I feel like I’m repeating myself when I say: knowing the ideological diversity of your enemy is TACTICALLY USEFUL because, when observed closely, any group large enough to be politically powerful is full of hidden fault lines and tense cease-fires

I feel like I’m late to the party in saying this but Colin Dickey’s Ghostland is really good y’all

‘It’s more fun to be a pirate than join the navy’ is accurate, but Jobs failed to mention that any BUSINESS is a navy in this metaphor. A small navy is at a disadvantage. Naval officers who act like pirates are called war criminals.

Smells Like Teen Spirit but every note or chord is B flat - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUD-TrPW-V4

I hope the five people following my ‘misc’ repo on github are happy recieving an email containing only the placeholder commit message ‘xxx’ like 30 times a day.

Onegai Twins is like if David Lynch tried really hard to make an unremarkable harem anime. Everything is just slightly off about it, but not in ways that can be easily articulated.

Isn’t calling your creepy ghost girl Kowai Mitsuko a bit much? Kowai Mitsuko in room 405 is like Victor Scarypants at 13 Mockingbird Lane

periodic reminder that weapons in of themselves don’t have a moral valence & we should think materially about whether or not their use is appropriate to our goals, instead of vaguely about accidental associations. this includes social/memetic weaponry like protest techniques

Re: generalism vs specialism & polymathy – BREADTH IS DEPTH because knowledge is a web, not a tree. It only looks like a tree if you SPECIALIZE.

Bad idea of the day: Scroll back through GUI input events & application states like you scroll back through shell history; inject conditionals and loops; use speculative execution of applications to show projected state from these changes.

Bad idea of the day: A small dedicated machine (like a chumby, maybe based on the raspberry pi) that ships with ipfs & ssb/patchwork, casts from ipfs or peertube to TVs.

Bad idea of the day: A tarot deck formatted like a set of business cards, one for the egregore of each arcanum (major and minor – not just trumps)

‘Sci-Fi Music Felt Like a Vast, Interconnected Mythology’: An Interview with Jason Heller | Hazlitt https://hazlitt.net/feature/sci-fi-music-felt-vast-interconnected-mythology-interview-jason-heller

Knowing that half of The Buggles became The Art of Noise makes me feel like maybe we do live in a comprehensible and ordered universe. But then I look at literally anything else.

People who have been to Japan: what kind of food (if any) is served in/around japanese video arcades? Does american arcade fare like curly fries or nachos exist? Is it japanese-style junk food like takoyaki? One-handed/clean stuff like stuffed mochi, rice balls, meat buns, stuffed bread?

Basically, if the antagonist of your story is actually a person or something person-like, it’s not really cyberpunk, because it’s not about the things cyberpunk is about. If you have an evil government or an evil corporation, it’s not cyberpunk either.

What It’s Like When Elon Musk’s Twitter Mob Comes After You https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-its-like-when-elon-musks-twitter-mob-comes-after-you

We spend an enormous amount of time and effort teaching children about animals – even ones that only exist far away (like tigers and elephants and giraffes) or that have been extinct for tens to hundreds of millions of years.

Tourist Trap is apparently on Shudder now. Even though it’s not Giallo, I recommend Giallo fans give it a watch: much like Profundo Russo & other pre-Suspiria Argento, it combines messy storytelling with some beautiful, surreal, and terrifying shot composition.

Bad idea of the day: a dual-layer LCD (like the 3d TVs from a few years ago) that uses the top layer exclusively for hover behavior

QOTD: “Like any extension of the human psyche, machines are scary things[…] When you take the scary human psyche and magnify it hundreds or thousands of times with technology, it’s really nightmarish”

pro tip: when you tie a part of reality to a social construct (like tying life to money, or violence to law, or technical decisions to industry hype) you risk huge ramifications unless the ‘real’ portion is the primary driver. social constructs are too floaty.

Jordan Peterson is like a pack of tarot cards: stare at him hard enough for long enough and eventually you’ll see a message that is both true and profound. But, as with tarot cards, if you attribute that message to any intent on Peterson’s part, it brands you as foolish.

What It’s Like to Be a Bot — Real Life http://reallifemag.com/what-its-like-to-be-a-bot/

Bad idea of the day: a system for sharing playlists of things that aren’t audio or online video, like themed triple-features or reading lists, so you can curate or browse that kind of human recommendation

Band name of the day: Machine-Like Men Are Still Toddlers

Bad idea of the day: creepypasta in the form of a walkthrough for a nonexistent game from an alternate universe where a game like that described is normal

I would like to wish all of you a very happy international socialist solidarity day

Not news to anybody paying attention, but I still feel like it’s worth a visibility boost: https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-models-contain-bias.html

GitHub - geophile/osh: Osh (Object SHell) is a command-line and API toolkit combining cluster access, database access, and data slicing and dicing. Sort of like awk and cssh morsels wrapped up in a Python crust. https://github.com/geophile/osh

I Lived Exclusively Off Doomsday Prepper Food for a Week - MUNCHIES https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/vbx399/what-does-prepper-food-taste-like-v25n1

If You’ve Met Aliens While on DMT, These Scientists Would Like to Hear From You - Motherboard https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjpjxm/dmt-aliens-study-johns-hopkins

Bad idea of the day: An RPG whose stats are traits like alienation, shadow integration, neurosis

Is every anime containing WcDonalds as a trademark-free McDonalds expy now retroactively progressive? Like, even SAO? (Hint: no)

Optimizing for anything other than human happiness seems like a recipe for misery. Of course, no existing political system really seriously attempts to optimize for human happiness.

I feel like Netflix’s adaptation did a pretty good job of keeping that social & political focus, and even frontloading it a little bit by injecting backstory from the second and third books.

GitHub - automerge/automerge: A JSON-like data structure that can be modified concurrently by diff… https://github.com/automerge/automerge

Why We’re Drawn To Time Loop Stories Like ‘Groundhog Day’ - Digg http://digg.com/2018/time-loop-movies-shows-books-groundhog-day

The Deep Roots of an … https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-song-sounds-like-english-american-medieval-comedy-nonsense

Writing parsers like it is 2017 | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/15/writing-parsers-like-it-is-2017/

How to Think Like a Medieval Monk | Lapham’s Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-think-medieval-monk

“A Sloppy Machine, Like Me&#8221… https://wearethemutants.com/2018/01/09/a-sloppy-machine-like-me-the-history-of-video-synthesizers/

Web application design is like a generation of people looked at that text adventure written in postscript and said LETS WRITE ALL FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS IN POSTSCRIPT EMBEDDED IN SELF-MODIFYING LATEX DOCUMENTS FOREVER

Mastodon makes the internet feel like home again | The … https://theoutline.com/post/2689/mastodon-makes-the-internet-feel-like-home-again

What Shonen Jump Was Like 30 Years Ago - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIh85_bCudk

What a new U.S. civil war might look like – Foreign Policy http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/10/what-a-new-u-s-civil-war-might-look-like/

@leveck@leveck.us Why not just use a menu and link your posts, friends and comments? I like the idea to use fts for comments!

Re: support for other protocols, it seems like twtxt would be pretty easily adapted to work over the p2p file network DAT, though it’d need client support for DAT or some way to follow people via files and sync in the background, which might be simpler for clients to support but would still require changes to most clients.

@benaiah@benaiah.me sounds a lot like why many years ago, I went with Drupal for a simple Blogging site vs Wordpress. WP was easier but Drupal allowed me as an admin to not have any filters. Which allowed me to put raw HTML in the posts to control certian that I was doing at the time

@nblade@nblade.sdf.org I could probably put something together, but I went this route originally because existing generators felt like they took too much control from me over the exact output. I want very small, static pages I can throw behind nginx, and I want to know exactly what the contents are. My current mess of spaghetti Racket is getting hairy since I’m halfway through an unfinished rewrite I started a while ago and forgot about, but at least I know exactly what it’s doing.