history

Caoimhe

What I’m reading vol. IX

Caoimhe ⬥

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

I have been rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 and talking about it with friends a lot so here is my favourite of all the intros from it or Brotherhood (it’s just the first intro from Brotherhood).

Also just a small rant: I hate how the top results on Youtube for this kind of stuff is always horrible interpolated to 60FPS upscaled crap that ruins the animation.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. I have conflicting urges to want to write more and do more but also I know I need to rest more. Don’t expect me to be Blaugusting. I am actually trying to get as much off my plate as possible and not commit to things, including pruning my RSS feeds quite a bit so I feel less obliged to keep up with so much. Everything is difficult 👍🏻

But I have still been reading and have things to share. No particular order or categories to things this time.

The Narrative Fallacy — Nikhil Suresh

On how a compelling narratives not just get people to buy into ideas, but obscure otherwise very obvious flaws, and how the use of narratives in this way is actually taught and enforced in university education.

No, the real point is that the claims from this study are ridiculous and intelligent people that have been studying for years can’t pick up on it. The real point is that I am actually really confused as to how Piff got his results, but at least I’m not tricking myself into thinking I know what’s going on. Did he fudge the numbers? Was the experiment poorly set up? Just pure bad luck in sampling? Hell, is the result true? I don’t know, but I will say that you don’t know either.

The Missing 11th of the Month — David R. Hagen

Why is the 11th of each month (other than September) consistently underrepresented in the Google Books database as shown in this XKCD comic? The answer is typographical.

When I began this study, I was hoping to find a hidden taboo of holding events on the 11th or typographical bias against the shorthand ordinal. Alas, the reason is far is far more mundane: a numeral 1 looks a lot like a capital I or a lowercase l or a lowercase i in most of the fonts used for printing books. An 11 also looks like an n, apparently. Google’s algorithms made mistakes when reading the 11th from a page, interpreting the ordinal as some other word.

So-Called “AI” Cannot Program — Natalie Weizenbaum

This really resonated with me. The most frustrating projects I have coded for are the ones where people have not thought through the meaning of what they are asking for, where they ask “make this work” with no clear definition of what working looks like outside of the most idealised possible scenario without consideration of real world use, let alone edge cases or failure states. I feel “a programmer is paid to refine semantics” to my bones.

Programming is the act of making a computer enact a semantic task. The computer’s silicon internals, its RAM and hard disk and even its pixels, are the syntax here. It has no intrinsic meaning, just a set of ones and zeros and a very complex set of rules for transforming them. The semantics are the human interpretation of what it’s doing and why, the understanding of those numbers and pixels as a map to the nearest ramen joint or a simulation of a puppygirl begging for treats.

(a) cohost postmortem: life after death — Jae Kaplan

I still get far too emotional thinking about Cohost.

the reality of social media is that unless you have an Audience, you are probably better served among friends.

Revisiting Chapters: Tyrion V, ACoK — Turtle-paced

I really love A Game of Thrones and I used to read a lot of fan analysis stuff and listened to a couple of podcasts just about the series. Turtle-paced is the one person in that sphere that I still follow and I still really enjoy reading her deep dive chapter analyses when she posts them. She does, as the name of her blog implies, post them at the rate of a testudine and it is a nice occasional treat for me.

This is just how it is, per Tyrion. His response is not to address the unfairness but to show gratitude for the benefits he enjoys. The idea that everyone should have those privileges does not cross his mind. It’s a way in which he’s like Cersei. Though again, and as usual for the Lannister siblings, this is also a product of an abusive home. Tyrion’s only protection against the various injustices he faces in life due to his disability come from being a Lannister. The idea that everyone should have Lannister-level privileges is a threat to him - which in turn is a belief born of despair that of course everyone will hate him for his disability, and this can never change.

GameCube controllers in Sunfluffs — Azure

Putting native Gamecube controller in a new PC game, cool! Seen via Misty.

okay so, something that’s been bugging me for 15+ years but i never realized how to put it into words until recently: regular game controllers have different layouts depending on if you’re in gameplay or in menus.

Moon Light Café — CD-ROM Journal

Another multimedia CD.

Writing about early CD-ROMs means coming across a lot of early examples of things that became famous later. Sometimes that means finding new and exciting angles on something familiar… and sometimes it means something that’s only notable for being early. Today’s disc is one of those.

What I’m Reading, Volume 3 — Caoimhe

My clone also shared some interesting links, including an article about the decline of bin stores, a type of business I didn’t even know existed and beautiful photos of industrial waste dumps in Russia.

Ancient Globalism: Rome, India, China, & Beyond — Nathan Goldwag

Ancient trade is cool! The past was international!

Titianus himself was a Macedonian, as well as a Roman citizen, and reflects just how complex and multifaceted these exchanges truly are. We talk of “Rome” and “China” as unitary civilizations, exchanging speech and goods like two singular individuals, but of course both were mere representations of vast conglomerations of peoples, cultures, and nations, all of which were constantly in flux. At Shatial, in the Karakoram Mountains of the Punjab, more than 1,000 inscriptions and 700 petroglyphs were carved into the rock near a key pass, recording names, dates, and prayers from travelers. They appear mostly in Sogdian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Aramaic, Brahmi, and Kharosthi. Nine are written in the extinct Bactrian language, one uses Chinese characters, and one is in Hebrew.

Rachel’s iPod — Luna

A short lament about erasing someone’s past from an old device.

Have you ever bought a pre-owned game cartridge or MP3 player or something, and the previous owner’s data is still on it — and for a brief moment, you feel a sense of connection with that stranger through their lingering data, and a twinge of sadness at the idea of deleting it to use the device for yourself?

Hell, I have felt sad in the past about clearing out my own childhood savedata from a cartridge. A few years ago I was able to boot my old copy of Soleil and was greeted with save files under my deadname as well as my brother and sister’s names.

Let’s make up fantasy consoles for fun — Kyle Labriola

Seen via Mike Egan’s link roundup.

If you could wave a magic wand and wish a new fantasy console into the world…what would it be like? What constraints would it have to force developers to get creative? If it came with hardware, like the Playdate, what would the console physically be like?

This is something I have actually thought about before. One of the myriad little ideas filed away that I will certainly never have time for (and would have to learn many, many new skills to ever do myself) and if I ever do get time for it the moment for it will probably have passed. But the idea of a Pico-8 style fantasy console with its own integrated development environment but 3D with an eye to creating PSX-style visuals in the way that been in vogue, especially with horror games with a Crocotile-style friendly editor for mapping and modelling has been fermenting in my mind for years.

And very importantly it would also be paired with a secondary, 2D, low-spec fantasy console similar to Pico-8 (some musings of this involved it being a Pico-8 clone that could run Pico-8 carts itself, but maybe that would be stepping on Zep’s toes too much) that could play its own separate games as well as link to main console to act as a simple secondary screen like a VMU, either running it in a separate window on the same desktop or else running on your phone linked via wifi connection. Have extra HUD info on the second screen, control a game entirely through your phone with a unique interface, pass it to a friend and allow extra asymmetrical co-op control, download a chao to your phone! I am aware that second-screen peripherals have been done a load of times and it has basically always bombed but I don’t care I love control and interface gimmicks and am eternally enamoured with stuff like the Dreamcast port of Silent Scope allowing you to use the VMU screen as an incredibly low fidelity scope and Zombi U’s gimmick of making you look away to the Wii U gamepad so much to divide your situational awareness in stressful situations.

What My Hysterectomy Taught Me About Bodily Autonomy and Misogyny — Kelly

Medical misogyny is nothing surprising to me but this lays it out very strongly.

There was no medical reason to keep it. You don’t need your uterus to survive, it’s only function is to be a womb. If you keep your ovaries you won’t even go into early menopause. Yet they made it clear that saving my womb was more important than my life.

Why are games scary? — Laura Michet

But at a certain point, you have got to stop accepting the argument that an amateur Daz 3D porn game is worth an international uproar, no matter how transgressive and offensive it’s trying to be.

I think this raises an interesting question of why anyone is bothered to take a game like No Mercy seriously at all. I do think there is an interesting idea in how games so very opaque to a lot of people that they don’t necessarily intuit the obvious difference between a shovelware porn game and something with the the actual cultural impact of, say, Call of Duty in the way that they obviously can between a Holywood movie and some random porn film but I do feel like it is something more culturally based than games just been too long and too much of an investment to experience.

Caoimhe

What I’m reading vol. 5

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

We Finally Know Why Ancient Roman Concrete Was So Durable

Caoimhe ⬥

via Cathode Church

The team tested their findings by making pozzolanic concrete from ancient and modern recipes using quicklime. They also made a control concrete without quicklime and performed crack tests. Sure enough, the cracked quicklime concrete was fully healed within two weeks, but the control concrete stayed cracked.

sciencealert.com/we-finally-kn

Caoimhe

What I’m reading vol. 4

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.