#and in order to prove to microsoft that it is really me trying it use it

[meerodi]

trying to go to college next year and currently the biggest hurdle of all of this is just, trying to get into. my fucking school email

[seriously-mike]

What Will Destroy AI Image Generation In Two Years?

You are probably deluding yourself that the answer is some miraculous program that will "stop your art from being stolen" or "destroy the plagiarism engines from within". Well...

NOPE.

I can call such an idea stupid, imbecilic, delusional, ignorant, coprolithically idiotic and/or Plain Fucking Dumb. The thing that will destroy image generation, or more precisely, get the generators shut down is simple and really fucking obvious: it's lack of interest.

Tell me: how many articles about "AI art" have you seen in the media in the last two to three months? How many of them actually hyped the thing and weren't covering lawsuits against Midjourney, OpenAI/Microsoft and/or Stability AI? My guess is zilch. Zero. Fuckin' nada. If anything, people are tired of lame, half-assed if not outright insulting pictures posted by the dozen. The hype is dead. Not even the morons from the corner office are buying it. The magical machine that could replace highly-paid artists doesn't exist, and some desperate hucksters are trying to flog topically relevant AI-generated shots on stock image sites at rock-bottom prices in order to wring any money from prospective suckers. This leads us to another thing.

Centralized Models Will Keel Over First

Yes, Midjourney and DALL-E 3 will be seriously hurt by the lack of attention. Come on, rub those two brain cells together: those things are blackboxed, centralized, running on powerful and very expensive hardware that cost a lot to put together and costs a lot to keep running. Sure, Microsoft has a version of DALL-E 3 publicly accessible for free, but the intent is to bilk the schmucks for $20 monthly and sell them access to GPT-4 as well... well, until it turned out that GPT-4 attracts more schmucks than the servers can handle, so there's a waiting list for that one.

Midjourney costs half that, but it doesn't have the additional draw of having an overengineered chatbot still generating a lot of hype itself. That and MJ interface itself is coprolithically idiotic as well - it relies on a third-party program to communicate with the user, as if that even makes sense. Also, despite the improvements, there are still things that Midjourney is just incapable of, as opposed to DALL-E 3 or SDXL. For example, legible text. So right now, they're stuck with storage costs for the sheer number of half-assed images people generated over the last year or so and haven't deleted.

The recent popularity of "Disney memes" made using DALL-E 3 proved that Midjourney is going out of fashion, which should make you happy, and drew the ire of Disney, what with the "brand tarnishing" and everything, which should make you happier. So the schmucks are coming in, but they're not paying and pissing the House of Mouse off. This means what? Yes, costs. With nothing to show for it. Runtime, storage space, the works, and nobody's paying for the privilege of using the tech.

Pissing On The Candle While The House Burns

Yep, that's what you're doing by cheering for bullshit programs like Glaze and Nightshade. Time to dust off both of your brain cells and rub them together, because I have a riddle for you:

An open-source, client-side, decentralized image generator is targeted by software intended to disrupt it. Who profits?

The answer is: the competition. Congratulations, you chucklefucks. Even if those programs aren't a deniable hatchet job funded by Midjourney, Microsoft or Adobe, they indirectly help those corporations. As of now, nobody can prove that either Glaze or Nightshade actually work against the training algorithms of Midjourney and DALL-E 3, which are - surprise surprise! - classified, proprietary, blackboxed and not available to the fucking public, "data scientists" among them. And if they did work, you'd witness a massive gavel brought down on the whole project, DMCA and similar corporation-protecting copygrift bullshit like accusations of reverse-engineering classified and proprietary software included. Just SLAM! and no Glaze, no Nightshade, no nothing. Keep the lawsuit going until the "data scientists" go broke or give up.

Yep, keep rubbing those brain cells together, I'm not done yet. Stable Diffusion can be run on your own computer, without internet access, as long as you have a data model. You don't need a data center, you don't need a server stack with industrial crypto mining hardware installed, a four-year-old gaming computer will do. You don't pay any fees either. And that's what the corporations who have to pay for their permanently besieged high-cost hardware don't like.

And the data models? You can download them for free. Even if the publicly available websites hosting them go under for some reason, you'll probably be able to torrent them or download them from Mega. You don't need to pay for that either, much to the corporations' dismay.

Also, in case you didn't notice, there's one more problem with the generators scraping everything off the Internet willy-nilly:

AI Is Eating Its Own Shit

You probably heard about "data pollution", or the data models coming apart because if they're even partially trained on previously AI-generated images, the background noise they were created from is fucking with the internal workings of the image generators. This is also true of text models, as someone already noticed by having two instances of ChatGPT talk to each other, they devolve into incomprehensible babble. Of course that incident was first met with FUD on one side and joy on the other, because "OMG AI created their own language!" - nope, dementia. Same goes for already-generated images used to train new models: the semantic segmentation subroutines see stuff that is not recognized by humans and even when inspected and having the description supposedly corrected, that noise gets in the way and fucks up the outcome. See? No need to throw another spanner into the machine, because AI does that fine all by itself (as long as it's run by complete morons).

But wait, there's another argument why those bullshit programs are pointless:

They Already Stole Everything

Do you really think someone's gonna steal your new mediocre drawing of a furry gang bang that you probably traced from vintage porno mag scans? They won't, and they don't need to.

For the last several months, even the basement nerds that keep Stable Diffusion going are merely crossbreeding the old data models, because it's faster. How much data are Midjourney and OpenAI sitting on? I don't exactly know, but my very scientific guess is, a shitload, and they nicked it all a year or two ago anyway.

The amount of raw data means jack shit in relation to how well the generator works. Hell, if you saw the monstrosities spewed forth by StabilityAI LAION default models for Stable Diffusion, that's the best proof: basement nerds had to cut down on the amount of data included in their models, sort the images, edit the automatically generated descriptions to be more precise and/or correct in the first place and introduce some stylistic coherence so the whole thing doesn't go off the rails.

And that doesn't change the fact that the development methodology behind the whole thing, proprietary or open-source, is still "make a large enough hammer". It's brute force and will be until it stops being financially viable. When will it stop being financially viable? When people get bored of getting the same kind of repetitive pedestrian shit over and over. And that means soon. Get real for a moment: the data models contain da Vinci, Rembrandt, van Gogh, and that means jack shit. Any concept you ask for will be technically correct at best, but hardly coherent or well thought-out. You'll get pablum. Sanitized if you're using the centralized corporate models, maybe a little more horny if you're running Stable Diffusion with something trained on porn. But whatever falls out of the machine can't compete with art, for reasons.

[nazmazh]

So, I'm talking with my friends, who are relatively big into Fortnite.

And they're explaining to me what today's update did to the game (me and the one's husband who is likewise not a Fortnite person).

And like, even though I'm not a Fortnite guy, I'm listening to this, and looking at what stuff has been posted to the internet.

And like...

Holy fucking shit.

It sounds like they're aiming to gut the whole core appeal of the game.

We're all just sitting here losing our goddamn minds at everything that apparently got pushed through in the new update.

I can't believe the speed at which Epic is looking to completely shoot themselves in the foot here.

It's like they sat atop their throne, and saw Blizzard/Microsoft, EA, CDPR, Unity, etc., etc. make massive blunders that utterly alienated large chunks of their otherwise passionate fanbases.

And decided that they could do that too! "We should emulate the unpopular moves those guys are making!"

Guns/weapons in the art/assets of your 3rd-person shooter-game where people expressly are being told to kill each other in-game?

Nope. Can't have that.

Not even in personal loading screen images that literally only the user will see.

No, there's no option for "I am 18+, I'm fine if I see this imagery. Here, I can prove this."

No guns in a shooter game. Not even empty holsters.

Borderlands Psycho-Man? Nah that skin's fine.

Michael "I'm from the slasher-movie codifier" Myers? Totally fine.

Funny jellyfish man that has a bandoleer? "FUCKING RESTRICT THAT SHIT IMMEDIATELY!"

Anyway, here's our new licensed character: "Omni-Man, from the famously all-ages property, Invincible!"

They're even locking skins that came out as part of bonus content that was sent out with today's release.

They couldn't even be bothered to fix their own "controversial" art assets before releasing it.

Because that'd be the more reasonable fix, if say, you're committed to this whole "violence bad" thing in your assets. Edit all the models and skins to remove those things, not restrict the content from the users who have sunk time and money into being able to use it.

But no.

They did not do that.

As my friend pointed out - The cornerstone of their legal defense against children playing this game has been "We are aware that there are many children playing our game. However, the game is rated T. You have to have an account to play - You must be of a certain age in order to make an account. Or have a parent give explicit consent to allow you to play despite being under that age. If the child lied about their age, the account must be terminated anyway, because it's invalid. If you gave consent for your child to play without really paying attention to the content, that's on you. At any rate, we have performed our responsibility with regards to child safety."

But... If they're expressly making this game more appealing to children, while still having the rating of T, then... Aren't they themselves actively encouraging children to play their game that is not rated for children? Which kinda invalidates them saying that children should not be playing this game?

And, and! Burying the main mode (well, two mode - Standard Game and Standard Game/No Build) in a sea of uncurated fan/player-made creative mode mods?

Like, it's like they're trying to frame those modes as just another possible experience, instead of like, the core reason people play the game.

Apparently the person in-charge (they got rid a previous creative/content director, if I'm understanding properly) has said something to the effect of "The MetaVerse-type experiences are why people play this game".

Not "They're a big part of the appeal, so we want to see how we can make that better/easier to access."

Just, essentially "This is the only thing we really care about now."

Like, I'm usually pretty skeptical of fanboy-type rage. But, like, nah, I'm all-in with them on this one.

It helps that my design-sensibilities-type-rage is almost never reigned it. This is pure stupidity on many, many levels.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out going forward. Will they realize just how badly they fucked up and revert things? Or will they double-down and lose their entire audience that actually pays for things themselves, and hope that little Timmy raiding mommy and daddy's credit card will be enough to sustain them going forward?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT WEALTH

When we started it, there wasn't any; the few sites you could order from were hand-made objects become store-bought ones—a wire service article whose first sentence is your own ad copy. Every startup that isn't profitable meaning nearly all of them, but none of their software could compete with ours. Most of the disputes I've seen between founders could have been having this idea at the same time, of course, but as far as I can tell it must be hard by how few startups do it. People think that what a business does is make money. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want, not money. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more experts to talk about selling the company to them, we had no experience in business. A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A lot of them try to make relativity strange. In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least by reputation, the level of measurement is more precise than you get from smallness alone.

I don't think there's an answer. Switching to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, be a group. The company that did was RCA, and Farnsworth's reward for his efforts was a decade of patent litigation. Who cares if you could read the minds of the consumers, you'd find these factors were all blurred together. It's rare to get things right the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. I had the misfortune to participate in what amounted to a controlled experiment to prove that. The discoverer is entitled to reply, why didn't you? I know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. When we switch to the point of view of a programmer using any of the languages higher up the power continuum. What were the results of this experiment? It takes an effort of will to push through this and get something released to users.

But these had had literally orders of magnitude less scrutiny. By the end of last year. In fact, nice is not the only way to decide which to call it is by comparison with other startups. What you're doing is business creation. It's a good metaphor because it reminds you that when the audience can communicate with one another. The whole tone is bogus. If you want a potato or a pencil or a place to work. Good does not mean being a pushover. But this is a list of the biggest ideas at Google is going to come up with more. And for the same reason: their performance can be measured. When you hear your call is important to us, please stay on the line, do you think, all you have to know who you should be nice to everyone. Developing new technology is a pain in the ass.

Giotto saw traditional Byzantine madonnas painted according to a formula that had satisfied everyone for centuries, and to lose one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to a lesser extent Britain under the labor governments of the 1960s and early 1970s. They didn't care what language Viaweb was written in, or didn't care, I wanted to keep it. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to, say, Python? For one thing, the official fiction is that you don't realize that. And it can't have been heredity, because it was more valuable, but because it is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. Gas stations? In this case we get three: the NPD Group, the creative director of GQ.

I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them. Their reporters do go out and learn Lisp. It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of consumer gadget. If you do everything the way the average big company does it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to me slightly funny. This bites you twice: in addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation—breaking people's day up into bits too small to measure. Like having more than one founder, one VC, and he'll chase down the implications of what one said to them. Why call an auction site eBay?

When you made mistakes, what caused you to make them. I am much the richer for the operating system FreeBSD, which I'm running on the computer I'm using now, and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers. I never reach them through the Times front page is a list of 5 commands Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy. And God help you if you choose them. There is no shortcut to it. It seems unlikely this is a simple answer to the wrong question. If you have a much greater chance of succeeding. But once you've admitted that one high level language can be more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Another thing blogs and open source have in common is the Web. Salesmen are an exception. The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it. Our startup made software for making online stores.

They want statements with punch, like top ten. When those far removed from the creation of wealth—undergraduates, reporters, politicians—hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to write it first for whatever computer they personally use. Presumably it killed just about 100% of the startups we've funded have had a founder leave. They believe this because it really feels that way to them. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don't make anything physical. For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for them. Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. But you don't need to join a company to do that completely. But more people could do it than do it now. We did it because we want their software to be good. I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them.

And we weren't the only ones they did great things for the companies they fund, why didn't they start them? Microsoft would still have signed the deal. You look at them and you think, all you need is good hackers: if you depend on an oligopoly, you sink into bad habits that are hard to overcome when you suddenly get competition. When my IBM Thinkpad's hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. Few know this, I mean the structure of the calculation. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. If there are three founders and one who was away half the time talking to executives at cell phone companies, trying to arrange deals.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Trevor Blackwell, Ben Horowitz, Justin Kan, Aaron Iba, Robert Morris, Karen Nguyen, and Harj Taggar for the lulz.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The "work ethic" is a dirty trick we play on ourselves

In Nebraska — and elsewhere — the forced-labor camps that some prisoners are sent to have been rebranded. They’re called “Work-Ethic Camps” now, and prisoners do 30–40h/week of hard labor for $1.21/day, interspersed with “intro to business” courses.

As Jamiek McCallum writes in Aeon: “If there was a formula for obliterating the work ethic, giving people undesirable jobs with long hours and barely paying them sounds exactly like it.”

https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-work-ethic-became-a-substitute-for-good-jobs

McCallum is reiterating the thesis of his 2020 book, “Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream,” which presents discourse about work-ethic as “a severe anxiety about a fundamental precept of the American civil religion.”

https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jamie-k-mccallum/worked-over/9781541618343/

Americans fret that a failing work-ethic is symbolic of national decline. Which is weird: hours for all workers rose by 13% between 1975 and 2016, and millennials are more likely than their elders to say “hard work is important to getting ahead.”

https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190685898.001.0001/oso-9780190685898-chapter-4

The white-collar workers who locked down for the pandemic increased their hours worked:

https://hbr.org/2020/07/microsoft-analyzed-data-on-its-newly-remote-workforce

The precarious “essential” workers who risked their lives and stayed on the job contended with irregular schedules and low pay.

We have a “work ethic” problem — but it’s not too little work ethic — it’s too much.

McCallum: “overwork, unstable schedules, and a lack of adequate hours define the paradoxical time signature of the work life today.”

But, McCallum argues, the work ethic doesn’t create the bad working conditions. Rather, we dream up the work ethic to resolve the cognitive dissonance of unsustainable, brutal working conditions.

That’s why surveys show workers who express a preference for shorter hours report satisfaction with their working conditions when their hours get longer — workers don’t “get what they want” so they “want what they get.”

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1162/1088198054084581

This rationalizing of the bruising effects of overwork as the virtuous expression of good morals is essential to capitalism. Capitalism requires that we prove ourselves “worthy” — of food, shelter, education, leisure — by succeeding in the market.

It’s not shocking that a Wisconsin school district is ending free school meals for young children in order to improve their work ethic. If you can’t afford food, you don’t deserve food.

https://www.businessinsider.com/waukesha-school-district-says-free-school-meals-spoil-students-2021-8

The cult of the work ethic is the flipside of the aristocrat’s leisure-as-status-symbol — the use of hobbies and “idleness” as a way to demonstrate your membership in the ruling class — think of preppie chic, with its emphasis on golf- and boating-clothes.

Early capitalists demanded leisure for themselves and hard work for the proletariat — but so did their enemies. Marxists valorized work and workers, creating the worker-hero.

But the left has also always had a pro-leisure/anti work ethic tendency, embodied by the likes of Woody Guthrie, whose “Talking Hard Luck Blues” is a smart and savage assault on the idea that overwork is a virtue.

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/woodyguthrie/talkinghardluckblues.html

I held 125 head of wild horses, put saddles and bridles on more that that

Harnessed some of the craziest, wildest teams in the whole country

I rode 14 loco broncos to a dead standstill and let 42 hound dogs lick me all over

Seven times I was bit by hungry dogs and I was chewed all to pieces by

Water moccasins and rattlesnakes on two separate river bottoms

I chopped and I carried 314 armloads of stove wood, 100 buckets of coal

And I carried a gallon of kerosene 18 miles over the mountains, got lost

Lost a pair of shoes in a mud hole

And I chopped and I weeded 48 rows of short cotton, 13 acres of bad corn

And cut sticker weeds out of 11 back yards

“All on accounta’ cause I wanted to show her that I was a man a I liked to work.”

In “Talking Union,” Guthrie says the point is leisure:

You get shorter hours, better working conditions, vacations with pay, take the kids to the seaside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C13JFv4JfH8

The work ethic hustle hasn’t just robbed us of time for leisure — it’s transformed leisure into a self-Taylorizing time-and-motion hustle. Conquering Disneyland requires a project manager, a spreadsheet and a stopwatch.

https://doctorow.medium.com/disneyland-at-a-stroll-part-vi-62934f35aac1

This is why we call it “late-stage capitalism.” It’s not just precarious workers logging destructively long shifts and losing the leisure time to imagine, dream, love and live — it’s also the 1%, who sometimes pay for the privilege. It’s a system that punishes the winners, albeit less severely than the losers.

McCallum closes his essay with some remarks from Andrew Russell, an inmate at a Nebraskan Work Ethic Camp. Russell worked a series of sub-survival jobs before finding a living wage selling meth, a gruelling job that he worked long hours at before his arrest.

Russell actually escaped from the WEC but was turned in by a friend who needed the reward money, and had to serve an extra year as punishment. He served three years and was released in 2019, having earned “enough money to buy a bus ticket to his parents’ house.”

“I know how to work just fine, been doing it as a kid. What are they trying to prove? I like to work hard, but there’s gotta be a point, so I don’t feel I completely wasted my time. I wanna do real work. What really matters is everything we do outside our jobs to strengthen our community — that’s the real work.”

[autumnblogs]

Day 10: I think the true purpose of this game is to see how many qualifiers we can get to precede the word "self" and still understand what we're talking about

https://homestuck.com/story/1642

I don’t think anyone has said much about Calsprite. There’s not much to be said. I’m pretty sure, based on the Juju rules, that this Lil Cal probably doesn’t count as the real one - supposedly, any version of a Juju from a Doomed Timeline doesn’t count as the real thing? In any case, it’s a very mild comfort that this being isn’t a source of even more power for the already arbitrarily powerful Lord English.

Another thing that I think is interesting to note is that Dave’s use of iPhone technology marks him, in my opinion, as a poseur. While I am by no means advocating against buying from Microsoft’s competitors, but Mac vs. PC is one of those parts of my childhood, and as an actual IT Professional I’ve learned more than a little about the way that they brand themselves and the history of Apple’s struggle for market share - Apple doesn’t advertise its products as computing alternatives, or as productivity software, or whatever - Apple sells a lifestyle. Apple products are styled as the sexier, more cerebral, more artistic, more individualistic alternative to Microsoft’s products, a computer not for the Office Drone but for... well, the Hipster. Hipsters have stopped really being a thing, or at least, nobody calls themselves that any more.

Like the vast majority of subcultures, I suspect the hipster subculture has kind of been swallowed by time, its symbols expropriated by Capitalism, its center hollowed out and its aesthetics packaged for mass production, as the cynical and jaded approach to popular culture of the hipster, along with its more enthusiastic counterpart “the geek” (actually pretty well personified by John!) became more mainstream - both stereotypes are probably a part of Homestuck’s general commentary on fandom. Fandom is something I think Homestuck talks about, but I don’t think it’s something Homestuck is about in quite the same way that it’s about, say, Narratives, or Reproduction.

More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/1643

While Homestuck has been a story that involves some time loops, Act 4 is where it really gets off the ground as an actual Time Travel story. The thing about Time Travel stories, like the thing about Cosmic Horror Stories, is that once a story starts having Time Travel, or Cosmic Horrors in it, it’s that genre forever. This is why DND, for example, is part of a cosmic horror story, because something like 20 years ago, an adventure writer decided that there should be the Far Realm, and now it casts its sticky pall over the rest of the game’s setting.

Homestuck sidesteps this issue largely by involving all of the genres that do this to a story, and just kind of blending them all together into a genre-busting stew. Homestuck is a superhero story. Homestuck is a creation story. Homestuck is a theogony. Homestuck is a cosmic horror story. Homestuck is a time travel story. And so on and so on.

https://homestuck.com/story/1657

And so began one of the greatest partnerships in the history of Paradox Space.

Also of note is that Terezi compares Dave to fire here, not the first or the last bit of symbolism linking him to that element. It’s pretty strongly linked, in general, with The Hero, in kind of the same way that the color Red, and the Sword is in these sorts of things.

Dave fits the Classic Hero Archetype a lot better in a lot of ways than John does, and Bro has been training him for that role since birth. On a much larger scale, Lord English has decreed from his position as the overlord of Paradox Space that Dave is the Hero who should defeat him.

https://homestuck.com/story/1663

Friendship proves once again to be one of the most powerful forces in the universe, changing John’s direction, and steering him away from disaster.

https://homestuck.com/story/1667

Not much to say about this conversation, but the transition between Karkat’s explanation of the Veil and the beginning of [S]Jack: Ascend is smooth as fuck.

https://homestuck.com/story/1670

Our very first self-indulgent author self-insert; the Fourth Wall is explicitly identified as a Fenestrated Plane. 1 Point for the Narrative Contrivance hypothesis.

https://homestuck.com/story/1692

Dave actually does care immensely. Not only does he spend a ton of his time being overshadowed by cooler more powerful men like Bro, and John, now Dave even has to spend his time being overshadowed by cooler versions of himself - and that goes in both directions - both Davesprite and Dave seem to think that the other is the more real, more cool Dave!

https://homestuck.com/story/1710

As a Light Player, Rose is preoccupied with Meaning. She sees it everywhere, and she certainly sees where it is not (at least when she is not Miserable with a capital M). Meaning and Value - Fortune - is not intrinsic to this item, but it is instead bestowed upon it by the fact that Rose loves it, and by the work that Rose put into it. The Rabbit is a labor of love and a treasured belonging, and the Love in the Rabbit is the Light that the Seer Sees.

https://homestuck.com/story/1714

I’m pretty sure that John and Kanaya only talk to each other about twice in all of Homestuck, which is a bit of a shame! John and Karkat are really a lot more alike each other than either of them is comfortable admitting (which I think is probably why Dave is attracted to Karkat). By the transitive law of friendship, it seems to me that John and Kanaya would probably be pretty good friends. On the subject of the other diagonal line in the quadrangle of friendship, I wonder if Rose and Karkat talk to each other pretty much ever?

https://homestuck.com/story/1715

The clear indication here is a parallel between Dave and Sollux, but like a lot of things that probably didn’t go as intended with the Trolls, nothing much ends up materializing from it. I suppose that by fucking off to do nothing for the rest of the adventure, Sollux gets to live Dave’s dream for him, so there’s that.

https://homestuck.com/story/1720

Adorable. This is one of the happiest little moments in the comic.

So often, characters are cut off from one another by moments. They just miss each other, or literally can’t understand each other because of supernatural shenanigans, or can’t communicate with each other on screen because of the way that communication can’t happen unmediated in Homestuck.

And even when they can talk to each other, often the awkwardness and pain of communicating with other people, of trying to get them to understand you the way you actually are, instead of only seeing you one certain way, is too great, and communication proves impossible.

But here, Rose and Dave don’t need words to hang out.

They shut up and jam.

(It’s also incredibly sweet that Rose‘s actual in-person esteem of Dave is so great that she cannot restrain her own thought process. For all her joshing, she really does think Dave is cool.)

https://homestuck.com/story/1722

Also incredibly sweet that Rose’s first order of business as soon as they’re done playing around is to destroy that goddamn puppet.

https://homestuck.com/story/1754

Just missed him.

https://homestuck.com/story/1775

I wish not to contemplate the implication that Homestuck Sprite Mode Legs are actually wafer thin.

https://homestuck.com/story/1812

Nearly as soon as Rose has awoken and absorbed herself from the Doomed Timeline, she gets down to business alchemizing a lot of dangerous and powerful artifacts in preparation to fuck shit up. I’ve never thought about it much before, but I think it’s not hard to say that the memories she absorbed from the other timeline cause Rose to embrace her more reckless and less charitable side. She comments on her own dangerous pursuit of power, and then immediately ignores that train of thought.

https://homestuck.com/story/1836

Dave sure is fixated on bottoms.

https://homestuck.com/story/1852

Note to self. Come back to this.

So far, the only thing of note is the number 12, a portent related to the victors of Homestuck, if only coincidentally.

https://homestuck.com/story/1857

Dave’s sincerity senses are tingling. Maybe it’s an instinct since he and Roxy are pretty similar people, maybe it’s just because Dave himself is not nearly as insincere as he wants to be.

Dave’s anxiety about being watched is also probably best exemplified by his insistence on hiding his eyes behind glasses.

https://homestuck.com/story/1887

Adorable!

I wonder if Andrew already had the sprite designs for these squirts, and their names picked out at this time.

The hair and accessories are certainly correct.

https://homestuck.com/story/1895

Before I get too much further into this sequence, I’d like to pause and take a second to just appreciate this prose. The style is captivating.

The shipping pun is also pretty good.

https://homestuck.com/story/1903

BladeKindEyeWear has already done a pretty good job explaining what the Ultimate Riddle is, so I won’t belabor it too much more than he has here. The Ultimate Riddle itself is, “What Will You Do?” And the answer to it is, “Do What You Will.”

Do What You Will isn’t just the inscription on AURYN, it’s also an extremely old phrase intended for spiritual enlightenment, historically first formulated by Saint Augustine in his Sermon On Love, where he puts it thusly, “Love, and Do What You Will.” The Love that Augustine is talking about is not Romantic Love or even familial love, but Universal Unconditional Love - goodwill toward everyone and everything, to have one’s Heart’s Desire be that everyone should flourish and be happy.

Another formulation, the Wiccan Rede is, “An It Harm None, Do What Ye Will,” perhaps a more detached, declaration. In either case, the Will here is not talking about merely chasing simple wants, but an invitation to follow one’s true will, not to respond to simple passions, but to take voluntary action in accordance with who one is as a person.

https://homestuck.com/story/1905

threatening.............

https://homestuck.com/story/1922

Jake Harley begins a life of serial abandonment.

https://homestuck.com/story/1930

I really should have brought this up first when Rose and Davesprite went back into time, but this is about the time Homestuck starts to get lousy with all kinds of alternate selves, Dream Selves, Doomed Selves, and so on and so on, and from a narrative frame of reference, they’re actually all literally the same guy - the actions of one version of a character inform us about all versions of that character.

More on that later.

https://homestuck.com/story/1931

More Roleplaying. John has a wild imagine spot.

https://homestuck.com/story/1934

Dave stares at the blood on his hands, and contemplates his death for a long time.

https://homestuck.com/story/1936

Some immediate foreshadowing in here. Jade, I’m pretty sure, is one of the few people in Tavros’ life who shows him some genuine unconditional friendliness, so it’s no wonder that he latches onto her.

The way he does is still pretty creepy though.

https://homestuck.com/story/1940

As long as I’m mostly focusing on the emotional dimension of Homestuck, the two major emotional beats in this Flash are the Sovereign Slayer slaughtering WV’s army, revealing the source of his self-loathing and trauma, and the death of Jade’s Dream Self.

The death of her Dream Self is not nearly the beginning of Jade’s Trauma Conga Line, but it’s definitely the first in the chain of events that leads her to finally snap out of her learned helplessness and blind optimism, and to start taking her fate into her own hands. She’s been so sure of her destiny up to this point, and now things are finally starting to get out of hand.

Also, I choose to believe that the bizarre Squiddles interlude is the first moment that the Dark Gods make contact with Jade’s psyche. They know she’s about to die, and they’re starting to communicate with her.

Anyway, that’s all for today.

Yesterday’s cough turned out to be post-viral infection, since I had Covid the week of the 11th, so for now this is Cam signing off, Medicated, and Not Alone.

[delimeful]

the shapes in the silence (8)

warnings: deceit (morally ambiguous), lying, arguing, negative thinking(lots)

Chapter 8

Apparently, ‘longest nap of his life’ meant three hours, because that was all he got before Patton came knocking gently on his door, snapping him out of a hazy nightmare in a cold sweat.

“Hey, kiddo!” He greeted, eyes suspiciously bright. Ugh, morning people. “We’re having a house meeting!” 

“A what?” Virgil responded automatically. He, of course, knew what a house meeting was, but- “You’ve never invited me to one of these before.” 

Patton had the grace to look sheepish. “Well, we don’t have them very often, and you didn’t… really want to talk to us last time we had one!” 

Oh yeah. He’d been absolutely certain it had only been an excuse for them to all complain about him suddenly ‘moving in’, so to speak. It’d taken actually eavesdropping before he realized it was actually an argument over who kept stealing Logan’s jam. He was fairly sure Roman had only passed up on accusing the new ‘unfriendly neighborhood Dark Side’ because he was the actual culprit. 

“...Sure, okay.”

He followed Patton downstairs, and found the others sitting already in their customary spots on the couch. Out of habit, he stepped towards the spot he normally sat as ‘Puff’, before remembering himself at a slight look of surprise from (still normal-sized) Roman. He propped himself up against the wall closest to Logan’s chair, not in the mood to loom menacingly by anyone who might be perturbed by it.  

As expected, Logan ignored him completely. “Good. Now that we are all here, I believe we should address the situation regarding Roman’s recent shrinking episode.” 

“Did you figure something out, Microsoft Nerd?” Roman asked, leaning forwards slightly. Virgil wondered how the nicknames had such little bite when they were directed at anyone but him.

Logan glanced at Virgil, but upon seeing no question about the situation in his expression, simply continued. “Currently, my hypothesis is that this size reduction happens to us due to the fact that we are incorporeal manifestations of a personality. For example, things like feeling overwhelmed or vulnerable might cause us to involuntarily shapeshift as a mechanism to protect Thomas or ourselves.” 

He flipped a few pages in his notebook. “I believe that is why access to our normal functions is limited whilst in the reduced form, as well, which is highly inconvenient.”

That would really stress Virgil out if he hadn’t already mastered the art of driving himself into the exact mental state needed to trigger his transformation either way. 

“As such,” Logan continued, “we need more information in order to find a solution. I believe Roman can help me test this hypothesis by focusing on aforementioned overwhelming thoughts to see if he can activate this reaction at will.” 

“What? Why me?” Roman protested immediately. “Why don’t you do it, Specs?” 

Logan gave him a condescending look. “Because I have no feelings, obviously. You are the only one we know of showing this symptom, anyhow. Our control group, so to speak.” 

Roman groaned, and for a moment, his gaze flicked to where Virgil was standing, wishing he was in bed as they talked about stuff he already knew. He straightened up a bit, narrowing his eyes back at Roman. What?

The creative side pulled his eyes away without giving him any sort of answer, but Logan hadn’t missed the byplay either. He stared between the two of them for a moment. Patton blinked at all of them mutually, lost in the silent stare off. Slowly, Logan leaned back. 

“If you’d prefer to do this at a later time-” He started, but Roman cut him off. 

“No, it’s fine.” He stared at Virgil like he was trying to convey something meaningful with the words. Virgil stared back, catching exactly none of it.

A moment and a flash later, Roman was sitting on the couch, doll-sized. Patton made the ‘oh no, cute!’ face again, and Virgil couldn’t help but stare. He was so… small. He couldn’t believe Roman had let him pick him up at all, so much could have gone wrong- 

“Oh, it worked!” Roman said, surprised. Logan hummed consideringly, already deep in thoughts he didn’t bother to share with the rest of them. 

“Can you turn back?” Virgil asked, voice sardonic. Roman scowled imperiously at him, but very noticeably did not get any bigger. 

“That part… appears to be more complicated.”

“Maybe try thinking about the opposite of what got you that size!” Patton offered, Logan nodding in agreement. 

Roman didn’t seem as easily convinced, but he did close his eyes and make an expression of thinking very hard for a few moments. Virgil took the opportunity to go make himself a bagel. It went perfectly up until the toasted bagel popped up loudly, and Roman groaned, presumably at his concentration being broken. 

“Anxiety.”

“What?” He responded through a mouthful of crunchy bread. “I’m hungry, I don’t have to watch you focus. You always figure it out eventually.” 

It was definitely meant to be delivered dismissively, but a second later there was a loud clatter from the lounge. Virgil poked his head around the corner. Roman was full-sized again, and had knocked a cup off the table in the process. He squinted at the startled creative side for a second. This was the second time in a row that had happened after he’d spoken.

Was Roman fucking with him? 

… No, Princey was too clueless for that. It was probably just coincidence.

Logan had taken it all in stride, turning to Patton and asking him to replicate Roman’s feat. Virgil took the opportunity to steal some of Logan’s Crofters and smear it over the other half of his bagel. Petty crimes. 

Once he re-emerged, Patton was still the same size, midway through an apology for not being able to manage it. 

“It’s quite alright, I have plenty of new information to look through. Oh, and Anxiety?” Logan called out, making him freeze where he was three steps up the stairs already. Could he seriously smell jam like a hunting dog? 

“Have you experienced anything like this before?” Logan asked, and everyone’s gaze turned to him.

Great, it wasn’t about the jam. It was so much worse. There was no getting out of it this time.

“No.” He answered bluntly, and ignored the way the lie tasted sour in his mouth. “I haven’t.” 

He looked away before he could see the mistrust form in their eyes, and retreated to his room. He hated lying to them, partially because it felt awful, wondering how and when they’d find out his untruths, but also because the more Virgil lied, the better of a grasp he got on the situation.

As such, it was almost unsurprising when he opened his door and found Deceit, standing in the middle of his room and eyeing his messy floor with distaste. He still felt his heart jump, though, looking over his shoulder as though the others would have trailed after him to witness the impromptu meeting. He slammed his door shut after him, already scowling darkly.

“What are you doing in my room.” He asked, flatly. Deceit gave him a deeply patronizing look. 

“Oh, because I can totally just stand around in the plain sight waiting for you to get back from your little get-together. That definitely wouldn’t get me harassed by those naive idiots.” 

Virgil gritted his teeth at the insult, voice coming out sharp. “I’m the one being harassed. I told you to leave me alone. Get. Out.”

Deceit raised an eyebrow. “Like you weren’t practically calling my name with all the lying you’ve been doing. Obviously, you know that even just hiding the truth counts as a lie. You’re clearly doing much better than a liar like me.” 

“Shut up.” Virgil snarled, the shadows in his room curling around his feet. He clenched his fists, ignoring the feel of nails biting into his palms. “You’re just sour that Thomas still hasn’t noticed you, even after I split off and proved that Dark Sides can appear to him.” 

“Oh, you’re so right. It’s not like I want to keep helping him without needing all that attention or anything.” Deceit smiled smugly, as Virgil worked his jaw. “You can’t play the villain forever, Thomas won’t still hate you and get hurt because of it. I’m much worse off, helping keep him safe by keeping him in the dark.”

“I don’t care if he hates me.” Virgil returned, ignoring the way Deceit’s lips thinned knowingly. “Thomas needs his friends, needs people, and if he goes down the road you want him to take, he’ll be alone and hated his whole life, and he won’t even know why.” 

“Virgil, you’re the farthest thing from a hypocrite I’ve ever met.” Deceit offered, saccharine-sweet. “After all, you certainly wouldn’t know anything about being alone and hated, now would you?”   

“Yeah, it’s my job.” He spat, furious. “I’m supposed to keep Thomas from feeling the way I feel preemptively, genius.” 

He took a deep breath, trying to prevent his voice from slipping. “I knew what I was getting into when I revealed myself. Maybe you should focus more on your own role instead of nosing into my business.”

Deceit’s eyes narrowed slightly with irritation. “Yes, I’m definitely the one slinking about where I don’t belong. You’d never take advantage of someone’s trust under false pretenses, after all.”  

Virgil bit into his tongue hard enough to make it bleed. Deceit smirked, as though he’d never been irritated at all. After a moment, the look smoothed over into something more contemplative.

“You are so obsessed with Thomas upholding society’s standards, so afraid of him becoming a bad person. But you don’t have anything to worry about. After all, you’re a reflection of him, and you’re so very selfless, aren’t you?”  

Virgil recoiled as though struck, but there was no victory in the other side’s expression. 

“You made the right choice. The others will accept you when you’re exposed. You won’t regret it.”

With that final condemnation, he sunk away, and Virgil was left alone with the silence ringing in his ears. He hated fighting with Deceit, hated that the man wasn’t above tearing at sensitive spots to get his own point across, hated the raw, cut-open feeling that came with it. 

Most of all, he hated that Deceit was right. 

He was just using the others, lying to them to assuage his own pathetic loneliness. He’d made his choice, he’d known he’d be surrounded by people who didn’t want him there. He’d known, he’d known, and it still never got easier.

The transformation was at the edge of his senses, only a grasp from shifting him, and for a moment he entertained the thought of letting it happen. Running back to them, curling up in the presence of Thomas’ best attributes until Deceit’s words were barely even whispers in the back of his mind… 

Something clicked in the subconscious, and he let the errant dream go, sinking onto his bed. Thomas was making another video, and though it didn’t seem like he was going to be summoned this time, he still had work to do. He pulled up a screen of the scene through Thomas’s eyes, attention catching on every possible minor flaw, predicting the audience’s every possible reaction, determined to make the editing process hell so that only the best of Thomas was shown. 

That was his job, after all.

[audreycj-things]

[𝓫𝓵𝓸𝓰 𝓽𝔀𝓸]   My Top Five I.T. Career Choices

Are you a current or aspiring student of the information technology department? Are you having trouble with what job to take once you’ve completed your four years of torture college? If that’s two yeses, you’re in luck because in this blog post, I’ll be sharing with you the possible careers I’m considering on taking after I graduate.

But before that, let me share with you how I became a part of the Computer Studies department in the first place!

A Back Story of My Career Dilemmas  

Roughly three years ago, upon approaching my senior high school years, I was dead set on taking the path towards becoming a lawyer. Hence, I enrolled under the Humanities and Social Sciences strand. (I no longer remember why I wanted to take up law though.) A few self-evaluations later, I realized I wanted to become a medical professional, specifically a neurosurgeon. I can attribute this to familial expectations, the many Korean dramas I watched, and my desire to improve the country’s healthcare system, to help people, and to be one of the few doctors with nice handwriting. And so, I shifted to the STEM strand up until I graduated.  

During my last few months in senior high, I underwent personal dilemmas on what I really wanted. Amidst my extended family’s career expectations for me, my wise mother constantly reminded me the reality of medical professionals’ work. She emphasized the importance of your college program being a product of your own choice rather than everyone else’s expectations. And so, I was no longer sure of what program to take in college. At this point, I was already panicking, especially after seeing how confident my peers were with what career they had in mind. All I knew is that I was completely clueless of what to become and that I am a fairly versatile individual who always tries her best in whatever situation and opportunity she’s thrown in. (I’m known to be a jack-of-all-trades type of person.)

Seeing my struggle, my mom recommended me to consider the I.T. field. As a college professor and her university’s official representative to local and international seminars, she has witnessed and understood the potential and significance of professions under this field. Although hesitant at first—mostly because I haven’t been too exposed to opportunities that allow me to acquire advanced computer-related  skills (not including the ones I learned in my basic education’s computer classes)— I gave her suggestion some thought and decided that I shall take up the challenge.

And so, here I am, enrolled as a Computer Science student in the tech savvy Malayan Colleges Mindanao.

My Top Five I.T. Career Choices

Before anything else, allow me to explain briefly about the I.T. field that I plan to be a part of. This is for you to be able to catch up with what I’m trying to say, especially since there are going to be various technical terms from here on. And who knows? I might spark your interest in giving this career path a try!

According to Computer Science Online, the information technology industry operates across a range of industries, such as healthcare, finance, education, and entertainment. Broadly, information technology can be defined as the use of computing via various components (e.g. hardware, services, software) to develop, manage, transform, share and store information in different forms. Careers in information technology deal with the design, creation, management, and maintenance of the varied components of the system, including software, hardware, networks, systems integration, and multimedia.

     [1]   COMPUTER PROGRAMMER

The number one thing that I absolutely want to become is to be a computer programmer.

Following Technopedia’s definition, a computer programmer is a skilled professional who codes, tests, debugs, and maintains the comprehensive instructions known as computer programs that devices should follow to execute their functions. Computer programmers also conceptualize, design, and test logical structures to solve computer issues. Programmers make use of specific computer languages like C, C++, Java, PHP, .NET, etc. to convert the program designs developed by software developers or system architects into instructions that the computer could follow. They often refer to code libraries for simplifying their coding and might build or make use of computer-aided software tools to automate the coding.

I’ve always been awestruck of how coding works. It amazes me how a series of words and symbols arranged in a definite order will result to apps, websites, and other various software—even this word document I’m using under Microsoft Office! It’s surreal how each element of this software functions in such a smart and creative manner, especially when you know it as merely words and symbols in its raw form. I want to be able to do this by developing and learning all the knowledge and skills a good programmer should possess. Afterall, one should aim for excellence first; success will follow.

     [2]   SOFTWARE DEVELOPER

Another career that I would love to have is to be a software developer. 

According to CollegeGrad, software developers are the creative minds behind computer programs. Some develop the applications that allow people to do specific tasks on a computer or another device. Others develop the underlying systems that run the devices or that control networks. Software developers oversee the entire development process for a software program, including testing and maintenance. They design the program and then give instructions to programmers, who write computer code and test it.

Admittedly, I prefer doing the back-end job of a programmer. I don’t really love leading a team in a somewhat creativity-based project. However, the idea of initiating and facilitating the coming-to-life process of a computer program seems incredibly fulfilling. If ever I do become a software developer, I would probably create a computer program that will be of use to hospitals and schools. In fact, my mother encourages me to consider developing an enrollment system someday. No pressure.

     [3]   DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR

My third option is to become a database administrator.

According to Learn How to Become and Wikipedia, database administrators are responsible for establishing databases for organizations in all sectors of the economy in accordance with their specific needs in order to ensure that data is readily accessible for efficient and effective use by anyone with permission to use it. They use specialized software to store and organize data. Their role may include capacity planning, installation, configuration, database design, migration, performance monitoring, security, troubleshooting, as well as backup and data recovery.

A database administrator’s job appeals to my perfectionism. The idea of being in-charge of keeping everything organized is a huge but ultimately fulfilling challenge.  

     [4]   CYBER SECURITY CONSULTANT

Another career I have in mind is to be a cyber security consultant.

Top Universities emphasizes that maintaining cyber security in the modern world has become increasingly important, so a cyber security consultant’s role focuses on understanding the risks to the security of information or data. I would have to analyze where security breaches may occur or have occurred, and restore or reinforce systems against such breaches, to ensure that confidential data is protected. This role could include ‘ethical hacking’, meaning deliberately attempting to hack into my employer’s network to expose any weaknesses. Alternatively, I could work as a computer forensics analyst or investigator to combat the increasing phenomenon of cyber-crime.

I can attribute my attractions towards this career to the movies I’ve watched that portray hacking (or anything of the sort) to be cool. In several action movies, I always felt excited when seeing characters getting out of a tight, life-and-death situation with their cyber security-related skills. Although now I know that there’s more to this job than hacking—which they only do for testing reasons, otherwise it would be a crime—it still appeals to that part of my self that craves for thrill. In hindsight, the chances of coming across serious cyber security situations (like a government cyber security breach) here in the Philippines is quite low compared to other countries, so I guess my thrill-seeking self won’t be too satisfied if I work locally.

     [5]   GAME DEVELOPER

My last and fifth career choice is to become a game developer.

According to Top Universities, game developers produce games for personal computers, games consoles, social/online games, arcade games, tablets, mobile phones, and other handheld devices. This role splits into two main parts. First, there’s the creative side of designing a game and dealing with the art, animation, and storyboarding. Second, there’s the programming side, using programming languages such as C++.

I fit into the second part of developing game—the programming part. Although I’d rather invest on computer programs that are of use to the community, helping create a game seems like a fun way to apply coding. In hindsight, games are not just limited to the “fun” aspect because they offer more benefits than entertainment, so I guess I’m still helping the community in a way. I play games myself, especially the MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game called League of Legends. I understand and have experienced that one can learn, acquire, and hone skills (like strategy planning, enhanced reflexes, analysis) from playing games, especially complex ones. Furthermore, one can create and maintain friendships with games, as well as improve their self-confidence.

OVERALL...

Computer programmer, software developer, database administrator, cyber security consultant, game developer… whatever my career will be, I hope I’ll love what I’ll do and contribute something to the betterment of the community.

I also hope to prove some family members wrong about IT-related jobs being insignificant, that graduates under this program just “end up in computer shops.” While managing and maintaining a computer shop is a noble job, there’s so much more to the professions under I.T. that are constantly being overlooked and taken for granted. We are literally living in the digital age, yet many people still don’t appreciate this field enough. Hopefully, I’ll be able to enlighten and inspire people to try this career path and be a part of the tech savvy community.

Wish me luck in my journey!

[robhorninginternalexile]

pleasure and protest

An essay about Covid-19 and the quarantine by Paul Preciado, published in early May in Artforum, concludes with a remarkably prescient sentiment:

It is imperative to modify the relationship between our bodies and biovigilant machines of biocontrol: They are not only communication devices. We must learn collectively to alter them. We must also learn to de-alienate ourselves. Governments are calling for confinement and telecommuting. We know they are calling for de-collectivization and telecontrol. Let us use the time and strength of confinement to study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now. Let us turn off our cell phones, let us disconnect from the internet. Let us stage a big blackout against the satellites observing us, and let us consider the coming revolution together. 

When I first read it a month ago, it seemed far-fetched to me. It struck me as the kind of tacked-on rallying-cry conclusion that many critical essays end with, sounding a note of hope when their critique otherwise suggests the futility of resistance. But now it seems as though ”the time and strength of confinement” has actually turned into a surprisingly broad commitment to “study the tradition of struggle and resistance among racial and sexual minority cultures that have helped us survive until now” for those thousands of people now joining protests whose tone has been set and adopted from Black Lives Matter and other police- and prison-abolition movements. It can appear as though the “coming revolution” has indeed come, and de-alienation is taking place night after night in the streets.  

But that development doesn’t seem to have followed from Preciado’s plea that we “turn off our cell phones” and "disconnect from the Internet.” The uprising is not currently shaping up as a unified resistance to technology; rather it has manifested as a collective rejection of racist policing and all the societal manifestations of structural racism more broadly. That’s not to say that contemporary technology is not deeply implicated in sustaining and extending racism. The webs of surveillance it facilitates makes possible not only the old forms of discrimination and targeted oppression but new forms of embedded, infrastructural racism, whether that is a matter of the racist search results Safiya Umoja Noble details in Algorithms of Oppression, the systematic misidentifications of facial recognition technology that Joy Buolamwini has detailed, or the ways race is encoded and reified and leveraged, as Ruha Benjamin outlines in Race After Technology. Day after day, Chris Gilliard’s Twitter feed documents the tech industry’s complicity in structural discrimination and racist policing. Especially egregious are “neighborhood watch” platforms like Nextdoor, which are vectors for racist intimidation, and surveillance systems like Amazon’s Ring, which have proliferated through the company’s partnerships with police departments. 

So Preciado’s implied sequence of events seems backward: Our relationship to “biovigilant machines of biocontrol” — a.k.a. phones — begins to change when our relationship to resistance and liberation struggles changes first. (And then changes in relationships to technology feed into protest tactics and strategy, and so on.) 

For now, tech companies seem like they are on the defensive: For instance, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon have been pushed (thanks in part to the researchers cited here) to abandon their development of facial recognition technology or temporarily halt its sale to police departments. Some workers at companies like Facebook have questioned their roles in fomenting fascism and racism. Yet it is also easy to imagine that tech companies will try to capitalize on any progress toward police abolition by proposing as alternatives its surveillance-driven forms of predictive policing and pre-emptive discrimination (like “cashless stores” which effectively prescreen customers, and other tech-driven forms of “targeting” that allow businesses to shop for customers). All the many forms of algorithmic screening will likely be touted as useful planks in efforts to “defund the police” by automating the police’s current function of enforcing modes of segregation and unevenly distributed economic exploitation. In Cloud Ethics, Louise Amoore details how companies have tried to sell AI tools to police departments that would, for instance, anticipate protests or identify targets for ICE by scanning social media and other forms of location data and network activity. These tools are marketed as police aids but they could be repositioned as automating the police away. Of course, this would not solve the problems presented by policing, but encode them in systems that would be just as impervious to change, abetted by the false sense of computational neutrality.  

It will likely require sustained protest and pressure to prevent tech companies from putting forward their usual methods (datafication, surveillance, solutionism, regulatory capture) that their business models demand. “Decollectivization and telecontrol” will certainly be attempted to contain the protests, even if they did not necessarily spark them.

In part, Preciado’s essay focuses on ideas of immunization as protection, as exemption from risks others are made to bear, and how these kinds of exclusions become the basis for communities. "The management of epidemics stages an idea of community, reveals a society’s immunitary fantasies, and exposes sovereignty’s dreams of omnipotence—and its impotence,“ he writes. (This makes me think now of the “qualified immunity” that U.S. police are granted to protect them from legal accountability for their actions, as well as how Nextdoor permits neighborhoods to defend their whiteness.) 

Epidemics are “sociopolitical constructions rather than strictly biological phenomena.” They don’t unfold according to some script dictated by a virus’s level of contagiousness; they enter into existing social relations and present an occasion for their rearticulation. Thus, Preciado argues, “the virus actually reproduces, materializes, widens, and intensifies (from the individual body to the population as a whole) the dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management that were already operating over sexual, racial, or migrant minorities before the state of exception.” With Coivd-19, this is evident in the how white people have been disproportionately less affected, an index of their relative privilege. The refusal among white people to wear masks reflects and celebrates this privilege as well, which helps explain why health officials who recommend masking have been harassed and threatened by white mobs.   

Similarly, “cures” for diseases don’t proceed inevitably to those who need them; they aren’t distributed any more evenly than power, wealth, or opportunity. They too must first reannounce the existing power relations, which delineate who deserves to become “well” or immune and who should be lastingly pathologized. (If a cure threatened existing power relations, those in power  would seek to suppress it.)

For Preciado, the social course of pandemics and “cures” reflect the more general logic of “pharmacopornographic” forms of control — “microprosthetic and media-cybernetic control” administered through communication technology and pharmaceuticals, visual and literal stimulants. As Foucault  argued about power generally, these mechanisms of control are experienced not as restrictive but as subjectivity-granting, an expansion of pleasurable possibilities that secure the subjects’ assent. Preciado writes: “These management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.” 

I’m often tempted by this line of analysis to treat all forms of pleasure with suspicion — anything proposed as “fun” is probably a thinly disguised form of social control, enjoyment of which establishes just how much my psyche has already been formatted by the apparatus of domination. It then follows that anything that makes me uncomfortable proves I’m engaging in a form of resistance. But that unsustainable line of thinking leads nowhere. The point is not to demonize pleasure but to explicitly politicize it, to engage in political practices that sustain a different kind of subjectivity that enjoys other kinds of joy. In this conversation with Zoé Samudzi, Vicky Osterweil explains:

One of the things that scares police and politicians the most when they enter a riot zone — and there are quotes from across the 20th century of police and politicians saying this — is that it was happy: Everyone was happy ... The playwright Charles Fuller, who happened to be a young man starting out his career during the Philadelphia riots of 1964 ... talks about the incredible sense of safety and joy and carnival that happens in the streets.

I think riots and militant violent action in general get slandered as being macho and bro-y, and lots of our male comrades like to project that sort of image. That definitely happens, but I actually think riots are incredibly femme. Riots are really emotive, an emotional way of expressing yourself. It is about pleasure and social reproduction. You care for one another by getting rid of the thing that makes that impossible, which is the police and property. You attack the thing that makes caring impossible in order to have things for free, to share pleasure on the street. Obviously, riots are not the revolution in and of themselves. But they gesture toward the world to come, where the streets are spaces where we are free to be happy, and be with each other, and care for each other.

This is the obverse of the pleasure in consumption and individuation that Preciado describes, which in his analysis is anchored in the technologies that allow us to consume in physical isolation at home like would-be Hugh Hefners in our multimedia-enabled “soft prisons,” adrift in a fantasy of dematerialized insubstantiation. 

The subjects of the neoliberal technical-patriarchal societies that Covid-19 is in the midst of creating do not have skin; they are untouchable; they do not have hands. They do not exchange physical goods, nor do they pay with money. They are digital consumers equipped with credit cards. They do not have lips or tongues. They do not speak directly; they leave a voice mail. They do not gather together and they do not collectivize. They are radically un-dividual. They do not have faces; they have masks.  

There seems to be a lot of fetishization of “real” communication implied here — again as if digital communication were the main obstacle preventing people from collectivizing their bodies for revolution. But the protests now seem to suggest that while consumerism may have been an obstacle (i.e. the right-wing talking point that the protests are popular because people can’t go shopping), digital technology, which many have been leaning on and living through more than ever under lockdown conditions, hasn’t been, at least not yet, and not in the ways Preciado is suggesting. 

The threat posed by technology is not so much that it prevents people from having “real” encounters but that it can facilitate such encounters on terms that are already fully contained — imagine, for example, protests operating only within parameters deemed acceptable in advance by machine-learning simulations, or conversations that are pre-mediated to a degree that they can’t exceed the anticipated possibilities. Preciado is right that these experiences will be pleasurable; people generally take pleasure in being accommodated, from being recognized. But to detect the kinds of pleasure that are complicit with oppressive forms of social control, it is not enough to simply look for situations where screens are foregrounded and bodies are suppressed. It’s not enough to check our voice mail.

[rasoir-national]

This was bound to happen : I’m talking about immigration law

@ghostplantss i don't know v much about french immigration law would you tell me about it? i'm v curious?

Oh wow. First tea, and now this ? Either you are my secret Santa, or my enabler.

So let me tell you about the passion of my life, Immigration and refugee law, and the fuckery this country has made of it.

The way a city, community, country treats the “other” is one of the oldest legal questions in the History of Humanity. From Antique Greek cities to the Jus Gentium of the Roman Empire, laws concerning foreigners might be the first form of international law known to man. In many ways, it’s by acknowledging the existence of “others”, by giving and restricting their rights, that a social group both truly asserts itself as a “political community”, yet acknowledges the transcending quality of “humanity” of the outsider.

Nowadays, this question is as politically charged as ever : the way a country regards foreigners, welcomes them, rejects them, is one of the most interesting ways you can define the country, one of the ways the country sees itself. By the way we treat the one who is not “us”, we highlight which rights we consider to be inherent to humanity in and of itself, as well as which ones we consider intrinsically rooted in our identity as “citizen”.

And all this proud History, all this contemporary tension, makes Immigration law fascinating to FUCKING NO ONE.

Look, one thing you have to know about lawyers is how much they love intellectual wankery. A nicer way to put it would be to say lawyers love systems. And theory. And generalisation. And categorizing. They like to look at a set of rules and see a pattern, a logic, a paradigm. They like to be able to neatly present it in two titles, each divided in two subtitles, each divided in two sections, and repeat that until they run out of microsoft font points.

And Immigration law... It’s not that. It’s not that at all. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a law that’s almost entirely dictated by conjoncture, by what a government needs it to say, by whichever concept they’re going to twist then to suit their needs. Whatever few theoritical concepts Immigration law might have been based on have been destroyed by years of either haphazardous or plainly malignant reforms, often both.

And not only does that mean that this at this point is an intensely, punitively complex law, it has also become - if it hasn’t always been - illogical and incoherent. The only “logic” behind it anymore is how much it can be weaponized against its subjects - foreigners. Because that’s the only thing that politicians care about, and because lawyers and especially academics have pretty much given up on it, leaving the terrain free for the former. You have to realize, in terms of pure numbers, Immigration law is the most practiced law in the country. It represents almost a third of all disputes. Yet it is taught in NO university in France. Not a single one. There are no courses, no grad school, no thesis program about immigration law in all of France. There is no money in Immigration law : almost all involved subjects are destitute. There is no intellectual curiosity, because the discipline, from a theoretical point of view, is pretty uninteresting. There isn’t even public interest, because deceptively, the general public hears so much about immigration from either ignorant or ill-intentioned people, that getting through the complexity of the topic is immensely complicated and unrewarding.

Lawyers, for the most part, have deserted the topic for selfish reasons, despite the fact that this is perhaps where they were most needed to make sure fundamental rules were enforced, that politics didn’t come in the way of good justice. They abandoned the most vulnerable subjects of law to the whims of lawmakers and political interests. That’s unforgiveable.

So as a result, Immigration law today mostly resembles a cat-and-mouse game where the law sets up as many traps as possible for the immigrant to fall into, with dozens of obstacles to navigate to finally, finally be able to legally settle in a country you might be have been living in for several decades. There are specific stay rules for retirees. That’s a thing. Every rule is meant to exclude as many people as possible. As a result, immigrants must get increasingly creative or even downright shifty in order to qualify for a stay. And in turn, public opinion will yell and say they are manipulating the system - well, duh. We’ve made a system in which it’s impossible to win fair and square and then we criticize immigrants for trying to game it.

Let’s have just one example : demands of admission because of sickness. French law categorizes different reasons for an immigrant to be admitted to live on french soil for a little while : study, work, family matters, and health. France has a very good health system compared to the worldwide standard, so many people come here to receive treatment they might not be able to benefit from in their country of origin for various reasons. Some people already don’t think that’s a reason for welcoming them, but fuck those people. Anyway, there are many, many people who will ask for permission to stay on the grounds of an “invisible” illness : depression, PTSD, personality disorder... all of which are very difficult to prove. Before 2017, the prefect had to decide based on the opinion of a doctor from the regional authority after they’d met with the author of the request. But the administration quickly realized that doctors tend to have that pesky thing called deontology or even - perish the thought ! - empathy. So there was a reform, and now the way it works is the ill immigrant goes to a doctor who writes a report, then mails it to the person’s lawyer, who then mails it to a doctor that will do a second report based on that report, and will send that second report to a group of 3 doctors who, on the sole basis of that document, will advise the prefect on whether or not the person is ill, and whether or not they could have access to treatment in their country. And when I say advise, I mean they mail a form with boxes checked. That’s it. No text. So we have a prefect, who’s not a doctor, making a decision about the health situation of a person based on a box-based form filled by doctors who have never met the person, who themselves are judging based on the report of another doctor who has no met the person either, this last doctor writing based on the report of another doctor who might have met the person once. And all of this can take up to a year. That’s time during which the immigrant cannot work, or receive benefits. And then, if the prefect decides against letting the immigrant stay, then they have only 2 months to challenge that decision, otherwise after those 2 months have passed, they can be arrested, incarcerated and deported at any time.

So given all that, is it any wonder that immigrants tend to “discover” illness after illness and constantly ask for stays based on that ? This system is so random and unfair, that all you can really do is try and try again hoping something will eventually stick. So now you have people complaining that immigrants are faking mental illness in mass, causing prejudice to the “real” mentally ill immigrants. And yes, that’s the effect. But make no mistake : the cause is how difficult it is for an immigrant to have their illness acknowledged when it’s not something “extreme” enough to have you cross the border on a gurney. Because it’s not enough to google “availability of x medication in x country” to make sure the person can actually access treatment in their country of origin.

So that’s the hypocrisy infusing (haha, tea joke) the whole system. And on top of that, the procedure is getting more complicated with every reform : miss one deadline, fill out one form wrong, and you’re out. And please remember we’re dealing with people who for the vast majority do not speak french (the ONLY language allowed in administrative matters according to the Constitution) and know nothing of our administrative system. It’s up to the person’s lawyer to basically map out the life of each of their client. And because there is no money in immigration law - you only get paid in judicial aid from the state - there aren’t many immigration lawyers. You have to do this out of conviction, cuz you’re certainly not doing it for the money or career opportunities. In the practice I interned at last year, each lawyer would at all times manage on average 50 to 80 active cases. And let’s be clear, a lot of them are assholes, because lawyers in general tend to be assholes. But the work they do in downright heroic.

So that’s where I come in to fix it all, right ? Yeah, no. This entire system is fucked, and given what the world looks like right now, it might be for a while. I’m under no delusion that I can do anything to change that. My goal is to help the way I can : I want to become an administrative judge, the ones who are in charge of examining administrative decisions regarding immigrants. This type of challenge represents roughly 50% of the activity of any administrative tribunal : every chamber, no matter their specialty, has to do a little of it, otherwise the system is so backed up it would collapse. Some of those judges do amazing work, and are some of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met. Some of them are not. Most of them are plain bored by this type of claim, because they’re repetitive, not really technical from a legal standpoint and always depressing. And a handful of them have ties to the far-right and are there just to expel as many immigrants as possible. So yeah, if all goes well I’ll be a judge in a few years, and I’ll be one of the only ones who came to the job because of immigration law, not in spite of it. It’s not bragging on my part, it’s just a sad fact. Judges at the tribunal where I’ve worked had a schedule for who was supposed to be in charge of new immigration claims arriving, and some judges would hide from court reporters in order not to get attributed cases that arrived right before their shift was over. So yeah, if I can be a small drop in the bucket and be someone who actually looks at these cases with the explicit intent of finding a reason to approve the claim, that’ll be good enough for me. Because Immigration law, or at least what we’ve made of it, might not be “interesting” but it’s goddamn important, and people should pay attention to it.

[ciathyzareposts]

New Tricks for an Old Z-Machine, Part 1: Digging the Trenches

One of the most oddly inspiring stories I know of in all computing history is that of the resurrection and re-purposing of the Z-Machine, Infocom’s virtual machine of the 1980s, to serve a whole new community of interactive-fiction enthusiasts in the 1990s and well beyond. Even as the simple 8-bit computers for which it had originally been designed became obsolete, and then became veritable antiques, the Z-Machine just kept soldiering on, continuing to act as the delivery system for hundreds of brand new games that post-dated the company that had created it by years and eventually decades. The community of hobbyist practitioners who spawned the Interactive Fiction Renaissance of the mid-1990s made the Z-Machine one of their technological bedrocks for reasons more sentimental than practical: most of them worshiped Infocom, and loved the way that distributing their games via Infocom’s venerable virtual machine made them feel like the anointed heirs to that legacy. The Z-Machine was reborn, in other words, largely out of nostalgia. Very soon, though, the hobbyists’ restless creativity pushed and twisted the Z-Machine, and the genre of games it hosted, in all sorts of ways of which even Infocom at their most experimental could never have dreamed. Thus a regressive became a progressive impulse.

In the end, then, a design which Joel Berez and Marc Blank first sketched out hurriedly at their kitchen tables in 1979, in response to the urgently immediate problem of how to move their DEC PDP-10 game of Zork out of the MIT computer lab and onto microcomputers, didn’t fall out of general use as a delivery medium for new games until after 2010. And even today it still remains in active use as a legacy technology, the delivery medium for half or more of the best text adventures in the historical canon. In terms of the sheer number of platforms on which it runs, it must have a strong claim to being the most successful virtual machine in history; it runs on everything from e-readers to game consoles, from mobile phones to mainframes, from personal computers to electronic personal assistants. (To paraphrase an old joke, it really wouldn’t surprise me to learn that someone is running it on her toaster…) Its longevity is both a tribute to the fundamental soundness of its original design and to the enduring hold which Infocom’s pioneering interactive fiction of the 1980s has had upon more recent practitioners of the form. Like so many technology stories, in other words, the story of the Z-Machine is really about people.

One of the more ironic aspects of the Z-Machine story is the fact that it was never designed to be promulgated in this way. It was never intended to be a community software project; it was no Linux, no Mozilla, no Java. The ideological framework that would lead to such projects didn’t even exist apart from a handful of closeted university campuses at the time Berez and Blank were drawing it up. The Z-Machine was a closed, proprietary technology, closely guarded by Infocom during their heyday as one of their greatest competitive advantages over their rivals.

The first order of business for anyone outside of Infocom who wished to do anything with it, then, was to figure it out — because Infocom certainly wasn’t telling. This first article in a series of three is the story of those first intrepid Z-Machine archaeologists, who came to it knowing nothing and began, bit by bit, to puzzle it out. Little did they know that they were laying the foundation of an artistic movement. Graham Nelson, the most important single technical and creative architect of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance of the 1990s (and thus the eventual subject of my second and third articles), said it most cogently: “If I have hacked deeper than them, it is because I stand in their trenches.”

Although the Z-Machine was decidedly not intended as a community project, Infocom in their heyday made no particular attempt to hide the abstract fact that they were the proud possessors of some unusual technology. The early- and mid-1980s, Infocom’s commercial peak, was still the Wild West era of personal computing in the United States, with dozens of incompatible models jockeying for space on store shelves. Almost every published profile of Infocom — and there were many of them — made mention of the unique technology which somehow allowed them to write a game on a big DEC PDP-10 of the sort usually found only in universities and research laboratories, then move it onto as many as 25 normally incompatible microcomputers all at once. This was, perhaps even more so than their superb parser and general commitment to good writing and design, their secret weapon, allowing them to makes games for the whole of the market, including parts of it that were served by virtually no other publishers.

So, even if highfalutin phrases like “virtual machine” weren’t yet tripping off the tongue of the average bedroom hacker, it wasn’t hard to devise what Infocom must be doing in the broad strokes. The specifics, however, were another matter. For, while Infocom didn’t hide the existence of a Z-Machine in the abstract, they had no vested interest in advertising how it worked.

The very first outsiders to begin to explore the vagaries of the Z-Machine actually had no real awareness of doing so. They were simply trying to devise ways of copying Infocom’s games — most charitably, so that they could make personal backups of them; most likely, so that they could trade them with their friends. They published their findings in organs like The Computist, an underground magazine for Apple II owners which focused mainly on defeating copy protection, hacking games, and otherwise doing things that the software publishers would prefer you didn’t. By 1984, you could learn how Infocom’s (unimpressive) copy-protection scheme worked from the magazine; by 1986, you could type in a program listing from it that would dump most of the text in a game for cheating purposes.

But plumbing the depths of a virtual machine whose very existence was only implicit was hard work, especially when one was forced to carry it out on such a basic computer as the Apple II. People tended to really dive in only when they had some compelling, practical reason. Thus users of the Apple II and other popular, well-supported platforms mostly contented themselves with fairly shallow explorations such as those just described. Users of some other platforms, however, weren’t fortunate enough to enjoy the ongoing support of the company that had made their computer and a large quantity of software on the shelves at their local computer store; they had a stronger motivation for going deeper.

Over the course of the 1980s, the American computing scene became steadily more monolithic, as an industry that had once boasted dozens of incompatible systems collapsed toward the uniformity that would mark most of the 1990s, when MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows, and (to rather a lesser extent) the Apple Macintosh would be the only viable options for anyone wishing to run the latest shrink-wrapped commercial software. This gradual change was reflected in Infocom’s product catalog. After peaking at 25 or so machines in 1984, they released their final few games in 1988 and 1989 on just four of them. The realities of the market by then were such that it just didn’t make sense to support more platforms than that.

But technical transitions like these always come with their fair share of friction. In this case, plenty of people who had been unlucky or unwise enough to purchase one of the orphaned machines were left to consider their options. Some of them gave up on computing altogether, while others sucked it up and bought another model. But some of these folks either couldn’t afford to buy something else, or had fallen hopelessly in love with their first computer, or were just too stubborn to give it up. This state of affairs led directly to the world’s first full-fledged Z-Machine interpreter to be born outside of Infocom.

The orphaned machine at the heart of this story is the Texas Instruments 99/4A, a sturdy, thoughtfully designed little computer in many respects which enjoyed a spectacular Christmas of 1982, only to be buried by Jack Tramiel under an avalanche of Commodore VIC/20s and 64s the following year. On October 28, 1983, Texas Instruments announced they were pulling out of the home-computer market entirely, thus marking the end of one of the more frantic boom-and-bust cycles in computing history. It left in its wake hundreds of thousands of people with 99/4As on their desks or in their closets — both those who had bought the machine when it was still a going proposition and many more who snatched up some of the unsold inventory which Texas Instruments dumped onto the market afterward, at street prices of $50 or less. The number of active 99/4A users would inevitably decrease sharply as time went on, but some clung to their machines like the first loves they often were, for all of the reasons cited above.

This little 99/4A fraternity would prove sufficiently loyal to the platform to support an under-the-radar commercia- software ecosystem of their own into the 1990s. For many users, the platform was appealing not least in that it never lost the homegrown charm of the very earliest days of personal computing, when every user was a programmer to one degree or another, when the magazines were full of do-it-yourself hardware projects and type-in program listings, and when one kid working from his bedroom could change the accepted best practices of everyone else almost overnight. The Z-Machine interpreter that interests us today was a reflection of this can-do spirit.

Infocom’s first taste of major success had corresponded with the 99/4A’s one great Christmas. Naturally, they had made sure their games were available on one of the hottest computers in the country. Even after Texas Instruments officially abandoned the 99/4A, there was no immediate reason to ignore its many owners. Thus Infocom continued to make versions of their games for the machine through The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in September of 1984. In all, they released fourteen 99/4A games.

But continuing to support any given machine eventually tended to become a more complicated proposition than simply continuing to use an already-extant interpreter. The Z-Machine in reality was more of a moving target than the abstract idea behind it might suggest. Infocom’s games got steadily bigger and richer as time went on, with more text, better parsers, and more ambitious world models. The original Z-Machine, as designed in 1979, had a theoretical maximum story-file size of 128 K, but the practical limitations of the machines running the interpreters kept the early games from reaching anything close to this size. (The original Zork, for example, Infocom’s very first game, was just 77 K.) As story files pushed ever closer to their theoretical maximum size in the years that followed, they began to exceed the practical limitations of some existing interpreters. When that happened, Infocom had to decide whether reworking the interpreter to support a larger story file was possible at all, and, if so, whether it was worth the effort in light of a platform’s sales figures. Following Hitchhiker’s (story-file size: 110 K), their fourteenth game, but before Suspect (story-file size: 120 K), their fifteenth, Infocom judged the answer to one or both of those questions to be no in the case of the 99/4A.

Barry Boone, the first person outside of Infocom to create a full-fledged Z-Machine interpreter.

As one might expect, this decision left a number of 99/4A users sorely disappointed. Among them was Barry Boone, a clever young man just out of high school who was already one of the leading lights of 99/4A hackery. Having read enough about Infocom to understand that their game format must be in some sense portable, he started doggedly digging into the details of its implementation. Soon he was able to make a clear delineation between the interpreter running natively on his machine and the story file it executed — a delineation the Apple II crowd writing for The Computist had yet to manage. And then he uncovered the big secret: that the interpreter packaged with one game could actually run the story file from another — even if said story file originated on a platform other than the 99/4A! Boone:

Having worked out the file format, I wrote a program to crunch the non-TI files and build the TI files. The resulting files appeared to work, but I quickly discovered [a] problem. If I converted an older game that already existed in TI format, everything worked perfectly. But with the newer games, there was a big problem.

The problem was that the interpreter software written for the TI had a number of bugs, many of which did not show up with the original set of games, but became all too apparent with the newer ones and made them unplayable. So I began a process of reverse-engineering the Z-Code interpreter for the TI. Once I reached a point of having recreated the source code, I began working on making the code more efficient, and fixing numerous bugs in the implementation. The largest bug I encountered was a vocabulary-table bug. Basically, the original TI interpreter would hit an overflow bug if the vocabulary table was too large, and the binary-search algorithm would start searching the wrong area of memory to look up words. This had the effect of making the last portion of the vocabulary inaccessible, and made the game impossible to play.

I also added a number of enhancements that allowed the games to load about twenty times faster, and modifications to play the games on TI systems equipped with 80-column displays. Finally, I had to make a second variation of the interpreter so that persons who had an extra 8 K of RAM (known as a Super Cart, or Super Space module) could play some of the games that required a larger memory footprint than 24 K of memory buffer. These games included Leather Goddesses.

Boone estimates that he finished his interpreter around 1986, whereupon he promptly began sharing it with his network of friends and fellow 99/4A enthusiasts, who used it to play many of the newer Infocom story files, transferring them from disks for other platforms. Boone was stymied only by the games from Infocom’s Interactive Fiction Plus line, such as A Mind Forever Voyaging and Trinity. Those games used an expanded version of the Z-Machine, known internally as version 4 — the mature version of the original virtual machine was version 3 — which expanded the available memory space to 256 K, far beyond what the 99/4A could possibly manage. Even without them, however, Boone gave himself and his mates ten new Infocom games to play — i.e., all of those released for the 128 K Z-Machine between October of 1984 and July of 1987, when this original incarnation of the virtual machine made its last bow in Infocom packaging.

But even that wasn’t quite the end of the story. An obscure footnote to Infocom’s history took shape in late 1988 or early 1989, when Chris Bobbitt, founder of a company called Asgard, the 99/4A software publisher that most resembled a real business as opposed to a hobbyist project, had the idea of contacting Infocom themselves to ask permission to market the newer games, running under Boone’s interpreter, as legitimate commercial products. Although Bobbitt doubtless didn’t realize it at the time, Infocom was by then on the verge of being shut down, and Mediagenic, their less-than-doting parent company, were also beginning to feel the financial stresses that would force them into bankruptcy in 1990. They saw Bobbitt’s proposal as a handy way to clear their warehouse of old stock and make some desperately needed cash. Jim Reiss, who worked at Asgard at the time as the last remaining full-time 99/4A software developer in the world, remembers how the deal went down:

[Bobbitt] contacted Infocom to ask for permission to release the later Infocom releases, and was given permission to do so on one condition: that the packaging and disks had to be originals for other systems, relabeled (the packaging) and reformatted (the disks) for use with the TI. Infocom scoured their warehouse and sent Chris two very large boxes of the titles he was asking to reproduce—and noted on the invoice that these boxes included every single copy of the relevant titles that Infocom still had in their possession. Some of the titles were relatively plentiful, but others were included in much lower numbers. The boxes only contained four copies of Leather Goddesses of Phobos, for example. All other titles had at least ten copies each, and some had a lot more. He was permitted to buy more copies from remainders in the retail channels, though, so it is possible there are more properly badged Asgard copies of the titles that were harder to find. All of the stock he received from Infocom was gone in a matter of months.

These games, which Bobbitt bought for $5 apiece and sold on for several times that, thereby became the last new Infocom games ever sold in their original packaging — out-of-print games from a dead company sold to owners of an orphaned computer.

Asgard prepared their own platform-specific reference card after the Infocom example and inserted it into the box.

Well before Asgard entered the scene, however, another, more structured and sustainable project had led to a Z-Machine interpreter much more amenable to being ported and built upon than Boone’s incarnation of same for an idiosyncratic, bare-bones, orphaned platform. Not long after Boone first started sharing his 99/4A interpreter with friends, a few students at the University of Sydney in far-off Australia started disassembling another of Infocom’s own interpreters — in this case one for Zilog Z80-based computers running the operating system CP/M. The group included in their ranks David Beazley, George Janczuk, Peter Lisle, Russell Hoare, and Chris Tham. They gave themselves the rather grandiose name of the InfoTaskforce, but they initially regarded the project, said Janczuk to me recently, strictly as “a form of mental calisthenics”: “This was never meant to be a public exercise.”

Still, the group had several advantages which Boone had lacked — in addition, that is, to the advantage of sheer numbers. Boone had been a bedroom hacker working on fairly primitive hardware, where cryptic assembly language, highly specific to the computer on which it was running, was the only viable option. The InfoTaskforce, on the other hand, had more advanced hardware at their disposal, and were steeped in the culture of institutional hacking, where portable C was the most popular programming language and software was typically distributed as source code, ready to be analyzed, ported, and expanded upon by people other than its creators, quite possibly working on platforms of which said creators had never dreamed. And then, thanks to their university, the InfoTaskforce was connected to the Internet, long before most people had even heard of such a thing; this gave them a way to share their work quickly with others across a wide, international swath of computing. The contrast with the segregated ghetto that was the world of the 99/4A is telling.

David Beazley, who did almost all of the actual coding for the InfoTaskforce interpreter — the others had their hands full enough with reverse-engineering the Z-Machine architecture — did so in C on a first-generation Apple Macintosh. On May 25, 1987, he used this machine to compile the first truly portable Z-Machine interpreter in history. Within a week, he and his mates had also gotten it compiled and running on an MS-DOS machine and a big DEC VAX. (Ironically, the latter was the successor to the PDP-10 line so famously employed by Infocom themselves; thus one might say that the Z-Machine had already come full-circle.)

As Janczuk remembers it, the first version of the interpreter to reach the Internet actually did so accidentally. He gave it to a friend of his at university, who, as so many friends have done over the years, uploaded it without permission on June 2, 1987. There followed an immediate outpouring of interest from all over the world, which greatly surprised the interpreter’s own creators. It prompted them to release an official version 1.0, capable of playing any story file for the standard — i.e., 128 K — Z-Machine on August 1, 1987. Already by this time, the Commodore Amiga personal computer and several more big machines had been added to the list of confirmed-compatible host platforms. It was a milestone day in the history of interactive fiction; Infocom’s games had been freed from the tyranny of the hardware for which they’d originally shipped. And they could remain free of the vicissitudes and fashions of hardware forevermore, as long as there was an enterprising hacker ready to tweak an existing interpreter’s source code to suit the latest gadget to come down the pipe. (So far, there has been no shortage of such hackers…)

With their university days coming to an end, the InfoTaskforce boys worked on their interpreter only in fits and starts over the years that followed. Not until 1990 did they finish adding support for the Interactive Fiction Plus line; not until 1992, in a final burst of activity, did they add support for Infocom’s last few text-only games, which ran under what was known internally as the version 5 Z-Machine. This last release of the InfoTaskforce interpreter actually attracted a bit of scoffing for its inefficiency, and for generally lagging behind what other hackers had done by that point in other interpreters.

In reality, information and inspiration rather than the software itself were the most important legacies of the InfoTaskForce interpreter. Beazley’s C source told you almost all of what you really needed to know about the Z-Machine, so long as you were sufficiently motivated to dig out the information you needed; doing so was certainly a fair sight more pleasant than poring over eye-watering printouts of cryptic disassembled Z80 machine language, as Beazley and his pals had been forced to do before coming up with it. The InfoTaskforce interpreter thus became the gateway through which the Z-Machine burst into the public domain, even as Infocom was soon to collapse and abandon their virtual machine. This was a role which Boone’s interpreter, for all its naïve brilliance, just wasn’t equipped to play, for all of the reasons we’ve already explored.

An enterprising American hacker named Mark Howell did perhaps the most to build upon the foundation of the InfoTaskforce interpreter during the half-decade after its initial appearance. His own interpreter bore the name of ZIP (for “Z-Machine Implementation Program”), a name it shared with the popular compression format, to enormous confusion all the way around — although, to be fair, this was also the name by which Infocom knew their own interpreters. ZIP was faster and less buggy than the InfoTaskforce interpreter, and for this reason it soon surpassed its older sibling in popularity. But Howell also delved further into the architecture of the Z-Machine than anyone before him, analyzing its design like a computer scientist might rather than as a hacker simply trying to write a quick-and-dirty clone of Infocom’s existing interpreters. When he came up for air, he uploaded his set of “ZTools” — programs for probing story files in all sorts of ways, including a disassembler for the actual code they contained. These tools did much to set the stage for the next phase of the Z-Machine’s resurrection and liberation.

In 1992, another building block fell into place when Activision shipped their Lost Treasures of Infocom collection to unexpected success. It and its sequel collected all of the Infocom games together in one place at a reasonable price, stored as neatly discrete story files ready to be fed into either the original Infocom interpreters included on the disks or an alternative of one’s choice. Lost Treasures shipped only in versions for MS-DOS, the Apple Macintosh, and the Commodore Amiga — the last three commercially viable personal-computing platforms left in North America by that time (and the Amiga wouldn’t enjoy that status much longer). But users of orphaned and non-North American platforms were soon passing around the tip that, if you could just get the story files off of the original Lost Treasures disks, they could be run on their own platforms as well with one of the interpreters that had by now spread far and wide. For example, our old friends at The Computist, still carrying the 8-bit torch in these twilight days of the Apple II, published instructions on how to do just that — a fitting end point to their earliest explorations of the Infocom format.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the magazine Acorn User published a similar article for users of the Acorn Archimedes, a machine that was virtually unknown outside of Britain, a few parts of mainland Europe, and Australasia. (“It’s hard to conceive of videogame nostalgia,” they wrote of the Lost Treasures collections, “but this is as close as it gets.” Little did they know…) It so happened that an Oxford doctoral candidate in mathematics named Graham Nelson was a stalwart Acorn loyalist and a regular reader of that magazine. By the time the article in question appeared, the window opened by the InfoTaskforce interpreter and all the software that had followed it, combined with the Lost Treasures collections, had already led him to begin sliding the next couple of building blocks of the Interactive Fiction Renaissance into place.

Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy running on an Acorn Archimedes — a platform for which it was never officially released — under a third-party Z-Machine interpreter by Edouard Poor.

(Sources: The Computist 5, 7, 34, 41, 47, 57, 58, 63, and 86; Acorn User of July 1993; Asgard Software’s newsletters from 1989 and 1990. Online sources include Barry Boone’s memories of writing his Z-Machine interpreter at The Museum of Computer Adventure Game History and his bio for the TI99ers Hall of Fame. The original source for the InfoTaskforce interpreter can be found in various file archives. My huge thanks go to Barry Boone, Jim Reiss, and George Janczuk for talking to me about their pioneering early work in Z-Machine archaeology.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/new-tricks-for-an-old-z-machine-part-1-digging-the-trenches/

[brothermouzongaming]

E3 2019 overview

I wanted to take the time to look at and talk about some of the games we’re more than likely seeing at the conference. E3 is...dying and it’s misleading trailers don’t help, but despite this, the show is still important and at least gives us a little insight into what may come in games/tech. So let’s cross our fingers and dive in. I’ll be focussing more on main titles and not DLC and updates. Available footage will be linked in the corresponding title.

Avengers project (Crystal Dynamics/ Square Enix)

It feels like ages since the teaser for the Avengers project dropped. Since then I have been trying to keep my hopes high, I even thought it was canceled for a time when we heard literally nothing since that trailer. I know nothing about this game, but I just hope Crystal Dynamics and Square are treating something this big with the care it needs. The last thing Marvel, more importantly Disney, want is another Battlefront 2 situation on their hands. If Square can incorporate their over the top combat style to the Marvel universe, it could be amazing, incredible, invinci- okay I’ll stop.

Borderlands 3

Getting back into Borderlands just before the big press release was very serendipitous. Something about this made me even more excited for some of the additions coming like loot instancing, slide/mantle (finally), secondary fire weapons, more diverse and varied play spaces, and a lot more. So many of BL2 and the Pre-Sequel’s flaws are glaring with me having played them recently and to see the long-awaited title addressing these exact issues so comforting when I get to thinking about this next adventure into the wastes. It isn’t some massive leap forward or anything, it’s more Borderlands and there’s nothing wrong with that to me. Finally, an online optional looter shooter that isn’t some strange mmo lite, long live the king. Randy Pitchford is a weirdo but I’m not gonna hold that against the devs lol.

Cyberpunk 2077

This is more than likely going to be my game of the show. E3 is typically full of surprises and anything can happen but in all honesty, I just can’t see much coming close especially since we aren’t seeing Death Stranding (thattrailertho). I was literally giddy when they released the gameplay trailer that they showed press and influencers and the FPS RPG looked very good but not unrealistic. Recently it’s come out that the game is “pretty different” from that showcase and that statement interests me as much as it gives me pause. Regardless, we are going to be seeing more of this game with CDPR claiming they’ll have an even bigger presence than last year. I just hope that we get solid gameplay footage and not buzzwords and theatrical trailers.

CoD 2019

Black Ops 4 came out guns drawn and it really impressed at first. Since that time Activision has found a way to completely reverse the conversation around BO4 and where the franchise is headed/ is as a whole. Activision needs a win, and with this being their main and essentially only franchise it has to be big. The rumor is that it’s Modern Warfare 4 which would be a “soft reboot” if that is the case. If not this year then next, I’m surprised it’s even taken them this long so hopefully all this time will lead to something good. Honestly, I’m shocked we’re still getting annual releases of this game. I don’t forsee CoD lasting much longer and this tug at our nostalgia may be a sign of that. 

Destroy All Humans (THQ Nordic)

I spent so many hours with my friend Walter terrorizing the meat bags between the tools the game devs gave us and some gamer creativity that was a relatively new aspect of gaming compared to nowadays where player creativity is often an aspect of gameplay. THQ has reported something insane like 50+ games in development which...sounds like a stupid choice but if this is one of them it’s definitely going to get people’s heads turning. Can you imagine what they’ll be able to do with today’s tech? They don’t have to go crazy but then again for the sake of a concise vision but...maybe they should?

Dino Crisis (Capcom)

Let’s talk more about old ass games I’m completely shocked could be coming back. So in light of Capcom bringing back past titles and breathing new life into them, it is reported that Capcom is looking to bring back...Dino Crisis? I swear to god if they make Dino Crisis before Viewtiful Joe and Onimusha? POWER STONE ANYONE?? I’m more than willing to suspend my meh-ness because Capcom has proved that not only can they bring back an old game we love, but they can do it damn well. If this is true, then maybe there is hope for some of my favorite Capcom titles from the past but mother of god why Dino Crisis?

Doom Eternal

Doom 2016 was one of the best first-person shooters I’ve ever played. “Smooth as butter” isn’t something I would use to describe most games but god damn if that game wasn’t lubed up before they packaged it because it’s damn slick. So imagine the stiffy I got when that gameplay was dropped and mobility was increased. Can we talk about the grappling hook shotgun? The new demons and takedowns to dispatch said demons? God knows what else is under the hood for us to find out when it releases let alone when they talk about it during the conference. A more open level design in tandem with the conventional “kill room” here and there is gonna really spice up the combat especially if exploration is properly rewarded. Rage 2 was a disappointment but I do have hope this is gonna live up to the hype the way it did the first time.

Gears of War 5

Lawd Microsoft needs a win. This is quite clearly their attempt at a blockbuster event like God of War was for Sony. Everything about the trailer screams “Oscar bait but for games” and I hope they do the damn thing. Make me sad I don’t have an Xbox dammit! This could be a big step for Gears and could even lead it down a more character focussed design. The world of Gears of War is rich for a deeper explanation, and I know that isn’t what Gears is known for but I won’t be told that they can’t do both. It appears to be heavily cinematic though gameplay can be seen in the trailer above. It seems interesting and I hope they really make something worth owning an Xbox for. The fans deserve it.

Halo: Infinite

Did I say Microsoft needs a win from the software perspective? Cause they do. The Xbox One is fine, the One X is a huge step up and is the most powerful console but there are next to no exclusives for this console. Ya know, the reason why you buy a certain console outside of interface and services. What better way than to bring back the most successful franchise Microsoft has associated with. There’s talk of it having an open world which is jarring initially especially when the history of Halo is rich with environments that tell stories alongside the mid-range combat. If they can properly expand that baseline to fit an open world format, it’ll be amazing. Whether or not they can is the question.

Harry Potter: Magic Awakened

Warner Brothers does a great job of shooting themselves square in the foot. They just put on the finest shoes money can buy and BAM queue the red kool-aid fountain. Shadow of War is the pinnacle of such stupidity with the way the monetization completely bankrupted the integrity of the game. The brief footage that was up involved a third-person real-time action reminiscent of the original games. Warner Bros. jumped on the trailer takedown but it’s safe to say the cat is out of the bag and casting spells in the kitchen. This could be a unique adventure involving a custom character, it could involve something more directly related to the books. Anything is possible but if we heard about it this year it wouldn’t entirely surprise me.

My Friend Pedro

A twin stick shooter of a different kind. Imagine stranglehold but cartoony, John Wick but even more comic book like. It looks like the entire game is going to be centered around ballerina jumping through levels and enemies leaving every enemy in your wake riddled with bullets. It seems light, fun, and self-aware in it’s silliness which can lead to the most fun type of games.

Session

Oh boy, SKATE was my jam back in high school and if you’re anything like me you’ve been waiting for the next game/ literally anything like it to come along. Session appears to be that game, we weren’t told a lot when it was revealed so I’m hoping that E3 will lead to some more information on gameplay and ya know, a release date. 

Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order

Anthem is in shambles and in my opinion, it’s this year’s No Man’s Sky. Between the games they put out, and the Star Wars games they put out (or don’t put out depending on your perspective); this does not bode well at all. Respawn is working on the project and their track record is very good, but I can’t help but worry about what EA is planning. They always find a way to put their hand directly into a project and do exactly what needs to be done to ruin it. Sometimes that’s on the front end in development and planning or lack thereof, and sometimes it’s on the back end with moving devs to other projects/ not hold their devs to the post-launch promises they tend to make and not fulfill. This story of a padawan in hiding after Order 66 is ripe for gameplay development and storytelling. So long as Respawn has the vision and can execute, all we need is for EA to stay the fuck away and let them work. We’ll see.

honorable mentions: Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Vampire Bloodlines 2, From Soft and George R. R. Martin collab, Fable remake, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad, Wolfenstein Young Blood, Afterparty, Beyond Good and Evil 2, Bleeding Edge (Ninja Theory’s new game), Last of Us 3 (v hype just not a lot of info)

[askagamedev]

(Inhale) Your E3 thoughts, PLEASE! I want them! I need them! :C

I’ve gotten a number of questions about my observations on E3 to varying degrees, so I figured I’d just have one big E3 “thoughts” post. In no particular order:

Co-op is big this year

A good number of the marketing for upcoming games is dedicated to “play with your friends”. Anthem, Fallout 76, Pokemon Let’s Go, The Division 2, Skull and Bones, plus (presumably) Gears 5, Halo Infinite, BLOPS 4, Destiny’s upcoming expansion, and so on.

Nobody cares about VR anymore

Did you notice any VR games getting any attention at all? Neither did I.

Publishers are backing away from Loot Boxes

The only thing most interviewees had to say about loot boxes was “they aren’t in my game”.

Where did Procedurally Generated Content go?

Looks like a lot of publishers have backed off from procedurally generated content as well. Authored and directed experiences were everywhere. Except for Fortnite.

Ubisoft Montreal is trying their hand at being Bioware

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey seems to be inheriting a lot from Bioware games, including optional LGBT romance content and a lot of role-playing context. Also, it’s an Assassin’s Creed game that doesn’t seem to be about assassins, like Dragon Age is a series that isn’t about dragons.

The Most American Game of All Time is getting remastered

From the studio that would eventually bring you Dark Souls… [Metal Wolf Chaos] is coming to the new generation. It is a game about the president of the United States piloting an armored mech to wage a one-man war against an evil terrorist army led by his own vice president. I am not making this up.

Gamers: Whoa, lesbian kiss. Game Devs: Whoa, MOTION CAPTURED KISS

Naughty Dog continues to do some really amazing animation work. More notably to people like me, they motion captured the world’s first good-looking in-game kiss. That’s pretty wacky - most of the time facial motion capture has a huge headset that gets in the way of locking lips, so they had to get kind of creative with the entire process.

Holy Crap, Naughty Dog’s animators and animation engineers are still ridiculous

Every time there’s a Naughty Dog trailer of some kind, they show some really amazing animation tech. It tends to be little things that most gamers don’t consciously observe, like seamless transitions between partial animation states. In the Last of Us 2′s gameplay trailer, they smoothed out almost all of the small weird animation pops that we take for granted, causing animators and engineers around the world to geek out. Like this:

AAA Visuals are getting more pronounced

The real tentpole blockbuster AAA titles have really differentiated themselves visually from other lower-budget titles. The number of effects, quality of the materials and assets, shader work, and all the extra bells and whistles are making the AAAA games even bigger and more distinct. A lot of people are hotly anticipating Cyberpunk 2077, but its visuals just don’t stand up (technically) to games like Gears, Division, BLOPS, Battlefield, etc.

Nintendo is probably in for a rough year

Nintendo’s stock price fell about 7% after their press conference, ostensibly because they are behind on their sales target for the year and the only system movers they announced are Smash 5 and Pokemon Let’s Go. The Labo did not prove to be the financial success they had hoped for, so it is looking unlikely they will hit their guidance for the year. That makes shareholders nervous and unhappy.

Indie AAA publishing suffered a pretty big setback

Microsoft bought Ninja Theory (and a few other indies). Self-publishing and attaining success like Ninja Theory is super duper hard. I’m glad that Ninja Theory has better financial backing now, and I hope that their deal with Microsoft is a good one, but I do wish that there were more mid-sized indie publishers out there with more success.

Crunch is over. I have time again.

Hopefully, this means the FANTa Project can resume next week.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent questions: The FAQ

[xoxopandapanda]

A Functionally Dysfunctional Valentine’s Day

Set in the Functionally Dysfunctional AU

@inuyasha-valentines

Contrary to popular belief, out of the two of them, Inuyasha was the romantic. While Kagome did love a good romance movie and a date night with her husband, it was Inuyasha who loved to plan and perfect their outings. Kagome had been the one to introduce him to the world of wooing, but once Inuyasha got a taste of it, he was addicted.

Kagome’s work at the clinic had been busier than usual, due much in part to the recent cold snap, and she had all but forgotten Inuyasha’s favorite holiday was coming up. But he hadn’t, and was busily using the extra time that his wife was at the clinic to prepare his ultimate plan. ‘When you getting home?’ He texted his wife because he knew a call would prove to be fruitless. He also knew that expecting a response right away was stupid, so he tucked his phone into his pocket, and set to rotating the tires on the car that had been dropped off that morning. Once he was done, he set to changing the oil, mentally preparing a list of things he needed for his special day with Kagome. ‘I have the roses and chocolate…maybe wine? Oh I should stop by the card section and see if there is a good one. I think we need more dashi stock…’ The good thing about being excellent at his job was his mind could be elsewhere while he was working. It was well over three hours later that Kagome responded. ‘It’s slower today, so I can be home for 4!! :D’ Inuyasha snorted at the emoji attempt, knowing that Kagome had expected it to auto fill but it hadn’t. But nonetheless, 4 pm was good. It meant they had a long evening to themselves. ‘Maybe I should pick up bubble bath stuff too…but she probably has quite a bit of that...’ Inuyasha shot back an actual emoji, just to mess with her a little bit, before looking at the time.  ‘Almost one…’

He turned back to the cars he had to work on, and decided that if he worked efficiently enough, he could close up by three, giving him enough time to get to the store. When it came to Valentine’s Day, Inuyasha was always the first person to have in his order for flowers at the local flower shop. He also preordered all the chocolates from the fancy Swiss store on the other side of town, so he knew he was safe in that regard. He had picked them up that morning, and keen to get them home. It was sometimes a toss-up if there were any good cards left, but Kagome loved either cheesy or mildly offensive cards, so he figured he could find one that fit either category. After all, most wives wanted to be wooed on Valentine’s Day, but Kagome just wanted to spend time with him. Locking everything up for the day finally, after calling his regulars to let them know he was closing a little bit earlier than normal, and starving off the jabs from Totosai to ‘Go and love her right up’, he texted Kagome to tell her he was heading to the store, and to let him know if she needed anything. He arrived just after 3 pm at the mom and pop grocery store that Kagome loved, but he wasn’t the only person standing in the card isle. There were dozens of men, trying to find a nice card for their special someone, some toting kids along, some toting carts full of stuffed animals and chocolate. Inuyasha silently judged all of them for their lack of organization, while mentally praising himself for being such a thoughtful spouse. The only reason he waited until the last minute to pick out the card was because the more picked over the isle was, the more visible the most ridiculous cards were, which saved him time in finding one. Scanning quickly over the options in the Funny-For Her section, Inuyasha picked up the first one that caught his eye. It had a dog squatting on it, with ‘HEY HOT STUFF!’ written across the top at an angle in a font suspiciously similar to the word affects in Microsoft Word that every middle schooler loves. Opening it to read the inside, Inuyasha barked out a loud laugh before closing it, grabbing the envelope, and walking away, heedless of the stares the other people in the isle were giving him. He checked his phone, but Kagome hadn’t texted back yet, so he chanced a phone call to her. “Hi handsome!” She answered the phone. He smiled, always happy to hear her voice, “Hey beautiful. I’m at the store, what do you want for dinner?” “Oh! You’re there right now? I need some soy sauce, dashi, and veggies? I think I still have some tofu in the fridge. What are you thinking for dinner?” “Oden or something, should I grab some meat?” “Okay!” Inuyasha heard, her excitement at the thought of having her favorite meal for dinner shining through. “If you pick up a cake mix, we can have that tonight too! Weight need eggs though...” “Got it. I’ll pick up the mix and the ingredients for the cake to be sure.” “Good idea. Also grab whatever snacks you want. I’m certain we are out of those.” Inuyasha swung down the baking isle, grabbing a vanilla cake mix, vegetable oil, and pink canned frosting. “On it. Anything else?” He asked as he made his way to the refrigerator area. Kagome sighed loudly on the other end of the line. “No, I’m just really excited to come home at a reasonable time. I can’t wait to pet my cat while it’s still light out.” Inuyasha snorted while inspected the eggs in the carton he had picked up. “Your cat is more important than your husband? I’m mortally injured, wench.” “Oh you’ll get your attention. But you know how Buyo gets when you get kisses before him.” Inuyasha places the eggs carefully in the basket he had in his arms, and wondered if he should go back and get a cart. “Maybe I should start being fussier than him. I wonder if that would get me the attention I desire.” “… don’t you dare…” Kagome’s voice held no malice, and Inuyasha knew that she was just as amused as him. Deciding a cart was too much of a hassle, Inuyasha meandered towards the snack section, inspected sales as he walked by. “Tempting idea though.” “You’re being a brat. But I do have to go if I’m going to get out of here on time. I love you.” “Hmm, love you. See you at home.” “Bye!” Kagome hung up quickly. Inuyasha rucked his phone back into his pants pocket, and picked out his choice snacks for home. He had to back track to pick up the meat, but it was fate in a way. Kaede was standing next to the fish, inspecting the choices available. She mustn’t have noticed him, but, to her credit, she didn’t jump when he approached. “What are you going for Valentine’s Day, Inuyasha?” Inuyasha selected some thinly sliced beef, wrapped it in a bag, before placing it in his now-teetering-fully basket. He then reached over and took Kaede’s nearly empty basket. “Spending it with the wife at home. What else should I do?” “You’re not taking her out to dinner?” Kaede selected a nice and plump, but small, white fish, and placed it in her basket that Inuyasha was holding. “She’s not to into going out. You have plans?” “Oh yes. To come here tomorrow, once the sweets are on sale, and have my fill.” Kaede grinned up at his with a full smile and a sparking eye. Inuyasha smiled back, responding, “Now there’s an idea.” Kaede turned on her heel, making her way to the front to check out. “Well I have all I need. What about you, young man?” Inuyasha closely followed. “Yeah, I’m done.” He placed the two baskets at the register of a young teenager, who looked completely unenthusiastic. The boy started to mindlessly ring the items up, not even greeting either of the customers, not that either minded.

The two mildly chatted over the different Valentines Day sweets that they liked the most. As the boy finished scanning and bagging Inuyasha’s grocery items, Inuyasha finally spoke to the cashier. “Her items too, please.” The teenager grunted and began to empty the second basket.

“Inuyasha, please. I can pay for my own groceries.” Kaede chided, but made no indication that she wanted to stop him from doing so.

Inuyasha grinned over at her, pulling out the enough cash to cover the transaction. “I can’t ask you to be my Valentine, but I can pay for your groceries.”

Kaede laughed, and Inuyasha picked up the multiple bags, although only one was the older woman’s. Kaede continued her comments regarding the Valentine sweets she remembered from childhood, and how few of them were still around, while the two of them walked to Inuyasha’s car.

Once they were settled in, and Inuyasha was beginning the brief journey home, Kaede took a peek at the card Inuyasha had purchased for his wife. She read it out loud, pausing at the end to chuckled good naturedly.

“If I didn’t know you two,” she croaked out, her voice caught up from her deep laugh, “I would think this was man trying to get a divorce.”

Inuyasha laughed too. “That’s why Kagome’s the best wife. She thinks these things are funny!”

Kaede placed the card back into the envelope, and leaned back for the last block home. “You two are a match made in heaven.”

Inuyasha smiled, but said nothing further to her comments, knowing that she spoke the truth. Pulling into the driveway of their small but present home, Inuyasha turned the engine off, and grabbed Kaede’s grocery bag. He walked her over to her house in a comfortable silence, and was patted on the cheek for his efforts. After making sure she secured her door, he went back to the car to bring in the rest of the bags of groceries. He had enough time to start chopping the vegetables for the oden before Kagome came back and took over.

He figured his car, although it was his baby, could spend one night outside, especially since it was predicted to be a mild night.

Kagome came home just as Inuyasha was putting the broth in the serving bowl to heat it up and boil the vegetables, left over tofu from the fridge, and meat. Kagome greeted him with a warm kiss, and a soft “Happy Valentine’s Day” before jogging to the bedroom to put her pajamas on, with Buyo hot on her heels, true to his nature and displeased that Inuyasha had received any sort of affection prior to him.

Inuyasha took the brief repose from his wife to quickly sign the card, and put it on the table for her, next to the vase of roses and fancily packaged chocolates.

Kagome entered the room, wearing her soft fleece pajama pants with hearts all of over it and one of his old t-shirts he wasn’t allowed to wear in public anymore. Her hair was haphazardly tossed up into a messy bun, and she carried the vocally displeased calico cat in her arms. She saw the card, and tossed a sheepish look at Inuyasha.

“It’s Valentine’s Day, isn’t it?” She asked, remorse already filling her eyes and body.

Inuyasha placed the oden ingredients into the broth, and grunted. He rinsed his hands, and walked over to her. “Don’t stress, woman! Christmas is your thing, Valentine’s is mine. After all, I tried to stay open on Christmas this year.”

Kagome laughed, her tense shoulders easing, letting Buyo slip a little bit. Buyo quickly informed both of them exactly what his opinion of that was, but they ignored him.

“Tried being the key word. No one was willing to come themselves!” She leaned into his embrace.

“Ah, what diligent customers I have, thinking of my wife just as much as I do!” He planted a kiss on her head, before picking up the still yowling cat from her arms and placing him on his shoulder. “One day, someone is going to call the cops on us for animal abuse with the way he carries on.”

Kagome patted the larger brown spot on Buyo, snorting, “If anyone tries to take him away, I’m sure they’ll bring him back in the hour.” She reached down and opened the envelope to reveal the card front. She tossed him a deadpan look. “I think I made something similar to this in middle school.”

Inuyasha grinned. “Isn’t it great! Just wait, it gets better!”

Kagome narrowed her eyes, and read the card. “Hey hot stuff…” she opened the card to reveal the image of the dog defecating with a grimace on its face, “You’re the shit.” There was cartoon steam coming off of the pile of excrement, and the color of the words was a deep brownish yellow, also appearing to be a special word affect, done with bad taste.  

Inuyasha looked back and forth from the card to his wife’s face once, and then twice, before Kagome let out a howl of a laugh, which proved to be too much for Buyo who demanded to be place on the ground instantly. Inuyasha complied, knowing that something was probably going to get destroyed by the cat, but not really caring.

Kagome’s laugh was infectious, and Inuyasha started to laugh along with her. “Inuyasha!” she exclaimed, “You’ve out done yourself!”

“I knew you’d love it!” He accepted her arms as the flung around his neck so she could pull him in for a kiss. Pulling back from her affection, he added his last thought for a while, “The only issue is, it’s not really work appropriate, so you can’t show it off.”

“Oh well, it’s the thought that counts,” Kagome retorted before kissing him again.

He was only released when the boiling of the soup pot became loud, and Kagome took a moment to smell the flowers and appreciate the chocolates. They ate their dinner in comfortable quiet, only interrupted by the whizzing of cars outside, and the groans of a grumpy cat in the back ground. They held hands under the table, like bashful lovers, even though they were in their own home with no one looking. Together, they cleaned up the kitchen, and made the cake mix kinda-sorta to package directions, but not too terribly worried if it turned out.

Once it was in the oven and the 58 minutes on the clock, Inuyasha moved into the living room to put on a movie. While Kagome did love a good romcom upon an occasion, Inuyasha couldn’t be bothered to sit through even an hour of it, so he put on a good action movie that he knew Kagome would love.

She sauntered into the room holding glasses of wine. “Look what I found under the sink!” she called to him before noticing his movie choice. “Rush Hour? Heck yeah!”

Inuyasha accepted the glass from her. “Only the best for my better half.”

Kagome blushed mildly, pleased by his comments, but more interested in the movie than further the conversation. Together they snuggled, drinking wine, until the timer went off, and Kagome left to take the cake out of the oven. She came back with one of her abnormally fluffy and large blankets, and dropped her head on his lap for the rest of the film.

Inuyasha absent mindedly twirled her hair in his fingers, and appreciated the warmth of their love and home.

Once the movie was done, Kagome was lightly dozing off on his lap, her breathing deep and regular. Inuyasha made no move to wake her up, but as soon as the noise from the television stopped, she opened her eyes. Her body tensed for a moment, before she released a loud sigh and stretched long.

She rolled over to meet his eyes. “Wanna bath?” he asked her.

“Everyday.” She sat up, and lifted her hands above her head. “Whatcha thinking of?”

“You, in a bubble bath, me, on the floor reading you some stupid tweets.” Inuyasha rose himself, placed his hands on his lower back, leaning back to stretch. He then stepped just in front of her to lift her into his arms, carrying her bridal style.

Kagome laughed gleefully, “Ooohhh, Mr. Romantic! You know the way to a woman’s heart!” Inuyasha carried her up to their bathroom, before turning on the faucet for her bath. Kagome stripped down, wrapped herself in a towel, before reaching to grab some bath salts and a bubble bath gel. She handed them to Inuyasha who put some under the running water. Soon the bath was heavily scented and frothy – just the way Kagome liked.

Kagome crawled into the warm water, sighing in appreciation, and Inuyasha sat on the floor next to the tub. He pulled his phone out of his pocket, where it had yet to leave from his trip to the store, and pulled up his Twitter app. It was virtually the only social media that Inuyasha consumed, but he was never active on it. He just enjoyed the different tweets from comedians that he followed.

He read all of his feed, filtering none of it, and he and Kagome rated whether they thought they were funny or not. If there was a picture included, Inuyasha would show it to Kagome, and some of the bootlegged items that were begin inspected caused quite the uproar between the two of them.

“Oh yes,” Kagome exclaimed between her giggles, “the collaboration between Nike and Winne the Pooh was my favorite one.”

Inuyasha gasped out his laughter, nodding his agreement.

Once the wine and hot water got to Kagome, she beached her way out of the tub, completely unconcerned that she was the opposite of graceful, knowing Inuyasha had seen much worse from her. He handed her a towel after tucking away his phone again. Kagome stumbled, still chuckling to herself to the bedroom. She called over her shoulder, “Bring the car to the garage. Then come back to bed.”

Inuyasha knew he shouldn’t have been surprised that she remembered his car better than he did, but if it was important to him, it was important to her, and he was pleased to hear her remind him to take it in. Although he hadn’t intended to do so, he went to pull his favorite car into the garage. As he grabbed his keys, he saw the destruction Buyo had chosen to wreak. Looking at the little pieces of paper that was strewn all of the entry way to their home, Inuyasha halfway hoped the paper wasn’t important, but chose to do nothing at the moment, because, hell, it was already done.

Inuyasha stepped outside and brought his car into the garage, and was back in the house before Kagome could get her inebriated and happy self into bed. She had managed to get her pajamas back on, but was fighting a losing battle with the duvet. Inuyasha watched for a little while, Kagome’s giggling preventing her from being able to easily pull back the cover, and her wobbly legs making her teeter her and there. Eventually, after he got his fill of amusement, Inuyasha helped her into bed, before changing into his pajamas of light sleeping pants, and no shirt. He went downstairs to frost and bring up the cake that had been momentarily forgotten. He hadn’t realized at the store that the frosting container came with some gaudy hearts and kisses sprinkles, but he poured them on top of the frosting anyways. Although Kagome was a much better cake decorator than him, he knew she would love it regardless. He climbed back up the stairs with two larger slices of the cake, and found Kagome had snagged his phone out of his pants, her mostly likely downstairs in her purse still. She was playing Whitney Huston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ at full volume. When she saw him enter the doorframe, she sang with it. Normally, Kagome had a lovely voice, that reigned in its listener, but slightly drunk Kagome was singing for the gods. And not in a good way. Inuyasha’s ears immediately pinned against his head, and he looked at her in horror. Kagome only lasted about 10 seconds before she started to cough from the effort, and began to laugh instead. “Let’s not do that again, wench.” Inuyasha approached the bed and put the cake slices on the side table on his side. Kagome rasped out, “You got it, dog boy.” Inuyasha took then phone and turned off the song. He set his alarm, a little later than normal for Kagome’s sake, and put the phone on the nightstand. Kagome was still laying down, looking up at him with eyes that shone so much love that Inuyasha had to take a second and kiss her. She tried to wrap her hands up into his hair and pull him closer, but he moved away from her to grab the cake slices. Kagome was easily persuaded to change her course of action, and accepted the plate with a wholehearted, “oh my, my, my! Thank you!” Inuyasha settled in next to her, still on top of the duvet, but in close proximity. They took turns feeding each other bites of their respective slices of cake, interrupted by kisses here and there. The cake was sweet, but not as sweet as the loved shared between the two lovers. Once the cake was finished, even the crumbs gone, Inuyasha picked up the plates, and walked them down to the dishwasher. He came back with a glass of water for both of them, but Kagome appeared to have already fallen asleep. She was curled up toward his side of the bed, her arm reaching out for him already. Kneeling on the edge of the bed, Inuyasha reached over her to place her water down on her nightstand. Placing his glass on his side, Inuyasha laid down carefully, waiting for Kagome to move her arm before placing his whole weight on the mattress. She pulled her arm back from instinct, and waited for him to settle on his back before reaching her arm across his torso and scooting closer. Inuyasha wrapped his arms around her, whispering, “You’re such a damn lightweight.” Kagome mumbled back to him, “But I’m your lightweight.” Inuyasha snorted lightly, “Yeah, you are,” before closing his eyes and chasing sleep himself. Except, Kagome’s giggles returned with a vengeance, and soon her entire body was shaking uncontrollably, and she looked up into his one opened eye and said, “You’re the shit…” Inuyasha screwed his eyes tight, trying to not laugh, but failing miserably. He too began to shake, and the two of them fell into hysteria together. Kagome reached up to pull him into a wet kiss, pulling away to say, “Happy Valentine’s Day to the best husband in the whole wide world. I love you more than you can ever imagine.” Inuyasha placed his hand on the back of her neck, and puller closer to him, tucking her head into the crook of his neck. “I love you too. You’ll never know how much.” Kagome sighed, and closed her eyes, finally succumbing to the call of sleep, with Inuyasha not far behind. The next morning, they’d go downstairs to find out Buyo had destroyed the water bill, and that they would have to call up the company for the amount they owed, would eat cake for breakfast, and would continue their week the best way they knew how: functionally dysfunctional. But for the moment, they were just in love, and happy to be that way.

[ges-sa]

New Post has been published on https://ges-sa.com/motogp-18-review/

MotoGP™ 18 - Review

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]MOTO GP 18

  So I won’t lie, I’m not a fan of MotoGP games, having played the older ones on the rare occasion, I step into this well-researched on the older titles. I am actually a F1 fan and a car racing gaming fanatic in general, so this might be a difficult one to please me.

  Initial Thoughts

One thing I found really easy to deal with in this game was the layout of menus and the organizing of the game. Usually, when playing games like MXGP, I struggled at first to actually understand what was going on because it was extremely overwhelming, it almost aimed at the fans and not to the gamers which cuts out an entire market in my opinion. Jumping into my first race, I revved up my engine and was ready to get off to my first win, well, little did I know. Before you even start the race, you have Bike settings, which apparently is really cool but I took one look and was like “whhhhhhhhaaaatttt” – minion style

  Initial Race

Eventually I managed to start my engines and got going on my first race and did I struggle, every turn was like a living hell of my face eating tar, I almost held a funeral for poor Marquez. It took me about an hour to master the art of cornering, it wasn’t that bad once you actually get into it, get rid of that Car Racing mentality and be more disciplined in your art.

  Audio and Visual

The game is visually average when it comes to actual gameplay. I found that it was dull and bland, even from track to track I struggle to get the awe I got when playing such games as Crew 2. Perhaps on the PS4 Pro or XBOX One X there would be a very visible difference, but not that I noticed. The player interviews and player animation are pretty standard, with my comparison to that of Fifa and the likes, which probably isn’t fair, smaller company and smaller title. If you look at it independently, the overall graphics were probably dead average and nothing to write home about.

  The audio, as expected, was great. The bikes zooming past, revving, gearing down and pulling off were all real experiences and as someone who used to ride before I nearly died against a steel railing, I can tell you for a fact that the realism is there. The bikes are authentic, and doing some research I found that the bikes were recorded per Manufacturer, which wasn’t from the developers themselves but if this is true, that is simply beautiful and they deserve mad credit there.

  Gameplay

So game modes, all the same, nothing’s changed. It is difficult at first, proving to take some serious concentration and efforts in order to master the riding. The games experiences is really good and I found it a lot more satisfying completing a race than I would in a car game, because of this difficulty setting. When I started to dabble with the physics setting, then things got real, honestly I couldn’t make the first corner and decided to revert to standard. The game is fun and a real challenge, which I don’t see as bad, so I would rate the gameplay amongst the best in any motorsport game I have ever played.

  Conclusion

The game is definitely a good play, but is it a good buy? Probably not! The game is too expensive for what you get, the game modes and replay-ability were really the downfall here. Unfortunately, we are in time where even sports games have interactive stories and modes that you immerse yourself into and you just don’t get that here, it is the run of the mill stuff from every other Career mode pre-2016. I indulged in the career once I got the gameplay down and I wasn’t interested for more than 2 hours, probably because you take an already difficult game throw me back to like a bicycle and tell me to win the MGP One day. My guess, the guy that are real MGP heads would be okay with that.

So in conclusion, if you’re a gamer and want to just try this out, grab yourself a pre-played MotoGP17 first. If you are a hardcore fan, then all you need to decide is if you want to spend R779.00 (As special on 21-Aug-2018)

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Additional Information

[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]Reviewed on: Playstation 4 Available on: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch Genre: Motor Sport, Racing Age Rating: Pegi 3 Publisher/Developer: Milestone S.r.l. Estimated RRP: R779.00 (R1069.00 Full Price) Release Date: 07 June 2018[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]

Likes

Fun Learning

Audio Quality

Dislikes

Lack of Replay-ability

Graphics subpar

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#MotoGP18 #Rossi #Marquez #Bikes #Gaming #PS4 #XB1 #PC #Switch

[quicklycybermoon-blog]

No, Blockchain Is Not Solving The ID Problem Anytime Soon

Renewing your ID card or driving license can be a time-consuming and painfully boring process. Just thinking of lining up in queues filling up tens of useless documents makes me wanna burst into tears. I mean, come on, we live in the 21st century, they promised us e-government and flying cars. Where are they? Can blockchain solve the identity problem? Do we really have to carry IDs everywhere we go in order to prove it’s really us? The blockchain advocates claim we can store our identity on the ledger. They say we would access it through biometrics and share the data with trusted individuals only. For instance, Accenture and Microsoft envision a future where handling personal information would happen all on the blockchain. Since specialists insist blockchain networks are secure enough it is safe to assume that identity thefts would happen very rarely. Distributed ledgers sound like the cure to everything that is horribly wrong in the modern world but is it possible they work as well in reality as they do in theory? At the moment, we are way too far from the day we migrate to blockchain technologies. There are several problems that need to be solved before we live in a blockchain world. First of all, there should be a global ID network, otherwise, it is pointless to think of adopting distributed ledgers at all. A global ID network means that businesses, individuals, and governments all have access to the data stored. This leads us to the second problem – governments don’t do well with technology. Just go to your local administration to see what I am talking about. Here comes problem Number 3 – since governments have access to the ledger, they would like to have control over it. What I am trying to say is, no “self-sovereign” ID management is not coming. It’s just a utopia. Even the head of blockchain ID startup Civic admits there is a long way to go. In an interview with Fortune, Vinny Lingham notes that governments and businesses will have a hard time agreeing on the terms and standards, which the global blockchain network should follow. True, e-voting was successfully tested in Switzerland and Estonia but implementing blockchain on a larger scale is a whole different story. Lingham clarified: “We looked at blockchain voting, and realized it will take any government of a reasonable size years to implement it. We won’t see elections on the blockchain in the U.S. for at least two more cycles.” He further adds that DLTs first have to make it to everyday apps before being put in charge of ID management, “It’s a grind, to be honest. Every week we’re signing up dozens of users. Hopefully, it’ll soon be hundreds or thousands a week.” Read the full article