Moonside

Moonside wrote

I do have the perception that McEwan was a bit of a Citizen Kane like benevolent narcissist and maybe the article could have gone more into that, but I have only occasionally read Shakesville so what do I know.

Below each post a notice stated that one must read the Commenting Policy and all of a post titled Feminism 101 before commenting. By my count, the Commenting Policy is 15,000 words long, including linked Shakesville posts. Feminism 101 is a roughly 22,000-word annotated bibliography of 182 posts dating from 2006 to 2012. In total, new commenters were asked to read approximately 205,000 words, about the equivalent of Moby-Dick, before typing a single sentence at Shakesville.

TBH this makes me wonder about how much influence Shakesville had on the rest of feminist blogosphere. First, I much prefer this model where no-one pretends to have the authoritative solutions for all issues and outside sources are prodigiously consulted. The model of Shakesville as trying to become a go-to place for an entire political world view and, incidentally, that of Silicon Valley rationalism and LessWrong/SlateStarCodex folks has a terrible track record.

Secondly, I think having too rigid expectations for conduct and prior knowledge set the bar for participation too high. This was an issue in the past in many feminist spaces, though I feel this has actually lessened perhaps because people can just set up a new shop elsewhere or can't be policed on Twitter or whatever. Given how the state of online propaganda and persuasion presently is, making these kind of demands come off as wanting to lose in a noble and enlightened manner and is a projection of weakness rather than strength. Feminism isn't a RPG and you can learn quite a bit from less experienced or educated folks and letting in 10 million somewhat ignorant 16-18 year old girls is probably better for the movement that spending multiple hours of research on problematic things someone said years ago.

This was pretty much a rant, but maybe a few uptakes could justify it. First, do promiscuously keep touch with people from different backgrounds and tendencies and have respect for expertise (when that notion can genuinely apply). Secondly, do have some rules for conduct, but keep them modest and clear. A few bad faith actors will always fly in through the cracks, but basically just banning slurs cleans up online spaces a whole lot.

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Moonside wrote

I followed the creator's tumblr blog for a while back when he was a comparative nobody. I found it pretty fascinating and enjoyed his attitude, and then he pulls out a TV show out of nowhere. It's truly an internet age experience.

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Moonside OP wrote

This article is a bit old by now, but it's a worthy read. I think people on here know by first hand that right wing trolling was organized and coordinated even before gamergate, something much elided in discussions about the online part of the reactionary movements. And the frustration about not taken seriously about the danger of it brewing on 4chan and Reddit is all too familiar.

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Moonside wrote

I've never seen a system of pseudocode that I've liked. Basically it's too concrete for planning and too abstract to be of much help when writing code. It seems to come from an era when procedural coding was all that was agreed to matter.

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Moonside OP wrote

The core of it is a relatively simple story of a privileged and faulty man's rise and fall. We the audience never quite get the final view of what he was like, but that is part of the point. I read some one star reviews from common folk afterwards and based on them I'd say that if you can accept faulty protagonists who never wisen up, Citizen Kane is for you too. Give it a shot.

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Moonside wrote

I see value in this piece, but I still think it's overly negative. Nation states with almost unlimited surveillance capabilities is worrisome and do not mean to slight that, but it's operating on leaky bucket model.

A bucket leaks if it has a single small hole somewhere below the waterline. Security of computer systems is sometimes thought about along the same lines in that attackers only need to find a single vulnerability but defenders need to protect against them all. But this ignores resource constraints. Your defenses only need to be strong enough to deter potential attackers, to be too difficult to bother with, to be too costly to breach. There are targets that are "too" valuable to derive protection from this.

The bucket thinking also abstracts out the value of privacy. It's not merely hiding things-it's also about intimacy, avoiding abuses of state power and so on. That's what is lost with bucket thinking.

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Moonside wrote

TBH EVE is one of the best games I solely don't play because I don't want to spend the time on it, not because it's not to my taste. The last time I tried out the trial I had fun (soon before they went free), but playing the game the way I wanted to play it would have taken at least 10 hours a week.

Station trading was my unexpected favorite thing in EVE since you could make a bank in it, it only took a five minute to log in and do your business and it's . Then I'd also wanted to play two other characters, one space pirate menace whose exploits are financed by the trading profits and one goody two shoes to participate in player factions and such.

Also lmao The Mittani is still obnoxious and still playing. A true legend of not logging off.

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Moonside wrote

Having never played the game nor not knowing much about it, I've seen people be horny for the spring fairy, the vaguely fantasy arabic race of buff ladies (?), basically anyone who seems like an adult (I guess). You'd gather that this was some R rated sexploitation game at this point....

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