#Just musing really

[morgana-ren]

Hear me out, hear me out, hear me out--

Pirate Astarion.

Baldur's Gate is his home, but it is a wretched city where the winding streets are filled with horrible memories that haunt his every step and he has seen enough of it for three lifetimes. There is not an alleyway he hasn't stalked nor a tavern he hasn't hunted in. Life is his eternal; why spend it here, where all he need do is look to the upper city wall to see Cazador's stone palace, where he spent the very long worst years of it? His misery will always overshadow his time in the light here-- The umbra is damn near inescapable.

Maybe he meets a pirate at a tavern while he is drowning out his malaise. Maybe he simply stows away on a ship bound for the distant horizon on a whim. Perhaps he gazes out on the dock one evening watching the ships come in and becomes hypnotized by the gentle push and sway of the ocean that stretches on eternally just as he does and realizes he's been thinking far too small. Either way, his destiny clearly doesn't lie here, but perhaps it might across that boundless ocean.

Pirates aren't discerning about the company they keep, and there is no shortage of captains of commerce to feast upon. Maybe one day they'll make port and he'll realize he's found home, or maybe he'll find he has a taste for the captain's quarters, taking as he pleases, amassing wealth beyond measure, bathing in a tidal wave of blood with Umberlee's blessing.

So many foreign flavors to sample, so many beautiful people to indulge in, so much fun to be had. Why become the most powerful man in Baldur's Gate when he can become the most powerful creature to ever sail the ocean?

[saint-augustines-pears]

I was talking to my sister today about whether or not animals can love, and the catholic answer is no, generally. It’s sad, but understandable. Animals can’t understand love and goodness in the same way that we can. Even so, we know that there are material goods that animals do desire, like comfort, health and sustenance. And I know that animals can want that for other beings, which, while maybe it isn’t love, it’s very nice to think of animals wanting the highest good they can comprehend for other creatures.

[thingsarentgood]

Not saying this is necessarily true of Wilmon but its so scary watching how fast a relationship like theirs could become abusive.

Simon was raised to endure. He was parentified since he was young, having to take care of Sara's feelings, his mother's expectations of being the good son, and his father's addiction. He's used to putting up with the behavior of the people he loves because thats what was always expected of him. That's why its sad when he makes himself small for Wille. Hes constantly underatanding and accepting of Wille's increasingly destructive behavior and he takes it with a smile because he had been conditioned to. I understand Wille is a scared kid with a million problems of his own (and also its a tv show that will hopefully end with them reconciling), but its sad how common it is for poc to become white people's emotional punching bag with no expectation for better.

[acertainmoshke]

I’m thinking tonight about the people we know when we’re young and then our paths diverge and we never see them again. What happened to my best friend from when I was 8? The girl I meant to exchange numbers with before we both left the duplex, but never did?

Or the girl I took a parks and rec cross country ski class with. I hated skiing—I was always the smallest and slowest—but she made it worthwhile. I used to bring a notebook and we would pass it back and forth. We were writing a book together. I typed it up later and still have it even though we only got a couple chapters in. I had just read A Patch of Blue, an old book about an abused white blind girl who ends up in an interracial relationship, so of course in our story an abused blind girl ran away from home on her own (we were too young to have an interest in giving her romance). Isabel was a couple years younger than me, and I only knew her for a few months while I had other friends I saw from middle school until graduation, but I have a line in my journal at 13 about how she was my only friend who didn’t make fun of me.

I wonder where she is now. I hope she still likes to write, too.

[digital-meat]

The nuance is that being able to use tools for the wrong thing is kind of what makes them useful. I'm not sure if I'm phrasing that right but the difference is, is it only possible to use it for the right thing, or just no wrong way to use it? Those are opposites.

It's not that you should invent a hammer that only works on nails, it's that when you design a hammer you should make sure the handle is long enough you won't bang your knuckles.

If any part of your plan involves the words "nobody could be that stupid", please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a moment's notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.

[minimirai]

a lot of times I'll write out a message and it'll have a "sorry" in it, but I'll realize a bit afterwards i didn't have anything to say sorry about. I always get super irrationally irritated about it right after too, like, "hey what the fuck, why do I feel sorry, this isn't my problem" or "why am I always the one apologizing in my conversations when there's nothing to apologize for"

its not that important but its time to kill these habits methinks

[nothatsmi]

Cozy TV times, ft. the beanbag chairs and another bottle of whisky

"Neil had all the time in the world, and that left a heat in his gut stronger than any whisky could." (the king's men, last sentence of chapter sixteen)

Did you know the word "whisky" occurs 6 times in aftg, 5 of them being in the kings men.

[swordatsunset]

Oddly enough one of the most meaningful/painful parts of I Saw the TV Glow was when Owen is sitting there, watching the old tapes, someone with a family and an adulthood (or so she tells us), however small and sad that life is, and she tells us how abjectly humiliated she is rewatching them. The cheesiness of the show, its stilted and childish plots, the bad acting and bad visuals and whatever else— Owen is humiliated to have been saved by this bad TV show. And regardless of the fact that I don’t think the Pink Opaque she watches is the actual Pink Opaque that saved her, it tunes into this fascinating and essential part of living dissociated from your actual life and restored/saved/rescued by media, which is the shame of living like this. Yes, this was the thing that helped me survive; it was awful and childish and embarrassing and I can’t believe I survived it, I can’t believe I got through this period with the help of this. It’s so easy, when your life is so small, to be ashamed of your lifelines: it’s so easy to survive and look back and be horrified at how pathetic (however untrue it may be) and pitiable you were, and then, in reaction to that blinding embarrassment, lash out at your former self, try to say how much you’ve moved on (because you’re better now, of course you’re better, you don’t need to be saved by anything, right?). You loved this? The reason you’re alive is because of this? How embarrassing. How sad.

[twolovelyberries]

and now i know how joan of arc felt!

[tinystepsforward]

autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)

I am almost definitely not the right person for this writeup, but I'm closer than most people on here, so here goes! This is all open-source tech drama, and I take my time laying out the context, but the short version is: Matt tried to extort another company, who immediately posted receipts, and now he's refusing to log off again. The long version is... long.

If you don't need software context, scroll down/find the "ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening" heading, or just go read the pink sections. Or look at this PDF.

the background

So. Matt's original Good Idea was starting WordPress with fellow developer Mike Little in 2003, which is free and open-source software (FOSS) that was originally just for blogging, but now powers lots of websites that do other things. In particular, Automattic acquired WooCommerce a long time ago, which is free online store software you can run on WordPress.

FOSS is... interesting. It's a world that ultimately is powered by people who believe deeply that information and resources should be free, but often have massive blind spots (for example, Wikipedia's consistently had issues with bias, since no amount of "anyone can edit" will overcome systemic bias in terms of who has time to edit or is not going to be driven away by the existing contributor culture). As with anything else that people spend thousands of hours doing online, there's drama. As with anything else that's technically free but can be monetized, there are:

Heaps of companies and solo developers who profit off WordPress themes, plugins, hosting, and other services;

Conflicts between volunteer contributors and for-profit contributors;

Annoying founders who get way too much credit for everything the project has become.

the WordPress ecosystem

A project as heavily used as WordPress (some double-digit percentage of the Internet uses WP. I refuse to believe it's the 43% that Matt claims it is, but it's a pretty large chunk) can't survive just on the spare hours of volunteers, especially in an increasingly monetised world where its users demand functional software, are less and less tech or FOSS literate, and its contributors have no fucking time to build things for that userbase.

Matt runs Automattic, which is a privately-traded, for-profit company. The free software is run by the WordPress Foundation, which is technically completely separate (wordpress.org). The main products Automattic offers are WordPress-related: WordPress.com, a host which was designed to be beginner-friendly; Jetpack, a suite of plugins which extend WordPress in a whole bunch of ways that may or may not make sense as one big product; WooCommerce, which I've already mentioned. There's also WordPress VIP, which is the fancy bespoke five-digit-plus option for enterprise customers. And there's Tumblr, if Matt ever succeeds in putting it on WordPress. (Every Tumblr or WordPress dev I know thinks that's fucking ridiculous and impossible. Automattic's hiring for it anyway.)

Automattic devotes a chunk of its employees toward developing Core, which is what people in the WordPress space call WordPress.org, the free software. This is part of an initiative called Five for the Future — 5% of your company's profits off WordPress should go back into making the project better. Many other companies don't do this.

There are lots of other companies in the space. GoDaddy, for example, barely gives back in any way (and also sucks). WP Engine is the company this drama is about. They don't really contribute to Core. They offer relatively expensive WordPress hosting, as well as providing a series of other WordPress-related products like LocalWP (local site development software), Advanced Custom Fields (the easiest way to set up advanced taxonomies and other fields when making new types of posts. If you don't know what this means don't worry about it), etc.

Anyway. Lots of strong personalities. Lots of for-profit companies. Lots of them getting invested in, or bought by, private equity firms.

Matt being Matt, tech being tech

As was said repeatedly when Matt was flipping out about Tumblr, all of the stuff happening at Automattic is pretty normal tech company behaviour. Shit gets worse. People get less for their money. WordPress.com used to be a really good place for people starting out with a website who didn't need "real" WordPress — for $48 a year on the Personal plan, you had really limited features (no plugins or other customisable extensions), but you had a simple website with good SEO that was pretty secure, relatively easy to use, and 24-hour access to Happiness Engineers (HEs for short. Bad job title. This was my job) who could walk you through everything no matter how bad at tech you were. Then Personal plan users got moved from chat to emails only. Emails started being responded to by contractors who didn't know as much as HEs did and certainly didn't get paid half as well. Then came AI, and the mandate for HEs to try to upsell everyone things they didn't necessarily need. (This is the point at which I quit.)

But as was said then as well, most tech CEOs don't publicly get into this kind of shitfight with their users. They're horrid tyrants, but they don't do it this publicly.

ok tony that's enough. tell me what's actually happening

WordCamp US, one of the biggest WordPress industry events of the year, is the backdrop for all this. It just finished.

There are.... a lot of posts by Matt across multiple platforms because, as always, he can't log off. But here's the broad strokes.

Sep 17

Matt publishes a wanky blog post about companies that profit off open source without giving back. It targets a specific company, WP Engine.

Compare the Five For the Future pages from Automattic and WP Engine, two companies that are roughly the same size with revenue in the ballpark of half a billion. These pledges are just a proxy and aren’t perfectly accurate, but as I write this, Automattic has 3,786 hours per week (not even counting me!), and WP Engine has 47 hours. WP Engine has good people, some of whom are listed on that page, but the company is controlled by Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102 billion in assets under management. Silver Lake doesn’t give a dang about your Open Source ideals. It just wants a return on capital. So it’s at this point that I ask everyone in the WordPress community to vote with your wallet. Who are you giving your money to? Someone who’s going to nourish the ecosystem, or someone who’s going to frack every bit of value out of it until it withers?

(It's worth noting here that Automattic is funded in part by BlackRock, who Wikipedia calls "the world's largest asset manager".)

Sep 20 (WCUS final day)

WP Engine puts out a blog post detailing their contributions to WordPress.

Matt devotes his keynote/closing speech to slamming WP Engine.

He also implies people inside WP Engine are sending him information.

For the people sending me stuff from inside companies, please do not do it on your work device. Use a personal phone, Signal with disappearing messages, etc. I have a bunch of journalists happy to connect you with as well. #wcus — Twitter I know private equity and investors can be brutal (read the book Barbarians at the Gate). Please let me know if any employee faces firing or retaliation for speaking up about their company's participation (or lack thereof) in WordPress. We'll make sure it's a big public deal and that you get support. — Tumblr

Matt also puts out an offer live at WordCamp US:

“If anyone of you gets in trouble for speaking up in favor of WordPress and/or open source, reach out to me. I’ll do my best to help you find a new job.” — source tweet, RTed by Matt

He also puts up a poll asking the community if WP Engine should be allowed back at WordCamps.

Sep 21

Matt writes a blog post on the WordPress.org blog (the official project blog!): WP Engine is not WordPress.

He opens this blog post by claiming his mom was confused and thought WP Engine was official.

The blog post goes on about how WP Engine disabled post revisions (which is a pretty normal thing to do when you need to free up some resources), therefore being not "real" WordPress. (As I said earlier, WordPress.com disables most features for Personal and Premium plans. Or whatever those plans are called, they've been renamed like 12 times in the last few years. But that's a different complaint.)

Sep 22: More bullshit on Twitter. Matt makes a Reddit post on r/Wordpress about WP Engine that promptly gets deleted. Writeups start to come out:

Search Engine Journal: WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg Sparks Backlash

TechCrunch: Matt Mullenweg calls WP Engine a ‘cancer to WordPress’ and urges community to switch providers

Sep 23 onward

Okay, time zones mean I can't effectively sequence the rest of this.

Matt defends himself on Reddit, casually mentioning that WP Engine is now suing him.

Also here's a decent writeup from someone involved with the community that may be of interest.

WP Engine drops the full PDF of their cease and desist, which includes screenshots of Matt apparently threatening them via text.

Twitter link | Direct PDF link

This PDF includes some truly fucked texts where Matt appears to be trying to get WP Engine to pay him money unless they want him to tell his audience at WCUS that they're evil.

Matt, after saying he's been sued and can't talk about it, hosts a Twitter Space and talks about it for a couple hours.

He also continues to post on Reddit, Twitter, and on the Core contributor Slack.

Here's a comment where he says WP Engine could have avoided this by paying Automattic 8% of their revenue.

Another, 20 hours ago, where he says he's being downvoted by "trolls, probably WPE employees"

At some point, Matt updates the WordPress Foundation trademark policy. I am 90% sure this was him — it's not legalese and makes no fucking sense to single out WP Engine.

Old text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks and you are free to use it in any way you see fit. New text: The abbreviation “WP” is not covered by the WordPress trademarks, but please don’t use it in a way that confuses people. For example, many people think WP Engine is “WordPress Engine” and officially associated with WordPress, which it’s not. They have never once even donated to the WordPress Foundation, despite making billions of revenue on top of WordPress.

Sep 25: Automattic puts up their own legal response.

anyway this fucking sucks

This is bigger than anything Matt's done before. I'm so worried about my friends who're still there. The internal ramifications have... been not great so far, including that Matt's naturally being extra gung-ho about "you're either for me or against me and if you're against me then don't bother working your two weeks".

Despite everything, I like WordPress. (If you dig into this, you'll see plenty of people commenting about blocks or Gutenberg or React other things they hate. Unlike many of the old FOSSheads, I actually also think Gutenberg/the block editor was a good idea, even if it was poorly implemented.)

I think that the original mission — to make it so anyone can spin up a website that's easy enough to use and blog with — is a good thing. I think, despite all the ways being part of FOSS communities since my early teens has led to all kinds of racist, homophobic and sexual harm for me and for many other people, that free and open-source software is important.

So many people were already burning out of the project. Matt has been doing this for so long that those with long memories can recite all the ways he's wrecked shit back a decade or more. Most of us are exhausted and need to make money to live. The world is worse than it ever was.

Social media sucks worse and worse, and this was a world in which people missed old webrings, old blogs, RSS readers, the world where you curated your own whimsical, unpaid corner of the Internet. I started actually actively using my own WordPress blog this year, and I've really enjoyed it.

And people don't want to deal with any of this.

The thing is, Matt's right about one thing: capital is ruining free open-source software. What he's wrong about is everything else: the idea that WordPress.com isn't enshittifying (or confusing) at a much higher rate than WP Engine, the idea that WP Engine or Silver Lake are the only big players in the field, the notion that he's part of the solution and not part of the problem.

But he's started a battle where there are no winners but the lawyers who get paid to duke it out, and all the volunteers who've survived this long in an ecosystem increasingly dominated by big money are giving up and leaving.

Anyway if you got this far, consider donating to someone on gazafunds.com. It'll take much less time than reading this did.

[niechys]

My hand slipped on this

I use @keferon 's design for obvious reason.

At the end of the day. I like doing manga : P

I swap the dialogue a tiny bit just to get the impact, I guess....

out take under cut

At first I was gonna do the "oh no he's hot" thing. But as I draw I think it's more funny if Aid just say it out loud.

I also still love it that he punch Vortex XDDD

[northstarscowboyhat]

Peepaw Starlo struggles. Autism 2 autism communication struggles.

[lucabyte]

Different standards

[paxcallow]

desire to draw raz's hair unhatted and uncombed spiraled into imagining an extended gag about some emergency situation forcing all of the psychonauts out of the motherlobe into the quarry in their jammies at like 2 am and judging each other's clothing choices instead of getting actual work done.

[hinamie]

binding vow

[khickuwa]

a momentary respite.