ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
Absolutely! I'm hoping to get a somewhat-serious public release in the next few months.
ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
I should definitely do that - I actually started a #workshop thread on a Discord for much the same reason, though unfortunately a lot of stuff that I'm doing is backend and hard to share in interesting ways. But I'll see if I can start posting there when I do have things of interest :)
I've been thinking about culture war in media lately.
For those who don't know, I'm a game programmer, working to kinda move into the game-director role. Obviously at some point I am going to have games with humans in them [citation needed], and since they're humans I need to decide what they look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color, which is of course now highly politicized, joining the ranks of literally everything else in existence.
But I'm not looking for an excuse to put characters in of one skin color or another. I want a universe that feels reasoanbly alive, with characters who are interesting and not just inserted for politics reasons. So a big part of this ends up being "how do I choose interesting characters that don't feel like a political statement, or at least, if they do feel like a political statement, it's a political statement I don't mind making, or a political statement I'm intentionally making as part of the game, and also, boy it would be nice to come up with a way to insert characters of literally any type without that also being a political statement, and I guess as a side note this involves talking about explicitly political media and what makes it work well or badly".
This has, in fact, been done well.
Let's talk about that.
One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it. Uhura was black, and everyone watching Original Star Trek knew it, because she was, you know, on screen, consistently reflecting fewer photons than Captain Kirk, as black people do. Kirk didn't seem to know it, though; Kirk just kind of ignored it. In fact, I'm not sure this ever came up during all of Star Trek. Uhura was black because Uhura was black, and the show carefully avoided ever making a thing out of it.
Another good example here is Miles Morales in Spider-Verse, who is also black, and again, I'm not sure the movie ever really mentions this. The movie is explicitly not about Miles Morales' skin color. Another example: a lot of characters from Borderlands 2, such as Ellie, who is a fat woman which is essentially never relevant to the plot, and Sir Hammerlock, who is gay.
Sir Hammerlock being gay is an interesting case, so let's talk about it more! With most characters, either you find out their skin color the instant you see them, or it turns into a serious Face Reveal thing (imagine the controversy if the Halo TV series had revealed that Master Chief was black!) But media in general tends not to show much about character's sexualities, and the game industry even less so. Even mentioning romantic choices feels like something that can't be done subtly - all characters could be seamlessly replaced by asexual beings that reproduce via mitosis unless your work is about the fact that sex happens.
(Tangent: Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage? Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction? Note to self, do this sometimes. End tangent.)
(Tangent addendum: I just played Guacamelee 2 and it does this. That's one! Anyway, moving on.)
But in the case of Hammerlock, he sends you on a quest to check out what happened to an old friend of his, and if you happen to dig into the quest details, which most people don't, you find out it's an old boyfriend, and honestly I really like how this is handled. Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool. 10/10, very human.
Let's talk about another technique! Another technique is to, instead of making the plot not about something, make the plot extremely about something. I did a search for "movies about black people" and one site recommends Malcolm X and another hit provided by Google is a list of "11 movies that confront American racism". You can guess where that is going! Uhura could have been white, Ellie could have been a thin guy, Sir Hammerlock could have been asexual, that wouldn't really have changed any of those pieces of media, but you can't turn Malcolm X into an Asian without some pretty serious plot adjustment!
There's nothing wrong with this solution either. I am generally not interested in this kind of media, but if that's the movie someone wants to make, hey, have at it, all up to them. But because I'm thinking about this for the sake of my own games, I'm discarding this because, as mentioned, I'm just not all that interested.
But while we're on the subject . . .
. . . I can't help but wonder if this is counterproductive.
A painful thing about human beliefs is that we are very very very bad at changing our mind. And having arguments shoved in our face really doesn't help. Walk up to someone who hates skub and shout pro-skub catchphrases at them, if you like; this will not make them more positive about skub, they'll probably just become more certain that skub is bad because all skub-lovers are fuckin' jerks, man. But show them movies that just happen to include skub, in a way where it sorta just . . . doesn't matter? Maybe they'll stop caring so much about the horrors of skub. Desensitization is a hell of a drug.
Show them movies that claim to involve this, but have the movie constantly shouting pro-skub catchphrases?
Well, now we're back where we were before. Or even worse, frankly, because now they'll be expecting any movies with skub in them to be a thinly-veiled propaganda piece. So not only have we failed to convince them with subtlety and care, we've fucked up future attempts to do so. Good fuckin' job, man, way to go.
Skub is an allegory, but you've figured that out by now, so let's move on.
Specifically, let's talk about allegories.
There's an episode in Original Star Trek where the crew finds some guy in space. The guy's face is white on the right side and black on the left side. Wild, right? Aliens! Shortly thereafter, they find another guy whose face is white on the left side and black on the right side. These two people hate each other because they think the other person's face is wrong and their respective countries have destroyed their entire planet in the ensuing war. Also one of them was used as slaves by the other. What is this story really about? Who can say! It is a mystery! We shall never okay it's obviously about racism. Like. Transparently so.
(In one of the weirder and less socially-acceptable examples of nominative determinism I've seen, the script for this episode was written by a stereotypically white guy named Gene L. Coon.)
Star Trek never fucking blinks. At no point does Captain Kirk turn to the TV and say "by the way, black lives matter", or any less anachronistic catchphrase. This is doubly impressive because Uhuru is still in this episode obviously and she doesn't even mention it. There is a single mention that Earth was perhaps not entirely copacetic in the past - by Chekov, not even by Uhuru, and in response to a question that does not feel shoehorned in whatsoever - and then that's it! It just moves on.
This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.
And Kirk's utter refusal to even consider racism frankly drives the point in both harder and more subtly.
It's a brilliant episode. I love this episode. It's a perfect example of how Star Trek writing, while hamfisted at the best of times, was elegant and refined in exactly the right ways. With so little effort they could have turned this into a cultural war! And they didn't!
I want more things like that. I want episodes that don't hammer in the point with a sledgehammer. I want allegories, not blatant propaganda; sure, it's still propaganda, I don't think anyone would claim that Star Trek wasn't. But it's careful propaganda. It's subtle propaganda. It's propaganda that doesn't come across like paid advertising, with the characters mugging at the camera while carefully holding soda cans so the label is visible, and the label says "vote for me in the next election, but not the other guy, he's a fascist, which is proven by this movie about comedic squirrels wearing silly hats".
And here is the point where I run out of clever inspiration.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
And it's goddamn impossible.
The problem with trans people (if you are getting linked here in anger because I said there's "a problem with trans people", finish the damn sentence first, christ) is that the entire classic concept of being "trans" is linked, kind of intrinsically, to being invisible.
Not to the person themselves being invisible. But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.
But that doesn't help. Uhura does not work if she looks exactly like a white guy. The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's "obviously successfully trans" - it's contradictory! You have to drop a Sir-Hammerlock-esque hint somewhere, and, one, it's really hard to do so when any mention of a trans person's birth gender is "deadnaming", while, two, Hammerlock is totally cool with casually mentioning that he used to pork a dude with a dong, but trans people themselves generally do not want to talk about their birth gender. It's similar to the whole reveal-a-character's-sexuality problem except massively boosted. Put a character in who keeps talking about all the people they're boning and they come across as oversexed and somewhat disturbing; put a character in who keeps talking about how trans they are and you get Hainly Abrams.
So, then what? An allegory? But what allegory can you possibly use?
How do you make a respectful allegory about something that you're trying to show is conceptually acceptable but whose ideal form is intentionally invisible?
Honestly? I don't know.
My best idea here is to do something with aliens; some species of alien with extremely flexible sexual characteristics, who don't mind talking about them but which are never relevant to the plot, just roll it into background worldbuilding. I guess it's ironic that I'm coming up with this idea while also playing around with the concept of an alien species with extreme inflexible sexual dimorphism, but so it goes. But this is inevitably going to result in people yelling "zomg are you saying that trans people are aliens" and so that frankly isn't even going to work.
I cannot come up with a solution here, and this makes me very sympathetic to people who are trying to do it the right way. There isn't a right way. There's never been a right way. There's just a lot of wrong ways.
Feels like a tool missing from my toolkit, to be honest.
I don't really have an ending to this post.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
Now that you can speak freely, can you spill the beans on what was going on with the reddit admins/AOE?
Who knows, man.
Here's an example post that they removed, with three posts of context:
I remember starting my career a couple of years later with the earnest belief that I might have only two or three years of employment left before the AI apocalypse came for bankers too
Probably the most baffling thing I've ever seen from you.
Now, it appears we mean different things by «bankers». For you it's clerks, probably all white-collared personnel. For me, uh, the ultimate proprietors – and it's clear no AI can replace that.
Okay. You're fine. I get it, you aren't a Nazi.
In America, Nazis do this when referencing Jews. It is very much not our "quotes". But I understand that in your culture putting <> is done in a different also valid manner.
But good God, it looks like an American internet Nazi naming the Jew when referring to <>.
Nazis do (((this)))
But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet
That last one - naming the Guillemet - got removed by the admins.
I've got a small list of such similar posts. We had a post removed for listing some global age-of-consent laws. We had a post removed noting that the 6-million Holocaust death toll is dubious because it's built out of many numbers that, themselves, have been readjusted over time but the overall total has never been questioned. We had a post removed comparing the lifestyle of 1880s black slaves in the US to the sub-Saharan continent and to other contemporaneous instances of slavery. We had a post removed noting some weird sentencing laws involving child porn (and similar weird laws regarding the definition of child porn).
These are all things we want to be able to discuss. If people start just berating their outgroup, well, that's uncool. But this wasn't that! These posts weren't as innocent as the quotation-mark one, I'll acknowledge that, but they're still nowhere near the stereotypical Stormfront screed.
Anyway, eventually they sent us a nastygram saying, paraphrased, we were having too many posts removed and saying that we should do something about it before they had to do something about it. They also said that if we had questions, we should send them over. We wrote up a pretty-well-phrased set of questions, sent it to them, and they just ignored it.
In fairness, they never said they'd answer those questions.
And so that's where we were; "go fix this stuff, our censors are inconsistent and overzealous, and we won't give you any answers regarding what's going on."
From there it's just a matter of time until we get booted.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
A few answers!
what the hell is your beef with Marseys?
Marsey's your schtick. It's a cute schtick! But it's not ours. If we're going to generate our own culture, we're going to generate our own culture, not start by just riffing off someone else's culture. Our codebase is an offshoot of yours; our community isn't, however. Frankly, while I totally appreciate that you guys exist, you're like the polar opposite of what we want around here; you guys keep doin' your thing, we'll keep doing our thing.
Why don't image uploads work?
A big thing we want here is effortposts. We don't want people to be able to slam down a giant blob of flashy pixels, we want people to write stuff. This is always going to be a text-heavy website, not an image-heavy website; that's the culture we're aiming for.
It's like you guys intentionally wanted to preclude people from attempting to have fun
I mean, bluntly, yes, we are trying to preclude people from having the kind of fun that you guys want to have.
Again, your community's great! I'm glad you enjoy it! But it's not what we're going for here - we do not want circlejerks, we do not want low effort spamposts, we do not want 24/7 memes.
We picked your codebase because it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features. The extra flashy stuff, as far as I'm concerned, is a negative for our purposes, and so yeah, we're gonna strip it out.
Sometimes your kids don't grow up to be carbon copies of you; we're taking after our other parent :)
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
7mo ago
How do you in-person voters... remember anything meaningful?
I go over the sample ballot, make my choices, and either mark them down on the sample ballot or print them out.
Then I bring that in as a cheat sheet and just follow it.
I used to write it down on my phone, but the state I'm in disallows phones while voting, so, paper solution.
ZorbaTHut
2yr 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
Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary.
So, here, lemme quickly explain.
We've (okay, "I") have a general policy of not demodding mods merely for inaction. I'm happy for them to come back, I'm also happy to have them giving feedback in the Mod chat channel. All of that is useful!
The downside is that this means we have a list of mods and a significant number of those mods don't really do anything. They're still valued people who I'm happy to respect, we just don't get a lot of work done, and the work needs to be done.
Before inviting new mods we were basically down to two mods who were commonly active and another two who were occasionally active, but one of the commonly-active mods was mostly active in doing the quality-contribution reports (which is valuable!) and so practically one mod was doing most of the moderation work. They were doing a good job but I'm always really leery of a bus-number-of-one situation:
- If they vanish, suddenly we have no working moderators
- If they start turning toxic, I have a big problem because I don't want to ban them because we would have no working moderators
- It's really conducive to value drift, which we might not even notice because it's just one person doing that work
In addition, it's a lot of stress on someone's back, which of course increases the chance that they decide they're done and they want to move on. Worse, they know they're a column, so maybe they end up feeling obliged to keep doing this when they don't want to, which pushes us right back into "start turning toxic" and "value drift" territory. It's a bad scene all around.
My main goal here was to take that bus-number-of-one and turn it up to two or three mods, entirely just to solve the problems with having a single mod.
When I've added mods before, my general experience is that for every two mods you invite, one accepts, and for every two mods who accepts, one contributes. If I want one active mod I gotta invite four mods.
So I invited four mods and they all accepted.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm honestly quite happy about this - maybe this means we'll have a healthy mod population until I can finally get some of the next set up updates to the Volunteer system done. But it still wasn't quite intended.
The tl;dr:
- We have fewer active mods than it looks like
- Having too few mods has a bunch of unfortunate consequences
- I went to add more mods and got more new mods than I expected
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Alright, I actually am going to push back on this. (Ping @AhhhTheFrench so you don't feel like you're grumbling into the void.)
Courtesy is the first section in the rules. That's not an accident, it's literally the first goal. And yes, this sometimes - probably often - means that we tell people not to speak as if they're in a group of friends, but rather as if they're in a group of professional colleagues. The reason is that incivility gradually corrodes what we're going for here. Not all at once, but one step at a time; it gets normalized, it gets standardized, and a significant part of the possible community finds that the place is now hostile.
From the rules:
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.
"Leftoids" is dismissive towards roughly half the population and there's just no good reason for it; you're not getting anything out of it for the argument, you're just using a slur against your outgroup.
Don't do that, please.
ZorbaTHut
2yr 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
1yr ago
I'm honestly impressed at how we can write rules that are so ridiculously lax that I would never expect anyone to run into them, and have people run into them anyway.
Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard
ZorbaTHut
8mo ago
@OliveTapenade It's treating it like a relative link; without an http:// or https:// in front of it, it's considered relative to this current directory. Note that it's not even The Motte doing this, The Motte is dutifully linking to whatever you ask for, that's web browser behavior.
If you paste it in raw, then The Motte says "oh shucks that's a website link isn't it? I'd better do all the appropriate processing!" and dutifully stuffs a http:// on the front of it.
Fix it by adding an https:// .
(click the "view source" button)
We should probably be autoprefixing it with https:// but I think this is literally the first time this has come up :)
ZorbaTHut
2yr 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
1yr ago
Target was algorithmically detecting pregnancy over a decade ago.
If Facebook doesn't have data regarding these symptoms, it's either because they haven't bothered or because they actively are trying to avoid it.
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
2yr 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.
ZorbaTHut
2yr ago
700 total registered users. I have no idea how that compares to Reddit's 19,000 subscribers; some of the tools we have now are providing a rather interesting look into the internals, and there's a lot of users whose names I have never seen at all who are dutifully upvoting things that are good and downvoting things that are bad. I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.
(Hi, lurkers, if you're out there!)
Also, those 19,000 subscribers probably included a lot of dead accounts, Reddit never pruned them at all. So we were never going to get anywhere near that number.
The stats I have also say that we have 150 active users on the site at this very moment, about half of which have registered accounts, but it's hard to say how this compares to the Reddit numbers (currently 2500); the concept of an "active user" is inherently very subjective and we never knew what the hell Reddit was doing anyway, every few months it would jump up by an order of magnitude for a day and we never had any idea why. I always assumed Reddit's numbers were garbage or at least garbage-adjacent.
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.
ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
Nah, that's exactly the expected consequence of the database vanishing - the site resets to Empty, and the first person who makes an account becomes admin.
Which doesn't mean there wasn't a hacker, just that it isn't evidence of there being a hacker.
Also, it means some poor guy picked exactly the wrong moment to make an account and accidentally discovered that they were now the admin of an empty site.
ZorbaTHut
2yr 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
2yr ago
Now that the servers are well again, I'll repost this explanation here!
We're using Kubernetes, giving us the whole Treat Your Servers Like Cattle, Not Pets thing. Kubernetes allows us to dispose of old servers and start up new ones pretty much immediately; if we do run into load problems, or optimize the site to the point where we no longer have load problems, I can just switch the backend hardware around and everything is solved.
This does require that Kubernetes knows everything about the servers in a way that lets it restart. Earlier, I was doing some cleanup of old pre-stable-site configuration and I deleted the wrong thing; I took out one of the bits required for the database server to start. This didn't break the site because the database server had already started; Kubernetes just said "uh-huh, everything is fine here, no problems" and kept on trucking.
Later, and annoyingly right after I went to bed, our host decided they wanted to do a server swap - they probably had a rack failure or something - and so Kubernetes dutifully noticed that our server had vanished, returned it to the pool, spun up a new server, and tried to restart everything.
At which point it sat there saying "hey, I can't start the database server. Help, please."
And I was in bed.
But this actually wasn't the only issue. I did a writeup on the startup pains we had. A quote:
As near as I can tell, there is a switch on the GUI. But this switch is also overridden by some settings in my configuration. Importantly, it's overridden irregularly; sometimes you'll do something, and it'll say "oh shucks, gotta go check that switch!" Because I hadn't realized this, it went and checked it and dutifully turned it off again.
I think I've fixed that now.
Nope! Hadn't fixed it.
I think I've fixed it now. But I might not have.
Later tonight I'm going to intentionally fake a server change in the same way it happened today. With luck it'll just work, without luck I'll fix it manually and then give it another try.
Pretty much, yeah.
(ping @TitaniumButterfly @Southkraut)
So, here, lemme give a sort of tl;dr of The Shape Of Zorba's Life.
I vaguely divide most of my tasks into a few categories. In no particular order, those are:
The tricky part is that I usually have time for at most four of them. Unsurprisingly, Sanity, Family, and Survival end up in those four. They're kinda important.
In my case, I work in the game industry. So "professional hobby" is making my own game studio. "Unprofessional hobby" is The Motte. I end up having to choose between them, and for a while, I was aiming most of that spare time at The Motte in the hopes I could make it start paying for itself; if The Motte could take over Survival (which more-or-less gets summarized as Money, usually in the form of Day Job) then suddenly "I have time for four of them" starts looking pretty good.
Well, I'm not going to say that outcome is impossible, but at the moment, it seems pretty unlikely. I took a serious shot, it did not immediately work out. This meant I had the long-term choice of sacrificing professional-hobby in favor of unprofessional-hobby, or vice-versa.
That whole "can I make The Motte take over Survival" thing also applies to the game studio, though. And I found myself in a situation where I had some really promising ideas and tools, which made it seem like I had a plausible shot at making Professional Hobby actually become my day job, thus subsuming Survival entirely, if I started working for myself and managed to get something viable before I ran out of savings.
And so that's what I'm fundamentally focusing on. If I can collapse Professional Hobby and Survival into one thing, then I have spare time to keep working on Motte stuff. But I just can't afford to get too distracted from this, because the bank account isn't going to last forever.
So the tl;dr is that I ended up needing to triage and The Motte got the short end of the stick. That doesn't mean it's abandoned - I really do want to work on it - that just means that there's enough stuff I have more immediate needs for that it has to be sidelined for now.
I will say that the mods have done a great job of keeping this place going. Its current survival is entirely thanks to them and I am extremely grateful. Fingers crossed that my current project is successful - in fact I'm looking at a major milestone coming up in a week that'll give me a much better sense of whether this is viable - and if it is, then I'll be able to come back to The Motte and put some serious effort into long-term plans that I simply never managed to work on.
Until then . . . keep it up, y'all.
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