Fly In The Sky - Oct 2024
The end of another Improv course, motor related discussion, spending a week in VR in No Man’s Sky, while we have a new Conservative leader, a new Labour Budget, and a new American Election.
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse
Car Caper
As usual had a trip up to Banbury to meet my folks,
The Car-Club finally replaced the closest car that’s been gone for ages.
Automatic gearbox which is nice. Car has no key-slot. Just a button with stop/start written on it.
It turns on the screen after one press, and turns the screen off after another press. 🤨 🤔
But how to start the engine?
Had to call ’em to ask. Apparently the trick is to be in Neutral, and hold the brake pedal, and press the start button all at once.
That works, but then in the car to drive back:
Start/Stop button error, consult manual!
🤨
I turned it off and on again a few times and seemed to work eventually.
Took a while to figure out how to open the petrol hole too. There’s a button under the dashboard.
I like the 360-view parking cameras though. See the car and it’s surroundings as though from a helicopter, like playing grand-theft-auto-1
🚗
Van Plan
The housing-estate also tell me that I can probably have a garage on the estate soon.
Asked for one of them years ago.
Was thinking a micro-camper could go in it when it came up.
So I spent a bit of time looking at all the tiny microcampers the like of which would fit in a standard domestic garage and also I wouldn’t feel terrified trying to drive.
Seems like really this means the smallest of the vans, the cars designed to carry a family of seven.
All the already-converted ones have some flaw of course which makes them less than perfect. Wrong type of sink or bed in the wrong place or whatever.
Meanwhile, the camper-converted ones seem to be selling for around 8 grand more than the unconverted ones, while also companies are claiming they’ll do the conversion for more like 4 grand.
So it seems like you could make small amounts of money by buying the cars, paying a company to convert them, and then selling them as campers.
Not interested in doing that, but does seem likely to be the best route to getting a camper of my own I really like. Design it myself. Buy the car and pay for a conversion to my design.
Now the only trouble is I don’t know anything about cars. The Renault Kangaroo seems like it’s about the right shape. Probably not the electric version given the range and charging time and the length of journey a camper typically does. But definitely not diesel either given the Ultra-low-emission requirements of the city I live in.🤔
Shrine Time
I’m still putting LED strips everywhere. Instead of doing the things I hoped to do.
I have made some sort of trophy case / shrine.
The top shelf of my bookshelves is now surrounded with a strip of LEDS to light it’s interior.
This makes it a display shelf, so instead of all the junk and boxes and the to-read queue which used to be there, it seemed to need some thing face-forwards.
A display-shelf.
So on the shelf now, my work, from right to left:
- Word Cloud Tarot deck - Original Edition
- Photo-book of holiday in Africa
- A DVD of my movie: Tentacles, After The End.
- A copy of my pocket-book, “Do Dream Sheep Bleat?”, black and white with a penguin on the cover.
- A copy of my book “Yes, the conspiracy really exists, and furthermore it’s all your fault!”
- A copy of the photobook from my trip to Iceland
- A wordcloud tarot deck made in partnership with Happy Toast
Improv Improvement
Top level play going on at Improv the last couple of weeks.
Then after the show, the group breaks up, just as it starts to really gel.
Seems like the next level has to be a different night with a different ringmaster, so probably a largely different group. At least some are joining me in Kings Cross though.
Need to find a steady troupe really instead of these 8 week courses. Only one more of these 8-weekers before we run out of levels and it’s all just varieties of “advanced”.
Maybe some folks in that final group will wanna go steady.
Figure it out after the summer.
Meantime there’s an end of course show which might be fun if you wanna come.
Budget Smudget
Labour did a budget, I didn’t look all that closely, but so far as I can tell:
No talk of nationalizing anything, big giveaways to fossil fuel companies, huge increases in money for bombs and guns, no huge public-owned projects, barely any green energy investment, more sin-taxes on smoking drinking and vaping, no understanding of macro-economics, no real plan for the future other than to rely on private-sector growth and no plan to get that other than give shareholders more freedom to loot public funds.
You can see why people say both parties are the same, but those people are wrong! Labour are in fact about 10% better, under their leadership we will see the country continue to decline into private ownership and techno feudalism at a slightly slower rate!
I liked Matt Green’s video
🤵 Does this [personal online budget calculator] also show the impact this budget will have in the NHS, Education, Transport, Infrastructure investment?
Er, no, why would it do that?
🤵Well, because doesn’t simplifying everything down to an individual figure without taking into account the broader aims of the budget risk misinforming more than informing?
🕴️ Well I don’t…
🤵Because it encourages to see everything through a narrow personal lens rather than understanding the effects on wider society? And also feeds into a kind of culture-war narrative that everyone is pitted against each other?
🕴️A pint will be a penny cheaper!
👏 👏👏
Leader Reader
Congratulations to Kemi Badenoch who is now the leader of the Conservative party.
Apparently she thinks the party has veered towards the political centre by “governing from the left” and must return to its traditional ideas.
Which I would describe as an absolutely batty opinion counter to observable facts about Brexit and Culture-war battles and the corruption and scandal that actually drove the party from power.
So sounds like she’ll be working hard to make the party more irrelevant and drive away any voters who aren’t rabid hate-filled crazy people.
Good times for the other parties I guess.
Expect they’ll change leader again before the next election though.
There’s a Tarot Reading on the topic below.
Electoral Spectral
The Americans go to the polls today.
We don’t often have such a concrete example of the difference between philosophical Deontology vs Consequentialism
Rules for life like “Don’t vote for genocide supporters” are good rules on the face of it. In general, that would indeed be a great rule to add to your Deontological set.
Until you’re in the impossible position of picking between two genocide supporters.
Sure, you can just stay home. More Americans will refuse to vote than will vote for either candidate most likely. It’s not a bad deontological choice. A hope to do no harm.
And yet, a consequential analysis shows you may indeed do harm by attempting not to. You don’t support the genocide-abater, and so the even bigger genocider gets in.
I usually lean Deontological because the world is chaotic and consequences are so unpredictable. Even the smartest among us can’t actually tell which action will have the best consequences.
But in the end you can only pick a set of Deontological rules by guessing at the average consequences of those rules. Rules can’t in themselves be judged good or bad without reference to their consequences.
The best outcome probably comes from the Deontological folks considering the consequences instead, on occasions like this. But then that’s what consequentialists always say.
Good luck America. Hope a lot of Deontoligical folks get consequenitalist when push comes to shove in the booth.
Sky Fly
Spent lots of the last week playing “No Mans Sky”, attempting to go through this new “expedition” and get that sweet looking space-ship.
Spent far too long trying to build a mech-suit to go collecting storm-crystals, but it was all a waste and I ended up just flying the ship around looking for ’em and jumping out to weather the storm for the few seconds it takes to collect ’em.
One bit involved just staring at the night sky for a minute.
Seems to be impossible in vr. The character never really looks up, just the vr view.
Had to play on flat screen to do it, and I’ve only played in vr. No idea what buttons do what. Nearly killed me just to look at the stars.
If I’d realized how much commitment it was when I started I wouldn’t have started.
Those massive quadruped sentinel things you have to kill took so long. Couldn’t even find any for ages then the battle was so hard I basically only managed by reincarnating as many times as I killed one of them. Picking up my old belongings from my old incarnation’s grave.
Call it an 8/8 draw.
I’ve not played in areas so crowded before really. Other people’s save-markers all over the worlds. If there’s a way to turn that off I’d turn it on and off a lot. Mostly off.
I keep losing my ship because I can’t tell it apart from the forest of distant-world save-markers of random players, and for some reason the icons seem to not load properly all the time.
In the end though, I did it. I got the fancy ship. It’s not all that fancy really. Quite surprisingly constrained in cargo-space, even having spent 20 million credits extending it.
Pulse-lasers are overheating too quick.
Gonna have to spend some time improving it’s systems I suspect, but this is no longer urgent as it doesn’t have to be done during the two-week expedition.
Blender Bender
My actual favorite Desktop Computer software program ever written is still Blender.
It’s fast and manages incredible levels of complexity with a UI that is better than any window-manager I’ve ever used and an API that’s just “you can type python into the window here” levels of integration.
Amazing.
Blender is to video/audio/3d-polygon-modelling as Vim is to text-editing.
It’s the actual top of the list of my free-software-real-money-donations list each month.
It’s one of the few projects not yet infected by corporatism or capitalism or enshitification or in-group squabbling.
But, man, that’s a lot of videos in your youtube RSS feed during conference week eh?
So much stuff going on.
I actually literally can’t keep up. Just look at how many videos they released during conference.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
Two shows this month, one about the US election and one about the new Conservative Leader
With only two weeks to go before the American Presidential Election, we find:
Harris has learned from her time as Vice President, and offers a friendly woke face on the continuation of the terrible horrors of the American state.
Trump on the other hand is a hateful and argumentative firebrand who will lead by egocentric feelings-based traditional-values hypocrisy while thinking himself god and abusing his powers.
Either way, you’ll get a corrupt government of ineffective clueless traitors.
And so, since American society is so filled with distrust and cynicism, the fragile peace may not hold and combative violence could break out.
This week, Kemi Badenoch has been elected leader of the Conservative party. We find that Kemi’s not very explicitly religious, but is a moral thinker driven by theological certainty.
This thinking, combined with the hidden influence of her relative luxury, leads her to disdain, hostility, indifference, and rigid cynicism.
Meanwhile, the party around her are treacherous deceitful wolves filled with resentment and mistrust.
So she intends to lead with valour, fight a crusade against oppressive wokeness, and tenaciously battle the culture wars.
But most of the country aren’t crazed moralistic wokeness warriors and most of those who are already joined Reform.
So she’ll just end up isolated and abandoned, doing a poor Farage impression, until she’s eventually betrayed by her party.
Links
Some stuff I bookmarked this month:
Labours First days
• Owen Jones: My verdict on Keir Starmer’s first 100 days
Perhaps the leadership will be helped by a Budget which will be forced to offer some answers to mounting crisis: but the refusal to overturn a failed economic model means that won’t last. Labour is assisted by a shambolic Conservative party, but one poll put it just one point ahead of its only recently crushed opposition without even a change of leadership. You cannot rule out this government disintegrating completely in office.
Gaza
• Mark Curtis: Gaza: Britain’s seventh genocide
Mark Curtis is surprised that people are surprised that Britain might support a genocide. He details how that is the normal position of the UK ministers:
High moral principles are largely espoused only for the cameras and complicit journalists, who regularly parrot them as though they are important to Whitehall planners. In reality, the UK is concerned about the law and rights only when it comes to enemy states, as a means to pressure and isolate them for public relations purposes.
US Election
• Call Jonathan Pie: US Election Specials Johnathan Pie’s US election special episodes are pretty good fun.
• Onion News Network - Electoral zoom in.
Ha. Very good. really rooting into the voting patterns.
• Scott Alexander on prediction markets:
Tomorrow - if we are so lucky - there will be a result. The great function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later.
Climate Doom
• Sam Hall - The Busy Worker’s Handbook to the Apocalypse Sam’s views are well evidenced but at the extreme end of reasonable:
Climate change will cause agricultural failure and subsequent collapse of hyperfragile modern civilization, likely within 10–15 years. By 2050 total human population will likely be under 2 billion. Humans, along with most other animals, will go extinct before the end of this century. These impacts are locked in and cannot be averted. Everything in this article is supporting information for this conclusion.
• George Monbiot - Labour’s carbon-capture scheme will be Starmer’s white elephant
The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, talks of a fiscal “black hole” of £21.9bn. But this is a real black hole: a long tunnel into the rocks, down which £21.7bn and more will be poured. A more reliable and cost-effective means of sequestering carbon would be to bundle up the money (roughly 1,100 tonnes in £20 notes) and shove it down the pipe.
Silly Geeky Metal
• C41c - “curl -v https://google.com”
a heavy-metal description of the action of a HTTP fetch.
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 web doesn’t have to be four giant corporate owned websites filled with screenshots of each other, we can redemocratise redecentralize and take ownership of our own web.
Like, using RSS.
In a great long article Cory Doctorow suggests you use RSS:
this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.
I have an RSS feed of my posts of course.
He also has a post explaining why Bluesky ain’t it
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.
Bluesky is taking more money from vulture capitalists, you see, and getting deeper into debt in order to grow their user-base of eyeballs they can sell to manipulative data-brokers and corporate advertisers.
This news surely will lead to exciting features and not at all to the inevitable enshitification of the service because I’m sure all these corporate interests are not interested in the least in extracting value from the users of the service!
I’m not entirely against Bluesky’s vision, which they have not yet implanted, but for now, you can follow me on bluesky through the bridge to the actual free un-owned distributed federation of anarchic communities on a network not owned by extractive capital.
It’s true!
I was glad that my Facebook-Account deletion is complete when I saw that Facebook will be filling with AI content. Zuck says:
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 you’re 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.
Why is the corporate web so hostile? Can we fix it? Maybe. Take Erin’s Xoxo talk, which was all great but at 14m:
There is a pretty strong belief in many quarters that because of corporate predation and human nature, no many-to-many social system can ever be anything but corrosive.
The Dark-forest theory of the internet… posits that the public internet is now so hostile to authentic human sociability that all real interaction has to go underground - into group chats, private slacks, and discords.
This is happening both because the platforms themselves are extractive surveillance monsters, and also because they’ve incentivized so much predatory Player-Vs-Player behavior…
In this light, retreating into private spaces is obviously wise and protective.
But my fundamental discomfort with that conclusion is that when those of us who have found our friends [online] all retreat into private spaces, we’re slamming the doors on everyone who hasn’t gotten there yet.
Leaving them out there to get eaten….
The answer can’t be that we cede everything above ground to the billionaires and demagogues and predatory forces they’ve arrayed around themselves…
So there’s only one option: we fix the fucking networks.
And Twitter?
@mcc@mastodon.social explains a T&C change there as they delete their account:
My Twitter account is currently locked and I don’t look at it, but I’m hard deleting it this month. If you have a Twitter account you don’t read, I also recommend full deletion before Nov. 15. Here’s why.
Twitter has their TOS now in an unusual state https://x.com/en/tos with two copies of the TOS printed one after the other, with a notice the new TOS goes active November 15.
The major difference I see is starting Nov 15 they give themselves explicit rights to train AI models on your posts.
Mastodon Maintainer @Gargron@mastodon.social explained the difference:
It’s wild how social media outside of the fediverse has deteriorated. You have followers, but if your post doesn’t please some opaque algorithm, they’ll never see what you post. You have to avoid certain words to please the algorithm. If you refresh the page good luck finding the same posts again. And people put up with it.
And
Back Doors
Signal CEO @Mer__edith@mastodon.world says:
Case in point: there’s no way to build a backdoor that only the “good guys” can use. When the entire technical community says that the EU’s ChatControl legislation + similar pose serious cybersecurity threats, we’re not exaggerating for effect.
But even the news press is corrupted.
@fabio@manganiello.social noted:
Two major media companies, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, made decisions to capitulate to the man they fear will be elected president before a single vote has been counted.
They decided not to run editorials endorsing their preferred candidate for president, Kamala Harris, because the owners of the companies, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, are afraid if they anger Donald Trump, he will hit them where it hurts: In their pocketbooks….
Fedi Music
Sad news that Radio Free Fedi is shutting down,
The project was always too big for a lone hamster, and informed friends and colleagues who respect my privacy will understand: we’ve overshot any handover options.
But the new Bonk-Wave album is due, as @keefmarshall@mastodon.online noted:
Please join us this Friday, 8th November, for the release of Not What I Call Bonk Wave - Volume 003 - Disc B - Bonked and Unbonked!
Leave your expectations at the door, as this more contemplative disc covers quite different ground to the previous one.
That’s it for this month, presumably we’ll know who the new US president is by the next one. Hopefully.
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