.org/web/20210413113555/https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-logic-of-the-like/ originally retrieved Tue 13 Apr 2021 11:35:55 AM EDT

is professor-dom a thing? like, can i get paid by people who feel sexual satisfaction when i assign them reading lists and engage them in round-table discussions? or do i have to spit on them or something too

agile is so fucked, though. like 'wake up worker, it is 7AM, time for your mandatory daily self-crit session'

so, i told my manager why my performance has been shit (tickets with important info missing, time zone issues mean PRs take at least 24 hours to be merged, over-rigorous 'security' measures make testing unnecessarily difficult) & he acted like he didn't know all that already. was this a mistake

shoutfactory is streaming elvira's movie mac on youtube and i've had it on in the background for like 2 days and i just realized... i've already seen every one of the movies she's showing in this set of episodes

marketing is like gambling: you might win big, but the expected utility is literally negative.

i feel like a lot of people these days don't know the difference between art and craft. craft is when you do something well, and art is when thinking about something too hard fucks you up a little in the head. there is some overlap. hope that helps.

love to spend 15 minutes of my daily standup trying to explain that the ticket's ready for test while the scrum master says shit like 'so i am hearing that you will start tomorrow'

once you give birth to a piece of art, you no longer own it. it will be recontextualized. you can choose to make this harder by annoying your fans. doing this increases the amount of money you can expect to make from like $5 to like $15.

the goal of being poly is to maximize the number of metamours you have. so, the winning strategy is to get a new partner close to poly saturation from several distinct polycules, like an ancient trading empire

Random link from the archives: "s16e06: Tech Journalism, But Not Tech Journalism; Sounds More Like A You Problem" https://web.archive.org/web/20231003085803/https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s16e06-tech-journalism-but-not-tech-journalism/ originally retrieved Tue 03 Oct 2023 08:58:03 AM EDT

human-style cognition is downstream of an omnivorous diet + scavenger lifestyle, right? from a materialist-history POV i mean: the more opportunistic food sources you can make use of, the greater the pockets of slack necessary for developing cogtech like language

Random link from the archives: "Facebotlish: Understanding an AI's Non-Human Language - The Atlantic" https://web.archive.org/web/20170620152559/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/what-an-ais-non-human-language-actually-looks-like/530934/?utm_source=atltw

exploitation movies have migrated from amazon prime to tubi. in a way, i feel like marginal media wants to remain marginal, to stave off a Legacy and a Reputation... they have within them the hermes spirit

Random link from the archives: "Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts | Aeon Ideas" https://web.archive.org/web/20181031102716/https://aeon.co/ideas/acting-like-an-extravert-has-benefits-but-not-for-introverts originally retrieved Wed Oct 31 10:27:16 EDT 2018

it wasn't like they hadn't noticed the growing things peeking out from between the bandages -- some a very non-fleshlike color, and others, equally disturbingly, a very close facimile to it -- but the ritual had had other effects as well.

Random link from the archives: "HyperRogue: the weirdest roguelike | Rock, Paper, Shotgun" https://web.archive.org/web/20180702084657/https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/28/hyperrogue-non-euclidean-roguelike/ originally retrieved Mon Jul 2 08:46:57 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Science Is Full of Mavericks Like My Grandfather. But Was His Physics Theory Right? - The Atlantic" https://web.archive.org/web/20181101124554/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/science-full-mavericks-like-my-grandfather-was-his-physics-theory-right/574573/

when you think about it, intertextuality is horny af. like, the books are having an orgy. the books are shunting.

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - automerge/automerge: A JSON-like data structure that can be modified concurrently by different users, and merged again automatically." https://web.archive.org/web/20180208114258/https://github.com/automerge/automerge

Random link from the archives: "'I'd Have These Extremely Graphic Dreams': What It's Like To Work On Ultra-Violent Games Like Mortal Kombat 11" https://web.archive.org/web/20190509105931/https://kotaku.com/id-have-these-extremely-graphic-dreams-what-its-like-t-1834611691

Random link from the archives: "Inside the global gig economy of werewolf erotica on platforms like Dreame, GoodNovel and Amazon Kindle Vella - Rest of World" https://web.archive.org/web/20220727083516/https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/

Random link from the archives: "Analogue Mega Sg Review: Sounds Like a Winner" https://web.archive.org/web/20190328102340/https://tedium.co/2019/03/26/analogue-mega-sg-review/ originally retrieved Thu Mar 28 10:23:40 EDT 2019

after decades of development, we still haven't managed to make a 3d game that doesn't look like ass much of the time. let's go back to 2d sprites, which people figured out how to make look really cool very quickly.

'tits or ass?' well, if i had to pick one, it'd be ass, because caring for someone incapable of shitting sounds like a lot of work. how do they expel waste? do they vomit?

Random link from the archives: "The Alan Parsons Project - I Wouldn't Want to be Like You - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20191201170311/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOwFVowEugQ originally retrieved Sun Dec 1 17:03:11 EST 2019

i only leave star reviews in two circumstances: either i expected something mediocre & was blown away, so five stars, or i feel like i was literally conned into wasting my time and money on a no-effort piece of shit, so one star. otherwise, quantifying and ranking media is fraught

Why Do Dwarves Sound Scottish and Elves Sound Like Royalty? - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-do-dwarves-sound-scottish-and-elves-sound-like-royalty

pet peeve: when people describe bits as 'zeroes and ones'. they can be literally any bivalue system. they're not inherently more number-like than they are iced-cream-flavor-like. in practice, they are more like 'ons and offs' bc electric digital computing.

Bad idea of the day: thc-infused candy cigarettes shaped like joints and blunts

Random link from the archives: "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist" https://web.archive.org/web/20231231133238/https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/ originally retrieved Sun 31 Dec 2023 01:32:38 PM EST

corporate computer security feels like this weird mix of over- and under- protection. like, it's a nightmare to do my job bc of all these hurdles in the way of the public domain data we downloaded for free, but i'm pretty sure anybody could call the public HR number & get my paycheck routed to them without any of my personal information

i shouldn't let LLMs & GANs ruin my appreciation for generative art. statistical methods like these are not new (and most of their problems with LLMs are shared with, ex., markov) & all that's changed is that people are trying to Productize, which they tend to do.

Voyager was my introduction to Star Trek & it's so weird to go back to it & realize the whole thing was basically the showrunners looking at various TNG episodes and going 'people liked that arc, let's do it worse but like fifteen times'. Meanwhile DS9 was fomenting revolutionary sentiment.

it must be super weird to be a children's media creator. like, you can have an enormous number of fans but all of them will completely forget about you in 2 years because 2 years is an eternity when you're seven. meanwhile the preproduction pipeline is 18 months.

Random link from the archives: "“I want the state to think like an anarchist”: Dutch historian Rutger Bregman on why the left must reclaim utopianism" https://web.archive.org/web/20180220171405/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/observations/2018/02/i-want-state-think-anarchist-dutch-historian-rutger-bregman-why-left

Random link from the archives: "I Lived Exclusively Off Doomsday Prepper Food for a Week - MUNCHIES" https://web.archive.org/web/20180412110152/https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/vbx399/what-does-prepper-food-taste-like-v25n1 originally retrieved Thu Apr 12 11:01:52 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "Why Mawaru Penguindrum is Like Curry - Meaning From Multiplicity - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20210728090317/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzyAwc3PSE originally retrieved Wed 28 Jul 2021 09:03:17 AM EDT

any resources on incompetent/semi-competent cult leaders? like, ones who have a hard time maintaining a following of the size they want

anybody know where to get high-res paul laffoley prints that aren't like eight hundred dollars? are they simply not available?

i like to read stuff that's way over my head, which is a mixed bag. on the one hand, i'm full of weird trivia from totally different domains. on the other hand, i routinely read a whole book and understand approximately none of it

we have a million adaptations of the first tarzan book (the origin story) and the second one (tarzan in new york) but no one has yet dared to adapt, like, books 6-10 where he fistfights giant mutant ants on mars and shit

i feel like some action movies are part of an 'action' body genre -- the point is to get the viewer all pumped up, and the plot doesn't matter -- while others are totally plot-focused and the action is basically an aesthetic abstraction

i wonder what the economic impact of smartphone lacking hardware keyboards is. like, you save a bunch of money on manufacturing but you dramatically increase the likelihood of extremely expensive typos. i'll bet the impact is overall negative

Bad idea of the day: intentionally reading against the text, but, like, as a kink thing

postman baffles me. like, this little GUI wrapper around core curl features is somehow 1) distributed as a binary that you gotta run from the unpacked tarball, 2) fuckin massive, 3) has accounts for some reason, and 4) gets updates like every couple days?

imagine coming of age in west germany in the 60s. like, you're 15 or something, and you realize your school principal, the local police chief, all the authority figures in your life are not just figurative but literal nazis. i'd probably join the RAF too

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201008044356/https://scribe.rip/p/i-didnt-like-kill-all-normies-very-much-225c17868d78 originally retrieved Thu Oct 8 04:43:56 EDT 2020

i wonder how it feels to be so famous that absolute strangers make genderbent shoops of thirty year old pictures of you. like, i guess when you're that famous you generally stay off the internet specifically to avoid weird things fans do

Random link from the archives: "Acting like an extravert has benefits, but not for introverts | Aeon Ideas" https://web.archive.org/web/20181031102716/https://aeon.co/ideas/acting-like-an-extravert-has-benefits-but-not-for-introverts originally retrieved Wed Oct 31 10:27:16 EDT 2018

at what point did MST3k start calling the sat 'the sattelite of love'? and is there, like, a story justification?

ever been watching a movie and been like 'aw nice, parts of this look like an actual movie'?

Random link from the archives: " What It's Like to Be Allergic to Corn - The Atlantic" https://web.archive.org/web/20190118104507/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/what-its-like-be-allergic-corn/580594/ originally retrieved Fri Jan 18 10:45:07 EST 2019

you guys remember back in like 2012 when the IEEE got called out because their journals had published a whole bunch of obviously-nonsense machine generated papers built through a generative grammar thing specifically invented to identify spam journals, and the IEEE announced they'd start using automated screening based on the word frequency of the default grammar?

patent terms are too long. 20 years? come on. you should get like six months. can't build up a competitive advantage that mitigates the first-mover effect in that time? sounds like a skill issue, git gud.

i can't bring myself to be mad about daylight savings because it's not like i don't routinely wake up to discover that while i was sleeping my daily standup has been moved from 7 AM to 6 AM

Like A Dragon’s localisation team explain how they bring the series’ singular storytelling to the west | Rock Paper Shotgun https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/like-a-dragons-localisation-team-explain-how-they-bring-the-series-singular-storytelling-to-the-west

all the furries must be excited for february ending. you know. because march comes in like a lion.

ok, it looks like atprototools doesn't support links yet because the devs haven't figured out facets (which are essentially xanadu-style links -- i approve). i'll have to override the post method to take an optional list of facets & decide how i want to represent them

i need my phone's spell checker to understand that most words can have an s added to the end (sometimes with an apostrophe either before or after it) and still be a valid word. it's fine that my phone has the vocabulary of a third grader; i don't necessarily mind that i have to teach it new words. i do not like that i have to teach it the same new word four times because nobody thought to plug in a fucking lemmatizer. i do not like that it takes my correct word and then removes things from it in order to produce an incorrect word.

betterhelp is a pretty mixed bag but one thing they do that i really appreciate is that they send, like, 10 reminder texts about every appointment, starting several days earlier. like, thank you for understanding that many of your customers have attention and time management problems, and not taking advantage of that to farm ninety dollar cancellation fees

Bad idea of the day: nanogenmo idea: 'horny bible', only the lines from the king james bible containing words like 'begat', 'lust', 'lover', and 'seed'

my roman empire is a chaos communications conference presentation i watched once that was ostensibly about how to fight for civil rights but was actually about how this protest organization changed into a lobbying organization and spent years trying to accumulate a database of which cookies specific conservative politicians liked best and what their habits were so that they could be easily cornered and given cookies. like: way to go spending an enormous amount of effort trying to optimize unsuccessfully bribing people who hate you? i knew lobbying was stupid & contributed to political corruption but i didn't realize it wasalso the political equivalent of a tabs-vs-spaces argument

it's really weird that we group religion and ethnicity together. like, ethnicity is something you're born into & cannot escape from, but religion is a set of things you choose to believe to be true and a set of actions you choose to take in relationship to it. do we group them together simply because religious organizations have a history of trying to accumulate power by indoctrinating pre-rational children? (to be fair, perhaps the way i'm framing religion is unusual: most people i've met who identify with a religious label also reject or are unaware of basically everything that religion claims to be true, and the only real exception is people who converted in adulthood; clearly those folks do not think religion is a set of beliefs and actions, but something inherited like ethnicity is)

dune is basically the ideal franchise for me because i love problematic things so long as they are complicated enough. i also like h p lovecraft and phillip k dick.

social media update: bluesky, like reddit, seems mostly good for finding new sex workers to subscribe to but too noisy, normie, and lib-brained to be useful for discussion like the fediverse is. it has some decent memes but they're largely just taken from facebook meme pages i already follow

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - mattiasgustavsson/dos-like: Engine for making things with a MS-DOS feel, but for modern platforms" https://web.archive.org/web/20211011222709/https://github.com/mattiasgustavsson/dos-like originally retrieved Mon 11 Oct 2021 10:27:09 PM EDT

Random link from the archives: "What Shonen Jump Was Like 30 Years Ago - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20171210184652/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIh85_bCudk originally retrieved Sun Dec 10 18:46:52 EST 2017

wild that so many people are putting, like, all their chips on Incompetence As A Service replacing trained employees, but it makes more sense when you realize that a lot of people making management decisions don't have the background to distinguish between a meaningful essay and clever bullshit, or between clean functional code and enterprise boilerplate bullshit

i've been on bluesky for a couple days and my verdict is: it's twitter again, by the guy who did twitter the first time, and leans very normie (having none of the interesting subcultures that made twitter interesting except furries and cute-animal bots, both of which fedi is much better on). it's probably a good fit for people whose only problem with twitter is elon musk, & who thought it was perfect a couple years ago. they've rebranded saved searches as 'feeds' and they're trying to pitch it as a UI revolution, which it might be in the context of an app that looks and acts like somebody replaced the icon pack in the official twitter app. so far as i can tell it's very liberal and i'm one of only a handful of anarchists even on there.

Adult Swim's Uzumaki Looked Like the Most Promising Junji Ito Anime Ever, So Where is it? https://screenrant.com/adult-swim-uzumaki-anime-junji-ito-where-when/

this morning i'm thinking about how, after my grandfather's funeral, some guy pulled my grandmother aside and spent like 20 minutes trying to convince her to worry about an immanent chinese invasion of the united states, and whenever i tried to push back on anything he was basically like 'what do you know, you're not a member of the military so you can't possibly have any idea about politics'. who was that guy? why did he think this was an appropriate time or place for that discussion? and why was he so sure?

one thing i don't like about academic writing is when people feel like, for their introduction, they need to summarize adjacent work from other fields & they end up repeating stuff that's dumb specifically because another academic of higher standing said it & it's outside their interest area to really question. for instance, i'm reading this book about the intersection of horror and architecture, and in the introduction they basically shit on horror movies and use adorno to claim that horror movies are bad because modern media is lazy. now, as a horror movie afficianado: most horror movies are bad, yes. but, as somebody who is interested in the history of gothic literature: most gothic literature is bad (and the same problems we have with it today are, for the most part, what people complained about in the 18th century). there's a very straightforward framing of horror that explains why a lot of it is bad, but it's rooted in analysis that acknowledges the nature of 'camp' as genuinely vital & important violation of cultural norms. i'm sure the rest of the book will be fine but whenever i see somebody look down on camp in favor of 'high art' i see it as a giant red flag.

Random link from the archives: "What It’s Like When Your College Shuts Down - The Atlantic" https://web.archive.org/web/20190625111435/https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/06/what-its-like-when-your-college-shuts-down/591862/ originally retrieved Tue Jun 25 11:14:35 EDT 2019

let me tell you a story about how not just gender roles but gender categories are highly culturally specific. in japan, in the 60s, there was a category called 'gayboy'; lots of people self-identified with it. what it meant was an AMAB person who dresses in a feminine way and enacts feminine roles. this can map onto a lot of stuff in other systems of understanding gender; actually, it was a pretty big tent. in the late 60s, a movie came out: half kitchen-sink drama and half documentary, Funeral Parade of Roses was a movie about life in tokyo's queer underground intercut with interviews with the cast and crew, themselves members of the tokyo queer underground, about their experiences of sex, gender, attraction, social roles, journeys of self-identification, and their similarity and differences with their characters. one of the questions that was asked, of many people, was 'why are you a gayboy?' the answers fell across a familiar spectrum, and again there's this temptation to place it on our own maps, which are ours because we prefer them and vice versa. for instance: 'i like being a girl', 'i like acting like a girl but only because i'm not a girl', 'i was bad at being a boy, and i found out that i'm naturally better at being a girl', 'i'm not exactly either a boy or girl', 'i'm a boy, this dress is just a fashion statement', 'i am not a gayboy, i am a traditional conservative woman with a birth defect'. now, the editor of japan's first gay magazine wrote a review of The Funeral Parade of Roses that took on a revolutionary tone, and afterward, the term gayboy fell out of favor and instead people refered to themselves as 'the rose tribe' -- as in, anyone who ever identified with something they saw in The Funeral Parade of Roses. the magazine pivoted to be the premire publication of the rose tribe, broadening its audience, but the old guard and the majority were gay men. in response to reader mail about gay male content crowding other stuff out of limited page space, the editor created a specific section called 'the lily tribe', which got guaranteed page space and was exclusive to femme-leaning content (while masc- and neutral- content could predominate elsewhere). this did not necessarily mean that the occasional lesbian or transfem article wouldn't make its way into the main body of the magazine if it was deemed of wide enough interest. the rose / lily categorization system seems to have remained the baseline in japan for a while (my direct knowledge of this part is very limited). today, our categories are more global and intersecting: anime will intentionally place trans flags or use bisexual lighting.

being critical of LLMs but not because you want to strengthen copyright is a difficult situation, if you want to interact with outsiders. actually this happens to me a lot: i criticize liberals but from the left, i think UFOs are a genuine phenomenon worthy of study but i think disclosure is bullshit & so is the ETH, i like low budget exploitation movies but totally unironically. coming to your opinions from the ground up instead of copying the opinions of your friends & slowly justifying or adapting them leaves you with a bunch of nuanced positions that don't fit well with the pattern-matching NTs usually do when trying to slot you into some category & figure out how to interact with you. and it's not like i don't understand why that's valuable: i totally spend a bunch of effort trying to satisfy the boolean 'is this person a fascist' when meeting someone new because i don't want to spend time and effort listening to a fascist. the problem is that a lot of the time, these frames are literally put in place as a form of power consolidation: whether you support strengthening copyright or you support widespread use of LLMs, you're supporting exactly the same large businesses for the most part, and only a nuanced position that doesn't frame it in terms of complete automation of existing commercial roles is capable of producing arguments that aren't functionally just shilling for pearson; the framing that UFOs are hostile extraterrestrials or hallucinations is basically just a story the US air force made up because it allows them to pull a paul bennewitz on people on the one hand but also justify military funding on the other, just by changing how the media spins an existing policy (the official air force position on UFOs has not changed since the 1950s); ironic enjoyment promotes bad craft while justifying dismissing good craft & interesting experiments as inherently unserious, & promotes the idea that a 'real movie' is defined by its budget and polish; i don't think i need to explain to masto why an anarchocommunist would dunk on liberals.

i do book clubs in my free time because it turns out i like everything about school but the grades. i should have realized that when i started watching recordings of lectures for fun.

libs love the rhetorical strategy of pointing out that two randomly selected right-wing positions are incompatible, ignoring that 'the right' is a fragile temporary alliance between fundamentally incompatible ideologies whose proponents would normally be busy murdering each other but were brought together by Nixon and Reagan & held together by fear. do individual right-wingers also, sometimes, claim to hold several beliefs at the same time that are incompatible with each other? absolutely, but this is normal when somebody hasn't come to positions rationally & has instead glued together various things they've heard without examining them and called it a belief system. most people with any belief system are like this. it's just more obvious in this case because the scale of the incompatibility between the various heterogenous groups those positions are taken from is so large.

i am an agnostic antitheist: it doesn't seem like there's a god, but if there is, it is our moral duty to kill him.

i was today years old today when i realized the term 'schmaltzy' (melodramatic) comes from 'schmaltz' (chicken fat used as a spread): a schmaltzy movie is (like a schmaltzy piece of toast) rich and greasy and might give you a stomach ache if you consume too much of it

how tf do you translate a book like the hypnomaterachia polyphili?

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200307072552/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/choose-your-own-adventure-narratives-have-existed-in-other-mediums-like-books-for-decades-f8367c541846 originally retrieved Sat Mar 7 07:25:52 EST 2020

genesis must have been really weird to the helenes -- like, somebody removed a rib from an indivisible substance???

one of these days some meta-analysis will reveal that 90% of ADHD diagnoses are actually just cases of misdiagnosed autism caused by shrinks whose entire training on autism came down to a paragraph in a textbook from the 70s that said, like, 'cant talk, obsessive'.

watching mst3k riff on manos: hands of fate is so weird because they're acting like it's especially bad but i actually watch movies just like it all the time for fun (and pay thirty to forty bucks for special edition remastered blu rays of them), and meanwhile a lot of the other movies they do i can barely sit through even with the riffing

the abominable doctor phibes is like if the villain of saw was gomez addams

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200617041921/https://scribe.rip/p/why-online-dating-can-feel-like-such-an-existential-nightmare-8729486aaaac originally retrieved Wed Jun 17 04:19:21 EDT 2020

Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/

sucks how musk does embrace-extend-extinguish by buying up whatever company happens to be doing a vaguely progressive thing (electric cars, space travel) & then running that company in such a way that it's inevitably doomed to catastrophic failure. like, is he trying to prevent electric cars and space travel from happening?

it occurs to me that, until the internet, the only reliable way to become famous without so much infrastructural support that you were practically just a figurehead for a large organization was to commit some kind of really gnarly crime. everybody from the king to stephen king basically owes their fame to institutions that promote individuals by polishing and spinning their image, but sink an axe into your dad's skull on christmas morning & songs will be sung about you for like 300 years. (though i guess there still is an institution involved there: the carceral one -- foucault demonstrates the shift from promoting murderers as examples of bad behavior to hiding them from sight in the first section of discipline & punish)

the thing about william hope hodgeson is he's great at coming up with really interesting resonant imagery and perverse ideas but he doesn't know how a fuckin plot works, so his novels like the ghost pirates are just drawn out twist reveals but his best short stories are like, here's a resonant image, and then something fucked up happens

pretty sure somebody must have figured out a way to glitch free superlikes out of okcupid, bc i got hundreds of random superlikes from obvious bot accounts in foreign countries in the past like 10 minutes. (also why the fuck do none of these platforms let you hide your profile entirely from anybody outside a particular location range?)

why would i settle for the kind of person who would settle for someone like me

are text collages an accepted form of collage art? like, essays composed entirely of color-coded quotes from other essays, composed by cutting up and rearranging printouts. because blackout poetry and cutups are both things, and collage art often includes snippets of text on top of images, but this is sort of a different thing -- a medley intended to bring people back to the original sources with an extra layer of intertextual framing.

one thing i've noticed is that, since i've started smoking weed regularly, i'm prone to spontaneously smiling (even if i'm not high, even sometimes if i haven't smoked in more than a week). this is unexpected but i approve -- i think it balances out my RBF a bit. like, i'm fairly chill, but i can't blame anybody for being intimidated by a white guy in combat boots and all black with a shaved head frowning

Random link from the archives: "What would the internet of people look like now? - The Verge" https://web.archive.org/web/20230904122351/https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/22/23803538/google-facebook-myspace-internet-culture-web-dot-com-crash originally retrieved Mon 04 Sep 2023 12:23:51 PM EDT

do you think that wittgenstein, when describing language games, intentionally chose the example of a builder asking for a brick because it inverts the tower of babel myth or is it, like, a freemasonry thing?

you know you watch too many horror movies when you can't remember whether or not you've ever seen a movie with a title like Shriek of the Mutilated

hearing todd in the shadows on maggie mae fish's video is really weird because it's, like, a crossover between the cracked exodus and the channel awesome exodus. a supergroup, even.

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - StevenBlack/hosts: Extending and consolidating hosts files from several well-curated sources like adaway.org, mvps.org, malwaredomainlist.com, someonewhocares.org, and potentially others. You can optionally invoke extensions to block additional sites by category." https://web.archive.org/web/20190123092520/https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts originally retrieved Wed Jan 23 09:25:20 EST 2019

explaining gundam to people without anime brain like 'so the newtype is the new soviet man but federov-flavored, except it's depicted as anywhere from autism to starseed indigo child shit depending on the show, and half the time the conflict in the show relates to guys who think it's the same as the ubermensch'

calling gorgons medusas is like calling vampires draculas

i took french all through high school, and i'd like to brush up to the point where i can maybe read serious books at some point. so, i'm thinking of starting with comics. anybody got french graphic novels they can recommend i read in the original language? is it worth investing in some tintin and moebius collections?

there are all sorts of interesting things you can demand be done with your corpse after your death but basically all the fun ones will be struck out by probate courts or will be a huge burden on the executor or are way better in theory than in practice. (as much as i love the 'my estate will be distributed in proportion to the amount of my corpse eaten by each attendee at my funeral slash banquet' nobody will actually do it and if they did nobody would attend.) the best i've come up with that is likely to work is schmaltz-adjacent: 'bury my ashes and plant a fruit tree above them, which must be allowed to grow to full maturity'. but here is a freebie for you, that you might be able to pull off if your executor has a sense of humor: 'my ashes are to be placed in envelopes with no return address and mailed to my ten worst enemies, so that i may haunt them'.

reading dating advice like i'm reading the mainenance manual for a yacht, except i'm not sad that i can't afford a yacht

i literally just realized that 'rugrats' (probably intentionally) sounds like 'regrets'

a lot (maybe even most) of popular technologies read like somebody got dared to do something in the most fucked up way possible, as a joke, and then the joke became a de-facto standard which then became a formal standard and now if anybody does a sensible thing they are violating best practices

people only like the hero's journey because it reminds them of star wars

weird that there isn't the same backlash to the professionalization of comedy that there is to, like, sex work. humor is an interpersonal bonding thing: that's why, in groups, we laugh about things that aren't actually funny until they become funny. what's more, it's one with no other dimensions besides pleasure: while it intersects with power and politics, it isn't inherently radical or inherently reactionary because it's not inherently funny. (being funny is a totally different thing than putting things out that people laugh at. being funny is deeply political.)

i really don't understand static site generators. or, like... i do? because i use one. it's just, i don't know why any two people would ever use the same one. it's easier to write a static site generator than reconfigure somebody else's.

when somebody says 'roguelike', i picture nethack, because hack and rogue are extremely similar games. this makes modern video game discourse extremely difficult to follow sometimes.

i subscribed to this guy's newsletter years ago -- seemingly cool, intelligent, interesting, with meaningful and insightful things to say about a wide variety of topics. and then at some point he got into NFTs. and then slowly more and more of the newsletter was about NFTs (which was OK because he sent them less and less frequently). but today he sent one out, and it literally begins with 'pay for twitter because otherwise nobody will see your posts' and the rest of the newsletter is literally NFT investing tips? like dude, even the most hard-core NFT boosters ditched the scene a year and a half ago, wtf are you doing? i followed you for japanese rural pizza-toast analysis and reflections on human-centered UX; why have you become a 2020 SNL skit?

in 100 years, english students will hear about stephen king for the first time in grad school and be very confused about why he was so popular. not knocking on king here -- i like his books, generally speaking -- but he's a deeply weird dude who writes long, rambling, extremely personal books that are frequently hard to relate to. people in the future will talk about It the same way people today talk about Moby Dick. people in the future will talk about The Tommyknockers the same way people today talk about Vril: The Power of the Coming Race. people in the future will talk about The Dark Tower the same way people today talk about Barsoom or The Night Land.

nothing i've ever read or heard about rust has dispelled my immediate first impression, which is that it's basically c for people who like haskell. between this and finding that the rust compiler won't build from source on a standard toolchain the last couple times i tried, i have very little interest. i like weird high-concept programming languages, and rust seems to be in the same basic category as scala (too weird for the normies but too normal for me).

all these stories about people trying to ressurrect the dead but having them come back wrong are typically classified as warnings about death being unavoidable, but i think most of them are more fruitfully read as metaphors for trying to get back with a toxic ex / reconnect with a friend or family member you cut out of your life for good reason. like: you still love somebody, and you want them back, but once they come back you realize that, while they are in some ways the same person you remember, they also ruin your life with what sometimes feels like malice. the real horror, then, is the thought that perhaps this is who they were the whole time and you just let yourself get used to it.

we all spend most of our time every day doing things we hate as part of systems that benefit literally nobody and continue to exist only because of the coordination problems involved in dismantling them. sometimes i think i'd like to write a book about how bad systems get locked in and prevent good systems from gaining a foothold, but i know that the only people who would read it are folks who want to misuse it to make sure their bad systems get locked in -- folks who don't care the ship is sinking so long as they get to sit in the captain's chair. case in point: even capitalists do not benefit from capitalism -- while they are doing better than everyone else, they are doing worse than most people would be doing if capitalism was abolished.

a pattern that repeats over and over in tech is that somebody will invent a cool toy (whose usefulness is very obviously, and sometimes intentionally, circumscribed), a bunch of grifters will say 'this toy is actually a panacea that will do everything for you', a bunch of capitalists hear this and say 'will it help me replace all my employees with perfect slaves?', the grifters will say 'yes', and a bunch of the capitalists will lose a bunch of their money to the grift but won't suffer real consequences. during the whole thing, regular people will be flooded with news coverage along the lines of 'new toy will solve all problems' and 'new toy will take your job and force you to starve'. and the new toy will be something like, play doom in your word processor at 5fps, or pay for a pizza without money but it takes four hours, or emit random dictionary words.

media depicts serial killers like vampires (brooding, scheming, tragic) but serial killers are actually more like werewolves (stupid fuckups with no self control)

movies used to be full of great fog effects, and then after like 1990, there was less fog and the fog that was there all looked like crap. is this just a fashion thing? is it lost technology? or was the good fog carcinogenic or something?

i've read at least five different books specifically about screenwriting, but i'll probably never write a screenplay, because if i do and somebody options it and then they actually make the movie they might ask me to go on set to do on-set rewrites, and as much as i love movies, literally any movie set sounds like hell

the thing about cryptocurrency is that it isn't even useful for the cool & good kind of crimes (like obtaining illegal drugs and weapons), only for the lame and boring kind (like rich people scamming marginally less rich people with elaborate financial instruments)

it's crazy how much your sense of time changes with age. like, i have stuff in my fridge that has been there longer than i was in high school.

browser monopolization discourse is sort of (though not entirely) pointless because, while we certainly can't trust google, the browser landscape has never not been heavily monopolized by large arguably-evil corporations with lots of w3c influence, and that w3c influence has manifested a spec that cannot be implemented without the resources of a large arguably-evil corporation. on top of that, the purported alternatives (ex., firefox) are dependent upon google's continued goodwill anyhow. like, this matters because we've trapped ourselves in browserland for no good reason and relatively few technical people have bothered to find out how to escape. but the way the web is specced out directly encourages and supports monopolization; even if we didn't have a browser monopoly/oligopoly every website is still structured like a monopoly because of the way addressing works so anything that uses web tech is doomed to a monopoly-adjacent state.

s16e06: Tech Journalism, But Not Tech Journalism; Sounds More Like A You Problem https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s16e06-tech-journalism-but-not-tech-journalism/

regression hypnosis is not a method for 'uncovering suppressed memories' because 'suppressed memories' are not a thing; regression hypnosis is a method for implanting false memories and integrating them. it makes sense that people would take a while to understand this, because a kind of strict institutionalized freudianism was widespread for basically the entire 20th century. under the freudian model, all memories are stored perfectly but the psychic censor distorts or removes memories during retrieval in order to protect the organism from scary thoughts; this isn't actually how memories work but seems reasonable to somebody who has swallowed other parts of freudianism. memories actually work a little more like statistical machine learning: perceptions slightly modify the action potentials of a bunch of networks of neurons associated with attributes of the perception, and recall involves doing a weighted random walk of these networks -- meaning that any memory of an actual percieved event gets contaminated by similar events (and, because these neurons are part of several networks that correspond to totally unrelated stimuli, unrelated events also get contaminated based on the luck of the draw), and remembering an event (real or imagined) modifies these weights too, which means any time you remember anything it causes both that thing and a random selection of semi- and un-related memories to become slightly more corrupted. the upshot of this, with regard to 'suppressed memories', is that any memory that you avoid recalling will eventually become so distorted as to become inaccessible (like a CD-R left uncovered in the bottom of a bag of badgers) but that also, all that's necessary to implant a false memory is to motivate somebody to 'recall' it. ask somebody a question and, unless they are quite conscientious, they will probably give the system 1 answer (i.e., do a random walk and use whatever vaguely plausible thing it emits) -- and unless the exact answer to the question happens to have been strongly imprinted, you'll get a confabulation (or in layman's terms, bullshit). regression hypnosis involves strongly motivating people to confabulate experiences that probably never happened (and that, if they did happen, are irretrievably corrupted anyhow); at best it will produce fragments of actual experiences in a soup of nonsense.

saying 'this place has a lot of crime so let's send more police' is like saying 'this place is way too bright, let's shine a spotlight on it and maybe it'll get dimmer'

if you like somebody, the best thing you can do is not to bother them

an idea i don't totally believe, but also don't totally disbelieve: will is pointless because planning at a human scale with merely human agency is impossible. in other words, we as humans are totally incapable of predicting how the kinds of actions we are capable of taking will influence the kinds of events and situations in the world that we care the most about, because we care about fairly broad social-scale things but can only do small-scale, easily-cancelled-out actions as a part of a complex and rapidly-changing environment whose interactions with our own actions cannot be understood, so we never have a justified belief that anything we do will be more likely to have a noticable positive effect than a negative one. even those things that are predictable (like eating when you're hungry) are entangled in systems that add invisible baggage (how many child slaves were involved in your meal?)

i'm at that age where i'll hear an adult talking about their nostalgia for some show they watched as a kid that i've never heard of, i'll look it up, and it'll turn out that i was like 25 when it started -- the point where 'basically the same age' in adulthood ceases to map at all onto 'basically the same age' in childhood

if you're somehow under the impression that discussion on HN (or lobste.rs) is high-quality, try sorting posts by new and reading entire comment threads. the hn mods are very good at ensuring that comments (regardless of quality or salience) that superficially resemble intelligent & civil discussion show up high on frontpage posts. HN is a certain kind of cultural bubble (and lobste.rs is a slightly different but largely adjacent bubble), and ideas that conflict with the unexamined assumptions forming the foundation of this bubble get quickly buried under emotional outbursts, like they do in other communities; there's a large volume of this shit (although most posts have zero interaction -- justified since most posts are low-information self-promotion bullshit -- most comments are in long flame threads attached to troll/bait posts). the comments that end up not being removed from frontpage posts are the ones that do not threaten the whole 'capitalism and pop-science are the solution to every problem' model common to HN posters, arguably because such comments inevitably cause ugly fights -- the kind that the mods would like to make outsiders think never happen there; of course, the general acceptance of this model is arguably the biggest problem with HN's community and the SV tech industry whose culture HN purports to represent, so these flamewars are actually the most pro-social form of content on the whole site. lobste.rs is basically just ex-HN people who don't believe anything different from the HN people but have a slightly higher average technical competence and a marginally lower tolerance for obvious spam.

Videodrome and Cat in the Brain are two great examples of the extremely small genre of 'famous horror directors depict what the world would be like if the people who write nasty op-eds about them were right'

'microcheating' sounds like it was invented by the kind of guy who puts on a suit and tie to beat his much-younger wife

become the rot you'd like to consume the world

Behind the Scenes of SOME LIKE IT HOT: Secrets, Scandals, and Marilyn's Mystique - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acfmuAI1Q_k

the world we live in is so far from the world we'd like to live in that it's sometimes hard to figure out even a general trajectory: will this get me closer or will i drive into a cliff now hidden by the fog of time?

there's no publicity like bad publicity

if you ever feel like you're not good enough, just remember: nobody's good enough, so keep at it.

jimray: "Like seemingly everyone on this app I have plenty…" - Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@jimray/110792901356804895

Bad idea of the day: a revenge movie from the perspective of a tulpa formed out of the collective guilt of a bunch of accidental murderers, looking and acting the way they expect (i.e., like the angry ghost of the person they killed)

i don't know how to explain this to somebody who doesn't already understand it (like my scrum master, whose mind is so alien as to be totally unknowable) but: looking pretty is totally unrelated to coding, so if you force workers to look pretty (ex., by making them come into the office or turn webcams on during meetings) that will inevitably take energy away from the more important task of doing the fucking labor. People came into offices because we didn't have the internet yet, not because offices actually provided value, and they continued coming into offices out of inertia and not because it wasn't a clearly stupid idea.

Taxi Driver and King of Comedy both represent worlds where people are trapped in shitty circumstances they can't imagine real alternatives to, and poorly-adjusted dudes working off naive-bordering-on-delusional models of the world consisting largely of contextless marketing slogans that give them no way to understand their own trauma, who then perform the only type of action they can imagine that's outside of their daily life: violence-as-spectacle. A smart viewer would recognize that these protagonists are deeply flawed, that they do not properly understand the nature of the system keeping them down, that their atomization and alienation is in a dysfunctional feedback loop with their individualism and self-aggrandizement, and that the fact that this spectacular violence worked is another terrible irony. But I am sure that my fifteen year old self would fundamentally misunderstand these movies as being in favor of 'heroic' big public gestures, the same way that a lot of teenagers misunderstood Fight Club, and the same way that my 5 year old self fundamentally misunderstood Weird Science. As somebody who as a general rule supports and enjoys 'extreme' media that represents undesirable behavior honestly, these movies are kind of an exception for me -- I wish they had more directly 'downer' endings, because the kinds of guys who identify with De Niro's beaten-down possibly-autistic protagonists are the least likely to understand the subtext of these movies and the most likely to actually perform public violence. I might recommend these movies to people, but only after specifically talking about this. (More likely, I wouldn't: these movies, despite their gritty reputation, are fundamentally cringe comedies -- michael scott with a gun -- and so they're really uncomfortable to sit through despite their artistry & all the social issues they touch on are better handled by books.)

folks with a better grasp of history than me: when was the last time china was actually communist? or was it only ever briefly gesturing in the direction of possible future communism, like the soviet union? because it sure is capitalist AF right now.

it's a hot take, but i don't think you can underestimate the impact edogawa ranpo had on japanese media. like... imagine if thomas ligotti wrote the hardy boys series. that might have given the united state a little bit of the weird legacy ranpo had on japan.

What would the internet of people look like now? - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/22/23803538/google-facebook-myspace-internet-culture-web-dot-com-crash

imagine what would have happened if a pandemic like covid-19 (one requiring a lockdown) had happened in 1998, when internet access was pretty widespread but generally limited to dialup. internet grocery & food delivery services existed at the time, as well. but the ability to pump high-resolution video to homes was limited to cable companies.

if you don't fit in anywhere, then any system that tries to predict your behavior based on the behavior of people 'like you' will do a bad job, because the sample size is too small and the sample too varied to have strong internal correlations

i'm embarassed that i didn't recognize this until seeing barbie clips but... margot robie and ryan gosling are extremely talented actors huh? like, they can play serious and comedy, give depth to totally shallow characters while playing against type, and really sell subtle shit with body language in short clips without coming off as scenery-chewing.

i am absolutely certain, without checking, that some iteration of the fate franchise must have a gender-swapped ben franklin. it is either loli ben franklin or milf ben franklin. each is equally likely.

a bit about my background, so that people don't think my weird takes about software come from nowhere: i spent 15 years in mostly self-guided exploratory learning around programming & computers (supplemented in the last 10 with formal instruction: took some high school classes & got a BS in CS), only after which i entered the industry. during that first 15 years, i did OS development and wrote language interpreters and compilers, rudimentary machine learning, got really inspired by descriptions of smalltalk environments and wrote a similar kind of environment in tcl, researched the history of hypertext and its variations, and did a whole bunch of other projects of similar complexity but less relevance. then i got an internship working on a search engine, and shortly after, i was contacted by ted nelson, who had seen some of my xanadu-inspired projects, and began to write code for xanadu in an official capacity. now, i've been in the industry for a decade, and because i work for a large company, i've collaborated with a lot of different units and seen & written very different kinds of code in very different languages for very different purposes. already soured on java, i soured even further when i had to enhance and maintain a large java codebase that hadn't been edited in 6 years, and meanwhile my eyes were opened to the scope of shell functionality (which i approached with an enthusiasm tempered by experience with tcl maintenance). when i shoot off some angry polemic about DNS, or jump links, or language design influence on code structure, it's coming from a synthesis of this whole history -- somebody who had a lot of time to grow to appreciate what good code looked like and did, and to create elaborate single-user projects, being forced to adjust to a world of bad code and one-size-fits-all software products, and looking for a line of flight.

an LLM is a plausible-sounding-bullshit machine because any purely-statistical generative system is a plausible-sounding-bullshit machine: it optimizes for least-surprise along the metrics it knows how to measure. it produces interesting output by breaking -- by failing to measure something important and therefore producing output that no human would produce, because no human could ignore whatever metric the model is ignoring. this is great for art: like random factors and constraints, an artist can use interaction with a statistical model to propel them out of a rut and onto a new path (as long as the model is sufficiently bad at predicting what a human would 'really' do -- i.e., so long as the training data in that area is sparse enough that the model's idea of the most-likely thing is absurd). it's horrible for anything where correctness is important: there is no negative feedback mechanism for factually incorrect or (in the case of code) non-functional output, only for output that is insufficiently boring from the perspective of event frequency correlations (where, in the case of an LLM or a markov chain chatbot, the event is a letter or word respectively). if you want reliably correct results, you need to be doing symbolic processing -- using a theorem prover, constraint solver, or expert system. this division between statistical and symbolic techniques in AI mirrors the system I / system II division in human psychology. with humans, it seems like system II is an extremely expensive epiphenomenon on top of system I -- that, through rigorous conditioning, humans are taught to sometimes simulate symbolic processing on statistical hardware. it's possible that computers could do this. but why would we want them to, when conventional computer hardware is much better at symbolic processing than statistical processing (and in fact, we are already doing it the other way around and implementing statistical modeling on symbolic hardware). (i say 'conventional computer hardware' because there are a couple dedicated neural net chips around, mostly built in the 90s; they are not heavily used, but if i didn't mention them somebody would probably complain.) IBM's 'Watson' was originally billed as something that could combine statistical and symbolic methods, but clearly, the statistical side has been given higher priority in ways that make it not just useless but actively dangerous for most of the tasks it is marketed for. the draw of statistical models for a corporation is clear: with an expert system, a human who is an expert in writing expert systems needs to interview domain experts (and all these people are typically paid very well for their time since there are few experienced expert system engineers and the domain experts are automating away some of their own future consulting contracts), whereas you just throw mountains of unstructured text at an LLM until it starts making coherent sentences (and there's a lot of unstructured text that's either in the public domain or where copyright claims are nearly unenforceable).

day one back from my vacation, i have a meeting and write like 4 lines of code, and then the waves of fatigue come back again

i don't like light mode because using light mode means i need to turn on the lights in my house (and probably even install more lights) if i want to use my computer & also do things around the house. but a computer monitor is a light source, so it makes sense to just tune it so that the amount of light it puts into my eyes when i look at is is comparable to the amount of ambient light reflected off of the surfaces in my home. it's not possible to dim your monitor to the point where a white background won't ruin your night vision, but combining a black background with a red, green, or amber foreground works fine.

deeply strange to see people (admittedly mostly non-technical people on places like facebook) get excited about bluesky & threads, when the fediverse... already exists, has existed for years, and is pretty heavily populated. corporations are spending a lot of money to make worse versions of mastodon, and then they are spending even more money making sure your aunt knows about their particular for-profit flavor & doesn't realize they could sign up on an instance owned by a person instead of one owned by a corporation. a lot of effort goes into convincing people that the fediverse is difficult to use; few of the people expending this effort on behalf of Facebook are getting paid. if you have ever called the fediverse confusing in public, contact zuck and demand your check for services rendered.

somehow, we ended up with a global software ecosystem consisting primarily of self-modifying rich text documents acting as slim clients to command line software running on remote machines running in vast centralized data centers, performing message passing over a protocol that uses DNS in conjunction with certificate hierarchies. and we're locked into this paradigm, basically because DNS is for turning hostnames into IPs and isn't suited for turning unique data identifiers into chunks of data or unique service identifiers into routing rules. now that we're locked in, we're being charged for network traffic by the byte & uptime by the second. this is sort of like ending up doing forced prison labor for the rest of your life because you filled out your taxes with a pink pen & the OCR system misread a checkbox.

during sprint planning i always forget to take into account that the last week of any sprint is like 75% sprint planning meetings, so 3 week sprints are actually only 2 weeks long unless you work overtime

it seems like there's no extension yet for what i really want -- which is to actually enforce my okcupid filters & enforce other things that should be filterable but aren't (like 'are we in the same state'). it ought to be straightforward: check the contents of a couple named spans against a regex, and produce a click event on the 'pass' button if they match / don't match. but i hate webtech so i really don't want to build it myself.

i sure hope that the facebook -> fediverse thing turns out to be a nothingburger (like when twitter was gonna join the fediverse, and when twitter was gonna join ssb, and when microsoft tried to EEE irc out of existence, and when microsoft tried the same thing with OGS) because it seems like all we're doing is what we always do in the face of an outside threat: sniping at each other in an uncoordinated manner.

dating shites sure love to show me the profiles of qanoners looking for A Real Man who can't read and loves to lift heavy things, as though either of us are gonna get anything out of that. almost as much as they like showing me profiles that are almost completely blank, or that are just a list of tourist spots the person has visited or plans to visit.

so, we all generally understand that ostensible anti-groomer laws are actually anti-gay and anti-trans laws, and that ostensible anti-sex-trafficing laws are actually anti-sex-work laws, and that ostensible anti-human-trafficing laws are usually actually a tool for racism. but will people in 2073 remember that? will we run into, like, a foucault situation, where people 50 years from now find out that major figures in some important social movement once oppoased some stupidly-named law trying to rules-lawer polyamory into illegality & frame it as 'they supported slum conditions' or some shit

ever have one of those days when you notice how broken literally every social-technical system is? every computer program, every bureaucracy, every machine, every habit, is all elbows? and then you realize: it's always like this, and you just usually have the spoons to compensate.

saw an ad from 1993 where somebody buys a puppy for a kid with terminal cancer and i feel like nobody involved thought through the ethics of that fully

somehow i was under the impression that flatpack was one of those overly elaborate mechanisms for putting a web page into a zip file and giving it to users like it's a real executable, but people are mentioning it in the context of gnome and distro packaging, so i guess it's like RPM (i.e., an overly elaborate way of putting executables in a tarball so you know what files to delete when uninstalling). but that just makes me further wonder: why? why are we talking about this? source tarballs are still the primary way that packages are distributed by package maintainers, and any other format is at the whims of distro maintainers.

cunk on earth is like borat meets eli5

the thing about giallo is that you'll see a 90 minute stream of the most beautiful images you've ever seen with the most haunting music you've ever heard, and the plot will be something like: an angsty teen with a psychic connection to bugs teams up with a monkey to kill a deformed toddler sexual-sadist serial killer

the popular reaction to rei ayanami demonstrates that NTs cannot distinguish between flat affect and 'no emotions'. like bitch she turned every living being on earth into goo as revenge against her neglectful guardian

i live in a social bubble where most people have a pretty good idea of how GANs and LLMs work (and can reason about them even if they can't implement one), so every time i'm directly exposed to unfiltered AI hype i'm kind of shocked. like, didn't you guys pay attention to the news for the past 15 years? but similarly with certain breeds of AI anti-hype (like 'GANs are stealing and reproducing YOUR PAINTINGS and LOSING SALES'), it's like... are you living under a rock?

the funny thing about using statistical models as an art partner is that the better the model it is, the worse the model is for art purposes. humans are great at pattern matching (way better than our best 'AI' tech), and we're especially good at identifying cliches (i.e., messages whose information level -- computed as quantity of surprise with respect to the human's mental model -- is below salience threshold), but our curse is that we have a hard time thinking outside of habitual modes, and so there's a long history of using drugs, machines, and social arrangements to scramble the WIP, forcing a piece of art that is shaping up to be uninteresting to instead shift to a more interesting path. (some of these tend to introduce too much information: you rarely get a compelling story out of exquisite corpse because it increases entropy on the paragraph level while eliminating normal forms of story-level coordination, for instance.) early LLMs fit this use-case well: so long as the suggestions, completions, or responses are sufficiently unexpected, they are interesting and can support an interesting large-scale structure. but LLMs try to accurately represent their corpus, and with extremely large corpora like GPT-3, they are essentially trying to accurately represent the most common features of already-existing literature. unlike markov models, which can have word frequency statistics intentionally manipulated by the user to give pretty straightforward effects (downrank the top quartile of 2-grams so that they are less likely to be picked than the 2-grams that show up only once and you'll get very diverse and unpredictable output, for instance), LLMs can't be reasoned about and manipulated in ways that dramatically decrease the likelihood of cliches without also scrambling less-frequent patterns. LLMs want to be boring, and using them to be interesting necessarily involves discovering the parts of the model that are poorly filled in and forcing the LLM into those areas -- to simulate a smaller language model, basically. so why not just use a tiny language model? because the style of language models used by GPT literally can't work without an enormous corpus.

grand unified theory of gay autism: autistics are more likely than NTs to recognize that something is wrong with the way society wants them to live, and are more likely to spend the intellectual effort necessary to figure out what the mismatch is (instead of merely settling for a vague 'i suck and should die'), even to the point of exploring possibilities that have been systematically censored (like 'maybe i like dicks' or 'maybe i would feel better if i had boobs'). there are probably lots of gay trans NTs walking around having no idea and just thinking that life sucks in a nebulous and all-pervasive way for everybody. (it does, because of capitalism, but that's a different thing.)

LLMs are sort of interesting tech, but to the degree that they are actually useful, most of the applications are better suited to other less-sexy technologies (like markov models) and the rest are things that shouldn't be done at all.

a huge amount of your taste in sci-fi correlates to whether you think space ships should be clean or dirty. dirty space ship people like cyberpunk and steampunk, new wave and radium age over golden age; clean space ship people like solarpunk and abrhams-trek and isaac asimov. of the big three golden age authors, heinlein has the dirtiest space ship mentality and clarke the cleanest. star wars has the skin of a dirty space ship franchise with the soul of a clean space ship franchise (especially in Return of the Jedi); star trek is the other way around (especially in TNG). the outer edge of dirty space ship sci fi is psychedelia; the outer edge of clean space ship sci fi is the adventure novel.

i cannot imagine what it would be like to have had youtube in high school. i cannot imagine what it would be like to have gone to high school after youtube was invented.

one thing every harem series has: a girl who is way better for the protagonist than the female lead in every way and was just about to get with him right when the female lead showed up and the series started. which is why harem shows are for masochists like me who love pain, love getting their hearts broken, and love the dramatic irony of seeing the doormat-protagonist inevitably end up with the physically abusive narcissist AGAIN.

went to jury duty today & had my first in-the-wild encounter with the results of poor reading pedagogy (or possibly a kind of brilliant prank): the law clerk, who seemed like he was in his late teens, was unable to pronounce even common names & mispronounced them in absurd ways. specifically: one woman's first name was Anita and he consistently called her Antifa

tiktok is showing me ads for nothing but plus-sized bras. i think they got confused: i just like to look at big tits; i don't have any of my own.

i always think tumblr has approximately the same meme culture as the rest of the internet, until some stale-ass thing i crossposted along with 300 other memes taken from facebook suddenly goes absolutely nuts with people who apparently haven't seen it before. like, i posted a probably-decade-old image macro about mormon missionaries being naive & it's been getting 20k notes a day for a week, and every few months i get a spurt of thousands of notes on a screenshot of a reddit post talking about asking for a vacuum cleaner for christmas that i posted 2 years ago & saw making the rounds heavily at least a year before that.

adobe & getty & whoever trying to train their GAN models on your work is a problem, but the problem is not 'they are stealing my intellectual property' (which is practically worthless from their POV -- think how hard you have to work to get any money at all from it, and then think how much effort that much money would be worth to a multinational corporation); the problem is that they correctly see themselves competing with large open models, and so they would like to own their own closed models, lock people into them, and strengthen IP law so that they can FUD open models out of existence. getty is competing with large open models, but no individual person uploading to getty is competing with GANs in any meaningful way, and artist commissions will never have serious competition from GANs because GANs require an artist's trained eye (and typically an artist's trained hand to fix in photoshop later) in order to produce acceptable-quality work.

in the 70s, we had established-but-super-weird absolutely-huge musical acts like king crimson and david bowie who would back the hell out of completely bizarre new acts like kate bush & klaus nomi, and so avant-garde shit like wuthering heights would actually chart. that's sort of like if the biggest act in the world was machine girl and they got electronic harshnoise analog synth bedroom producers on SNL

why is everybody talking about bluesky all of the sudden? didn't it become old news like two years ago when it stopped being based on secure scuttlebutt?

old tech storytime: SMIL is a w3c standard XML dialect for mixed media and vector graphics animations from 1997. it was developed by apple, microsoft, and realmedia -- the owners of the three biggest software media players (quicktime, windows media player, and realplayer). a SMIL page is about as interactive as a DVD menu -- not exactly turing-complete but potentially substantially complex -- and the SMIL standard contains all of the media control elements later added to HTML5, the whole of what later became SVG plus animation controls, and a bunch of other features that have not yet been brought into other standards. had it taken off, most of the things people used complex javascript+css hacks for in the early naughts (back when it was called 'DHTML' and was largely graphical flourishes like animated menus) would become trivial in SMIL, as would most of the things web developers used embedded flash for (such as videos). so why does nobody know about SMIL now? why don't our browsers have SMIL support? because microsoft released a deliberately-incompatible implementation of SMIL built into internet explorer the day before the standard was finalized in order to fragment the SMIL user base & sink the product, basically just as a way to waste apple & realmedia's time and effort (a replay of what they did to IBM a couple years earlier with the OS/2 project). most of webtech for the past 20 years has consisted of reinventing SMIL poorly instead of just using SMIL.

Random link from the archives: "Facebook's First 'Civil Rights Audit' Is the First Step in Climbing Everest - VICE" https://web.archive.org/web/20190703125418/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5w95g/facebook-launches-first-civil-rights-audit-like-climbing-everest originally retrieved Wed Jul 3 12:54:18 EDT 2019

say what you will about saber marionette j but it sure has a lot of ideas. like, 'the only straight man and the most gay man on a planet of only men team up with ancient fembots to reform not-hitler and his leopard-themed ninja fembots' is all in the first couple episodes.

i constantly hear people complain about other people & my internal reaction is 'that guy sounds like a fucking jerk; you should cut them out of your life immediately'. but there can't be that many, right? it can't be that only the people i surround myself with are cool and literally everybody else is irredeemable. it can't be that everybody i know is constantly intentionally subjecting themselves to jerks even though they know better.

as somebody whose family was never big on holidays, birthdays, or special occasions, i don't have a good sense for whether certain things are 'real' holidays. like, do people actually celebrate mother's day, the way that people outside my family actually celebrate thanksgiving or new year's, or is it more like arbor day, where some teacher might do a special event in elementary school but there's no organic celbration, or is it like international felafel day, where it's purely a marketing invention with basically zero impact on anybody's real life public or private beyond an excuse for somebody to change the designs on their coupons?

Bad idea of the day: all secret agents are implanted with 'burn chips' so that they can be killed remotely by their CO if they go rogue, but because the bureaucracy / management branch of the espionage agency is made up of veteran former agents, they were all implanted, and introduced checks and balances to prevent a single highly-placed mole from wiping out a third of all active agents. as a result, rogue agents are kept in a suspended state of not-dead-yet dependent upon a willingness of bureaucrats to introduce red tape to gum up the works of an otherwise straightforward summary trial and execution: like a cross between cold war MAD doctrine and death row bargaining. most active agents are in this zombie state where they are under an indefinitely suspended sentence of death -- a situation where he pleases a big enough proportion of the bureaucrats to continue suspending his sentence, and in return, these bureaucrats may allow him to fulfill desires they are too afraid to articulate. the social reality becomes, in a way, a distorted mirror of the collective dream-life of the espionage-bureaucrat class. the demiurge invents kremlinology.

Random link from the archives: "In medieval England magic was a service industry used by rich and poor alike" https://web.archive.org/web/20190927125137/https://theconversation.com/in-medieval-england-magic-was-a-service-industry-used-by-rich-and-poor-alike-124009 originally retrieved Fri Sep 27 12:51:37 EDT 2019

discourse around the intersection of LLMs and commercial publishing is annoying largely because it's a complete rerun of the discourse around generative grammars in academic publishing from a decade ago, mostly by people who have no idea there even was such discourse. (and the problem in academic publishing was not solved; a bunch of journals did what some people are suggesting we do -- use word frequency statistics to flag likely generated works and just blanket reject any ms that got flagged -- and to the degree it worked at all it's a testament to the laziness of academic spammers & the wide availability of journals that are themselves spam, because you can absolutely break any of those word frequency heuristics with like two minutes of effort

just heard a segment on NPR saying that, because of a specific law passed after 9/11, the hijackers can't be brought to trial in the US. in other words: somebody put the entire machinery of the federal government's legislative branch into action to make a meaningless 'screw you' to five specific guys and that's part of why the case is still open after twenty-two years. which just blows my mind, because... 9/11 wasn't actually unprecedented in basically any way. foreign nationals have committed murder on US soil before, so why not literally just prosecute these guys for murder in the normal way? not just that, but: 9/11 wasn't the first foreign terrorist attack on US soil to kill people, nor was it the first time a terrorist attacked the WTC specifically, nor was it the first time a plane crashed into the WTC specifically. it seems like 9/11 was turned into a much bigger deal than it needed to be specifically to justify a bunch of things that various politicians wanted to do but didn't have a good excuse for -- that it primarily served to lower the bar on what could be legally justified.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20190802101624/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/package-dependency-hell-is-primarily-a-function-of-unfamiliarity-and-its-not-like-it-doesn-t-20e4d908bcc originally retrieved Fri Aug 2 10:16:24 EDT 2019

god, why is city hunter so good? a show like city hunter doesn't have any right to be this good.

LLMs could be cool, if people stopped focusing on applications that fall apart the moment you apply system 2 thinking. It might look like a duck and quack like a duck, but it's actually just a wooden duck with a speaker in it, which can be fun to have around the house and all but you'll be disappointed if you expect it to eat bread.

seeing a really clean bong in media is like seeing a computer with no wires or seeing two twin beds a jesus-width apart in a couple's master bedroom

hot take: scream is... fine. it's commenting on pop culture conceptions of slasher movies that were never actually accurate, and that lost whatever relevance they had even before it came out. it's reasonably well-executed but less interesting or atmospheric than early-80s slashers like the burning or happy birthday to me, and to the degree that what it comments on actually exists instead of being a 'beam me up scotty' popular-misunderstanding, those tropes are present in late-80s direct-to-vhs slasher cash-ins that are now forgotten (if not totally unavailable). its biggest impact on the slasher genre was to resurrect and preserve those tropes well beyond their sell-by date by inspiring late-90s slashers that try to copy scream's formula poorly. same applies to the whole rest of the franchise. it's watchable but if it were erased from history nothing of value would be lost.

pet peeve: folks who, rather than spending 5 minutes to clearly formulate their question in an email & waiting 5 minutes for a response, want to have a 20 minute voice chat meeting where we can't understand each others' accents & constantly end up talking over each other because of the 3-5 second variable latency. i know that a lot of people are more comfortable thinking through things in a conversational format, but doing that feels sort of like throwing your trash on the ground because the trash can is too far away -- ultimately, it's inconsiderate because you're making somebody else pick up after you out of laziness.

something that i don't think gets talked about much is that, as a long-time anime fan, trends in average art quality are pretty dramatic. in the 80s, your average anime would have some absolutely beautiful shots. in the 90s, shows you wouldn't necessary expect (like slayers or dna^2) would have some absolutely beautiful shots. then basically everything sort of looked like dogshit for about a decade, as animators got used to digital coloring at the same time they started to get used to CG & digital compositing for the first time on tv budgets & also were doing way more shows at once at the same rates -- plus the trend of 'realistic' (i.e., low-contrast & desaturated) coloring was imported from live action around this time. but since around 2010, your average show has gotten better and better looking on average until the point we're at now, where basically every show occasionally has cuts with absolutely incredible blocking or color design or something, even shows that look like dogshit 90% of the time, and the shows that always look bad are typically TRYING to do something interesting, and the shows that would have been given zero effort 20 years ago often look amazing almost all the time. gag-based harem comedies look amazing most of the time now (and sometimes even push artistic boundaries). how the hell did we get to the point where a show like bokuben or nagatoro looks, on average, better than fate/zero?

nagatoro & kaguya-sama are both organized around playing intimacy-chicken and i actually like this as an improvement on the format you used to see in rom-coms in the 90s & naughts, where the characters are genuinely conflicted about their relationship & are either extremely accident-prone or literally just go into a fugue state where they don't care about consent. rom-coms of this breed need to extend the will-they-won't-they state as long as possible while also providing fanservice, so stuff needs to happen that normally would seem couple-y without the protagonists actually being a couple. the intimacy-chicken model gives these characters agency, ensures that every interaction is mutually consensual, and structures things so that the eventual payoff is inherently the result of character growth: these characters are only kept apart by their own internal hangups, and as they grow into a state where they feel comfortable loving and being loved, they naturally transition from this kind of plausibly-deniable mutual teasing into a comfortable intimacy based on familiarity and care. whereas in love hina (to pick probably the most egregious example not to involve a literal aspiring-rapist) basically just has god-the-author reach down and deus ex machina keitaro into boob grabs and panty flashes multiple times an episode so he can get his ass beat until these women get stockholm-syndromed somehow into thinking he's admirable. when there's a boob grab in nagatoro, it may be accidental but it's the direct result of an activity both people entered into specifically because of the risk of accidental boob-grabbing. there's room for overlap here: rent-a-girlfriend (which i like a bit better than most, not despite but because of the way that the main character's character flaws are highlighted -- they are pretty typical flaws for the kind of guy whose romantic frustrations & lack of perspective could easily lead him down an incel pipeline but who also could develop into a functional human being) has characters who like the MC despite their better judgement, or who like the MC for reasons that are not based on his character, and who deal with the ramifications of being involved with somebody who has a lot of growing to do before he's actual boyfriend material -- something that i think every straight girl has experience with, and that every guy who has grown out of early patriarchal conditioning remembers from the other side with a generous helping of cringe.

i feel like the credit card company made a major tactical error in reminding me that 2% of two grand is forty bucks

Alternative Currency History: Money That Doesn’t Look Like Money https://tedium.co/2023/01/18/alternative-currency-history/

i got a bunch of emails indicating that somebody used my email at, like, a funeral home to organize a memorial service? (i have not attended any funerals lately.)

how much of the 'programming types should be just like type theory' attitude is actually about the concrete benefits of type derivation and how much is literally just 'math is high-status so we should make programming more like math'? (because even though eliminating state from functions in programming has lots of concrete benefits, the people who support functional programming vocally are certainly mostly trying to steal valor from math...)

does the handwriting of musical notation give clues into the state of mind of the scribe? like, is there a benefit to trying to play off original manuscripts so that the subliminal feel of the waver of the tail of that note, tracing a slight tremor of the writing hand, can be reflected in the way the musician plays the note

it's not that probability matrices are a bad way to model history for the purpose of prediction (nor even that they fail to account for creativity: the lossiness of any statistical model produces errors on generating predictions at different levels of abstraction and these errors, when taken seriously as hidden intentions, produce juxtapositions and mutations that are 'creative' by changing the flux distribution across the network of desire, opening up new channels and draining or flooding the old); it's just that any intelligence whose ass cannot at least theoretially be kicked if enough community members agreed it was necessary will inevitably start acting like a spoiled rich kid and be wildly irresponsible. too much positive feedback & you get the cocaine meltdown.

the problem with LLMs is that, for human beings, words are tied up in a network of desire and affiliation not just with other words (which corpus statistics models) but with beliefs, behaviors, habits, memories, media objects, management and logistical decisions, legal complications and bets about the probability of enforcement, traditions, emotional tantrums, honey bee population densities, the changing shape of eggplant and cabbage, and bets on bets on estimates on bets regarding the unknown content of the bowels of the earth which we must seek advice from the digitized memories of a hundred dead expert geologists in simulation to even begin to orient ourselves. everything but the words is lost, so there is no concept of bad faith (when the words are isolated and out of sync with the rest); as a result, everything, for the language model, is in bad faith. (bad faith is not totally useless; if it can be recognized and detourned, it becomes the house built from the master's pilfered tools.) how can we trust a machine that has no bank account, cannot be sued, cannot be punched in the nose? it's not just that it doesn't know what a sunset looks like, but that it has no way of caring about being wrong about sunsets.

conspiracy is not an octopus; it is a ratking. this is the primary theoretical failure in the reasoning of conspiracy theorists. a radical framework is simply a hub-and-spoke elaboration of an arborescent mode: trees reproducing themselves fractally; actually, a radical approximation of the flow of desire and operation of desiring-machines loses so much fidelity versus the rhizomatic lens so as to be useless for predicting the likelihood of any particular relation to be True (either abstractly or in reference to a phenomenal world): the order word lurks in the anus of the policeman in each person's head, cutting off new tendrils that dare connect outside of the family. arborescent tendencies of thought, when widespread, project onto the society as a whole a rejection on the prohibition on incest (of thoughts, ideas, behaviors, artifacts, trade, and desire, as well as sexually) which could also be thought of as a prototype or analogy of pathological codependence. co-independence is the norm: we depend on each other in a way that uses redundancy to avoid disruption, have many shallow acquaintances even within a dunbar-sized group.

Random link from the archives: "Eat Like a Medieval Saint With Her Recipe for 'Cookies of Joy' - Gastro Obscura" https://web.archive.org/web/20210928154659/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-cookie-recipe originally retrieved Tue 28 Sep 2021 03:46:59 PM EDT

in/spectre is a lot like familiar of zero, in that it has a lot of good and interesting ideas and then, for unclear reasons, chooses to focus on uninteresting elements

under the studio system & for decades after, theatres were sold movies as package deals, wherein to show the A picture, you'd have to also show the B picture that had been packaged with it. imagine something like that across studio lines, tied to government art funding or something: wanna show the new marvel movie? well, you gotta show this random arthouse movie about a heroin-addicted vampire made by a college student too. wanna show the new DC movie? well,you gotta show this french-language family drama about a divorce in 1967 west berlin that makes frequent allusions to the compositions of brughel.

Bad idea of the day: an anti-recommendation engine that recommends content that is as different as possible from anything you or people in your social network have liked in the past

last couple years i've been noticing a growing number of dating profiles saying they're 'looking for a real man'. like, sorry, no, fake man here

I'm usually tolerant of linguistic drift but the shift toward treating 'shop' as intransitive seems like it's an astroturfed plan to make it easier to talk about buying things, and to thereby orient people toward a more consumerist mindset.

i really dig watching things like manben, & i think doing so improves my drawing skills in subtle ways, because what i've realized over time is that once you have the fine motor skills to make correct drawing motions, a lot of the challenge of drawing is similar to the challenge of programming -- that the sense you have of a complete image of the finished work in your head is illusory & certain details won't be considered until you're actively doing the thing. watching professionals reason about how to draw complex scenes adds to the database of things i've never considered might possibly need extra consideration, as well as the database of possible solutions/decisions/tools.

anybody know what documentation i need to read to implement a minimal ssb service? basically just something like the old sbot -- a daemon that serves messages to peers & accepts requests via a socket to post raw messages. (even fetching messages from peers & making them available to a client is a low priority & can be skipped for now tbh)

so weird to see dating advice that just assumes you're getting dates. like -- what do you need advice for? you did it. you won.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220209111015/https://scribe.rip/p/scott-alexander-doesnt-like-growth-mindset-yet-b6e26ec929fb originally retrieved Wed 09 Feb 2022 11:10:15 AM EST

what sucks extra bad about dating sites is when you literally run out of people to swipe through. like, you just saw every single woman within 100 miles & none of them want to know you. does anybody?

tiktok keeps showing me advertisements for plan b. like, bro, thanks for the vote of confidence, but you're not gonna make any money that way. meanwhile, facebook recently recommended a group called 'grippy sock gf maximum security prison uwu'

Random link from the archives: "Inside the global gig economy of werewolf erotica on platforms like Dreame, GoodNovel and Amazon Kindle Vella - Rest of World" https://web.archive.org/web/20220727083516/https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/ originally retrieved Wed 27 Jul 2022 08:35:16 AM EDT

Random link from the archives: "The Adults Who Treat Reading Like Homework" https://web.archive.org/web/20211112164744/https://scribe.rip/p/the-adults-who-treat-reading-like-homework-5d814ec94868 originally retrieved Fri 12 Nov 2021 04:47:44 PM EST

Random link from the archives: "AI and the Future of Design: What will the designer of 2025 look like?" https://web.archive.org/web/20211107053723/https://scribe.rip/p/ai-and-the-future-of-design-what-will-the-designer-of-2025-look-like-b27ad0f6ef3a originally retrieved Sun 07 Nov 2021 05:37:23 AM EST

i had been hearing about Mitski for a while in the context of, like, what a Lain fan should listen to?? and that did not prepare me for listening to her for the first time today & discovering she's just, like, off-brand Saint Vincent. which is fine. Saint Vincent is great. but where does the reputation come from?

I am once again asking you how an innovation is like a headquarters?

I am once again asking you how a crossover is like a disarmament?

I am once again asking you how a cylinder is like a genesis?

I am once again asking you how a depletion is like a reaction?

I am once again asking you how a sufferer is like a supposition?

the bias toward being vulnerable with other people as part of your own mental health, while in some ways it's great, is a little strange right now because people aren't talking about/admitting that... everybody has shit that they should never put on other people. like, you need to be ok with everything about yourself, sure, but you should never expect anybody else to be okay with everything about you. if you just dump your trauma on people who are dumb enough to care about you, you're not respecting them. it's great to be vulnerable with yourself, and it's great to be able to be vulnerable with the people who have consented to a mutual vulnerable connection with you, but there's also shit inside you that is an antisocial infohazard & you need to know exactly how far to go when being vulnerable.

I am once again asking you how a stoppage is like a recourse?

I am once again asking you how an opposition is like a touchdown?

I am once again asking you how an arrow is like an Easter?

I am once again asking you how an overseer is like a frigate?

I am once again asking you how a bondage is like a rector?

I am once again asking you how an advice is like an apartheid?

weird to read about attachment styles because the description is like 'healthy and secure people feel like '. also, weird that basically anybody whose parents both worked (i.e., basically anybody not rich) under this model is sort of doomed to be dysfunctional.

I am once again asking you how a hearth is like a bonus?

I am once again asking you how a countryman is like a gridlock?

I am once again asking you how a prophecy is like a curator?

I am once again asking you how a posterity is like a transmitter?

I am once again asking you how a scarcity is like a clearing?

I am once again asking you how a countdown is like a chasm?

I am once again asking you how a forefront is like a pairing?

I am once again asking you how a deflation is like a bingo?

I am once again asking you how a buyout is like a doorway?

I am once again asking you how a demon is like a booty?

I am once again asking you how a matrix is like a fulfillment?

I am once again asking you how a follower is like a lustre?

I am once again asking you how a nervousness is like an embodiment?

I am once again asking you how a Frenchman is like a bodyguard?

I am once again asking you how a cumin is like an outpost?

I am once again asking you how a hockey is like a mantra?

Microfeatures I'd like to see in more languages • Buttondown https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/microfeatures-id-like-to-see-in-more-languages/

I am once again asking you how a tractor is like an advertising?

I am once again asking you how a nursery is like a scissors?

I am once again asking you how a ligament is like a terrier?

I am once again asking you how a computing is like a devolution?

I am once again asking you how a shopping is like a clothing?

it'd be cool if, for every person who said 'i would date you if it weren't for <being in a relationship/living in a different country/some other potentially-permanent situation>' i also got, like, a date. because people say they'd date me in theory a lot, but in practice, people don't date me.

I am once again asking you how a warmth is like a wiring?

I am once again asking you how a threshold is like an investment?

I am once again asking you how a stillness is like an anatomy?

I am once again asking you how a parliament is like a clearance?

I am once again asking you how a google is like a horseman?

I am once again asking you how a canonization is like a functionality?

I am once again asking you how a booty is like a molasses?

I am once again asking you how a hearth is like a happiness?

really weird that mother's basement is making a big deal about a figure of himself that actually just looks like glass reflection

I am once again asking you how a sweater is like a lighting?

I am once again asking you how a kangaroo is like a basin?

I am once again asking you how a permission is like a demonstration?

I am once again asking you how an apostle is like an underwear?

I am once again asking you how a dioxide is like a glitter?

I am once again asking you how a stagnation is like a devolution?

I am once again asking you how a seizure is like a template?

I am once again asking you how a whisky is like a nourishment?

I am once again asking you how a bookmark is like an appellation?

I am once again asking you how an environs is like a carrier?

I am once again asking you how an orientation is like a snapshot?

I am once again asking you how a republic is like a Syrah?

I am once again asking you how an abundance is like an offense?

I am once again asking you how a violation is like a manufacturer?

I am once again asking you how a matrix is like an effectiveness?

I am once again asking you how a thriller is like a statement?

I am once again asking you how an accounting is like a drunkenness?

I am once again asking you how a dentist is like a pounding?

I am once again asking you how a comedian is like a whiteness?

I am once again asking you how an embodiment is like a boomer?

I am once again asking you how an aggression is like an underwear?

I am once again asking you how a trauma is like an eloquence?

I am once again asking you how a Pueblo is like a sloth?

I am once again asking you how a contents is like a pounding?

I am once again asking you how an auspices is like an emancipation?

periodic reminder that 'a traditional christmas' really means being a gay communist furry for like a month and a half, and the sanitized consumerist version is at best like 150 years old. go put on a dress and a horse skull and throw rocks at your landlord like it's 1450.

I am once again asking you how a ticker is like a monument?

I am once again asking you how an imprisonment is like an indicator?

I am once again asking you how a parson is like a domination?

I am once again asking you how a leopard is like a machinery?

I am once again asking you how a peter is like a leadership?

I am once again asking you how a fluke is like an ounce?

I am once again asking you how a recurrence is like a neighborhood?

I am once again asking you how a vaccination is like a skate?

I am once again asking you how a redundancy is like a tendon?

I am once again asking you how a regularity is like a sharpness?

I am once again asking you how an outfield is like a feces?

I am once again asking you how a headquarters is like a resignation?

I am once again asking you how a publicist is like a cross-examination?

I am once again asking you how a tendon is like a custard?

I am once again asking you how an electricity is like a consist?

I am once again asking you how an appendix is like a reader?

I am once again asking you how a lordship is like a kangaroo?

I am once again asking you how a mortality is like a publisher?

I am once again asking you how a mortality is like a stillness?

I am once again asking you how a consultancy is like a circus?

I am once again asking you how an oxygen is like an accuracy?

Random link from the archives: "The Left Brain/Right Brain Divide is a Myth" https://web.archive.org/web/20211026185208/https://scribe.rip/p/why-science-like-art-is-the-practice-of-imagination-in-a-straightjacket-7532ee6b5363 originally retrieved Tue 26 Oct 2021 06:52:08 PM EDT

I am once again asking you how a girlfriend is like a peter?

I am once again asking you how an aversion is like an architecture?

I am once again asking you how a pairing is like a conflagration?

I am once again asking you how a coaster is like a comrade?

I am once again asking you how a logic is like a rationality?

I am once again asking you how a panther is like a ratification?

I am once again asking you how a solemnity is like a bending?

I am once again asking you how a posting is like a commenter?

I am once again asking you how a chasm is like an outpost?

I am once again asking you how a novella is like a resignation?

I am once again asking you how a feces is like a fluke?

I am once again asking you how a metre is like a seeder?

I am once again asking you how a wealth is like a dispatcher?

I am once again asking you how a mowing is like a baron?

Random link from the archives: "Ask Slashdot: What Would Computing Look Like Today If the Amiga Had Survived? - Slashdot" https://web.archive.org/web/20190905085344/https://ask.slashdot.org/story/19/09/03/2224200/ask-slashdot-what-would-computing-look-like-today-if-the-amiga-had-survived originally retrieved Thu Sep 5 08:53:44 EDT 2019

I am once again asking you how a refrigerator is like a bounds?

I am once again asking you how a header is like an indecency?

I am once again asking you how a humility is like a coaster?

I am once again asking you how a proximity is like an intermission?

I am once again asking you how a glamour is like a vegetation?

I am once again asking you how a proceeding is like an adage?

I am once again asking you how a distribution is like a refinery?

I am once again asking you how a fluke is like an aesthetics?

I am once again asking you how a header is like a womanhood?

I am once again asking you how a genitals is like a Sister?

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180926235156/https://scribe.rip/p/to-me-that-looks-very-much-like-a-randomly-self-organizing-chaotic-system-7582142229be originally retrieved Wed Sep 26 23:51:56 EDT 2018

I am once again asking you how a mouthful is like a falls?

I am once again asking you how a subscription is like an adoption?

I am once again asking you how a beginner is like an opportunity?

I am once again asking you how a workman is like a vogue?

I am once again asking you how a sophistication is like a Chihuahua?

I am once again asking you how a vampire is like a diver?

I am once again asking you how a heads is like a simplicity?

I am once again asking you how a misery is like a boomer?

I am once again asking you how a scenery is like a foyer?

I am once again asking you how a sweater is like an aversion?

I am once again asking you how an inactivity is like a physique?

Popular writing manuals that are actually pretty bad and should be avoided: Story by Robert McKee (meandering and abstract), On Writing by Stephen King (not really a writing manual), Writing for Interactive Media by Jon Samsel (unimaginative and obsessed with the limitations of mid-90s tech and market forces), any of the many writing manuals by Kevin J. Anderson (advice only applicable if you happen to be Kevin J. Anderson), Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose (10% good advice, 20% repetition, 70% complaining about Kids These Days Being Too Woke), Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg (contains exactly one piece of writing advice -- to trick yourself into writing -- repeated for 200 pages, interspersed with completely unrelated anecdotes about hanging out with some cult leader), Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and Susan Weinberg (indulges too much in emotional bullshit to the exclusion of actionable advice, and more than half the pages are just reprinted short stories you've already read in high school english), The Anatomy of Story by John Truby (a mix of extremely abstract & confusing models & weird sweeping political shit)

it's not until i decide to skip my daily standup that i realize how much (and how reliably) it saps my energy. like, all week i've barely been able to write a single line of code, because i get up and go into a meeting at 7:30 AM and as soon as it's over i'm ready for bed again, exhausted for the whole rest of the day. i skip the meeting today and i clear all my open tickets in like 20 minutes.

I am once again asking you how a cabbage is like a quantity?

I am once again asking you how a reformer is like an operation?

I am once again asking you how a functionality is like an interpretation?

I am once again asking you how a confiscation is like an error?

I am once again asking you how a villa is like an assignment?

I am once again asking you how a pragmatism is like a discord?

I am once again asking you how a reinforcement is like a captaincy?

isekai oji-san is fun and all but one of the central gags simply doesn't work because the tsundere archetype was common by the early 90s (and present in very high-profile shows much earlier -- macross features it, and so does urusei yatsura) so the idea that an otaku who disappeared in 2000 wouldn't recognize a tsundere because the tsundere archetype appeared in 2004 is complete nonsense. the term tsundere might concievably only be 20 years old, but even that seems unlikely.

I am once again asking you how a layout is like an adaptation?

I am once again asking you how an authority is like an ascent?

I am once again asking you how a chili is like a solitude?

I am once again asking you how an originality is like a coconut?

I am once again asking you how a misunderstanding is like a permission?

Bad idea of the day: a game about a school structured like the one in utena (wherein duels determine who the mc is engaged to), where you play as the rose bride who is also secretly sending messages to suggest duels, and it's an otome game so you manipulate duel scheduling to get with whoever's route you want

I am once again asking you how a progression is like a mobility?

Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project " Andreas Kling " I like computers! https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform-browser-project/

I am once again asking you how an apologise is like a physique?

I am once again asking you how a custard is like a shaving?

Random link from the archives: "Eat Like a Medieval Saint With Her Recipe for 'Cookies of Joy' - Gastro Obscura" https://web.archive.org/web/20210928154659/https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-cookie-recipe originally retrieved Tue 28 Sep 2021 03:46:59 PM EDT

I am once again asking you how a correlation is like a wardrobe?

I am once again asking you how a provocation is like a dwelling?

I am once again asking you how a brotherhood is like a hamburger?

I am once again asking you how a battery is like a waistcoat?

I am once again asking you how a hockey is like a specs?

I am once again asking you how a shoplifting is like a philosopher?

I am once again asking you how an infiltration is like a daddy?

I am once again asking you how a hallway is like a mango?

I am once again asking you how a prototype is like a standstill?

I am once again asking you how a windfall is like an infamy?

I am once again asking you how a sesame is like an advert?

I am once again asking you how a polling is like a liquidation?

Random link from the archives: "Seeing Like a Finite State Machine — Crooked Timber" https://web.archive.org/web/20191126154143/http://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/25/seeing-like-a-finite-state-machine/ originally retrieved Tue Nov 26 15:41:43 EST 2019

I am once again asking you how a lustre is like a precedence?

I am once again asking you how a fragmentation is like a lodging?

I am once again asking you how a dedication is like a follower?

I am once again asking you how an Armour is like a servitude?

something i really like about spriggan: it makes very clear that everybody who thinks they can make use of the full power of these ancient artifacts is a complete elon-musk-tier idiot who's liable to just fuckin get himself killed

I am once again asking you how an involvement is like a panther?

I am once again asking you how a vomiting is like a honesty?

I am once again asking you how a Barrymore is like an organisation?

I am once again asking you how a cheerleader is like a buyout?

I am once again asking you how an affinity is like a folklore?

I am once again asking you how a lookout is like a pendulum?

I am once again asking you how an absence is like an attacker?

I am once again asking you how a semifinal is like a councilman?

I am once again asking you how a synopsis is like an obscurity?

Pathologic: Seeing Like A State | Sophie From Mars - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ0katDtrE4

I am once again asking you how a lordship is like a domination?

I am once again asking you how a ligament is like a villa?

I am once again asking you how a quart is like an Orientalism?

I am once again asking you how a stanza is like a retirement?

I am once again asking you how a ma'am is like a lineage?

I am once again asking you how a gridlock is like a provider?

Bad idea of the day: a museum shaped like a world map, and every exhibit is placed approximately where it originally came from

I am once again asking you how a potassium is like a ralph?

I am once again asking you how a genitals is like a sesame?

I am once again asking you how a scenario is like a dawning?

I am once again asking you how an attraction is like an atheism?

I am once again asking you how a neighborhood is like a pointer?

I am once again asking you how a puberty is like a specification?

I am once again asking you how a Catholicism is like a juror?

I am once again asking you how a passenger is like a disobedience?

I am once again asking you how a helplessness is like an abundance?

The Future of the Internet Will Be Nothing Like Twitter, and That’s a Good Thing https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7g4vx/the-future-of-the-internet-will-be-nothing-like-twitter-and-thats-a-good-thing

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200924014319/https://scribe.rip/p/ai-thinks-like-a-corporation-and-thats-worrying-ee9a1f6f0d21 originally retrieved Thu Sep 24 01:43:19 EDT 2020

I am once again asking you how an indecency is like a brotherhood?

I am once again asking you how a certainty is like an epilepsy?

some of early punk was, like, suicide writing a song about ghost rider and singing it while wearing sunglasses indoors and whipping bike chains at people and audiences having their minds completely blown. or like the lead singer of the damned dressing up like a christopher lee stunt double and demanding to be known as dave vanian. because music can be fun and meaningful, and anybody who makes art is in some fundamental sense dorky (self-expression means you have a self to express, and having a self is the fundament of cringe)

I am once again asking you how a parliament is like a pendulum?

I am once again asking you how a hearth is like a vanguard?

I am once again asking you how a provider is like a feedback?

I am once again asking you how a terror is like a semifinal?

shudder just got Evil Dead Trap 1 & 2, and if you have shudder and like weird early 90s giallo-inspired japanese gore films, you should watch them

Mastodon Tips: Do We Need a Post-Scheduling Tool Like Buffer? https://midrange.tedium.co/issues/mastodon-post-scheduling-considerations/

I am once again asking you how a reformer is like a self-confidence?

I am once again asking you how a colleague is like an inactivity?

the killer robot movies of the 80s and 90s (war games, deadly friend, evolver, small soldiers, etc) have a better intuitive grasp of the real problems associated with reward function gaming in machine learning systems than killer robot movies from earlier and later, at least for the ones set 'in the present day', and i think it's because that's the sweet spot wherein rudimentary machine learning tech was just widespread enough that filmmakers know somebody who knows exactly how it works because they've implemented some (ex., by following the heiserman books) but wasn't so widespread that it became highly professionalized. all these movies exaggerated the power of the tech (mostly in order to give us machines that could see in real time -- actually, even today, mobile robots are unlikely to have the processing power to do what was put into an action figure in small soldiers) but they basically capture the nature of a pattern-matching mechanism tied to an optimizer. the other half, somewhat related, is that the robot effects during this era aren't just practical but robotic. in other words, the people doing the effects know how robots work and how they break, and while it's necessarily exaggerated, that knowledge acts to somewhat ground the behaviors (whereas when robots were people in costumes or CGI hallucinations they didn't need to have any relationship to the actual physics of an electro-mechanical device)

I am once again asking you how an outcome is like a discovery?

I am once again asking you how a recipe is like an outing?

I am once again asking you how a probation is like a fulfillment?

seeing a lot of people on twitter say 'mastodon is siloed'. three days ago i'd assume this was a misunderstanding & try to clear it up. now i'm beginning to think a lot of it is bad faith. like: discovery isn't functionally impacted by federation, because the way you find people to follow on mastodon is exactly the same as the way you'd find people on twitter (by following people boosted by the people you already follow when they say interesting things, or by initially following people you know from other platforms). everybody who is currently on twitter already knows how to do this, and has no reason to believe it would work any other way on any other platform.

hot take: 'the fediverse is not like twitter' is a terrible message to send to new users, because the fediverse is (intentionally) very much like twitter & the handful of technical differences are not going to be noticable or understandable to new users until they are already no longer new users. meanwhile, the social differences (things like: most users are linux-using gay communist furries) largely come from previous waves of migration away from twitter, so long-time twitter users are going to recognize and be nostalgic for those elements.

I am once again asking you how a narrator is like a jogging?

I am once again asking you how a comedian is like a murderer?

I am once again asking you how a sesame is like a prorogation?

I am once again asking you how a helper is like an enthusiasm?

What Was Germany Like in the Decade After Hitler? ‹ Literary Hub https://lithub.com/what-was-germany-like-in-the-decade-after-hitler/

I am once again asking you how a witchcraft is like a collaborator?

I am once again asking you how a Snead is like an allegiance?

I am once again asking you how a joseph is like an envoy?

one of my character flaws is that, whenever someone says something i already know, i get slightly offended (as though they are implying i don't know the thing). this is more of a problem than it might otherwise be, because i went down wiki holes 12 hours a day for like 10 years, & devoured trivia books for a decade before that...

I am once again asking you how an ankle is like a nobody?

I am once again asking you how a freestyle is like a grappling?

I am once again asking you how a forgiveness is like a provider?

I am once again asking you how a broccoli is like a leadership?

I am once again asking you how a thicket is like an attractiveness?

I am once again asking you how a battling is like a perusal?

I am once again asking you how an outing is like a fascism?

I am once again asking you how a solicitation is like a groundwork?

I am once again asking you how a circus is like a boldness?

I am once again asking you how a tractor is like a mathematician?

I am once again asking you how a persona is like a pendulum?

I am once again asking you how a buyout is like a snapshot?

I am once again asking you how an emperor is like a detention?

I am once again asking you how a dossier is like a handling?

I am once again asking you how a demonstration is like a viewpoint?

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220919111026/https://edwardolobo.substack.com/p/it-wont-look-like-mad-max originally retrieved Mon 19 Sep 2022 11:10:26 AM EDT

I am once again asking you how a sophistication is like an arrears?

I am once again asking you how a specification is like an onslaught?

I am once again asking you how an assembly is like a theology?

I am once again asking you how an enlightenment is like a ligament?

I am once again asking you how a savior is like a stocks?

I am once again asking you how a jenny is like a hostility?

I am once again asking you how an actuality is like a gridlock?

I am once again asking you how a firing is like a matron?

I am once again asking you how a projection is like a lookout?

has nick cage ever really embraced the hairpiece lifestyle? like, has he ever done a role where costume and makeup was like, yeah, it's a hairpiece, everybody knows it's a hairpiece, so let's really make the most of the freedom the hairpiece format provides us and pick impossibly wild hair?

I am once again asking you how a penguin is like an overseer?

I am once again asking you how an assignment is like a tracing?

I am once again asking you how a cross-examination is like a brainstorming?

I am once again asking you how a withholding is like a poster?

I am once again asking you how a leasing is like a hoarding?

I am once again asking you how an infamy is like an earnestness?

I am once again asking you how a daybreak is like a consist?

I am once again asking you how an embroidery is like an imperialism?

I am once again asking you how a runoff is like a taker?

I am once again asking you how an equation is like a Sister?

I am once again asking you how an operation is like a fluke?

I am once again asking you how a vaccination is like a basis?

I am once again asking you how a scholarship is like a barrister?

I am once again asking you how an anomaly is like a rebirth?

I am once again asking you how a networking is like a cabbage?

I am once again asking you how a pounding is like an offense?

I am once again asking you how a designation is like a souvenir?

I am once again asking you how a semicolon is like a redistribution?

I am once again asking you how an oracle is like an interact?

I am once again asking you how a honesty is like a phrasing?

Deathmaster captured something interesting: cult leaders are often psychic vampires. When they have communes, they are functionally landlords as well. So it's justifiable, when writing fictional cult leaders, to use vampire semiotics: these are powerful people who entrance, produce fantasies, impose their will, feed off the people below them, but who generally operate through seduction. At the same time, as Van Helsing said of Dracula, in a sense they have 'a child brain', because the kind of fourth circuit fixation that makes you spend all your time perfecting your ability to generate charisma for the sake of ekeing out personal power over other people will necessarily also manifest in a kind of arrested development (can't imagine a form of self-worth that isn't based on external validation, like some kind of middle-schooler).

I am once again asking you how a forefinger is like a quart?

Bad idea of the day: vampire as parasitic-sea-sponge: fangs are fruiting bodies used for reproduction, and the puncture holes made by the bite become the combination mouth-anus of the creature, which gets most of its nutrition from filtering the host's blood. so under stress, the vampire's neck holes will, like, gape. soon after reproduction, the host (now something like 40% mycelium by weight) is liquidated for remaining nutrients, forming a deposit of star jelly

I am once again asking you how a ducking is like a contentment?

I am once again asking you how a brainstorming is like a civility?

I am once again asking you how a depression is like a metaphysics?

listening to this guy do a presentation about ad tech where he has completely swallowed hype about ad-tech effectiveness & catatrophizes about it. let's be clear: ad tech isn't sustainable, and that's easily provable based on a bit of back of the envelope math. consider the amount of money you have, and the number of ads you see every day. how much would it cost to actually buy everything that was advertised to you? how many hundreds of times your net worth would it take to buy everything in every ad you saw in a single day? that's the upper limit on the maximum effectiveness of advertising, because the most you can do is go broke. now, ad-tech actually can't get anywhere close to that, because it has zero access to the most important signals about advertising success: it has no idea whether or not you bought something in response to an ad. it's optimized for proxy measures that CAN be captured, but the relationship between those proxy measures and the only thing that actually matters is just, sort of guessed by humans at some stage of early development and never reconsidered. then, on the other side, we have the companies buying the ads: how many ads do you need to buy before you have spent more on advertising than you will make in profits? the answer is, generally, not all that much -- and if ad targeting worked, it would lower that number because the likelihood that somebody bought something would increase proportionally to ads, but ad targetting doesn't work well enough to actually calculate and plan about that factor. the actual value of ads (in terms of the percentage increase in number of people buying a product who have seen the ad vs prior multiplied by the marginal profit) goes down with every ad you put out, and goes down with every ad any competitor puts out: every podcast tries to sell me mattresses six times an episode but i only need one mattress per 10-20 years. the promise of ad-tech is that this number will go up over time, but every business that has ads is bound to notice that they overestimated it in the first place & adjust, being willing to pay less and less for targetted advertising. all the personal information ad-tech companies collect, all their gdpr violations, aren't actually going to make targetting good enough to make the ads worth paying for, and ad-tech survives purely on the basis of misleading investors about possible future targetting improvements that will never really happen, trying to get theirs and get out before all of the customers realize that there's no point in advertising with them at all. is the personal information a problem? absolutely. but not because the companies can predict behavior -- they can't, at all -- but because that data is gonna leak and be used by nazis or something. your ethnicity, gender, and sexuality says absolutely nothing about whether or not you are gonna buy a car or a mattress (nor is your politics or taste in movies) but it's a great predictor of whether or not somebody is looking for an opportunity to bash your head in.

I am once again asking you how a cumin is like a terrier?

Texas haunted houses: Gainesville's Hill House Manor | wfaa.com https://www.wfaa.com/article/features/welcome-to-a-texas-haunted-house-where-the-ghosts-like-to-get-freaky/287-dfc5d57d-81f7-483e-8eb9-725182744862

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201002071518/https://scribe.rip/p/i-tend-to-be-drawn-more-to-grounded-films-because-i-like-that-theres-usually-a-lesson-to-be-1662acedeada originally retrieved Fri Oct 2 07:15:18 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201004093723/https://scribe.rip/p/what-it-looks-like-on-the-dark-side-of-the-web-f53ff9f4ef3c originally retrieved Sun Oct 4 09:37:23 EDT 2020

what if libraries had cars? like, what if, instead of paying a rental company, you could just show your license, proof of insurance, and library card and get one of the library's old beaters for a week?

If you like cyberpunk & horror & you need something suitably early-90s to read, I highly recommend Arachne by Lisa Mason. Seems to be out of print -- I could only find an ARC second-hand. It takes a couple chapters to hit its stride, but it really wades into the bodily grossness of human flesh, the rickety materiality of robots, the horrifying numinousness of the collective unconscious, and the exploitativeness of capitalism (especially self-exploitation as part of hustle culture). And it's from, like, 1992. Apparently there's a whole trilogy? Anyway, go read it.

one of the downsides of blocking bad-faith shit from all my feeds is that i get into this headspace where i feel like bad-faith argumentation is rare, easily identified, easily avoided, toothless, and ineffective -- forgetting that i've spent literally years doing daily maintenance to produce a space with those characteristics. based on the accounts of... pretty much everybody, it seems like the norm is to be absolutely inundated with it all the time and manipulated by it despite yourself, because your ability to resist blatant emotional manipulation has been worn down through exposure.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20220214154707/https://scribe.rip/p/moral-licensing-gives-men-like-bill-gates-too-much-power-c4418c85d3c6 originally retrieved Mon 14 Feb 2022 03:47:07 PM EST

people keep making videos talking about how cyberpunk 2077 edgerunners is great over the top of the most lazy/generic/halfassed looking footage ever. like, i guess it must be good in context, but it looks less like an anime (let alone a cyberpunk anime) and more like one of those late 90s nickelodeon productions trying to cater to 13 year olds by showing the character designers one (1) low-res jpeg of akira

horror and comedy 'want to do things to your body'; does melodrama? we have the idea of 'weepy movies' but i feel like they often invite engagement rather than, as with horror, pull the tears out of us even against our will. but also i haven't finished clannad so

YouTube’s ‘Dislike’ Button Doesn’t Do What You Think | WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-dislike-button-mozilla-research/

geekdom/fandom can be broken down into two subgroups: one based on costly signalling (generally, the production of creative transformative works, but sometimes legally risky manouvers like tape-trading or technical ones like translation) and one based on consumption (sometimes, but not always, involving participating in a critical discourse, of varying degrees of rigour). these two groups are biased in very different directions because of the way the gatekeeping mechanisms manifest: one joins and participates in the costly signalling segment of fandom by defeating legal, technical, and cultural mechanisms of centralized media control manifesting in the form of market segmentation, artificial scarcity, and the fixation of elements into 'canon' based around authorial intent, and while this produces a widespread anti-IP sentiment, were these blockages fully removed, there would be no way for this group to meaningfully demonstrate their affiliation; the consumption-based segment, on the other hand, can only show its affiliation through legitimate and 'approved' channels, and is limited to officially-available media and tie-in merchandise, but benefits directly from network effects. While the consumption segment is broader in some ways (no skill or daring is required, nor any connections) it is narrower in others (one's cultural capital here is tied entirely to one's bank account, and wealth is not a good proxy for anything other than perhaps power, so not only is there no need to form a complex web of meaningful relationships within a fandom of this type, doing so is a negative since it limits the 'fan's ability to cut all ties with one fandom and gain social capital in another through buying and selling). completely opening up licenses -- flooding the market with new shows, licensing every anime in every region for simulcasting -- paradoxically gives in to the apparent demands of the first group and demolishes them: if your cultural capital came from fansubbing TV rips, you are no longer useful to your cohort when crunchyroll streams the new episode within a half an hour of broadcast (even if the official sub has none of the translation notes or karaoke subs or font changes that formed the basis of inter-fansub competition); if your cultural capital came from writing spicy and politically radical slash fics in private mailing lists under threat of bogus lawsuits, your cultural capital goes away when the showrunners begin to anticipate, manipulate, and lampshade the things you would say by lurking in fan communities and turning them into a kind of unpaid second writer's room. There are only a couple things left to do: go much further (in obscurity, by focusing on older titles that are not available, or in transgression, by making transformative fan content so culturally radioactive that businesses cannot touch it), continue what you're doing in a community that keeps shrinking because of a loss of a sense of meaning, or become a consumer-type (if you can afford it). Or, alternately, become one of the outside observers -- the people who do not actually participate in the cultural production but collectively provide social capital through a consumption of fandom that's wholly passive. It is these folks who leave the outer ring of costly-signalling-based fandom first: they have not done any costly signalling themselves, but they watch fansubs because they don't want to wait for an expensive dvd release that might never come, read fanfiction because they wish they were seeing these situations in the shows themselves, and (though totally silent and anonymous) their footprints produce view counts that justify cultural production. When the costly-signalling side of fandom shrinks, though, and this group leaves, they will necessarily find less fulfillment in observation of the consumption side: a lovingly constructed spirk-tribble orgy is always going to be more fulfilling than a photograph of someone else's collection of mass-produced dolls, because the former at least offers imaginative investment. One could always graduate from an observer to a member of the costly signalling based fandom culture: while skill is prized and confers social capital, all that is actually necessary to join is sacrifice (ex., a willingness to write bad fanfiction in public, which may over time become good fanfiction); the consumption-based group is only open to you if you can afford to spend money on worthless objects, and class mobility is such that if you can't, nothing within your power is likely to make it so that you can. I've tried to be NPOV here, but I think it's clear that the costly signalling based segment is doing something valuable (making meaningful cultural production, breaking down barriers, weakening the power of corporations and IP, being inclusive across class lines, transforming an interest in media into the development of useful skills) and the consumption based section is a kind of shallow one-upsmanship between rich idiots; it benefits IP owners to cater to the latter and try to demolish the former, and until that process began in earnest and cultural shifts became noticable in fandom spaces, there was very little interest in distinguishing between the two (who overlap anyway).

Random link from the archives: "What could a Clojure/LISP editor be like? - Rakhim Davletkaliyev - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20190119201734/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edQyRJyVsUg originally retrieved Sat Jan 19 20:17:34 EST 2019

post-apocalyptic movies (especially ones where the bomb went off) are full of orc-berserker types in sprawling hierarchies, but i think that environment is a better fit for loose federations of small cells of halfling rogues. like: deforestation means not only are you a big honking target but you also lack the calories to keep an arnoldesque physique.

so, i was out sick from work for a week and apparently while i was out, lots of stuff broke because of known issues & nobody did basic stuff to fix it (like manually remove rows from a database, or cherrypick two commits to master).

Random link from the archives: "Ask Slashdot: What Would Computing Look Like Today If the Amiga Had Survived? - Slashdot" https://web.archive.org/web/20190905085344/https://ask.slashdot.org/story/19/09/03/2224200/ask-slashdot-what-would-computing-look-like-today-if-the-amiga-had-survived originally retrieved Thu Sep 5 08:53:44 EDT 2019

Random link from the archives: "GitHub - robpike/ivy: ivy, an APL-like calculator" https://web.archive.org/web/20200213091728/https://github.com/robpike/ivy originally retrieved Thu Feb 13 09:17:28 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201004024051/https://scribe.rip/p/what-if-other-professions-hired-like-software-development-d40d2ae256fc originally retrieved Sun Oct 4 02:40:51 EDT 2020

i don't understand why people affix photos of themselves to ostensibly factual advice. it never lends credibility. either you're hot, in which case it's like, that only worked for you because you're hot, or you're not hot, in which case, that clearly didn't work because you're not hot.

i finally read the only ad facebook has been serving me for like two years and it turns out it's for a kidney cancer drug. (neither i nor anyone i know has kidney cancer)

last night i saw a movie called Sins of Dracula. i had a much better time than i expected to. it came out in 2014, but it's a pastiche/parody of pureflix-type 'evangelical propaganda version of a regular movie genre' movies, which is a thing that was common about 10 years earlier. the premise is that this is a 'christian horror movie' that teaches about the dangers of secular community theatre, by presenting a story wherein a community theatre production of a jonestown musical is actually a honeypot run by an over the top 'evil satanist' to get misfits he can kill in order to ressurrect dracula. also there's a minor character who is basically shaft-meets-kojack-as-evangelical-exorcist. i don't know if i would have liked it nearly as much if i was sober, but i had a great time; it never felt like a mean-spirited movie (the way bush-era evangelical-media parodies often do)

being able to talk to horses doesn't seem like a reason NOT to take LSD to me, tbh. unless the horses know some awful secret that drives men mad

being edgy is associated with discontent, but not with whether or not you have a good model of what's causing your discontent or how to remedy it, so i feel like whenever somebody's edgy i need to check to see if it's in a normal way or in a future-nazi or current-nazi way

Fuzzy Green 'Glacier Mice' Move In Groups And Puzzle Scientists : NPR https://www.npr.org/2020/05/22/858800112/herd-like-movement-of-fuzzy-green-glacier-mice-baffles-scientists

Cook Like an Ancient Mesopotamian With the World’s Oldest Recipes - Gastro Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mesopotamian-recipes

Eating Like an Explorer Once Called for Plenty of ‘Portable Soup’ - Gastro Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/portable-soup

Random link from the archives: "Something went wrong" https://web.archive.org/web/20211024183409/https://scribe.rip/p/to-me-that-looks-very-much-like-a-randomly-self-organizing-chaotic-system-7582142229be originally retrieved Sun 24 Oct 2021 06:34:09 PM EDT

Hirohiko Araki drawing 1x speed raw video/ AKA how to draw like araki - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQRrQDLQTZE

BotD has a new feature that I like quite a bit: since dreams are being used as a kind of hint system, but I have a whole bunch of dreams to write, I wrote a 'dream generator' that would use internal scores to weigh the random selection of a dream character, and then use those same scores to randomly select dialogue. Each dream character has a partially-overlapping set of topics they're concerned about, and a partially-overlapping (sometimes biased) set of topics they can speak on -- in the form of a list of evocative but ambiguous lines for each topic. When compiling the database of dream lines, I specifically selected things that obliquely relate to events in the story -- so that they will be interpreted as foreshadowing in the case that they occur before those events -- and that obliquely mirror the lines in other categories.

Inside the global gig economy of werewolf erotica on platforms like Dreame, GoodNovel and Amazon Kindle Vella - Rest of World https://restofworld.org/2022/china-romance-novels/

Random link from the archives: "HyperRogue: the weirdest roguelike | Rock, Paper, Shotgun" https://web.archive.org/web/20180702084657/https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/28/hyperrogue-non-euclidean-roguelike/ originally retrieved Mon Jul 2 08:46:57 EDT 2018

Random link from the archives: "What would a world without pushbuttons look like? | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20190117100914/https://aeon.co/essays/what-would-a-world-without-pushbuttons-look-like originally retrieved Thu Jan 17 10:09:14 EST 2019

Six Programming Languages I'd Like to See • Buttondown https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/six-programming-languages-id-like-to-see/

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20201007234213/https://scribe.rip/p/gmos-wed-like-to-see-f0b76c1059a3 originally retrieved Wed Oct 7 23:42:13 EDT 2020

Random link from the archives: "I Tried to Live Like Joe Rogan - The Atlantic" https://web.archive.org/web/20190819091848/https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/08/my-joe-rogan-experience/594802/ originally retrieved Mon Aug 19 09:18:48 EDT 2019

reading go nagai manga makes me feel better about my own drawing skills -- like, 90% of the time he draws a face it comes out wonky, anatomy is all over the place, and yet he pioneered like half of the most popular genres in anime

How the Internet Is Like a Dying Star https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/629ec16551acba002091af11/internet-social-media-reactionary-doom-loop/

Random link from the archives: "Thread by @patrissimo: "1/ On the danger of "Puzzles". A puzzle is an activity which takes brains but not effort, like Sudoku, crosswords, Hearthstone/MtG, bridge, […]"" https://web.archive.org/web/20190524081737/https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1130871057961766912.html originally retrieved Fri May 24 08:17:37 EDT 2019

Awards Named After Men Are More Likely to Go to... Men https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/male-award-names-study

Random link from the archives: "We can’t leave it to billionaires like Bezos and Bloomberg to solve the world’s problems | Simon Jenkins | Opinion | The Guardian" https://web.archive.org/web/20200221092409/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/21/billionaires-bloomberg-bezos-government-mega-rich originally retrieved Fri Feb 21 09:24:09 EST 2020

Random link from the archives: "Books Like House Of Leaves: An Intro To Ergodic Fiction | Book Riot" https://web.archive.org/web/20210712211305/https://bookriot.com/books-like-house-of-leaves/ originally retrieved Mon 12 Jul 2021 09:13:05 PM EDT

Bad idea of the day: implant a rare earth magnet into the head of the penis so that being in any room with AC is like getting a 60 stroke per second blow job from the inside

if hypertext stack editing programs on home computers (like hypercard) had remained popular for another 20 years after the introduction of the web, we would have had a perfect understandable set of metaphors for a new breed of 'found footage' epistolary FMV horror games, because people collecting pieces of media together in combination with personal notes in a manner that could be packed up together for distribution would be a recognizable thing. we have the tech but there's no social basis for this behavior anymore, and so any epistolary FMV game has to either take place in an alternate universe, spend time justifying why the collator might be using weird monkey-patched old hypertext systems, or create an in-universe justification wherein the player character is somehow using a strangely designed professional database of some kind. basically, a very short-lived set of technical and financial incentives in the real world prevented a really interesting & obvious potential style of game from coming into its own.

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20200319161442/https://scribe.rip/@enkiv2/i-dont-remember-writing-this-but-it-looks-exactly-like-my-writing-style-1faf3ef0b394 originally retrieved Thu Mar 19 16:14:42 EDT 2020

my rule of thumb when it comes to my own creative works is: the amount of money or attention any of this is going to net anybody is negligable, so i'm creating 100% for my own amusement; as a result, i get to be as self-indulgent as i like, & i can quit whenever it stops being fun

i'm late to the party on Termination Shock, but i recommend it tbh. it's not transcendently good or gut-bustingly funny like early Stephenson, & is instead definitely in line with lesser efforts like REAMDE and Seveneves, but in a way i think his slow transition to near-future technothriller has started to mature (and the geopolitics feel more like Bruce Sterling than Neal Stephenson in this book)

Random link from the archives: "Why We Like to Have Our Backs Scratched" https://web.archive.org/web/20211025052842/https://scribe.rip/p/why-we-like-to-have-our-backs-scratched-e29e79e2253c originally retrieved Mon 25 Oct 2021 05:28:42 AM EDT

my favorite podcasting trend is where horror podcasts have the 'what have you been watching' section expand to like an hour & the ostensible subject of each episode just gets smushed into the last 20 minutes

Band name of the day: things that look like people but act like animals

Werner Herzog Has Never Liked Introspection | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/werner-herzog-has-never-liked-introspection

Random link from the archives: "BBC - Capital - These fake start-ups highlight tech firms’ silly name trends" https://web.archive.org/web/20180502131307/http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180425-why-do-startup-company-names-all-sound-alike originally retrieved Wed May 2 13:13:07 EDT 2018

it always takes me like 10 minutes to remember the term 'brussels sprouts' because growing up my mom always called them by their french name, 'petits chuts', & so i find actually-bilingual people really impressive for being able to hold a conversation in any language at all

damn, i'm doing a lot more shooting my shot lately. taking risks. they're all failing miserably but for some reason i'm not stopping like usual. this is scary.

New Amazon Worker Chat App Would Ban Words Like “Union” https://theintercept.com/2022/04/04/amazon-union-living-wage-restrooms-chat-app/

Random link from the archives: "Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug But It's We Like to Party by Vengaboys - YouTube" https://web.archive.org/web/20200719175618/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXzFukTUyhk originally retrieved Sun Jul 19 17:56:18 EDT 2020

if you, like me, felt that you had 'basically seen' cabinet of dr caligari because of seeing clips of it & reading about it, i promise you, you haven't. the cut on shudder in 77 minutes long, and it's a pretty fast-paced movie. go watch it.

is there already a superhero whose only power is being very good at mental math? i feel like you could do interesting things with that -- ex., organizing rube goldberg traps because he can calculate all the forces and shit, along with a bunch of margins for measurement error

Like Twin Peaks? The X-Files? VIDEO GAMES? Then You Will Love This. - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRyNd3p_49g

saw a profile on okcupid where we agreed on 5 preference questions and disagreed on 6 preference questions, and otherwise had no overlap. their match score? 85%. like, i'm sure these match percentages are somehow related to preference questions (and questions can be weighted), but however they're doing it now dramatically inflates scores, which makes it hard for people who rarely find good matches / require specific things from a partner. there was another profile with a match score of 93% who could only speak ASL -- which I don't speak -- and i feel like language issues like that ought to be represented & affect scores too (since there's no point in matching with somebody you can't talk to -- how many mute or deafmute people are seeing pages and pages of results where nobody knows any sign language?)

Random link from the archives: "" https://web.archive.org/web/20180831191044/https://scribe.rip/p/the-aesthetics-of-science-fiction-what-does-scifi-look-like-after-cyberpunk-ba9f1991e75c originally retrieved Fri Aug 31 19:10:44 EDT 2018

forgive me if this is obvious but it just now struck me as salient for the first time: collage-based pop-art became a thing in the 50s and 60s because of mass-distribution high-resolution photo-mags like Life providing a wealth of material to draw from, and likewise, the 'postmodern' mixing of styles from different decades and genres in music videos and later films in the late 80s and through the 90s were probably enabled by VHS releases of older films & cable channels like Turner's re-running old movies (i.e., even though footage wasn't necessarily used & editing wasn't necessarily done on VHS, VHS re-releases created an awareness of a variety of styles and helped situate them, so that one could draw from a style that wasn't part of a current 'scene' and expect some of the audience to also have a context for it). in other words: technical advances in communication technologies democratized access to visual ideas from groups distant in space or time, preparing people's imaginations for both creating and interpreting new variations. both photo-mags and video tapes are time-binding technologies, and i think this might be specific to time-binding: long before VHS existed, films got re-released for new theatrical runs, and although that occasionally led to artistic inspiration when a particular film ended up being very popular in re-run (ex., Disney's Alice in Wonderland, originally not terribly popular, got re-released in the late 60s and marketed to heads, & 50s re-releases & TV re-runs of 30s Universal horror flicks created the 'monster kid' generation), these hyper-specific genre riffs mostly only happened when it was possible for large numbers of people to re-experience media in detail repeatedly at their own leisure -- especially to rewind, use slow motion, go frame by frame, and eventually to zoom. likewise, you don't get hip-hop without records and tapes (not just the equipment but the actual media -- if records decayed & became unusable in 10 years then hip hop would have looked very different because crate digging would not involve digging so far back in time) and you don't get jazz without cheat books (i.e., jazz has its origins as a popular form in a certain set of process-technologies -- notational technologies in addition to techniques of performance and concepts about improvization -- and those notational technologies have a material basis and economic-social constraint-incentive structures that influence them). videocollage existed before the 90s, because at least some people had film projectors, film splicing equipment, and access to large quantities of developed film, but until the 80s everybody in that category was a Film Person (and probably a Film Industry Person); videocollage only became A Thing when regular people had cheap access to a huge variety of film (and even then, the editing technology was only accessible to Film People), and videocollage will only become democratized when recorded video and the film editing tech is not just cheap but the technical skills widespread. video (and to some extent audio) has actually gone backwards in this respect for reasons of copyright protectionism: streaming is so common that younger people often don't have copies of any film or music (either on media like DVDs or pirated files), and as understanding for how to get access to video in a form that can be edited becomes an additional hurdle people have to cross before editing (on top of getting and learning to use editing software, which is generally quite hard to learn to use) the number of people from a new generation who bother doing any of it drops. IP holders see DRM and (to some degree) streaming as a win because they see piracy as lost sales, but this is actually only a short term win for them (if at all) because the most skilled people in any domain are folks who started young and got a lot of practice -- in other words, people who didn't get 100% of their training on-the-job but instead are former amateurs -- and those people are also the ones most likely to bring new and innovative ideas into a stagnating field. In other words, when streaming and DRM is promoted to the exclusion of media that can be easily edited, the next generation is starved of new talent. the same thing has happened to computing: in the 80s, lots of people learned BASIC without intending to ever become professional programmers because it was one of the things machines could do out of the box; in the 90s, lots of people learned HTML and javascript without ever intending to become professional web developers because it was one of the things a web browser could do out of the box; today nearly all development tools & development tool documentation is aimed at professionals or would-be professionals and put in places where only people who are interested in learning to code will ever come across it, with few opportunities (excel being a rare exception) where non-programmers can 'naturally' slide into doing a little programming in order to make their lives easier. creative industries that don't get fresh ideas stagnate and eventually crash as they hit the limit of what their intellectual monoculture can imagine. because we have misused computer technology for professional protectionism, we are headed for a creative-stagnation crash in software, film, and music within the next 15 years, unless we take some drastic measures (like putting programming & multi-channel editing into the curriculum of mandatory schooling)

i'm very critical of cryptocurrency but one common argument i don't like is 'it is only useful for criminals'. lots of cool stuff is illegal; lots of criminals are good people. some things that only support criminals (because they only do illegal things) are good for the world.

two pervasive things in academic writing that bring reading to an absolute fucking halt: 1) interrupting yourself to explain why you've chosen to explain something in a particular way (save that shit for the intro), and 2) repeating yourself like you're afraid people are skimming or skipping around

the most recent radiolab episode was good but i got three emails about it from radiolab plus like two targetted ads on facebook and, guys, it wasn't that good. it was of the quality i expected of a radiolab episode: marginally better than reply all and marginally worse than strange arrivals