gattsuru
1d ago
There's also a bit of a magic trick where the professional will move the scope of the discussion to a field they've prepared heavily as part of their opening gambit. It's not limited to these sort of public oral debates, but once you catch the trick it's hard to miss how common it is, even if the actual slight-of-hand is pretty hard to imitate.
gattsuru
1d ago
Dayton, Ohio 2019 spree shooter. Very heavily themed his online presence around Canti and Atomsk.
gattsuru
1d ago
Barring bad soap operas, no. But prosecutors will want to bring witnesses, have to question the target, and (while I'd argue shouldn't) handle the media, and all those things are more expensive when the first question is 'did you know she had a dick'.
As with netstack, haven't gotten Silksong yet.
Trying to veg a bit with Star Citizen. It is, to skip to the punchline, an awful game, made all the worse by the staggering amounts of time and money that have gone into it. It's been in development over a decade and has yet to complete (or even seriously implement) a single gameplay loop, nine months into the 'year of playability' the server infrastructure still panics over moving boxes into the wrong location, and anyone who plays the game for long develops a paranoid fear of elevators; calling it half-finished is too complimentary by halves. I bought in back during the original kickstarter at one of the lowest tiers, but the game has increasingly focused both its marketing and its development on megaships marketed to whales, often to pretty ludicrous ends (eg, you can't buy an Idris even if you had a thousand bucks to waste, and even if you could, it makes absolutely no sense to own even as a way to grief people).
Which makes it all the more frustrating how good the core of the gameplay can be. The whole bit where you seamlessly blast out of a docking bay, start warping to a mission destination, leave the pilot chair to prep gear and a light motorbike in the bay, hear the decel as you get into orbit and drop out of quantum travel, fly down to the surface and land 20 klicks out dodging turrets, jump into the bike and go off to start busting heads with a rifle, and head back when done. Or you sculk around the edges of a pirate and PVP-heavy point-of-interest in your undergunned salvage ship, carefully managing ship power to avoid spiking anyone's sensors, to crack apart and chew down salvage left behind by their battles. Or you're on a ground mission and have to take quick cover because someone else is fighting a massive space battle and you can't risk eating a golden BB. Even just hauling cargo, tedious as it can be, still feels a lot more engaged than the standard Freelancer/No Man's Sky/Elite.
And then the mission system can't count to five, or you get killed by drinking a bugged soft drink, or you fall through two different floors of your ship at superluminal speeds and fuck your entire cargo and a few hundred thousand credits as it goes 50 gigameters that way. Or you do all that turret-dodging and crack a half-dozen heads, grab a mission objective, mount your hoverbike, and it shoots into outspace leaving you behind and literal hours of travel to get back to your ship. Or you look at your cargo run and realize that you're making fewer credits-per-hour than you would with VLRT missions, and this route involves dodging PVP pirates in heavy fighters while you're armed with a handheld tractor beam.
The technical implementation is challenging enough that some of this can be excused or handwaved: this giant scalable dynamically moving pile of microservices is probably necessary for the game's intended final scope even if it's almost exactly the sort of hypothetical I use to argue against the microservice of everything. But then there's other bugs that are incredibly simple model or stat errors and take literal months to fix, or parts of gameplay loops that just need a (client-side-only!) UI update. How do you have five hundred people working on a space game funded by selling ships and not have a way to sort ships in-game after ten years?
Space Engineers is my other mindless space game, as a more build-em-up. Recently dropped a survival gameplay update with some other decent tech fixes. There's some stuff to criticize -- combat is still hilariously floaty-feeling, whether two spacesuits with handguns or big capital ships, and the end-game prototech gameplay loop still feels kinda dumb a year later -- but there's still some amount of enjoyment in designing and building out a decent light frigate.
gattsuru
1d ago
Does anyone here recall seeing a “notices bulge” meme in the wild lately? Do modern trans people use it?
It's a really common furry/anti-furry thing, generally focused around M/M (or, more rarely, M/F) roleplay norms. By convention the person noticing the bulge is usually the femmy one. Given the demographics of the furry roleplay sphere some of the M/F stuff is probably trans people, but the specifics of the joke misalign enough to what most trans people are looking for that probably less than you'd expect. See this for a relatively sfw joke about it.
gattsuru
1d ago
When discussing tradeoffs, guys being able to look at porn at work isn't going to win against making it difficult for women to be employed there.
Is there a difference between this style of "tradeoff" and "that have been systematically stripped from and denied to myself and my allies for decades or more, and will never in any case be allowed to protect us in any way in the future"?
gattsuru
1d ago
First the violent nutjobs took FLCL references, and now they're taking the concept of getting rawwed by a werewolf in tight jeans. Is nothing sacred.
gattsuru
1d ago
The notices bulge one is a furry meme, rather than trans. (Not even girls-with-dicks side of furry, afaik; I've seen it more from the gay side, and not just in the sense that I would see more of the gay side.) Kinda has escaped containment since it originated as a bit of an anti-furry thing making (fair) mockery of cringy RP conventions, so might just be general too-online reference.
gattsuru
1d ago
The alleged shooter has been caught, and this time they seem confident enough about it to give a press conference.
We've gotten more details about the etched messages on shell casings, and they seem a mix of general antifa and memelord. The supposedly trans-related one looks to have actually been the furry-originated 'owo notices your bulge' joke, and that's usually more cis gay (or even, rarely, cis M/F) roleplay before it turned into a general cringey joke, but along with the rest of the details, it's looking pretty explicitly like radicalized iso-standard lefty.
I can't link to it without self-doxxing, but a teacher in a nearby school, one who I worked with for STEM outreach post-COVID, is now in state-level news for the same stuff as the Home Depot lady from months ago. I'm pointedly getting out of any chat or social media around that entire conversation and its downstream effects, and it's too early to drink, and I'm going to be working with students from that school later today and I'm not going to mention it and I used to respect him and I'm done.
gattsuru
1d ago
The 'she wasn't a virgin' defense to rape allegations didn't get accepted by juries very often in the modern era, but it was still pretty costly for genuine victims even where they were successful in getting their attackers brought down. What extent people don't bring charges in marginal cases where those costs are high is an unknowable number, but it's probably not zero.
gattsuru
1d ago
I'd hope he's learned a lesson or at least fear, and you're probably better at reading body language than I am, but Hasan specifically also has a pretty long history of pretty explicit calls to violence (cw: BakedAlaska link, also BA-grade legal analysis), and his career depends pretty heavily on not having a legal hammer or Senate nudge go after him. I have no idea what Twitch executive he's got compromising photos of, but given that the website is pretty notorious for banning game streamers who get too rough, there's gonna be some fallout on that sphere.
gattsuru
2d ago
What do you want to say at work that you think you're being prevented from saying because of potential employer liability under "hostile work environment" standards?
It's a matter of standing law that the Civil Rights Act controls what public radio stations that employees may turn on. Google defended -- and the NLRB accepted -- that anti-discrimination law actively required that the company police the speech of its employees. Other cases have held that employers are responsible for even off-premises and after-hours speech by their employees, or where the speech was not even directed from one employee to another.
What makes you think than your employer would have no problem with you saying that even if the potential liability didn't exist?
In some cases, this is plausible as a defense. Several early hostile work environment cases revolved around 'employees' who were already fired by their employer, with the lawsuit between plaintiff and employer revolving around whether the employer should have acted sooner.
In other cases, it's hard to even separate matters; there's now a strong convention against nudie mags in even the bluest-collar of blue collar jobs, and of course no employer wants their workers to be staring at breasts while on the job today. Would that have been considered as unacceptable without thirty years of HR hammering into every employer and employee?
But in most, it's not especially defensible. We just had a big court case about an employer making fun of an employee for being gay (and fat); the only reason the employer won (after a long and uncertain court case) was because everyone agreed this job was ministerial, not Because Free Speech Uber Allies. And the employer very clearly did not want to apply the anti-'hostile work environment' policy, given that they probably spent tens or thousands of dollars defending their not complying with it. There are hundreds of cases like this, almost all of them get no legal defense, and that's before getting to the wide variety that no one defies even when they want to because they know they're fucked.
And then you think for ten seconds, and you remember that people put a ton of political capital into not only maintaining but expanding (Bostock! Kinda a big deal!) these policies, and it becomes kinda obvious.
gattsuru
2d ago
This is a fascinating normative statement, and one I'd love to support.
As soon as we turn from 'should' to 'does', though, the answer changes radically. Mike Adams was forced into early retirement (and driven to suicide) over his personal writings in 2020. Damore doesn't have his old job at Google back, and the punchline to his whole NLRB thing was Google arguing (and the board accepting) that the law required them to fire employees for speech. People were fired for anonymous donations to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense fund. Nor does it stop at firing: Kyle Kashuv and Harvard, LexManos and Forge, Vaxry and Hypr, Mercedes Lackey and the convention circuit, yada yada.
There was a big important court case about whether the federal government can pressure private companies to ban and censor specific users, and SCOTUS said fine by us. [context]
Never again would be a wonderful philosophy. It also demands that it stop happening the first time. I would love to see that change. But I notice that it is only when progressives are getting fired that any progressive cares about freeze peach, even the ones that proclaim they were 'always' the principled ones.
I would love to have arguments against this strategy; I don't.
gattsuru
2d ago
Punchline to the Pause Letter story: data was 'lost'. Indeed, FOIA-able records for the relevant periods in question here were 'inadvertently lost' years ago, and we have only found out this month. Even after the FOIA was submitted, the SEC did not initially search these records, even after claiming both orally and in court filings to have completed and re-completed a search of all records, and unsurprisingly no disclosures of possible record destruction were ever delivered despite explicit regulatory requirements -- even long after the internal report about the scope of the 'inadvertent' data loss was complete.
Most critically, we did not get this by the grace of the courts.
gattsuru
2d ago
The issues show up without diving into algorithmic media.
gattsuru
2d ago
Probably a reference to this conversation and its predecessors.
gattsuru
2d ago
gattsuru
2d ago
Most of the coverage is downstream of this WSJ article, which is unfortunately paywalled in a way that archive.is can't bypass; see here for visible-text.
Given how poorly that Red Hood comic went, I'm not sure Felker-Martin's barely a tenth of a Tara Strong. Dowd is more persuasive, with the caveat that it falters if pulls a Toobin and is back in six months.
I guess this is where I should clear my throat and say "Political violence is bad and I condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk"?
I genuinely do appreciate that. I will note others: I've mentioned KelseyTUOC already, but there's been some number of decent prominent and not-so-prominent people who've spoken up, sometimes even in credible or costly ways. Even some pretty awful scumbags are at least trying to motion around it, if not very sincerely. Some of them are even sincere-seeming: I genuinely neither expected nor hoped a Young Turk to have tried, even if he's still pointing the wrong direction.
It's also a long way from persuasive enough. This is a moderator at NeoForge Discord. This is a moderator at the Hexcasting Discord (to her credit, the mod dev herself has been more responsible, albeit in a 'don't make people watch someone die' sense than a 'aggressive violence is bad even when it happens to people I don't like' one). This is imgur yesterday, this is the front page sorted by viral today. This was tumblr yesterday, hastag his name, sorted by top; this is tumblr with the same constraints today. I logged into Star Citizen last night to take my mind off things, and had literally could not get out of the in-game bed before I had chat cheering it on; this is from an FFXIV guild I dropped before the election, and a discord I'm gonna leave in a few months.
And it's not just the nameless and faceless grunts, or bluesky, or the people who skinsuited a project I once respected. This is Ken White, who to what minimal credit he deserves says that Violence Is Bad before going straight into 'you can't defame the dead' mode. This is Barry Deustch, B from Radicalizing the Romanceless. This is from the writer of NeoReaction: A Basilisk, and was well-respected in the tumblr ratsphere for almost a decade. There were 51 posts over 12 hours in the rpg.net thread (cw: big image), and while there's a couple that aren't dancing in blood, there's literally five times as many where people who I once took seriously now going full :
On the other hand, my immediate reaction is fuck them, they get NOTHING.
It's like the person upthread saying how we shouldn't have this thread at all - is this how we defend actual free speech and small-d democratic values? By running and hiding and staying quiet? Nah, screw that. Charlie Kirk was an awful person and I feel bad for the family he left behind, but I would feel bad for them beforehand, too, for having that kind of guy as a father and husband.
Now, anyone getting revenge porny or actually cheering on political assassinations isn't correct, either. Frankly, given how parts of his fanbase were turning on him from going from 'release the Epstein files" to "it's a Democrat hoax", I expect this to be part of the occasionally seen far-right "you aren't hating enough or the right people" circular firing squad, which unlike the leftist version tends to involve actual firearms.
I can keep doing this, if you'd like, but I don't think it's healthy for either of us.
I've gotten it from someone I let live in my home for six months while they were getting back on their feet. Didn't even go looking for them, I don't follow them on tumblr anymore, just bam, snuff video with a Dark Souls meme thrown into it, with a 'leopards eating faces' tag in case they needed to make it clearer what they were condoning. Do you want a list of exactly what thoughts, in what order, went through my mind? It's not just me; KendricTonn is another guy who fled to the heartland (poor bastard ended up in Ohio!) and he's getting it, too.
I considered looking up the social media of some of my past partners. Do you think it would help, or not? I'm pointedly not doing it, because that way lies even more psychosis than looking up your exes normally does.
As a prediction, which I will send you in plaintext in PM and post publicly here in a week, sha256: a009fcb948bd1a70a38d133d81f0cc96af6efa94904133184a5f40d0cb5d6004
Because ten years ago, it would have been useful to have a decent handful of examples of prominent speakers who would consistently speak in defense of "bad argument gets argument, not bullet". We have not been dumped ten years in the past. We have a decade of people Friedersdorfing these grand principles about how they'll defend people that they totally didn't defend in the past.
Jerk That Can't Write A Comic Story Worth Shit isn't a costly signal. Matt Dowd might be, if it sticks. Actually blackballing people and organizations that promote or defend this sorta stuff is. Either people haven't brought serious and costly signals of enforcement against their own side, or people think these examples you're bringing forward are the serious and costly signals. If that's the central example from the aftermath, I'm going to point to Forge again, and Damore again, and Kashur again, and show exactly how much political debt their alliance is in.
They might not have done it, themselves! They might even, in their heart of hearts, have whispered words about how it tots would have been better if no one did these terrible things. It's genuinely terrible that people have to handle the weight of bad acts from people they might not even like, just because their political alliance. It's also a little late for them to complain.
gattsuru
2d ago
Fair. We'll see if it's a real thing or just another Toobin, but I'll register that I did genuinely not expect that.
gattsuru
3d ago
What would that even look like, with tribal positions reversed?
The simple answer is a journalist, and to be fair that has happened, albeit typically with different political valences and, probably more critically, at much more personal scales. And there's a fair cynical analysis that scale matters, and it shouldn't.
The more morbid answer is that it's literally anyone with a social media account. We had discussions here where posters -- well-respected ones! -- thought some level of political engagement put people beyond questions of doxxing or targeting, and pointed to someone who could e-mail and call state politicians, and motioned about how great power came with great responsibility. Before today, you could imagine a world where that had limits, not just ones that the person drew for themselves, but that applied across their political alliance, and 'responsibility' meant nothing more and nothing less than being set right when wrong. I can hope that's what the posters here meant, back then.
Even if we turn down the violence, and I'm not certain that's even possible, at the end of the day there's no going back to that. This is not someone getting kicked out of college, and it's only deniable in the sense that people will deny it.
Because there are countless ways to say Kirk wasn't harmless; my tumblr and bluesky and discord feed has no small number of them, and I can't even log into an MMO without seeing it (thank you Star Citizen's chat being broken like everyfuckingthingelse). He was impactful, and it doesn't take much impact at a national level to change tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives, and even if you think it was for the better not everyone's going to agree with you. And then you remember Joe The Plumber or Ken Bone, and weep.
We've seen variants of this before -- the doxxing tit-for-tat back in the CCW days cut my teeth and a few others -- but they depended on certain very specific tools, which could be shut off. Now, the only necessary tool is a network account.
gattsuru
3d ago
Outside of the general ethical problem with 'government agents did bad things, these guys are also government agents' -- it's hard to overstate how indiscriminate -- McVeigh specifically evaluated the daycare situation in the building he targeted. That's a good part of the point of the original charcoal briquettes rant.
gattsuru
3d ago
Yes. I dropped a PM conversation with FCfromSSC over a tangentally related matter, and there were a portion of discussion around the Baude/Paulsen stuff that I will not post here and did not write down anywhere except in a direct e-mail to Baude.
There are ideas that are dangerous. I will no sooner than write publicly how to kill large numbers of people and probably get away with it than I would inform twelve year olds about the cool cleaning technique of mixing bleach and ammonia.
Some, I (have to) believe are in corrupted information environments. That’s not much of a defense when they ban and/or threaten anyone who would give true information they don’t like, but it’s a defense.
And then there’s Ken White.
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