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 … | Continue reading
a tail of personal reflection | Continue reading
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 In … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 preci … | Continue reading
As part of the IP Abuse ??? series, this analysis focuses on corporations violating the original intent of copyright in favor of personal power and profit instead of taking a well-rounded analysis of all the relevant factors, like enclosure in general. When I’m looking for an exa … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 mo … | Continue reading
This question came on Retrospring: Is your website the official location of the unofficial collection webapp or is it just there now for testing? I’ve also gotten other variations of it, so I wanted to get some thoughts down. The UHC is, itself, unofficial, in that it isn’t actin … | Continue reading
”…okay, fine, you can have one more, but only because of the name” a Deltarune theory Spoils Homestuck, Undertale, and Deltarune Answering the questions raised by Ralsei’s prophesy: Who is the Angel? What is the “Angel’s Heaven”? How can it be banished? Angels and Heavens🔗 … | Continue reading
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 deci … | Continue reading
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 th … | Continue reading
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 th … | Continue reading
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. Fac … | Continue reading
people fell in love with subscription AI chatbots, only to see them "lobotomized" by the company with no recourse # | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 understandin … | Continue reading
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 manual as The number of code tokens … | Continue reading
“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 … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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-man … | Continue reading
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, book … | Continue reading
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 E … | Continue reading
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 discuss … | Continue reading
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, … | Continue reading
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 tit … | Continue reading
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 t … | Continue reading
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 s … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 thro … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 Zachtronic … | Continue reading