Apparently Warhammer 40K had to explain why hate groups aren’t part of their real-life culture.
For clarity: satire is the use of humour, irony, or exaggeration, displaying people’s vices or a system’s flaws for scorn, derision, and ridicule. Something doesn’t have to be wacky or laugh-out-loud funny to be satire. The derision is in the setting’s amplification of a tyrannical, genocidal regime, turned up to 11. The Imperium is not an aspirational state, outside of the in-universe perspectives of those who are slaves to its systems.
Did you see this?. You probably should. It’s like a list of ingredients for a good life.
Zoom really made a splash during the pandemic and I think overall it improved people’s lives during a hard time. But, it also proved to be dishonest and pretty gross. Now they are finally paying a tiny amount as a penalty. But this line from Bruce Schneier really caught my attention:
…for lying to users about end-to-end encryption, and for giving user data to Facebook and Google without consent.
Am I the only one that’s noticed a rise in app developers pushing customers into mandated relationships through Discord and Slack as “support” channels? It feels like a trend and I am not onboard with this investment in other people’s business. Sure, I love a good user forum, but Slack and Discord are garbage user forums. Not to mention that Discord is a privacy disaster. It feels lazy and opportunistic and I don’t like being cattle for developers.
Some really interesting stuff in this Wikipedia article. It’s easy to forget how complex the market is and how unintended consequences lurk behind every decision. For example, how a smaller coin in Japan meant a bigger impact from home game consoles.
The U.S. game industry lobbied in Washington, D.C. for a smaller $1 coin, closer to the size of a quarter, arguing that inflation (which had reduced the quarter’s spending power by a third in the early 1980s) was making it difficult to prosper.
Stay with me. This isn’t my typical link-post. It’s also long so if you don’t care about the web or independent writing, here’s a nice article about genealogy and statistics.
Two recent articles by Jason Kottke mesh nicely with something that has been weighing on me for the past couple of years. Let’s set the context though. I think kottke.org is a wonderful site and I read every article he publishes on his RSS feed.
A series of articles on CNet last week really caught my attention.1 The flagship article sets the stage.
You can’t miss the rise of hate, racism and the neo-Nazi movement on the internet. But somehow, The New York Times did. A Saturday profile of a Nazi sympathizer drew widespread criticism for giving Tony Hovater, 29, an unchallenged platform for sharing his views.
Here’s the Brutal Reality of Online Hate
Steven Poole over at The New Republic:
Gladwell is a brilliant salesman for a certain kind of cognitive drug. He tells his readers that everything they thought they knew about a subject is wrong, and then delivers what is presented as a counterintuitive discovery but is actually a bromide of familiar clichés. The reader is thus led on a pleasant quasi-intellectual tour, to be reassured at the end that a flavour of folksy wisdom was right all along.
Still a long way to go for equal rights. Sad, really. Also, move the fuck out of Florida and stop spending money there!
This relationship occurred when they were both minors, and my daughter’s girlfriend’s parents waited until she turned 18 to arrest her.
From The Hawkeye Initiative:
Our CEO loves this picture. It is to all appearances his favorite piece of comic art for the game. He had it blown up poster-sized, framed, and displayed on the out-facing wall of his office. There, it looms over the front room like a ship’s figurehead. It is the first thing workers and visitors see when they enter the building and the last thing they see when they leave.
