New President Guy, and Bluesky, and Sci-fi - November 2024
I had half the week off to do writing and 3d-modelling and play games and meanwhileTrump won the election, and Bluesky gets a boost from subsequent Twitter-Quitters.
Me
Improv Show
Did another improv show, at the Bell in East London.
It’s smaller and more grim than the Miller in London Bridge.
One of those pubs that somehow still seems smokey even though nobody is allowed to smoke any more. Upstairs in the show-room is more crowded and squashed.
Fun shows though.
The group works well together and performers and audience all laughing heartily.
Break from that till next year now.
Glad to find more of the group will be at the next setof practice sessions than I expected, even though it’s a different day of the week in a different place.
Time Off
At the start of the month the boss reminded me that I had yet to take all my holidays days.
So I had like 13 days off work, andmostly ideally therefore was working on the VR-sci-fi project instead.
I did get some of that done, but spent more time playing games and debugging backup systems and deleting/replacing Wordpress on my website and watching TV.
It was nice, but I have a blister on my trigger finger now.
Next newsletter is next year, so happy solstice,merry new year, and see you on the other side.
sci-fi Writing
It is too easy, on days when trying to write, to do absolutely nothing whatsoever at all.
Not even really figure out what you’re supposed to be writing.
But, after days of that, I finally got a draft of a script done, mostly late at night as usual.
It’s too long, it’s too preachy, not enough action, and what action there is badly paced all focusedat the end so not engaging enough from frame one.
The dialog needs more characterisation.
It didn’t really go where I thought it was going toand will be more complex to make than I hoped, but it flows okay.
Story progressing from circumstance how it oughta.
So there is a draft. At least something to stare at other than a blank page or the wall as I continue.
Done enough to start finding the models for the cast.Bought a pack of six character-assets, started toconvert them as needed…
sci-fi modelling
Work on the V0.4 film has begun. This character asset has been adapted to work with the software, the puppetting and Inverse Kinematics,and now also has an animatable face.
He’s going to be a raving maniacal troll I think.
Lin Linwood is in fact related to Coral Linwood, our public liaisons intern with the Starship Schrodinger’s Destiny, but not closely.
They see each other at weddings and funerals.
She’s a family friend who can hopefully help the crew.
Fox
I sometimes hear paranoid cat-owners worried that foxes might murder their kitty, but the roles are the other way around in the battle that unfolded outside my window.
This cat is clearly harassing the poor frightened fox.
After a bit of frightened panic around my yard the fox fled, jumping over the fence towards the neighbours.
The cat followed, with intent to bully.
Quick video there at the link.
Binface
Went to see Count Binface at the party conference in London.
Lovely setup for standup in the Pleasence, with tables around the stalls and balcony instead of rows of chairs.
Mostly jokes about how the real politicians are all even more stupid than he is.
Surprised he held a mic like a standup comedian,instead of having a wireless one built into his bin.
He gets far fewer mayoral votes under first past the post, but he didn’t explicitly say that was why there were so many fewer second time.
Probably didn’t want to bring attention to the downward swing.
On target for government in 2043 though according to trends he reckons.
Blades and Sorcery
Blades and Sorcery the VR game got it’s full release at some point since I last looked at it.
Mission mode instead of just the sandbox/wave-fighter now, so been playing that half the weekend.
That rock-monster battle was magnificent. If I wasn’t already so good at this from all the sandbox play it’d have been quite a struggle.
Climbing all over the monster as it swings you around the cavern, being battered off it onto the cave walls, running around the ledge to jump and swing from the dangling lamp-shades.
Spooky new lost-civilization maps.
Awesome stuff.
Backups
I sure am glad I found out my backups weren’t working as expected when I only wanted to restore one file rather than all of them.
Check they’re actually backing up the files in the directory you think they ought and not just making a daily copy of a symlink.
Rebuilding that backup system to work properlytook the computer more than two days to builda 3Tb archive.
I was using Linode object storage to keep thatoff-site, but they don’t appear to allow me to delete the old bucket without first emptying it, and the link for doing that isn’t just a “really sure” button but a wall of text in the manual I can’t be arsed to read.
So delete that account instead. That should force them to delete the data.
Which means now I have to find a new object storage service that’ll work with rclone.
Which all seems pretty expensive now I’ve tripled the size of the backup by doing it properly.
I have gone with a company called Vultr.
Copy to their server has begun. It’s all already encrypted so the worst they can do it lose it really or bill me fraudulently.
I like the fact my bank (full banking license pending) lets me create a custom card just for an individual vendor. Makes it feel much less risky to try a new vendor out, and easy to track what spending is done or cancel it if needed.
For instance, Linode have done their closing transaction so now I’ve frozen their card and they can’t bill me again.
Vultr looks pretty nice though. Might try their VMs next time I need one too.
Wonder if my GPU rendering can be done there?
Copying the archive to their object store isnow 120 hours in with at least as much time still to go.
Wordpress Uninstall
In 2018 the Wordpress project released the “blocks editor” and after a short time using it I resolved to get the hell off of Wordpress.
Finally, now, a mere six years later I have completed the project and now https://dalliance.net is served from a bunch of static files compiled by Hugo.
The project timeline was basically six years of procrastination followed by two days of fairly intensive work.
The brief attempt at using Wordpress as a microblog is deleted: 342 pages removed from the web
The brief attempt at using Wordpress as a bookmark/link system is deleted:328 pages removed from the web.
Lots of broken links and screwed up threading in my books is fixed.
Ditching Wordpress feels like a big step really.
I was accustomed to the idea that I had to remove all the corporate proprietary software from my life.
Wordpress is still free and open, weird to feel like I have to delete that so hard too.
Politics
Assisted dying
The parliament voted on assisted dying, and passed it.At least stage one.
In general, I think the safeguards are too stringent,and the rule where you have to have less than six months left to live is wrong.
The longer you may have to suffer painful torture, the more urgent ending that suffering could be.
I kinda expected they would sort out assisted dying in time for the boomers to use it but this isn’t it.
If this bill is law in 40 years or whatever when it’s my turn to end my suffering, I will still have to ensure I do it nice and early, before I become incapable and need help to do it.
I will still be forced to do it alone and unaided.
It’s too quick, too soon for a young parliament
Sorry everyone, you must continue to suffer in pain because changing the law to allow people to own their own lives and decide their own fate is happening too quickly!
Fucking parliamentarians thinking they own me.
They are determined to force me to die unaided and alone.
Palliative care isn't where it needs to be.
But voting against this bill will not improve palliative care. Instead of giving someone a way to end suffering, you force them to suffer what you admit is poor palliative care.
If this bill fails, it won’t be replaced by a sudden massive increase in NHS funding or staffing for the terminally ill.
This bill doesn't have enough safeguards
Bloody hell, it makes you go to a judge and beg for the right to die. Makes you collect two different doctors and plead for them to bless your decision.
I’m not saying there ought to be a suicide booth on every street-corner, but it’s my life, and no damned judge has no right to demand I must live.
None of those doctors have to have been the family doctor.
What if the family doctor is dead? I don’t think I’ve seen the same GP two times in my entire life. They change more often than I’m sick.
I guess I’ll have spent longer being sick when the time comes, but this city does not really have family doctors.
People may feel that to spare their family suffering and anguish they feel forced to choose to die.
So? Isn’t that a good reason? Seems like a good reason to me. I’d be mostly sparing myself that pain and anguish but sparing those I love is certainly a bonus!
The state should not have the power of life and death.
Yeah, right. Don’t care about that when you’re sending soldiers off to kill people in a war do you? Don’t care about that when you’re dropping bombs on the middle east.
And of course it isn’t the state doing the killing, it’s the doctors assisting the patient killing themselves. The bill just gets the state out of the way.
We're moving to a situation where it will be cheaper to help a patient die than treat their illness.
Sorry Dianne, it’s already cheaper to let someone die than treat their illness. We’re not “moving” into that situation at all, it’s always been cheaper to let someone die than treat them.
The ideal bill would allow for cryogenic preservation at the deathbed but we’re a long long long long way from a government ready for that kind of thing.
Farmers & Tax
When landowners were given tax-breaks on their farms in the 1980s, land became valuable for more than just the land.
Ownership of the land becomes a tax-hedging scheme, which inflates it’s price.
When Clarkson bought his farm, he paid more for it than it’s really worth, because it came bundled with a tax-avoidance system.
I can’t say if he wanted it primarily in order to avoid taxes, that’s for him and his accountants to know. Perhaps he’d rather it’d been cheaper and properly taxed.
But investment corporations surely are are pushing up the price of land because of this, making land a monetary asset rather than just valued by the productive capacity.
Soon farming families are priced out, and the land is owned primarily by tax-avoidance corporations and gentry, who rent the land to the farmers that work it.
Now the tax-dodge goes almost entirely to the rich, and working farmers pay them rent for the privilege.
Is concentration of wealth in monopolistic capital a side-effect of a well-intentioned scheme to help farmers? Or is it a deliberate act from the party of capital to increase it’s own power and riches?
Hard to say, that’s for the Conservatives and their accountants to know, but we can still reverse the effect before it’s too late.
Bluesky
After Trump won, another wave of people fled Twitter.
Finally waking up and noticing they were drinkingin the nazi bar.
โ ๏ธ
Aye, another big one, you can see it in the swell.
Reverberates all around the ‘verse. ๐ฌ
Directed more over yonder this time, I reckon, towards the perilous waters under the blue sky.
They’re cast adrift from one single owner, just to wind up with another. Awaiting for it to cloud over there too. Corporate vultures already circling. ๐จ
Even flotsam like national newspapers and lunchtime talk radio presenters in this wave, to judge by the reverb in the chatter.
For the best that those types stick to corporate sea-lanes, for now. They tend to attract the hoard.
Aye, we’re well to keep away from the horde.
…
Everyone’s going mad for Starter Packs there,where someone else chooses dozens of celebrities for you to follow and you can follow the popular people all at once!
Hard to imagine anything more irritating that having a feed filled with some bunch of wankers picked by someone else, unless it was lists of journalists and influencers.
Oh, that’s what they mostly are ๐คข
If Mastodon had Starter-Packs people would say it’s confusing and hard to use.
๐
They’d probably also be right.
๐
Bluesky app & future
It’s limited to 300 chars? Really? ๐
Where is the app that allows 5000 characters?
Or is this network not really decentralized!?
Oh. It’s owned by a company?
That took blockchain capital? ๐
My account will just be a mirror of the free network then.
…
A wormhole in time opened up and out fell this future timeline about bluesky:
-
2025 - Golden age, new 3rd party clients.
-
2026 - Adverts on the site
-
2027 - Bitcoin Integration
-
2028 - Charge other companies for API access to relays
-
2029 - 3rd parry clients access revoked
-
2030 - Sold to Amazon Consortium
-
2031 - Must now be logged in to view threads on the web app.
This is only one possible future. The real future could go faster or slower than that, or the whole internet could get shut down during WW3.
Installing Bluesky server
People keep saying Bluesky is a centralized thing which doesn’t federate.But in fact you can run a personal-data-server.
I set one up to try and figure out how it works.
Not even hard to install really. Run the install script. It sets up 3 docker containers.
Then you have a API server that can talk to the bluesky network. It’s doing so right away.
Which is a shame, I wanted to run it without connecting it to anything in test-mode or company-wide-mode first.
Maybe there’s ways to do that. Dunno.
Since it’s just an API server I can’t really give out a profile URL, to have a page listing the account’s posts.
I can see a way I could build one, but doesn’t seem like anyone else has. Just like a front-page to the hosted account? An actual public web-page that lists the user’s ฮผ-blog posts?
Crazy talk!
The only web-apps are multi-column explorers. I don’t really understand to what extent the data on my bluesky personal-data-server is forwarded to the rest of the network.
When “the rest of the network” is basically just one big blue-sky server, I guess just to one server is all there really is.
I guess having a fedi instance like goto-social just seems more natural to me because to me the point of it all is to have a web-page that displays your posts.
Twitter used to do that, and goto-social or mastodon do that, but I’m an old fuddy-duddy web-head that doesn’t understand the ways of the app that everyone likes these days.
So nobody cares if running a bluesky-server doesn’t actually deliver web-pages that display your posts grandad! Everyone’s using an app anyway.
Here’s what I’m thinking now: holding my account data on my own server which is still reliant upon the master indexes doesn’t really have much advantage over using their public data-stores.
Not enough advantage to be worth a fiver a month for yet another virtual-machine at Hetzner, certainly.
Especially when the account would be, at best, a mirror of some of the posts already stored and backed up on my Mastodon server on Fedi.
Why would I need to duplicate that data-store in adifferent format just to push the content into their central index?
Seems like I can skip the PDS step and just inject it directly to their public systems.
If I wasn’t already in control of my public microblog data I guess there might be more point to it.
But, I already got a self-owned store and that one has a nicer front end that actually shows web-pages.
So this one PDS server I ran lasted less than 24 hours.
Deleted now.
Instead, just running a shadow account over there on Bluesky’s own servers, mirroring my usualposts.
You can find it here sky-heads
There’s also
and one for the starship project
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot - Bluesky
This month’s best Tarot show: Bluesky!
We find Jack started it to avoid having to censor, but it’s user moderation tools are stronger than Twitter’s censorship ever was, so people can nowescape Twitter’s endless trolls!
So in short , people aren’t going to Bluesky because they are seeking adecentralized forum which nobody can own or buy, but just because it’s mildly better moderated than Twitter.
Shockingly, people don’t want a free-speech sitefilled with trolls who harass them.
The thing that’s ironic about this is that Jack started Bluesky primarily so he could hand over responsibility for moderation and allow a free-speech site, but what that’s actually done is create a more heavily moderated site than even Twitter before Elon.
Reading
I read “Speech! How language made us human” by Simon Prentis, in which he explores some ways in which language affects what kind of animal a person is.
We can dismiss the idea that language is the actual stuff of thought, the thing the brain uses to think:My mum’s typical sentence proves it utterly
Where did I put the thingy, you know, the whatsit
She clearly thinking of a thing without knowing the word for it, so words aren’t the base unit for thought.
Yet language is also clearly the thing which gives us such a deep and rich culture, and he is entertaining and enlightening as he goes though what some of that means.
He’s really optimistic in the final pages, that our international agreement and commitment to law and human rights - a thing borne by language - can bring about some approximation of world peace.
Course, it was written before the start of world war 3 in 2022. Will we be able to talk ourselves out of it escalating? Or will wetalk ourselves into another final catastrophicglobal meltdown?
That’s the thing about language I guess.
Could argue either side.
Watching
Watched “The Gentleman” on Netflix, a Guy Ritchie gangster show about a soldier inheriting a title and a dope farm.
They have a great use of music setting the mood in every scene and a series of great comic-book characters as gangsters. The lack of honour among the thieves lets them turn on and betray each other to weave a winding complex plot.
Suzie Glass is cool and hard-nosed and strong and efficient as is the soldier lord. They’re a good team in a world of chaos.
Links
Social Media
Bluesky rising
- Cory Doctorow - Ulysses Pact Cory explores Bluesky’s features and explains why he won’t be using Bluesky yet:
I don’t know why Bluesky hasn’t added the federation systems that would enable freedom of exit to its service. Perhaps there are excellent technical reasons to prioritize rolling out the other systems they’ve created so far.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter.
So long as Bluesky can be a trap, I won’t let myself be tempted.
Twitters Bots
- Benn Jordan - Dark Truth About Bots Meanwhile on Twitter, it seems about a third ofthe accounts there are bots or corporate or state influence actors.No wonder everyone fled!
Facebook failing
404 report that Zuckerberg explains the downfall of Facebook in an Investor Call:
If you look at the big trends in Feeds over the history of the company, it started off as friends, right? So all the updates that were in there were basically from your friends posting things. And then we went into this era where we added in creator content too, where now a very large percent of the content on Instagram and Facebook is not from your friends. It may not even be from people that youโre following directly. It could just be recommended content from creators that we can algorithmically determine is going to be interesting and engaging and valuable to you.Strangely he seems excited by it rather than thinking it of some kind of hellscape.
No wonder everyone’s feeing Facebook.
Vote Analysis
Oh, alright, yes. Trump won the election. We shouldthink about that.
As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, democracy is at its most vulnerable when inequality in a society has become entrenched and grown too glaring. Deep social and economic disparities create the conditions for demagogues to prey on peopleโs resentments, and for democracy ultimately to fall in the way that Plato described.
Kamala Harris didn’t lose because she’s a woman or because she’s black. She lost because, if your political and media system โ rigged by donors โ limits the choice to two hardline neoliberal candidates, with anything else denounced as โcommunismโ, the most hardline, neoliberal candidate has an edge. Over time, the system keeps moving further to the hardline, neoliberal right.
Voter analysis video from onion news network.
Ha. Very good. Really rooting into the core of voting patterns
Video
George Lucas Wasnโt Done With The Prequels, so we Finished Them.
Lucas had Star Wars stolen from him by Disney, and was never able to release a Special Edition of the Prequels. The crew takes it upon themselves to bring balance to the force.
Protocol and encryption negotiation can be pretty metal.
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 flow from Twitter went mostly to Bluesky this time,but is Bluesky as decentralized and un-own-able as Fedi?Where can we go to be free?
Bluesky
@cwebber@social.coop was very involved in Activitypub/Fedi and has detailed technical notes:
How Decentralized Is Bluesky Really?
A technical deep-dive, since people have been asking me for my thoughts. I’ll expand a bit on some of the key points here in a thread. ๐งต
Excellent detailed description of the differences.
@driusan@doomscroller.social notices it’s a single corporation:
Even though I think BlueSky has a technically superior foundation to ActivityPub, and it’s gotten some traction amongst Twitter users who were driven away by Mastodon’s culture in the initial Twitter wave, I decided to stay on the fediverse instead of Bsky because the open/federated/decentralized culture is more resilient to the type of attack that happened to Twitter vs the “federated” but for all intents and purposes centralized nature of BlueSky that’s maintained by a single corporation. I think culture is more important than technology for a social network.So how are things going on BlueSky?(Checks in)https://bsky.app/profile/mommunism.bsky.social/post/3l7uxozsv3c2a
@oliphant@oliphant.social explains why some people are preferring Bluesky:
I don’t know. People want to be in “the place” and they want to be where the other people are and AOC isn’t joining Mastodon and Barack Obama isn’t joining Mastodon and my ex-wife just found out that Mastodon exists at all like…yesterday? Because I told her?
You are comparing a place that is basically a single user experience, where the tech and the user experience itself, the entirety of “The Bluesky experience” is created by a small, tight, and apparently very well-paid team of technical experts. They have literally millions of dollars at their disposal.
Meanwhile, over here we have the dinky little DIY nerd internet, where people write code for free and host the infrastructure for fun and have ZERO millions of dollars and most of us are getting paid almost nothing, and there’s no single shared software, much less anything you could truly call a single contiguous place even as we refer to this as “the fediverse” or “this place” or “on here” it’s really not, it’s truly decentralized, and my slice of the fedi looks different than yours because we follow different people.
There’s no well-paid onboarding team or user experience team or fuck, there’s not even a “design team” because that would imply a centralized staff (ie., bluesky or X or Meta developers).
There’s people making software so people can host their own social media. Many are almost doing this work for free. They have no large investment capital, and often are doing this in addition to their real day job, for the love of it, because they believe in a mission of social media anyone can use and host, and a space that truly isn’t owned by anyone, which no one can shut down.
And this little DIY nerd vehicle, “this place” it still gains more users, every month, little by little. Sometimes an ebb, sometimes a flow, but this is without a marketing department, without an MBA, without VC funding, honestly, largely without capitalism.
It’s a miracle, and I think we should be realistic about what we should expect. Not seeing “the big numbers” doesn’t really mean anything to me. We were never going to compete with the “new place” and the “one experience” and if you’ve ever used an iPhone you’ll understand the advantages of centralization, and controlling an entire technical ecosystem, and how onboarding and UX is utilized to make adoption easier.
Also, how easily you can use millions of dollars of investment to look like a ‘serious bet’ to the rest of the world, or get your name in the media, and to drive recognition and adoption.
What the fedi can do better than just about anything else is be affordable self-hosted ownerless ad-free social media in perpetuity. That will always have an appeal and it will still be here, waiting, when the other platforms (from which we can steal all their good ideas while jettisoning all the predatory bad ones) have enshittified or changed ownership to baby Hitler.
AI comic
@kmcshane@mastodon.art has a comic not drawn by AI:
A better way to spend a billion
AI-squatting
@rysiek@mstdn.social is thinking about “ai-squatting”
And now I am thinking of AI-squatting: “hallucinations” might be somewhat predictable with regards to short strings like phone numbers and domain names.
Which would lend itself to the kinds of scams or attacks where scammers/attackers register a bunch of domains or phone numbers that are likely to be “hallucinated” by a chatbot in a particular context…
Orange in his mouth
@micefearboggis@fediscience.org has a hilarious story about putting a whole orange in his mouth:
When an article says “some scientists think” then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn’t given sufficient thought to the reverse operation. ๐งต
Trump - What happened
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social has a thread about the election
In 2011, the town of Empire, Nevada effectively ceased to exist. A company town, Empire was home to a small community based around a gypsum mine. Gypsum had been in high demand as a component in sheetrock, a popular building material in US housing construction. But the 2007-2008 economic crisis caused a crash in the housing market and new construction, which in turn killed demand for sheetrock and thus gypsum.
So, Empire was closed down and its hundreds of inhabitants expelled….
Trump - Fight Back
@ajroach42@retro.social tells us to build community:
The most important thing you can do, the big message, is to build a community. That’s how we Organize. That’s how we create social change. Organizing for “the vote” is useless. The work happens in kitchens and coffee shops and bookstores and libraries and living rooms and concert halls. Make friends. Support your friends. Be ready to defend one another if the moment calls for it…
AnarchoNina
Anarchonina writing lots of good stuff.
She explains how to stop fascism: Don’t deliberately fight cops, but if you put your body in the way of profit the cops will come and fight you.
There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop a genocide; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop banks boiling our kids like soup; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to stop weapons manufacturing; join them. There are people right now putting their bodies on the line to oppose police militarization and Cop Cities; join them. There are people risking violence to oppose fascist organization; JOIN THEM
she explains why it’s happening:
Without putting too fine a point on it - doing colonialism, building police states and criminalizing political opposition to the establishment order while that very same establishment works to allow capitalists to continue enforcing a fossil fuel economy that is ABSOLUTELY going to kill billions, is pretty fascist and it doesn’t matter how little you want to hear that.
If it makes you feel better, I didn’t say they were nazis - but hell yes every capitalist party in 2024 is fascist.
She asks who built the police state Trump will inherit?
Again, will Trump have to BUILD a police state? Will Trump have to BUILD camps? Will Trump have to START genociding people for cracker fascist billionaires? Will Trump have to WRITE laws to suppress his opposition? Will Trump have to GIVE power to billionaire nazis? Will Trump have to SET the planet on fire?
WHO BUILT THIS MACHINE THE FASCISTS ARE GONNA USE TO KILL ME?
Fuck off.
All great threads.
Disinfo
@ophiocephalic@kolektiva.social on disinfo:
Counterpoint on the new Taylor Lorenz Substack piece about disinformation. The article’s conclusion references the now-familiar concerns about ’ a “post-truth” online landscape’ and ’the fracturing of a shared reality’; but this isn’t quite right. In fact, there has been a shift from a single official monoculture of disinformation to many niche subcultures of it. The “shared reality” we’ve lost was actually always one which was manipulated to manufacture consent….