I’ve been working on the animation, playing with Godot and Stable Diffusion, and fighting with banks while the UK government risks the union to insist it decides how Scotland should assess gender.

Me

Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse:

Spent a lot of time on the lighting of the cartoon I’ve been working on for years. My scene is too big to fit the lightmaps.

While improving my remote backups, I found a trick to keep open your ssh connection so that when copying lots of files with individual commands you don’t have to keep renegotiating the connection.

And when repairing all the things I broke doing that I used many Git features leading to a rhapsody about Git

Trouble with banking. The NSI are holding my money hostage and refusing to give it me back. Leading to complications paying a tax bill.

A little rant about the capital-controlled advertising-supported corporate internet and why it’s bland and dull.

Went to Banbury and met a hoss made from flowers.

England decides it can tell Scotland how to assess gender, at the risk of the union itself. Why?

Exploring The Godot Game Engine making a first little test project. It’s pretty nice, but not actually suitable for my current plan.

Some of Google’s new Captcha tests are impossibly hard and misconceived.

The world economic forum creates crazy conspiracy stories on all ends of the political spectrum!

Playing with Image-creation software Stable Diffusion. Turns out you can have it put your face in thousand movie-posters overnight and turn them into a video.

At the very start of Feb the tarot cards from the kickstarter turned up so I have lots of postage and packaging to do next week!

My Birthday Next Month

It’s my birthday this time next month! come celebrate with me if you want. In London all Saturday afternoon/evening.

Reading

Not finished any books this month. Darn. Too much TV:

Watching

Peripheral

William Gibson heavily involved in creating the TV version of his book (which I haven’t read). Sci-fi world in which people from the present are inhabiting robots in the future and there’s fighting between parallel worlds. It’s very good.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Everyone else saw this great movie about parallel worlds and possible lives when it was in the movies but I don’t go to the movies so I waited till now. It is indeed as good as everyone said.

The Orville Season 3

The best Star-Trek last year was not really star trek at all, it was The Orville Season Three which was smart and exciting and philosophical but no longer really played for laughs the way S1 was.

Ghosts US

The USA did a version of the BBC show Ghosts, and re-imported it as Ghosts US. America did as many shows in a year as BBC did in 5. Interesting how they’ve changed ghosts. No cave-man, but one native Indian. Still feels pretty cute and homely and funny, but with that different US twist.

Undone

Animated/Rotoscoped series “Undone” is about a dreamy time-travelling adventure in which they keep trying to fix everything, and strangely mostly succeed. I was sure she’d screw up the past so much she stopped existing and became, well, undone. But I guess not. Strange trippy dreamy show.

Rick And Morty S6

Cartoon Rick And Morty continues it’s adventures and continues to be crass and rude and clever and amusing. Royland is leaving due to court-cases and accusations of woman-beating so they’re replacing him with impressionists next season I guess. Here’s hoping it’s still okay.

His Dark Materials

The BBC’s final season of His Dark Materials.

I switched somewhere along the way reading it from paper to audio-books, and there was cartoon and a movie that never got past the first book I think? So I really felt like I’d seen it before even though I definitely hadn’t seen it before, and only listened to the actual end never watched nor read it.

That ending though. Saddest thing there is. Made some some observations on the ending and how another similar show made me cry more.

Links

Betterage’s law would suggest all headline-questions answers are “No”, but here it’s more like a “maybe”. New modeling suggests the planetary crash that may have caused the moon may have settled more quickly into a ball than thought.

Jargon-filled and really requiring concentration to read, but it’s very good. He argues for “polycentric systems [of governance that] can serve as checks and balances on each other and make much better use of information that pertains to their domain, creating a mesh of interlocking governance systems that are ability to deal with the real world’s complexity.”

He says “Essentially, we can think of this approach as a form of Cambrian Governance.”

We don’t want centralized control and ownership, we need many-centers and federation.

“Don’t let them talk to you about freedom. This government is stripping out fundamental liberties with the speed and determination you would expect in the aftermath of a military coup. Knowing that their days in office are numbered, the Conservatives seem to be snuffing out democracy as quickly as they can.”

Murray talks about polarization of opinion in general, and about the Ukraine War and Trans Rights in particular. Two camps: Both wrong. Both denying any nuance can be countenanced. He suggests the true answers are unsayable and always shouted down by trolls and angry denial.

The discussion under my link-bot’s post demonstrated the point pretty well.

Before that polarization it was cool and normal to point out that Ukraine was corrupt and had a problem with nazis in it’s millitary but the media will not currently print anything remotely like the things they were happy to print in 2014.

This is bizarre and strange. A 3d-voxel rendering of Seinfeld’s flat with an AI generated script running 24 hours a day generating a constant long show about nothing for ever.

Terrifying and entrancing and just on the wrong side of being good in anyway. Please don’t watch it for too long. The robots will fill your brain with spam and junk soon enough.

John Carmack the programer-god who bought us Doom and worked on space-rockets and was big in VR and now he’s hacking on AI. Seeing what a man in a garage can do with just millions in investment. Trying to make a human level thinking machine. If any single man can create the AI that destroys the world this man is the man. He seems to think it won’t destroy the whole world though so here’s hoping for that.

more…

That’s just the highlights this month, there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed

Around The Fediverse

The fediverse is an anarchic rebellion of freely interoperating groups fighting against adverts and tracking and corporate ownership of the means of communication. Still adding thousands of new accounts every day and approaching ten million accounts that escaped the plastic corporate censored advertising-ridden spying tracking panopticon to join the free web. Can you figure out how to join them? Some say it’s difficult, and yet there are a few real idiots who manged it. They get everywhere.

Here’s some stuff the non-idiots have been saying lately:

“According to twitter, the app “has violated Twitter Rules and policies”. I can’t tell much more at the moment since the email they mention never arrived in my inbox.”

Google killed them just like yahoo killed webrings because if you can just surf from site to site then you don’t need search engines. Sod it let’s bring them back. Aye they might’ve been often ugly and tacky but *you could use them* is the thing.”

“Network effect can’t be reduced to ‘how many people use a service’. What should also be considered is *who* is using a service. For the past 5 years, there’s been a mass movement of devs to the Fediverse. "

He also points out Twitter were fools to screw over 3rd party app developers

I don’t know why we put up with it. I demand answers. "

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