nah it was r/degoogle on the other site, but they have new mods now who are workin hard to clean up the crud! :^D

)

thank :^)

i am pumped for the foreboden dreams

OH MAN I'M GONNA GO SO FAST

yea!

what if we just publish 6 "best games" lists ourselves?

I have not seen Adventure Time, so I can't make any comparisons.

That said, Homestuck definitely revolves around certain themes, many of them emotional. I don't want to spoil things too much, but a lot of these things are pretty timeless. I recently re-read Homestuck (i.e. in the past year), and it holds up well.

I will admit, there's definitely a value to having had been there to discuss, speculate, and theorize with others. It gives one time to digest and metabolize each update, a forced pacing that one might not get when reading it straight through.

But that's true for any TV show! Game series! Written fiction series (especially penny novels)! Or anything else that has a release cycle.

If you're interested in Homestuck, I wouldn't want "being late to the party" to be the reason you don't read it. I was late to 17776 but it was (and still is) a great read. (BTW, if you like Homestuck, you might like 17776.)

Things I liked about Homestuck:

1. Easy to keep track of characters/who's who.
2. Interesting narrative mechanics.
3. Very fucky storyline, complicated to understand. Timelines, parallel universes, etc.
4. It gets very meta, in good ways.
5. Genuinely funny.
6. Elation at having had successfully read one of the longest pieces of fiction in the human language.
7. Music that slaps
8. The majority of the story takes place in chatboxes (think AIM), which is relatable to me, as someone who spent a lot of time inside on AIM and not a lot of time outside.
9. Running gags, callbacks, and references galore.

A problem: The first few acts was a kind of text-based-game deal, with the author literally making updates in response to user submitted commands. This structure is apparent, and it does not age as well as the rest of the comic.

The direction and basis of the comic kind of shifts over its 7 year lifespan. This is pretty apparent even without being super invested in it like I am.

One problem is that the original flash animations are being deprecated, replaced with HTML5 when it can, or YouTube videos when it can't, which sucks because the pixel-crisp animations and YouTube's CBR encoding do not mesh well. Even worse, [S] Cascade, arguably the most important animation in Homestuck, is not properly accessible from the main site.

If you do get into Homestuck, let me know, I can find you the mirror that hosts the flash animations.

lol look them up on google and see their location on map

like

all of canada and then some

gamers... what the heck...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slack_Technologies it's tru

at least it's reliably bad

everyone knows what to expect with irc

and then if someone told me, "hey, they made an IRC 2, it's going to be a lot better"

i'd expect all the bad things to be fixed

not to have a bunch of bad things added, and also some emoji

haha holy shit what the FUCK

BTW for what it's worth, if you have the ~technical skills~, you could also make your own VPN using something like a Linode server and OpenVPN or Wireguard. Idk how that works for, say, legal subpoenas though.

lol

mullvad seems good enough to me

if i should believe what they say, then they're good as fuck

hey sorry for not reading this or replying to this yet, things have gotten wild very quickly in my life just recently, and this is something i definitely want to read. i appreciate the source

EDIT: update, ~5 years later:

• falun gong is definitely a fascist cult, thank u to neku for bursting my bubble on that
• unfortunately, the "falun gong organ harvesting" thing is probably real,
• but it's a way way bigger issue w.r.t. targeting uyghurs,
• And the machine learning research that tipped me off to this has definitely matured since then :\

What tipped me off was a ~2019 paper showing a system to efficiently categorize between Han and Uyghur people just by a low resolution image of their face. "What an odd thing to say", etc etc. I feel like things might have gotten worse since then!!

I've quit the machine learning research space but man

can you provide more details here? i didn't know about this and i can't find a lot of details supporting that, and i definitely want to know more

i agree that it sounds very wild

TLDR: It sounds wild but is true. Just google "organ harvesting falun gong" and "organ harvesting uyghur". I focused too much on Uyghur people, the Falun Gong have been and still are also having their organs harvested.

First: Concentration camps for the Uyghur ethnic group (an extreme minority ethnic group which is mostly Muslim) (is most definitely a thing)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps], and (1)there's (2)plenty (3)of (4)research into facial ethnicity recognition and into recognition of Uyghur faces in particular.

Uyghur people make up less than 1% of the China population, but nearly half of people in Xinjiang are Uyghur. Xinjiang has a higher amount of surveillance than the rest of China, and anybody who enters the region has to consent to having a spyware app installed to their phone.

Finally, regarding organ harvesting, the most egregious claim: There's a well-known less-recent history of organ harvesting from other political prisoners, most notably the Falun Gong. The "reliance on death row inmates" for organ harvesting was supposedly ending around 2014.

Reports on systematic organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners first emerged in 2006, though the practice is thought by some to have started six years earlier.

Further down in the article,

Based on his research, Gutmann concluded that organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience became prevalent in the northwestern province of Xinjiang during the 1990s, when members of the Uyghur ethnic group were targeted in security crackdowns and “strike hard campaigns.”

I.e. If this is correct, they were harvesting organs from Uyghur people (who are mostly Muslim) and switched to Falun Gong around 1999.

So, aside from all this history, there are more recent reports that organs are still being harvested from prisoners. This is following an investigation that was released publicly, at ChinaTribunal

I focused too much on Uyghur people, but reading into this, the Falun Gong still are and have been being focused on. I was focused on the Uyghur people because of the amount of ML publications I saw regarding facial recognition of Uyghur people.

to be fair i do this too but only ironically

YES

Explanation for people who don't hate themselves:

fsck is a Linux utility called "Filesystem check", which can be used to fix a broken filesystem (or seriously seriously damage it)

fsck -y (where -y means "yes, fix this") automatically says "yes, fix this issue" rather than having you answer 10000 yes or no questions

the feeling when you do stupid, stupid, stupid things, but are able to fix it in just a few minutes?

fsck yes

u r valid

stay excited with me!! i've been excited for years. we're on the proper timeline for impeachment, and even though it's unlikely to come to fruition, it's still good for continuing investigations.

it's a real fucking shame that the only thing that matters is when trump hurts the other rich and powerful, but let's hope he continues.

but i have a feeling trump would step down or something before he were to get impeached. he's an extremely useful symbol of oppression and a symbol of rallying for white supremacists and that symbol would take a great blow if he was impeached.