design

Caoimhe

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

Your musical entertainment:


Media

The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch — Forrest Wickman in Slate

A look at how creative decisions and compromises get made on a movie set.

You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.


Heaven Will be Mine – Caoimhe

My clone recently discovered Worst Girl Games and has been having a time of it. When I played it I actually didn’t click with Heaven Will Be Mine nearly as much as We Know the Devil but Caoimhe’s words on it are making me want to revisit it.

Heaven Will Be Mine is short and sweet. A full playthough is roughly five hours. Within that time, it packs a narrative of the trans struggle for identity and recognition, the search for meaning in a perpetually hostile world, the never-ending quest of humans’ self-discovery and exploration, and of course cool mechs beating each other up.


A List Of Games By Trans People Before 2010 — Dot Maetrix

Cute little list and led me to this fun interview from Bad Games Hall of Fame with Rebecca “Burger” Heineman and to revisit this interview with Megumi, the programmer of Virtual Lab1 that I had read before.

Not gonna lie I did NOT realise how long Maddy Thorson had been doing Trans-People-Can-Double-Jump Platformers before making this list. Like, I thought that Celeste was primarily her drawing from the twitchy platformer style of Super Meat Boy but as it turns out, lmao nope Not only does Jumper predate Meat Boy by sevaral years, but the lead character, Ogmo, went on to appear as a playable character in Super Meat Boy, acknowledging the influence that game had taken from Thorson’s work. Like, I fully had the order of cause and effect completely wrong here.


Chips Theory, In Brief: Doctor Who’s Unresolved Aesthetic Debate — Tamsyn Elle

I swear that I am not going to keep linking to blogs by lifeforms that have been bred for thousands of years to sustain themselves solely on ever-more incomprehensible Doctor Who criticism but I needed to share the chips–soufflé spectrum model of media analysis with the world.

Note how chips becomes synecdoche for an ordinary life, an inescapable pillar of the daily grind as fundamental as work, home, sleep, and commuting. Chips is what the rest of us do.

There’s an inescapable class element to this. Science fiction is often accused, with some justice, of being a middle-class genre; even when it’s militaristic our focus tends to be on the officer class. A good deal of the value of Rose in the first place is that, as a working-class soap opera type of character, she does not at first seem to belong on Doctor Who. Indeed, often that’s part of her quality: in her first episode it’s her experience in her school’s gymnastics team, silver medal, swinging on a chain, that saves the day with straightforward physicality where the Doctor’s talk of Shadow Proclamations and anti-plastic failed to hold sway. Then she’s befriending the lowly mechanics and servant girls who turn out to be key to their respective stories.


Thoughts on IDW Transformers: The Furman Era — Bobby Schroeder

A nice little piece laying out some interest aspects of the Transformers series2 through the lens of a particular run of comics including the historically weird handling of gender and how later IDW comics corrected that.

When James Roberts began writing the fan favorite series More Than Meets the Eye, he wanted to explore the subject of Transformer romance. And if Furman said that there aren’t any women on Cybertron, then, well… I guess he’s been left no choice but to declare it the robot yaoi planet! His hands were simply tied, folks.


Media ∩ Technology

The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland — Bret C. Devereaux

Look. If Bret Devereaux is going to keep writing articles analysing the practicalities of speculative fiction tropes I am going to keep linking to them.

Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup.


Why We Don’t Have UIs Like the ones in Neon Genesis — Zemnmez

Damn now I want a vector-based display again.

Everyone who works with interfaces should be looking at these and asking themselves why interfaces don’t look like this. Where did we go so wrong? Where’s the big fuckup where we ended up with like, windows 95 instead of this shit? This is something I have devoted untold and definitely irresponsible brain space to. And honestly, the best answer I have is very simple, but I think also a kind of interesting look at how our tools shape the designs we make.


I wasted $410 recreating a fake website that shows up for 10 seconds of a TV show almost no one remembers — Alyx Wijers

Wijers doing an extremely important job 🫡

When I watch TV and movies, I sometimes notice web addresses. I’ll usually note them down, and look them up later to see if they’re registered. In most cases, they’re registered by the studio or network or whatever and just redirect to their site. AMC, for example, keeps www.savewalterwhite.com up from Breaking Bad (now 12 years after the series ended, as of the time of writing), and www.cometlist.net up from Halt and Catch Fire.


Technology

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents — David Kriesel

Quite an old one but recently linked to by Tina. What if your scanned just randomly changed numbers around in the scanned image? What multiple models of scanners from the largest manufacturer in the world did that for years without being fixed? There is also an accompanying video.

In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like:

  1. Incorrect invoices
  2. Construction plans with incorrect numbers (as will be shown later in the article) even though they look right
  3. Other incorrect construction plans, for example for bridges (danger of life may be the result!)
  4. Incorrect metering of medicine, even worse, I think.

I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back — Fireborn

First of a series of posts on this blog dealing with the hell that is trying to use Linux while blind.

Linux claims to support blind users here. It even ships the tools. But using them? Getting speech or braille output when you need it most? That’s a punishing mess of driver quirks, missing defaults, audio stack failures, and layers of modern regression hidden under the surface.


Avoiding becoming the lone dependency peg with load-bearing anime — Xe Iaso

Anubis is a piece of software that has become popular for helping block unfriendly crawlers that have been overloading a lot of sites to grab data for neural network training without care for the damage they are doing to the web. It also has an cartoon character mascot that has proven useful for weeding people who like being dismissive pricks.

At some level, I use the presence of the Anubis mascot as a “shopping cart test”. If you either pay me for the unbranded version or leave the character intact, I’m going to take any bug reports more seriously. It’s a positive sign that you are willing to invest in the project’s success and help make sure that people developing vital infrastructure are not neglected.


Technology ∩ Capitalism

Why Bell Labs Worked. — Areoform

Seen via a post by Fabio Manganiello going further into Bell’s treatment of people compared to what companies and academia both demand of them now, shared by Xerz and boosted by Jennifer Glauche which also inspired the next post by Elilla.

Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later. Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, “what’s stopping someone from just slacking off?” Kelly would contend that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”


Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google — Elilla

On the empty promises and dehumanisation of Google.

It’s the little things that bugged me, how people would eat the free candy or have a bowl of cereal and just leave trash and dirty dishes everywhere for the cleaning ladies (contractors) to deal with; more than that the way nobody looked at them or said “thank you”. We Brazilians have a social class for that, a social code underlying that studied invisibility, I knew what this was: these were maids. Servants. The women in my family, my friends at school. The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.

  1. Virtual Lab is a body-horror falling-block game that used the Virtual Boy’s 3D effects for the self-insert mascot character’s breasts. 

  2. I was going to mention her talking about the distinction between the Budianskian and Furmanist modes of Transformers stories but while she does allude to this she keeps it accessible for those who don’t want to know a bunch of fandom jargon and just mentions the distinction as “robots in space” stories versus “robots in disguise” stories. 


Caoimhe

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

A friend has been infodumping about Susumu Hirasawa and I thought I’d share her passion a little wider so have this live performance from him:


This page is under construction: A love letter to the personal website — Sophie Koonin

One thing to warn is that if you do actually make your own website is that tinkering with it can be addictive in and of itself, at least to me. It’s like a model train set: There is always more you can tweak or add to it. I updated my homepage a few days ago to make each section stand out from each other a bit more.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it’s your space and you can do whatever you want with it.


A Eulogy for Urban Dead — Adrian Hon

I played Urban Dead back in the day. It’s sad to see it go and infuriating to see it happen because of a regulator trying to target the likes of Facebook and Tiktok and not even being able to conceive of small, independent operations or how it could affect them.

Naturally, these player-generated events were chaotic and often hard to discover, though the ability for humans to graffiti messages helped spread the word. Zombies, being dead, were not permitted to communicate as freely – they could only use the letters a, b, g, h, m, n, r, and z – but this was sufficient to lead to four different zombie languages including terms such as armah baz (army base), zmazh anh grab (smash and grab) and my personal favourite, barhah (roughly “a spirit of zombie warriors in brotherhood”).


Currency Pokemon on Pokemon Home — Laura Michet

I saw this because it was shared by Adamn Le Doux. How the restrictions of online pokémon trading evolved a market where the currency changes every time a new game gets connected to the system. The current one being a qilin giraffe thing. Also some followups: How to buy a Pokemon online and How to stop all the online Pokemon players from ruining their own fun.

Today, you’d list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you’ll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You’ll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.


I ordered a wheel of cheese in a can — Laura Michet

Also from Laura Michet: A type of cheese I now really want try.

The cheese is apparently one of a very small number of cheeses that can cure inside a can, apparently because it’s made with a culture that emits less gas than other cheeses, so it won’t bloat or pop the can. It is only sold in 30 oz containers. It is cheddar… you can get several flavors. Big time cheese fans or people from Wisconsin know and care a lot about it and I get the impression that it is quite popular here in the US, but I have never heard of this shit before.


CD-ROM Journal: Crosscountry BC — Misty De Méo

A look at a Canadian edutainment game series.

It it were just about navigating routes, it might be educational but a bit dry. What makes Crosscountry work is that the player is making so many more decisions than that and being immersed in the truck driver life. The player’s driver needs to eat, and sleep, but it’s not enforced just by forcing the player to rest. No, it takes the much more interesting approach of giving the player consequences. Forget to sleep, or to run the windshield wipers during the rain? You have a much higher chance to get into an accident on the road. Forget to fuel up? You can use your cell phone to call for a tow or an emergency refuel, but it’ll cost you. None of these are tutorialized or explained in advance, except via the manual; for most children, these are fun or unpleasant surprises. It’s that sense of capricious cruelty that makes Crosscountry so much fun.


The Most Mario Colors — Louie Mantia

Seen via Mike Egan’s post roundup. This is the ideal post. This is the type of thing that people should be researching.

Most Mario games with polygonal logos have a different color per letter, but the sequence of colors in Mario’s name is rarely the same sequence across games.

This captivated me—for some reason—and I set out to analyze every Mario video game logo to see if I could find a pattern for specific arrangements of colors and to determine the “most Mario” color scheme.


a love letter to level editor icons — erysdren

Who doesn’t love some programmer art?

i want to show you some cool art from the late 90s and early 00s. this art was only ever intended to be seen by the developers at a select few games companies, and thus may contain obscure in-jokes and references that nobody outside of the company is likely to understand.


dev scoops: vultures in Weird West — Joe Wintergreen

Joe Wintergreen talks bout the first thing he worked on in Weird West and shows how systems-driven game design allows complex interactions through fairly simple building blocks.

In the end, it ended up being just as well that I implemented the landing-and-walking-around behaviour for the vultures, because later we wanted chickens and there was already Flightless Bird Support – a chicken is just a flightless vulture who lays eggs, as any ornithologist will tell you.

As minor as these guys are, they’re one of the features I’m fondest of – my first task, omnipresent, occasionally chaotic, and shipping almost unchanged from their initial implementation. Good eggs.


Why Are Chronically Ill People Forced to Hide Their Pain? — Kelly

Oh no! You’ve scrolled too far and entered The Serious Zone.

Unfortunately most people can’t process the lack of choice in the matter. They genuinely believe that we either want to be this sick, or could get better if we really ‘tried’. They believe they wouldn’t be able to handle what we go through, because they’re convinced they will never NEED to handle it. They’re the exception. Chronic illness won’t happen to them.

This is the comfortable lie that most people tell themselves so that they can move through life without having to think about the precarious nature of the human condition. Without having to consider how quickly you can become disabled, homeless, an ‘other’. How quickly your life can change without your consent.

This need to cling to a lie makes people abandon us. Some will stay when you become chronically ill, but most have an internal clock. If you’re not better by whatever random and pre-conceived timeline they’ve set for you, they walk away.


Crashing the economy because you hate TikTok women — Ryan Broderick

Ending the roundup again with a light dusting of fascism. I am far too online and read far too much about American politics and fascists but I was still taken aback by this description of a strain of hatred I wasn’t familiar with.

If you don’t spend a lot of time in right-wing fever swamps, you may have completely missed the almost year-long meltdown conservatives have been having about this one particular video, which is most commonly referred to as the “Gen Z boss and a mini” video. It was posted to Instagram back in July by an Australian skincare company called tbh skincare. The original has since been deleted, but according to Know Your Meme, it had about two million views in its first 48 hours. The dance and song the women in the video are doing is a variation of “Boots and a Slick Back Bun” TikTok meme that was popular last summer.


Caoimhe

This roundup is going to link to and quote articles dealing with sex, kinks, sexual assault and also fascism at the end.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

Taking a page from Mike I am going to include a suggested piece of music to listen to while you read this; the first track from my Cohost song of the day playlist, the title theme from Robocop for the Game Boy:

I’ve divided this into two sections, the first for people who I haven’t linked to as part of these roundups before and the second for people who I have.

New challengers

Hermit Crab Intimacy (On Visitors) — Rabbit

Home, intimacy and vulnerability.

When I live somewhere, I feel like my life saturates it and sinks into the walls, like cigarette smoke. Every strong emotion I feel creates an energy that overtakes the room for a while; if I had a big hard talk with my partner in the old living room, I knew it was over when we moving upstairs to relax in bed, and the feeling would be left behind. And over time, the kitchen isn’t just the place where I cook, it’s where I care for my loved ones; the bedroom isn’t just the place where I sleep, but where I connect with my partner and feel safe at night. The house is not just a house. It is a home, a being, a body that I have a relationship with that requires love and care and patience. Cleaning my house feels like also shoveling out all of that psychic debris. It is an act of care for the place, and an act of care for myself. I have always been part of a house; my home has always been part of me.


design thoughts: let things be rare — Joe Wintergreen

Some game design thoughts.

Some things are cool because they’re rare, and that’s the whole reason. You can implement a cool feature, say “wow, that’s cool, we should make that happen more”, and just like that, it’s not cool. It’s no longer a story players tell each other. The first time you play Splinter Cell Conviction, and you’re hanging off the side of a building waiting to pull another guy out a window, and a particularly savvy guard actually leans out a window and checks the side of the building – that’s amazing! What a smart, weird thing to do! But then they do it again, always. It’s not reactive or rare, like you thought, so it’s no longer cool. You won’t be saving that clip.


I Love Niche Problems — Caoimhe

I am not a Formula One girlie but Caoimhe’s passion for saving and sharing the history of it is inspiring.

Long story short, I’ve been building up a rather popular niche in the high seas community. My archive of F1 media is solid, comparable to plenty of other buffs around the world, but I’ve made a commitment to sharing it as widely as possible, for as long as possible.


The Digital Packrat Manifesto — Janus Rose for 404 Media

Relatedly, a celebration of media hoarding. Anything on any streaming service, on a website, can be taken away without notice. What’s yours is yours, and also organising a Jellyfin server is very satisfying.

Sure, there are websites where you can find some of this material, like the Internet Archive. But this archive is mine. It’s my own little Library of Alexandria, built from external hard drives, OCD, and a strong distrust of corporations. I know I’m not the only one who has gone to these lengths. Sometimes when I’m feeling gloomy, I imagine how when society falls apart, we packrats will be the only ones in our village with all six seasons of The Sopranos. At the rate we’re going, that might not be too far off.


Johnson. A Plane Man — Hyphinett

A little downpour game made from a Ryanair Boeing 737 safety manual :)


Returning champions

A Hackable, Custom, Magic Wand (Plus) Board — Kore

Kore’s third post about hacking a Hitachi wand, as previously seen in the first and fourth roundup.

So: the Hitachi Magic Wand is a very good device. It, however, has very little granularity in how strong it is. Even the newer Magic Wand Plus only has four, non-customizable settings.

I don’t like this and want to fix it. In the process, I’ll also be adding bluetooth connectivity, because I thought that was pretty funny.


The Cuddled Little Vice — Elizabeth Sandifer

I have previously linked to Sandifer’s writing on Doctor Who and inane September the 11th memorial comics but another one of her long-term projects is The Last War in Albion, a sprawling series of essays which she describes as “a history of British comics. More specifically, it is a history of the magical war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore”. After a long hiatus she is back with a book-length article on Neil Gaiman. This is obviously written in light of the sexual assaults that have come to light, but is neither a polemic nor trying to turn his works into some sort of gotcha against him or his fans. It is a clear-eyed and fair assessment of the merits and flaws of his work woven with the story of the man himself and of his craft, his cynicism and his actions.

When one talks about Sandman being foundational to millions of people, one is talking not exclusively but substantially about teenage girls of the 90s and 00s who were into goth subculture. And a fundamental part of its appeal is that its best character—the one who gets all the good lines and who the reader is all but forced to love—looks like them. In contrast to Cinnamon Hadley, who was a bold fashion and makeup experimentalist, at the end of the day dressing up like Death required little more than a black tank top, black jeans, some boots, a cheap piece of jewelry, and a bit of practice with an eyeliner pen. It is difficult to think of another iconic character in comics that was routinely first encountered by people who were already cosplaying her. It’s no surprise that many of those young goth girls passionately identified with her, nor that they became adoringly loyal fans of her creator—fans that he would spend the rest of his career both catering to and preying upon.


The Strange Armor of Dragon Age: The Veilguard — Bret C. Devereaux

Last time I linked to two of Devereaux’s pieces and am doing so again. Following on from his piece about sci-fi body armour we have this analysis of the armour of Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

And that actually makes a fair bit of sense: if you expect to be fighting in close combat, you hardly want anything on your person adding encumbrance or weighing you down or providing an extra easy hand-hold for someone to grab and pull at. And more to the point, your ancient or medieval soldier doesn’t need them because he has nothing to put in a bag or pouch that he needs to grab in combat. His primary weapon and shields, after all, are carried in his hands, his armor is worn on his person, his backup weapon is in a scabbard at his waist…and that’s it. Archers might carry arrows in a quiver, of course and slingers stones in a small bag, but that’s just one small container of clear and distinct purpose, generally at the waist. This is just a design feature one does not find in the kind of technological environment posited in these games.


Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ — Bret C. Devereaux

And the second on the logic of “gold” as a generic currency in fantasy settings compared to historical reality of money and coinage.

But part of the reason these coinage systems work they way they do is that they operated in societies in which a lot of economic activity was non-monetary or at least, non-coinage. And here, we should go back to our ‘money’ vs. ‘currency’ or ‘coinage:’ remember, money came first. So let’s say you live in a small community – like a peasant village working beneath a large landholder’s manor – and you need to transact some things, but you don’t have any actual silver because coins are scarce and valuable (and being a subsistence farmer, you grow most of what you need yourself), how do you do it? Well, one way is to do it ‘on accounts’ – you need wool and so when the shepherds come down from the hills, you trade for some of their wool during the shearing with a family you know and both you and they make a mental note that you owe them for the wool. You might express that amount of debt in silver (as a unit weight – see how we get to coinage as a pre-measured weight of silver?) but there’s no reason to measure out silver (even if you had any) because you see these folks every year and next time they’ll ask you for some grain and so on.

Note that this is not the same as the concept of ‘barter’ – there is, in fact, a notional ‘money’ intermediary, it’s just not a physical coin or bill, its expressed as an account, a purely notional unit of value.


The Quietly Coercive Nature of “Vanilla” Sex — Devon Price

Following on from linking to a bunch of his writing this piece from Devon Price that made me reconsider my relationship to sex a bit and do some self-reflection pushed me to start moving forward with trying to get bottom surgery, something I had previously considered but put off.

I think one of the biggest problems in how people conceive of diverse sexualities is by attempting to place all sex acts upon a single hierarchy from “extremely kinky” to “tame.” Under this framework, activities like PIV and oral are viewed as neutral precursors to the racier and more extreme forms of sex that a person must “work themselves up” to – and this obscures that those supposedly neutral sexual activities can be both incredibly exciting & fulfilling to some, and downright disturbing or traumatizing to others.

[…]

According to the Vanilla-to-Kinky Staircase Model, boundaries can only be drawn hierarchically: you can only say no thanks forever to sexual acts that are more “extreme” and higher up on the staircase than the ones you’ve already engaged in. This means that kinky people often feel coerced into sexual acts that do absolutely nothing for them, and non-kinky people are expected to like anything and everything that their social group considers to be ‘standard’ sex.


AI and Esoteric Fascism — Baldur Bjarnason

Last time I linked to an economics-based analysis of the popularity of software development frameworks. This time fascism, yay 💖

These “bonkers” ideologies are integral to the fascist project as a rationale for atrocities and destruction. They are a belief system that promises a bright future to the selected people and provides them with a systemic rationale for letting mass death happen as “AI” will replace the workers.


Caoimhe

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

Doing another one of these. I still intend on doing rebogs as well and I’ve added some more styling to make reposts stand out from my own words and make a more clear divide between them.

History and science fiction

On Bread and Circuses — Bret C. Devereaux

Devereaux digs into the origin of the phrase “bread and circuses”.

So the surface reading seems clear: he is putting the Roman people on blast for letting their authority over public affairs be taken away, usurped by emperors who promise them bread and circuses (we’ll come to if this is an accurate representation of the history in a moment). They used to have all of this power, the power to bestow offices and armies, but now they cower fecklessly in the wake of imperial slaughter and arbitrary rule.

Except, of course – wait a minute – isn’t the theme of this passage that power is an unwise thing to ask for? The theme of the whole poem is that you shouldn’t be asking the gods for these sorts of things!

The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor — Bret C. Devereaux

Also from Devereaux.

Instead, where real armors evolve against threats, fictional armors evolve as a visual language, borrowing the design elements of other fictional armors far more often than they dip into their own historical exemplars, with the result that the whole thing sort of devours itself.

Fiction referencing exclusively other works for fiction rather than looking to the world is something I think about as well from time to time.

Book Review: War with the Newts — Nathan Goldwag

Goldwag reviews a book from the man who coined the word “robot”.

The novel starts with Captain van Toch, a Czech sea-captain in the service of a Dutch trading company, stumbling upon an isolated community of giant amphibians in the Dutch East Indies, living on a single tiny island, their numbers culled constantly by sharks. Van Toch realizes that they’re trainable, and extremely intelligent, and has the idea to plant colonies of them across the Pacific to work as pearl divers. After his death, the Pacific Export Company transitions from luxury goods to mass labor, selling newts across the world as an undersea work force capable of hydraulic and maritime engineering, which results in Newts settling most of the world’s coastlines and becoming an integral part of the global economy. “So now we find the salamanders on the road to their finest flowering; but the human world, too, is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. New continental coasts are being feverishly constructed, new dry land is emerging from where shallows used to be; artificial air support islands are springing up in the middle of the ocean.” (Newts, pg. 165). For all the absurdity, however, Čapek treats his topic seriously. We’re given footnotes, citations, discussions of legal dilemmas and cultural disputes, discourse on the economic impact of newt labor and how it affected different nations and groups, taxonomies on newt evolution and biology. It doesn’t feel like a cheap trick or a gimmick because it’s all done with such care.

Gender

Degendering and Regendering — Talia Bhatt

In short, to acknowledge transmasculinity, a society would have to first admit that manhood—just like womanhood—is a social class and not a ‘natural’ category. Its people would have to acknowledge that the desire for independence and self-actualization exists within all of us and is not, in fact, stored in the balls.

My Doctor Emailed Me Back — Abigail Thorn in Trans Writes

Thorn outlines very well the fundamental ideological problems in the N.H.S. and how trans healthcare is handled that I think apply very well to the H.S.E. here in Ireland as well.

There are even more serious charges. The coroners’ reports into the deaths of Sophie Williams and Alice Litman said lack of gender affirming care contributed to their deaths. That is to say, it is a matter of publicly recorded fact that the NHS’ failure to provide gender affirming care has contributed to the deaths of patients. Nobody at NHS England has resigned or faced consequences.

Of course panic, misinformation, and mistrust take hold in these conditions! Of course people come to believe the NHS are making secret plots behind closed doors! These conditions are entirely of the NHS’ own making. Slapping a famous trans person’s face on a new outreach program does nothing to address them. As I told Colonel Korn, if the NHS wants to increase trust they should start by apologising.

But the Colonel expressed his bind to me the same way every other NHS senior official I’ve spoken to has. The Department of Health and Social Care tells the NHS how they have to spend their money. The mandate they get from the Health Secretary tells them what services they have to commission: if it says “Ten more transplant wards,” they need ten more transplant wards, and that’s that. If it says “Spend £90m pathologizing trans people,” that’s what he has to do.

This point bears underlining: every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

Technology

Hitachi Hacking, part two! — Kore

Followup from the first of these posts.

In my last post, I succesfully made a bluetooth/wifi Magic Wand Plus. Unfortunately, though, I completely bypassed the original Hitachi board, which happens to be where all the buttons and LEDs are attached, so it was only usable remotely. To make the physical controls work again, I could either make my own copy of the Hitachi’s board, with buttons and LEDs in the same places, or somehow reprogram the original board and make it do my bidding.

The first option requires a lot of measuring, which I find really annoying to do. So, let’s hack the Hitachi’s microcontroller!

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity — Baldur Bjarnason

I love economic forces.

MongoDB’s popularity among managers during its peak was largely down to the idea that you no longer needed a database expert. Just throw the data into the document DB puddle and let your existing less-specialised developers handle it. The promise of the document database during the peak of their hype was that you didn’t need to employ as many specialists.

Electron, PhoneGap, and React Native promised to let companies replace their expensive platform specialists with more commodified generalists.

Standardisation in web development lowers costs, increases predictability, and makes the various browsers more interchangeable. It’s a hedge that reduces the individual market power of each browser, but usually in equal degree while increasing the value of the overall web, leaving each browser vendor better off as a result. Their market share might not increase but they have a bigger cut of a larger pie. Incompatibility tends to drive developers and companies to other platforms, reducing the overall pie.

Standardisation of labour, conversely, does not benefit labour.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI — Thomas Claburn in The Register

Everybody hates A.I! Here’s another reason to.

Whatever happens to Python or pip is likely to eventually happen to more projects or more frequently. I am concerned mostly about maintainers that are handling this in isolation. If they don't know that AI-generated reports are commonplace, they might not be able to recognize what's happening before wasting tons of time on a false report. Wasting precious volunteer time doing something you don't love and in the end for nothing is the surest way to burn out maintainers or drive them away from security work.

Seth Larson

Palette swaps — Mabbees

Seeing as I dusted off Pico-8 again recently here’s a little post about doing palette swaps in it.

The concept of a palette swap is drawing something with a different set of colors. It’s a good way to get more mileage out of your PICO-8 sprites. There are a bunch of things you can do with palette swapping

  • create variations on a character
  • make simple looping animations
  • fade in or out of a scene
  • simulate day/night cycles

But what does this mean for us as programmers? How do we represent the concept in code?

Scrapers I block (and allow), with explanations — Seirdy

Technical website bullshit, but something I’ve been meaning to look at setting up for this site too.

Bots I block fall into one of the following categories:

  • Bots that only serve to power adtech on other sites. My site has no ads, but I allow bots such as Google’s AdsBot.
  • Intellectual property snitches. I forbid robots that scan for plagiarism, trademark/copyright violations, brand protection, etc.
  • Robots that power invasive background checks that border on cyberstalking.
  • Scrapers that build datasets to train Generative AI (GenAI), such as large language models (LLMs). I don’t block search clients used by GenAI research assistants; I only block scrapers used to train GenAI models.

Everything else

Saying Gaelic / Gaeilic is ok

I used to be one of the people who “corrected” people about the word Gaelic. I am sorry.

The Irish Language was referred to as both Gaelic and Irish until the Republic was formed. “Irish” was mainly used by academics; “Gaelic” was used by the common people.

The Republic chose “Irish” over “Gaelic” for political/nationalistic reasons.

Pornhub Sees Surge of Interest in Tradwife Content, ‘Modesty,’ and Mindfulness — Samantha Cole in 404 Media

Dahl started an Instagram account in 2023 that parodied tradwife content creators, after her own account was banned by the platform multiple times. Tradwife content (short for “traditional wife) is fetish content, even if the “wife” isn’t showing skin. It’s a fantasy, and always has been, even when it was used to sell ovens to 1960s homemakers.

Laziness Does Not Exist — Devon Price

Kim is the person who taught me that judging a homeless person for wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes is utter folly. When you’re homeless, the nights are cold, the world is unfriendly, and everything is painfully uncomfortable. Whether you’re sleeping under a bridge, in a tent, or at a shelter, it’s hard to rest easy. You are likely to have injuries or chronic conditions that bother you persistently, and little access to medical care to deal with it. You probably don’t have much healthy food.

In that chronically uncomfortable, over-stimulating context, needing a drink or some cigarettes makes fucking sense. As Kim explained to me, if you’re laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep. If you’re under-nourished, a few smokes may be the only thing that kills the hunger pangs. And if you’re dealing with all this while also fighting an addiction, then yes, sometimes you just need to score whatever will make the withdrawal symptoms go away, so you can survive.

Playing Both Sides — Mike Egan

A cute story about Star Wars: Battlefront.

But it wasn’t just that it was super difficult and took a long time. The hilarious part of all of this is that the fact that there was still a battle going on outside meant that the number one reason we didn’t get to destroy the shield bunker was that the match had ended. The AI armies we were ignoring went on fighting their war and reached a conclusion before we were able to deal enough damage to the damn thing.