I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to “use” something. Except obviously, it’s not theirs, and so it’s absurd for them to make that demand, right? Quick examples§ I’m not trying to pick on this person at all: they’re not a twitter main character, they’re not expressing an unusual opinion...
Societal alienation, intensely depressive. Harris, 68.0 million popular, 226 electoral. 43%. Trump, 72.6 million popular, 295 electoral. 57%. I am haunted by what these numbers represent. I am not writing you a proof. I am upset, and this is a reflection. My basic worldview has been that things, on average, will continually get worse. Even before...
This was originally something I was going to talk about in Corporations have Rejected Copyright, back when that series was going to just be one long post (really!). But since I saw Nintendo apparently sued Palworld today, I wanted to put this up as background information. You should definitely read You’ve Never Seen Copyright first, particularly...
Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities§ The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left?...
Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don’t actually want. Worse, it then turns out there’s some reason they’re not just useless, they’re actively harmful. While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes — cryptocurrency,...
or, the many people who said movies like Coyote v. Acme that were killed for a tax write-off should be forced into the public domain were right, and here’s why This is the last post in a series. You can read this entry by itself, but for the full context, start at the beginning. Copyright is busted, now what?§ A healthy system of creative rights,...
Remember when Elon Musk was trying to weasel out of overpaying for Twitter? During this very specific May 2022-Jul 2022 period, there was a very artificial discourse manufactured over the problem of “fake accounts” on Twitter. The reason it was being brought up was very stupid, but the topic stuck with me, because it’s deeply interesting in a...
Gris§ Last week, looking for a game to play to wind down at night in bed, I went through my backlog of unplayed Steam games and filtered for something that looked relaxing. I fished out Gris. Gris is intriguing, atmospheric, and gorgeously animated. It’s a beautiful indie title. And I kinda hate it?
This is a follow-on to CDL: Publishers Against Books. You probably want to read that first! This is specifically about the lawsuit and its hollow arguments. On June 1, 2020, all four major publishing companies (Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House) sued the Internet Archive on the basis of copyright infringement. The...
Combining lending with digital technology is tricky to do within the constraints of copyright. But it’s important to still be able to lend, especially for libraries. With a system called Controlled Digital Lending, libraries like the Internet Archive (IA) made digital booklending work within the constraints of copyright, but publishers still...
My friend Floober brought some recent changes VRChat is making in chat, and I thought I’d jot down my thoughts. The problem with the VRC economy is the same problem as with most “platform economies”: everyone is buying lots in a company town. The Store§ This was the precipitating announcement: VRChat releasing a beta for an in-game real-money...
As part of the Corporations Have Rejected Copyright series, this analysis focuses on corporations violating the original intent of copyright in favor of personal power and profit, and so skips over some other valid avenues of criticism like enclosure in general. When I’m looking for an example of copyright abuse, I find myself returning to...
Apple puts its logo on the devices it sells. Not just on the outer casing, but also each internal component. The vast majority of these logos are totally enclosed and invisible to the naked eye. This seems like an incredibly strange practice — especially since Apple doesn’t sell these parts separately — except it turns out to be part of a truly...
Hear me out: copyright is good. When it comes to copyright, it can be very easy to lose the forest for the trees. That’s why I want to start this series with a bit of a reset, and establish a baseline understanding of copyright doctrine as a whole, and the context in which our modern experience of copyright sits. The current state of copyright...
Anonymous asked: Is your website the official location of the unofficial collection webapp or is it just there now for testing? I’ve gotten a few variations of this question, so I wanted to get some thoughts down. The UHC is, itself, unofficial, in that it isn’t acting with the authority of the Homestuck brand, and it’s not a What Pumpkin...
”…okay, fine, you can have one more, but only because of the name” a Deltarune theory Spoils Homestuck, Undertale, and Deltarune #the-angel-is-you div.highlight.deltarune table.highlighttable, #the-angel-is-you pre.deltarune { font-size: 18px; padding: 0.5em; box-shadow: 0 0 1em #484848; border: 4px solid white; background:...
I’ve decided to do a short write-up on a tool I just call “Sorter”. Sorter is something I built for myself to help me organize my own files, and it looks like this: It’s designed to do exactly one thing: move files into subfolders, one file at a time. You look at a file, you decide where it goes, and you move it accordingly. It’s the same...
Reddit is going the same route as Twitter by making “API access” prohibitively expensive. This is something they very famously, very vocally said they would not do, but they’re doing it anyway. This is very bad for Reddit, but what’s worse is it’s becoming clear that companies think that this is a remotely reasonable thing to do, when it’s very...
Netflix is finally turning the screws on multi-user accounts. That “finally” is exasperation in my voice, not relief. Netflix is demanding you pay them an extra surcharge to share your account with remote people, and even then caps you at paying for a maximum of two. It’s been threatening to do something like this for a long, long time: Since...
I played The Last Clockwinder last week, and it changed the way I think about production games. This article has minor spoilers for The Last Clockwinder, Factorio, Infinifactory, and Universal Paperclip. I recommend you play Universal Paperclip and The Last Clockwinder first. Factory games§ The Steam page describes The Last Clockwinder as a “VR...
Hi, The EFF, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, World Leaders, and whoever else, Do you want to write a license for machine vision models and AI-generated images, but you’re tired of listening to lawyers, legal scholars, intellectual property experts, media rightsholders, or even just people who use any of the tools in question even occasionally? You...
This post discusses sexual topics and contains graphic descriptions and accounts of severe emotional abuse culminating in suicidal ideation. If1 you’ve been subjected to advertisements on the internet sometime in the past year, you might have seen advertisements for the app Replika. It’s a chatbot app, but personalized, and designed to be a...
Everybody hates paying subscription fees. At this point most of us have figured out that recurring fees are miserable. Worse, they usually seem unfair and exploitative. We’re right about that much, but it’s worth sitting down and thinking through the details, because understanding the exceptions teaches us what the problem really is. And it...
#jinja2-as-a-pico-8-preprocessor .side-by-side div.highlight:nth-of-type(2) td.linenos { display: none; } Pico-8 needs constants§ The pico-8 fantasy console runs a modified version of lua that imposes limits on how large a cartridge can be. There is a maximum size in bytes, but also a maximum count of 8192 tokens. Tokens are defined in the...
“How can I show someone how my blog articles actually render?” It sounds like it should be super easy, but it turns out it really isn’t. I write in Markdown (and attach the source to all my posts if you’re interested) that then gets rendered as HTML on-demand by Pelican. (More on this on the thanks page.) But that means there’s no quick way to...
The “blue check” — a silly colloquialism for an icon that’s not actually blue for the at least 50% of users using dark mode — has become a core aspect of the Twitter experience. It’s caught on other places too; YouTube and Twitch have both borrowed elements from it. It seems like it should be simple. It’s a binary badge; some users have it and...
If you asked me what I expect “VR” to look like, I would answer lowpoly, wireframes, etc. You know, the SUPERHOT vibe, or the crisp plastic cartoon vibe of Virtual Virtual Reality or VRChat, or maybe even a little Quadrilateral Cowboy. Boneworks is not that. Instead of freely-manipulated wireframes and polygons, we get… this: Boneworks’ aesthetic...
Events --> I don’t like “events”. I don’t like it when things are limited with requirements of spacial presence and time. I don’t like experiences that only exist in one moment and then can never be relived. I don’t like ephemera. I prefer things. Toys I can play with, tools I can use, books I can read, movies I can watch, all at my own...
Content warning for nonstop horribleness throughout. Like, no kidding, some of the worst humanity has to offer. Content warnings for more overt exterminationism, violence, acts of terrorism, sexual abuse, discrimination against rape victims, and the holocaust. Table of Contents Eugenicists need broad centrist support Buying the euphemism The...
Okay. We looked at law. Let’s keep looking. Let’s gaze straight at the horrors until our stomachs churn and our eyes bleed. Content warning for nonstop horribleness throughout. Like, no kidding, some of the worst humanity has to offer. Content warnings for the same topics discussed previously, with a particular focus on individuals and...
So, we’ve talked broad strokes. Here’s where we start seeing specific policies emerge as part of the agenda. Content warning for nonstop horribleness throughout. Like, no kidding, some of the worst humanity has to offer. Content warnings for the same topics discussed previously, with a particular focus on state-sanctioned violence, modern...
Genocide. It’s a big word. It describes possibly the worst atrocity the institution of society can commit. It’s so mind-bogglingly terrible that a staple holocaust denial argument is that it was simply too bad to have really happened. Genocide is such a big word that I didn’t title this “The Case for Genocide”, even though that’s what it’s...
people who know more than me talk about Epic acquiring Bandcamp --> March 2, 2022: Bandcamp puts out a press release about their “joining” Epic Games. This follows in a line of eerily similar acquisitions of companies catering to indies, namely Sketchfab and ArtStation. There are lots of interesting topics intersecting here: Venture capital and...
I can’t write about antitrust. There’s too much to talk about. So I have to break the idea down, way down, to something manageable. I’m going to chew on one phrase here, “the government shouldn’t pick winners and losers.” It’s a favourite of the pro-monopoly types and it almost sounds reasonable, so let’s think about it for like a minute. First,...
The following are exerpts from my fully transcribed playthrough of Psycholonials, which I wrote last summer. If you aren’t familiar with psycholonials or haven’t played the game, I recommend reading that to catch up. If you’ve already played Psycholonials though, here’s some food for you. Exerpts though, not the whole thing. This article has...
I went to my old university today.1 I wanted to use the library. It was a strange experience. There were things about my time there I missed, but I didn’t miss my time there. There was too much wrong. Ways I didn’t fit. I looked around. It was passing period, and there was a throng of students coming and going both ways. The pavement was nice,...
The other day I had a quick medical question (“if I don’t rinse my mouth out enough at night will I die”), so I googled the topic as I was going to bed. Google showed a couple search results, but it also showed Answers in a little dedicated capsule. This was right on the heels of the Yahoo Answers shutdown, so I poked around to see what Google’s...
Hack ‘n’ Slash is a game about hacking (and comparatively little slashing) published by DoubleFine (of Psychonauts fame) in 2014. It features art by Raz Mavlian and it’s directed by absolute madman Brandon Dillon. It’s not a “programming” game (like 7 Billion Humans, a Zachtronics game, or even Quadrilateral Cowboy), and it’s not at all the...
Anonymous asked: What exactly drives you to make pieces such as the big one about the hiveswap fiasco and many others? This is a big question, so that gives me an opportunity to be self-indulgent. Here are a few things that come to me. One major part of the answer is serious dissatisfaction with how current social media handles persistent...
Update 2023: I won. On August 5, 2021, Apple presented their grand new Child Safety plan. They promised “expanded protections for children” by way of a new system of global phone surveillance, where every iPhone would constantly scan all your photos and sometimes forward them to local law enforcement if it identifies one as containing contraband....
{this.onerror=null;const newsrc=`https://web.archive.org/web/0/${this.src}`;console.log(this, this.src, newsrc);this.src=newsrc;})();" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/877267279523741696/rzCAYZLP_normal.jpg"/>Polygon@Polygon“I came to regard that fandom as being pretty close to a cult [...] And that’s about how I’ve come to regard all...
There’s this popular description of someone “having brain worms”. It invokes the idea of having your mind so thoroughly infested with an idea to the point of disease. As with the host of an infestation, such a mind is poor-to-worthless at any activity other than sustaining and spreading the parasite. A “persistent delusion or obsession”. You...
During the years when Homestuck updated regularly, I usually had some sort of update notifier that pinged me when a new page was posted. But since Homestuck usually updated daily, I ended up just keeping a tab open and refreshing it. And that’s pretty much how I kept up with other serial media on the internet, for years. A writing blog that posts...
This article has spoilers for Deltarune through Chapter 2 and (ambiguous) spoilers about Dangan Ronpa V3 As you might know, I have a somewhat complicated relationship with Undertale theories, so for Deltarune I’m kind of forcing myself not to go too red thread board with trying to “solve” things — which sucks, because I really like solving...
Heart & Slash is a special little game. The whole thing is so aggressively fun and stylistic I can’t help but love it. It’s a 3D procgen dungeon beat-em-up. It reminds me of a cross between Neurovoider (a game I love) and Tower of Guns (a game I admittedly do not). What really gets me is the style. The whole game has this beautiful graphical...
Somebody asked me about a comment I made online about the odd situation raised by the state of Homestuck^2 and Hiveswap’s authorship. I sent them a long message but by the time I was done I realized I had quite a few thoughts on the issue, and so this is me expanding that out a bit. Usually I like to let ideas percolate until I have a couple of...
Git is changing. GitHub, GitLab, and the core git team have a made a system of changes to phase out the use of the word “master” in the development tool, after a few years of heated (heated) discussion. Proponents of the change argue “slavery is bad”, while opponents inevitably end up complaining about the question itself being “overly...
YoYo Games announced today that they’re switching GameMaker to a subscription model. You know, I was planning on doing a high-effort article about this some day, but what the heck, let’s do it now. First, here are the actual details of the GameMaker change. Instead of buying development tools you can use to develop things, YoYo is making its...
I remember seeing a whole kerfuffle about 5G around this time last year. Not the mind-control vaccine, the actual wireless technology. People (senators, mostly) were worried about national security, because Huawei (the state-controlled Chinese tech company, who is a threat, actually) was getting its 5G patents through and making its claim on the...
back in april i built a physical version of the wii shop wednesday wii {this.onerror=null;const newsrc=`https://web.archive.org/web/0/${this.src}`;console.log(this, this.src, newsrc);this.src=newsrc;})();">gio :⁾@giovan_hanyway I built the wii shop wednesday wii Mon Apr 26 06:34:13 +0000 2021 {this.onerror=null;const...
Sonic ‘06 is infamously bad. It’s glitchy, it’s a meme, et cetera. But actually, it turns out that it’s really bad. It’s a bad game. I played it. I played so much of it. I own the DLC. It’s honestly hard to describe. So here’s a description. I’m trying not to include general shoddiness here, which there is a lot of. Also, I’m not numbering them....
Sometimes steam will give you a coupon for a random game that isn’t very popular. And so this is how my evening went: this post is about horrible deranged nazi porn. no one should read this. in case there is any ambiguity in tone, I think everything discussed here is terrible
One of your questions was whether I thought Gio was a stalker. It’s my personal take that he probably does not technically qualify as one, but I also don’t think it’s a simple “no” either, given his antagonistic fixation toward people at WP, and his persistent invasiveness has made the women at WP uncomfortable. Suffice to say for now, I don’t...
This morning YouTube sent out an announcement that, in one month, they’re going to break all the links to all unlisted videos posted prior to 2017. This is a bad thing. There’s a whole lot bad here, actually. Edit: Looks like Google is applying similar changes to Google Drive, too, meaning this doesn’t just apply to videos, but to any publicly...
Twitter Blue! $5/mo for Premium Twitter. It’s the latest thing that simply everyone. I have an issue with it, but over a very fundamental point, and one Twitter shares with a lot of other platforms. So here’s why it’s bad that Twitter decided to put accessibility features behind a paywall, and it isn’t the obvious. Client/Server architecture in 5...
Homestuck is once again lit up over fan merch. Homestuck and fan merch have a long and troubled history, but this latest incident is between artists, Redbubble, and Viz media. Here are my thoughts on that! In late May 2021, artists who sold Homestuck merch on Redbubble got this email: Dear [name], Thank you for submitting your fan art for...
As is common in Python, the mechanical process of displaying something on screen in Ren’py is at once easy to execute and deceptively complicated to execute correctly. The Ren’py documentation does a fine job of defining the specifications of position properties, but intuitively understanding how to use those properties can still be hard because...
or, “W.D. Gaster undercuts Undertale’s cohesiveness as a work” This article has spoilers for Undertale/Deltarune and Petscop. When I wrote The Raphael Parable, I updated it with a little ARG. “The ARG Update”, I called it. There were scattered clues, and a puzzle, and secret notes so the diligent scavenger could piece together what really...
Befriendus; everybody’s favorite visual novel about making alien friends. It’s got trolls, yes, but it also has a slew of accessibility options. You can adjust everything: color, font, motion, even spelling. It’s clean, it’s easy, and it works. Here’s how we did it. When I was designing the basic accessibility framework I had these principles in...
I got myself an Oculus Quest 2 a couple weeks ago on a recommendation, and I have some thoughts! If you haven’t done VR before (like me, before I had my first thoughts) you might be wondering what you might notice besides the obvious. So, here are my observations, in no particular order. Haptic feedback is really important§ Haptic feedback is...
My first published, “successful” piece of game content was The Raphael Parable, a little exploration game about wandering through an impossible office. I say “game content” here because The Raphael Parable isn’t a game per se, but a map. A mod for the Steam release of The Stanley Parable that bootstraps the assets and mechanics to create a...
I cannot emphasize enough that this is my description of claims someone else made and relayed to me. I have done as much follow-up and confirmation/debunking as possible, but this is an article about an accusation. The only things I’m treating as truly confirmed are the ones that I was able to independently confirm, which I’ve noted. Enough of...
Twitter is an ephemeral medium. You scroll through tweets just fast enough for them to register in your head, and then they’re gone forever. If you want to find something again, you can go to somebody’s profile and scroll through, one tweet at a time, until you find what you wanted. This is a lousy way of capturing history. That’s not great,...
Nintendo is trending on twitter today for yet another abuse of the legal system. Today, though, it’s not about a fan game, or intellectual property, or anything else Nintendo has something approaching a reasonable claim too — it’s all a sham.
One of the reasons Homestuck was so popular is how contemporary it was to internet culture. You tell anyone that Homestuck is heavily influenced by internet culture and they’ll nod and agree and you’ll both be very intelligent media critics. But somehow, even from that same group, you’ll see people who notice how the writing style of Homestuck...
This is a writeup of a project I did in April but never released. Well, I’ve definitely released it now, if you want to give it a try! Instead of a real introduction, here’s a video demo, with camcorder LP technology from 2005: `' style="background-image: url(https://img.youtube.com/vi/GFba91hnWyo/hqdefault.jpg);"> I am not going to buy a capture...
This section was originally included in the main body of The Hiveswap Fiasco but I decided it was distinct enough to move it to its own aside page. A quick note here about how Kickstarter works. This may seem excessive to litigate now, but as you’ll read shortly, it’s unfortunately surprisingly relevant. When a Kickstarter project succeeds,...
The real “story” of Hiveswap isn’t about the game or the universe. Rather, the conversation “about Hiveswap” is dominated by stories about the development and history of the game as a project — starting as a Kickstarter success story but then bouncing from scandal to scandal for years. The story of how Andrew Hussie burned through a $2.5 million...
[@Fyrebeam](https://web.archive.org/web/20200314233041/https://twitter.com/Fyrebeam) Really disappointed Clip Studio doesn't have a one-time purchase option on the iPad, and instead you have to buy an annual or monthly subscription 😔 > https://twitter.com/leounsung/status/1237808726221848576 --> I have a memory from when I was very young of my...
“Tabs or spaces” is one of these age-old computer science preference issues (like whether you use Vim or Emacs1) that gives people a binary preference they get to pick and then get very attached to, due more to sunk costs and personal identity than anything else. (Good thing that only happens with unimportant stuff.) I was thinking about this the...