Moonside

Moonside OP wrote (edited )

Reply to Gwoss Dispways of Power - Gretchen Felker-Martin on the moral sadomasochism hiding behind displays of purity in social media queer art circles by Moonside

This piece is partially inspired by the recent fallout of Ana Mardoll, but by no means limited to it or commenting on him/xer as a person. (I forgot the proper pronouns, but I want to engage less with them as a person rather than more so mea culpa and w/e.)

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Moonside OP wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by neku in So what's a nice way to keep a blog in 2022? by Moonside

So apparently zillion people agree with you since it is a very popular way of running a website. My hesitation about it is that it might be a bit too heavy for my purposes. My project is such that I could go full web 1.0 and full on just write html+css+javascript in a text editor. I could go that route, but I like some modern conveniences such as tags, archives ordered by date and so on.

With the risk of being pretentious, I'm thinking of Samuel Johnson style affair back when he published short essays as two penny sheets. Or something more contemporary like a xeroxed zine.

In the end I think I will research it and Jekyll and see which one I prefer.

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Moonside OP wrote

Reply to So what's a nice way to keep a blog in 2022? by Moonside

P.S. to see a first hand example of my level of techitude, see my custom styles for jstpst.net - Saturn Valley or something. I use it solely for this site and it imitates the save file and character creation screens of EarthBound. Also, mint green and light blue squares are objectively the most delicious looking background graphic possible. I would sincerely wear a t-shirt based on EarthBound save file and character creations screens!

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Moonside wrote

Reply to was anyone here taught in school that protists are one of the kingdoms of life by ___

It changed over time. In primary school I was taught animal, plant and fungi kingdoms, with protists and bacteria being outsiders and not classified in any particularway. In high school it was three domains of archaea, bacteria and eucaryotes and eucaryotes contained the three kingdoms of animals, plants and fungi, with allusions made toward the fact that fungi and animals were somewhat closely related. Protists were understood to be a varied group.

That said the messiness of not being a kingdom makes protists more interesting rather than less to me.

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Moonside wrote

Reply to 2023 prediction by emma

Honestly my only complaints about BoTW are downstream of it being a children's game (I would have enjoyed a more complex characterization and story but it's understandable given the target audience - even ignoring how, say, Link and Ganon are simplistic in part because they're following the legacy of a series descending from NES era.) Something more successful storywise with similar demographic would be Chrono Trigger so I know it can be done. Actually EarthBound and Mother 3 might fit that bill too!

I expect more from video game stories as time goes on and BoTW had some of the craft in place (e.g. lovely animations and voice acting, especially loved the Rock Dad and princess Zelda). The Twitter user and game designer @docsquiddy has convinced me that most games should be build around stories, but BoTW felt like mechanics, exploration and frankly joy of movement centered title.

Actually it took me a hideous time to understand that gyroscope had anything to do with aiming, I wondered why shooting with a bow was so shaky! So two complaints.

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Moonside wrote

Reply to Two types of privacy by Seirdy

When qualifying privacy recommendations with context, I think we should go further than describing threat models: we should acknowledge different types of privacy. “Privacy” means different things to different people. Even a single person may use the word “privacy” differently depending on their situation. Understanding a user’s unique situation(s), including their threat models, can inform us when we select the best of approach. How do we choose between reducing a footprint’s spread and size?

I think this is excellent thought and even if it ultimately the insight can be accommodated within the framework of threat models, it's useful as an architectonic principle. Privacy to me is a cluster concept, covering concerns as varying as state surveillance, confidentiality in therapy and being able to sit on the loo in peace!

That said, I think the central distinction of the piece is stated in terms that could be more helpful:

I highlight two main approaches to privacy: “tracking reduction” and “tracking evasion”.

Approach, I fear, is the wrong term and too general as well. TR and TE seem to be general privacy strategies. Strategy is a term that also avoids an exact definition, but a helpful starting point might be that a privacy strategy would consist of privacy objectives, the ways they can be achieved and the resources employed. Since the ways of undermining privacy are quite similar (the internet is a mostly open platform with often untrustworthy agents that are hyperconnected) and the means (computer software and hardware) are similar, making the distinctions primarily a matter of privacy objectives and secondarily of the other factors seems most prudent to me.

My second concern is how 'data' is employed in the definitions of TR and TE. Reading the main text it seems to me that leaking less data is not the point of tracking evasion, but rather reducing the range of inferences that may be done with, especially avoiding deanonymization. This isn't some monotonically decreasing function of how much data is being collected.

A downstream of this is that distinction between wants and need such as in the passage

In other words, TR falls closer to “wants” on the (somewhat contrived) “wants versus needs” spectrum

mostly loses its force. I block adverts online mostly to avoid malware, which is a low probability threat never-the-less a pain to deal with since I need access to a computer to get my needs met. Very casual means suffice to accomplish this, but it's not a mere want that is out of synchrony with my needs.

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Moonside OP wrote

Reply to comment by neku in Shower thoughts I had on a parody of the Fallout series by Moonside

I was trying to mock how falloutiness has descended into empty signifies - mascot acting in a overearnest fashion, oldies on radio, nuclear symbology and literal nukes and everything being radioactive (when in the first two games radioactivity as a present phenomenon plays only a minor role and nuclear power and weaponry, while present, is mostly background), bottle caps as currency.

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Moonside wrote

Reply to imagine how much better the internet would be without content mills, especially the ones with computer generated "content" by hollyhoppet

I have fond nostalgia for the time when links were worth clicking on. There were actual WEB pages where the hypertext made cohesive wholes unlike traditional books and links weren't just navigation. Or links just joined together home cobbled web pages and the need to link was a most sincere sign of respect. Now everyone wants to trap their users on their platform.

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