My big concern here is that the financial reports end up consisting mostly of time spent writing financial reports. I'm happy to talk about roughly what's going on and where the money is going (right now, server fees, somewhere around $50/mo) and if we get to Serious Money (tm) stages then yeah I'll do the legwork or hire someone to do it for me.
But if we're looking at $100-$200/mo then I'd actually rather not have the money than have to do a detailed financial report.
Finally, it's worth noting that "spent responsibly" is a kind of squirrely concept. I worked on a World of Warcraft mod a while back that took donations, and I made a big thing over how contributions would go towards the future development of the mod. And they did! They went to my pocket so I kept working on the mod. Basically made it a full-time job for a year or so. If I got a ton of contributions then "make this a part-time or even full-time job" starts looking viable, but then the financial report will be like, "Server Fees: $50, ZorbaTHut's Payroll: Everything Else".
Which some people would object to, even if I'm effectively working at a discount.
Donation-based stuff is weird because people get weird about money.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
I'm not sure we've ever actually had to enforce this, but the official policy with Motte pronouns is:
- You are always allowed to use the person in question's preferred pronoun.
- You are always allowed to use "they", regardless of whether the person accepts that or not.
- You are always allowed to twist yourself in knots to avoid pronouns even if it looks really silly.
- If you're doing something historical, you can also use the person in question's officially preferred pronouns at that time in the story, but don't cleverly split hairs on this one; if you write a story about the Wachowskis, and start out by referring to them as "he", but then switch to "they" when they transition, the Eye of Sauron may look down upon thee.
The good news about these policies is that everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable, which is probably about as good as we can get.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
It was obvious to anyone paying attention, but now it's pretty much confirmed.
From the rules:
Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.
"As everyone knows . . ."
"I'm sure you all agree that . . ."
We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.
Avoid this kind of thing in the future, please.
ZorbaTHut
7mo ago
We're not asking you to not post about it. We're asking you to also post about other stuff.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright, I'm gonna chime in here.
@Jiro points out, correctly, that despite there being a lot of words here there isn't actually much evidence. A rule:
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Also known as the "hot take" rule.
If you're saying something that's deeply out of the ordinary or difficult-to-defend, the next person is going to ask you to explain what you mean. You can head this off by explaining what you mean before hitting submit. The alternative is that the first half-dozen responses will all be "can you explain in more detail", which increases clutter and makes it much harder to follow the conversation.
Are your statements accurate? Are you just making it up? Fucked if I know! But if you're going for straight-up "the holocaust was a fake" then you damn well better be bringing some serious ammo to the table.
You should also be pre-emptively answering expected responses, and you're not really doing this. @To_Mandalay has a good example of such responses; you've chosen instead to fling out stuff like bloggers "desperation descending into madness". One of our rules is:
Be charitable.
Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize.
and this is a good example of not doing that.
Next, @Aransentin points out that this is just copypasted from another site. Good chance you're not even the author; you didn't even include all the links!
Finally you've made no effort to actually respond to this, choosing instead to go ask someone their thoughts on HBD.
This might not be a troll, but it sure is acting like one, and I'm just gonna ban you for a few days here.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
In defense of wrecking Jones:
First, reports are that he was basically ignoring the court system. I think it is entirely justifiable that "ignoring the court system" gets turned into "the court system reminds you, and society in general, that the court system is not to be ignored".
Second, people are looking at the fine and saying that it seems excessive in absolute numbers. But I think there's a lot of value in fines that are relative to someone's net worth. And I think "promoting a harassment campaign against people who had their children murdered, all for the sake of selling merchandise" is reasonably responded to with "a fine of at least 100% of your net worth". Which is about what this is.
If we fine people absolute numbers, we're giving rich people effective permission to do whatever they want while ruining poor people's lives for small transgressions; if the goal is to make them stop, then relative numbers are what you've gotta do.
ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
I think my issue is that civility is an axis on its own, and worse, it's a contagious one. If two people are flaming each other then the spectators think "ah, flaming each other is okay", and we get more flaming, and it just kinda continues from there. There isn't really a way to limit it to just extremists; if we allow it for extremists we allow it for everyone.
But on top of that, I don't think it's an inevitable component of being an extremist. I think there's no reason debating extremists need to be any less civil than people who are ideologically aligned, regardless of how different they are.
With these two together, there's serious consequences to allowing it and not so much benefit to allowing it.
If there was an election for motte dictator, you’d get my vote, and I’m not just saying that, dear leader.
It is legitimately appreciated :)
I keep hoping someone else comes along and does what we do, only better, and, man, just nobody does that.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Yeah, I could've sworn we fixed it, but it appears to have shown back up again. Unfortunately it seems very difficult to intentionally replicate, while very easy to accidentally stub your toe on, which makes it a pain to fix. If you can figure out reliable repro steps I would love to hear them :V
In general, you're welcome to PM me with reports, or post them in whatever thread seems most reasonable and ping me.
ZorbaTHut
10mo ago
I think the core issue is that you have to heavily subsidize the very concept of childraising. Having children is horrendously expensive, to a point where you can't simply subsidize it by giving money to the people having kids, you have to build systems that make childraising cheaper. And that's not just expensive in a monetary sense, that's expensive in a time sense and an effort sense.
I think, if I were going to try this, I'd be aiming at essentially building an entire new culture around larger familial units; "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together, with a designated subsidized night caretaker and one or two full-time employees to handle things like food and cleaning. Make it clear that living in these places is easier, in a way that extends beyond simply "having money", but that they're available only for people with kids.
Honestly, this would kinda be aimed at a modern reinvention of tribal living.
For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week.
The problem is that people today want careers, and what you're basically offering here is the government guaranteeing that you can cripple your career for your kids if you want. I'm not going to say that's bad - having that available would help - but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that people don't want to cripple their career for their kids.
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
Hah, I like how Uhura doesn't even take offense there.
These all feel like really good examples of doing it right, honestly. Yes, if you're pulling a character in from ancient times, they're going to have some confusion about a black woman serving on board the bridge, of course they are! But that doesn't need to be the thing the episode is about, and in fact probably shouldn't be. Allegory, not sledgehammer.
. . . also that's a pretty funny line in response to Sulu.
Just as an FYI, we just deployed a major performance improvement for this site. It also might be buggy. Please report any issues you run into, especially those involving the display of the front page or comment threads (like this one).
(At the same time we're currently working with a significant performance degradation because of a library bug. Hopefully we'll get that one solved soon too.)
Edit: So far there are 414 janitor submissions, y'all are great, I was expecting to have to wait a week or two to get a good chunk of useful data but nope this is going fast.
(one post is considered one submission, not one set of posts)
ZorbaTHut
2mo ago
Nah, this was honestly expected - the login system is based on user ID, and if the user IDs get reset and you get a token for a now-available user ID, that token is still valid once the site reboots. No particularly great mystery.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
ZorbaTHut
7mo ago
For what it's worth, I think the existence of vote buttons is important for people to feel like they're contributing; hell, if we had vote buttons and they did literally nothing they would still be a net benefit.
But yeah, I'm not super-happy with how they currently work.
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
In short: why?
Because if I can prove it can't be done, then I can use that to explain why people don't do it. Because if I can prove it can be done, then I can do it and gently show people how to politics better.
Because to me, "the existence of trans people" isn't propaganda any more than putting angels or nazis or bikers or forest rangers in a game is propaganda. Having things in a game does not imply support for those things, nor does it imply disapproval of those things. Having a larger palette makes for more options, which lets me make better games. And the more ways I can use parts of that palette, the better off I am.
Because it's a challenge.
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
I actually think that's clever and I like that. And then of course nobody really brings it up, it's just "hey, yeah, go for it."
(One of the things that was in my notes for that post that didn't make it in was my then-4-year-old daughter deciding she wanted to play Monster Hunter World, and in character creation, decided to make a middle-aged black man, which I admit I thought was kind of funny. But I also don't think it meant anything, she just thought he looked cool, which, in fairness, he did. So, hey, go for it kid, have fun.)
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
This is part of what I'm slowly approaching with the volunteer system, although I have had no time to work on it lately :/
ZorbaTHut
9mo ago
I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.
I can't speak for the other mods, but when I'm reading over comments I'm often not thinking about them with mod-brain, if that makes sense. There's been times I've browsed recent comments, gone to look at the mod queue, and said "oh shit, yeah, that comment I literally read a minute ago was awful, wasn't it".
Reports absolutely help, and reporting it for the right thing is also important, but if it's ambiguous, don't stress too much about it - choose a report reason that's defensible and you're in the right ballpark.
(Every once in a while someone reports a twenty-paragraph megapost for "low effort" and I tend to just sort of approve those after a quick skim to make sure it's not the word "cheese" repeated a thousand times, so if someone is being antagonistic in a megapost, and you report it for "low effort", that might be a wasted report; don't do that. "Not reporting megaposts as low-effort" is basically the bar of report-quality that I ask :V)
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Sigh. Because I looked down at my clock and saw "9" and typed 9 in.
That was the month, Zorba, not the day.
(Fixed, though - I like being able to edit titles here.)
At some point we'll get this automated and these problems will go away.
So here's a thing that I've been sitting on for months.
Chtorrr.
I've never seen this mentioned anywhere, which surprises me, but "Chtorrr" is a pretty obvious reference to a scifi novel series named The War Against the Chtorr. "boy it's funny she named herself after the bad guys" no no, that's not where I'm going with this. Hold your butts.
The War Against The Chtorr is a post-apocalyptic alien invasion novel by David Gerrold, best known for his Star Trek episode The Trouble With Tribbles. I haven't read his stuff in over a decade but I know I loved it as a kid, and I've still got the books in a box somewhere - someday I'll dig that out. The Chtorr series was meant to be the longest thing he'd written, originally a trilogy, then six books; the fifth book has been delayed for literally twenty years, jesus christ get that thing finished already.
The overall plotline . . .
. . . okay I'm going to take a brief diversion. The overall plotline has some cool worldbuilding. One of the past events was the USA went totally world-conquering imperialistic and was defeated soundly, a la Nazi Germany but with less genocide. The USA was put under severe economic sanctions but this turned out to be an even bigger problem for the rest of the world, as the USA was producing pretty much all the world's high-tech equipment. The world grudgingly allowed the USA to continue selling tech, which they did.
Later the aliens arrive and large parts of humanity join the aliens and use human military equipment against the remaining US countries . . . and it turns out that the USA has remote killswitches in literally every chip they'd sold post-sanctions. Which they originally put it in stop anyone deciding to crush the USA, and which is technically now being used for that exact purpose, just nobody expected that "anyone" was going to be aliens.
Anyway. Diversion over.
The overall plotline is that an alien invasion shows up from outer space. This isn't the normal "spaceships and greys with guns" invasion. The Chtorr are some kind of symbiotic hive-mind species, including fungal and worm creatures. There's no particular unified military action taken by them, they just kinda . . . colonize . . . and spread . . . and it's hinted that there's some kind of induct-humans-into-the-hivemind thing going on, and large sections of humanity start giving themselves freely over to the Chtorr menace and it's all very bad.
A big recurring theme here is the collapse of civilization and the dehumanization caused thereby. This series does not pull punches; it is not a stars-and-stripes patriotic fight against the aliens (check out Doc Smith's Lensman series if you're into that, it's gloriously ridiculous), it's a bunch of disorganized guerillas who are trying to stop a force that cannot be stopped while under siege from opportunists and warlords and everything else that you would expect from the fall of humanity.
There's murder. There's rape. There's torture. And there's pedophilia.
One of the plotlines is the main character visits . . . god, I don't remember the details. An orphanage? It turns out that the leader has been raping the kids, and they're like, "aw hell nah" and kill the guy and save the kids to bring back to their town. That night, one of the kids crawls into the main character's sleeping bag and asks to have sex, and the main character is all like "aw hell nah" but the kid is insistent and so the main character basically flees the tent and goes to talk to the group leader.
The group leader says, paraphased,
okay, look. This is an insane situation to be in. But this kid, for the last three years of their life, has been taught that physical intimacy is how you show trust. And while we absolutely need to deal with that, we need to get these kids to safety first, and right now we're in the middle of a forest full of people and animals that want to kill us. If you don't prove to him that you trust him, he'll probably run away - we've seen this happen before - and get eaten. We've seen that happen b efore too.
So maybe you should pray to whatever god you believe in, make whatever penance you think is appropriate, and just do it, quite literally, for the sake of the kid.
Or maybe you shouldn't. Not gonna judge you either way. But make the decision that you can best live with.
Sorry you're dealing with this.
And the main character goes back and has sex with the kid.
(Fade to black, obviously, it doesn't go into detail.)
I just want to reiterate that I'm not making this up.
I actually think this is a really good series overall. It's uncomfortable to read - excruciatingly so - but that's kind of the point, yeah? It's asking what atrocities humans do in a situation like this, it's asking what atrocities are justifiable in this situation. Do I think the main character made the right choice? Fuck, I don't know! But that's great. Seriously, I read this book twenty years ago, it's stuck with me the entire time, I still don't know what the right solution is!
But this is the book that Chtorrr chose to name herself after.
And if David Gerrold was posting The War Against The Chtorr on Reddit, I guarantee that Chtorrr would be banning it.
I don't really have a conclusion here; this entire situation is just ridiculous.
Yeah, there's someone on the dev Discord who did a big dump. I'm currently pinging the mods to make sure there's no strong reason not to post this, and otherwise I'll probably be posting a big chunky JSON archive of everything so people can repost if they want.
(edit: posted)
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