pleatedskirtsteak

[pleatedskirtsteak]

this poem is about being nonbinary.

[pleatedskirtsteak]

Here’s to 2023, a year of as many little courageous kindnesses as possible. ♥️

[pleatedskirtsteak]

I meant to make this meme ages ago when pride month was still on but yeah gé (pronounced gay) is the Irish for a goose.

[pleatedskirtsteak]

if you don't do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

[pleatedskirtsteak]

Thinking about something

[pleatedskirtsteak]

There is a kind of aggrieved entitlement from Gamer Types about any discussion over graphics, but I feel like these types take having a beefy PC to heart instead of realizing part of the complaints about graphics is that they're rewarding behaviors that short change themselves as well.

The discussion isn't about whether or not complex, graphically indulgent games shouldn't be allowed to exist, they always have and they always will, but I think it's telling that a game with hundreds of actors on-screen at once already existed in Rollercoaster Tycoon, which could do that in 1999 by being written almost exclusively in Assembly and being extremely optimized as a result. Granted, doing something like that in a modern game is functionally impossible, but the limitations of hardware meant that really efficient game design could enable a surprising amount of detail and moving parts could be fit into a really compact space.

Now, with hard drive technology being accessible and cheap, and incomprehensible power being relatively inexpensive, you can fit thousands of gigabytes and multiple teraflops into a cheap hard drive and a medium-strength APU, games are enormous in size (100+ GB per game), and very textured without being very big.

Is the equivalent of Rollercoaster Tycoon possible anymore? Not really, games are way too complex and have way too many fancy lighting engines and models to be hand-stitched, but it does mean publishers like EA and Ubisoft can churn graphical powerhouses on a regular basis without bothering to optimize, or account for bad UX decisions. Games could be cleaner, smaller, more efficient, and less bloated, but they don't have to be, so they don't.

Your $4,000 bit-cruncher could be even cooler, look even better, and use less energy if developers had the time to make their games better, but instead, they're forced to crunch, don't have time to optimize, and produce games that look really good by requiring a bunch of power under the hood simply because publishers want to make more, better looking games faster.

In 1969, we landed humans on the mood with computers that were fractions of a fraction of the power of the computer most of us carry daily in our pockets. Now we can barely load a webpage in under 30 seconds despite having the fastest internet ever in history and computers that are doubling in power every handful of years.

Why is it that technology is so much more powerful, but never seems faster? Well, I guess I'd need more than a $500, eighth-of-an opinion to work that one out.

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

[pleatedskirtsteak]

[pleatedskirtsteak]

GUMROAD IS BANNING NSFW CONTENT IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS

I haven't seen anyone talk about this yet, so I might as well.

They've updated their content policy to comply with payment processor Stripe and Paypal's censorhip. They gave 24 hours. On March 16th 2024, Gumroad TOS will no longer allows sales of any written or drawn nsfw content.

This is going to hurt for so many creators. Giving that little time leaves people's source of income wildly unstable, especially with such a huge overhaul of what content is allowed.

I hate this. I hate what censorship is turning the internet into. I hate that nsfw content creators keeo getting pushed to the fringes, that they need to digitally migrate so often, because nowhere can be trusted to allow their art for long.

I don't know what to do next, there isn't some sort of "here's what you can do to help!" People just deserve to know.

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TL;DR: We're looking for English-speaking neopronoun users (aged 18+) to participate in a paid linguistics study.

Hello!

Professor Kirby Conrod from Swarthmore College is recruiting participants for a paid interview study (in-person in Philly or on zoom). Anyone who uses neopronouns for themself, is 18 or older, and is fluent in English is welcome to participate. The study will consist of a casual interview between you and a researcher, a similar interview with a friend of yours, and an exit survey for each of you. Each will receive $15 as compensation for their time.

If you're interested in participating, please fill out this form: (https://forms.gle/YajpkjxGYiwL7RLF6). Filling out this form does not require you to participate; it's just an expression of interest.

Even on Tumblr, neopronoun use is relatively uncommon, so it would be very helpful if folks could reblog this post to help it reach as many neopronoun users as possible.

[pleatedskirtsteak]

I would argue the people who really deify "freedom" in the American sense means freedom from government restriction. Which is to say if you have a lot of money, you can set the rules rather than the government. So if you own a bunch of land, you can say you're allowed to chase people out if they want to camp on it, you aren't forced by the government to allow strangers on it. Ditto for your fruit trees. Your business's wages. Your religion's desire to restrict medications or healthcare treatment.

In short, Americans want to be free to restrict things they can afford from being public goods, be that telecommunication utilities or putting spikes under their overhangs and angular arms on their outdoor benches, or privatizing the 15 acre field they own that they don't do anything with, or keeping them from making an oil pipeline directly through a wildlife sanctuary.

The freedom they want is freedom from the government stopping them from doing things they want to monetize.

Friends don't let friends read Atlas Shrugged

[pleatedskirtsteak]

Games journalism is a fucking road to Golgatha. Lin Codega deserved better. Renata Price deserved better. Jenna Steober deserved better. Ashley Oh deserved better. I could go on and on and on and it wouldn’t come close to bearing witness to the hundreds of brilliant people who were shafted by a wretched industry

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[pleatedskirtsteak]

As long as we're talking about weird sibling texts y'all gotta see this completely unprompted banger my sister sent me the other day.