Tarotdrome in cyberspace - March 2024
The world is falling apart and war ravages the globe, but I visited an aviary and spent much of the month making a 3d stage/lightshow on which to do a new format tarot show.
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse.
Birds
Went to visit with the family, for my dad and brother’s birthday. We went to Birdland in Bourton On The Water in the Costswolds. Met some beautiful bird friends.
They have apparently basically the only Emperor Penguins in England, and they are old and mostly related so breeding is tricky.
Who knew a penguin would live 40 years eh?
They tell me one of them was a Hollywood star in the batman movie but they all look pretty much the same so not sure if it was the ones in the photos on the post there or not.
Prime
I Cancelled my Amazon Prime as it expired at the end of the month, explaining in the exit-form that Amazon seem to like adverts on videos and hate worker-unions in warehouses whereas I hate adverts on videos and love worker-unions at workplaces so seems like we’re incompatible these days.
Didn’t really use the videos much but definitely won’t use it at all now there’s adverts on them.
Making the new Tarot show
Spent much of the month having fun in Blender,
building this new virtual set for the tarot show. Looks absolutely wild. Virtual 3d stage, lightshow, dancing tarot cards.
Okay #blender fans: Went through a long process trying to speed up the render
Initially looking like it’d take about three to five days to render on my machine. I need it overnight at least, ideally in an hour.
The aim was for the first new-format show on the 2nd April, and I hit the target
What fun it’s been building this big virtual stage and writing all the python programs to automatically animate it all.
Took all month, but future shows should barely take a few hours.
Check it out in “Releases” below.
WorldPol
Worrying month. The rich have taken all the wealth and are increasingly violent against their scape-goats to keep the masses doing anything about it. War on the rise in europe. Genocides. A tide of climate refugees coming and the elite pulling up the drawbridges.
It’s like as soon as everyone who remembers the last time dies, humanity decides it’s time to do it all again.
This time with drones and murderbots and atom bombs.
~
Giving arms to one side and aid to the other is a very American sort of compromise isn’t it?
~
Will anyone check if the USA is crossing it’s fingers when it assures the court that it won’t kill Assange and will try him fairly?
I mean what does the court think will happen if they just lie, like they will.
They will just lie.
~
Then everyone seemed to think the Conservative party ought to return money given to them by a racist?
Crazy.
Don’t give racists money!
I think the party ought to donate the money to an anti-racism charity of some kind rather than give it back to the racist!
~
Meanwhile Starmer’s going on about small boats. Completely accepting the government’s framing that these refugees should somehow be stopped instead of welcomed?
Wankers, all of ’em. The MPs that is, not the refugees.
~
Never thought I’d see the day. Owen Jones quits Labour. Apparently there is such a thing as a Labour Party too right-wing for Owen Jones.
He quits and recommends people vote Green or Independent.
Reddit Floats
Reddit went public on the stock market. There were lots of people saying they were being offered pre-IPO shares due to their community involvement. I’m told at about 35 dollars?
I deleted my Reddit account during the recent API debacle. These days the cool kids are all at KBin and Lemmy the distributed unsellable threadiverse. Won’t be no IPO of the threadiverse.
But there’s a lot of uncool kids still there, and they are easier advertising fodder.
Usually you’ll see a new IPO drop 50% before it even decides which way to go. So I’d say sell ’em fast if you got ’em at 35 dollars. Rebuy at 25 of you really wanna hold long term for some reason. My guess would be Reddit does not do well, even if they become a meme stock.
They have never made any money.
Sweary AI complaining
I pondered on how to avoid sounding like an AI, and came with a very sweary solution.
Content-warning so I won’t copy it here.
The US President account joins Threads
The Presidental account joined Threads, and turned on syndication across to the Fediverse.
We block Facebook’s Threads of course.
I’m hearing the head of the fed, the potus with the mostus, the American Headican himself has joined Fediverse.
The President of the USA.
Don’t worry! He’s blocked here in advance.
All indications are him and his organisation will still continue to be largely unaware we exist.
This encroachment from the breached perimeter at Threads was foreseen and contained beforehand.
And to the president of the USA: can I wish you a personal and hearty fuck off and leave us alone.
Everyone remember when Potus joined Geocities? Oh, the way we mocked them. “Got a spinning logo there Potus?” we’d cry, “ha, how lame”
“Get your own domain you geocity plebs!” we’d say.
Eventually they registered .gov of course to stop the relentless mocking. It was a different time back then. Global states were expected to run their own fucking internet infrastructure not rely on surveillance capitalists to do it for them.
Releases
Wordcloud Tarot
It took all month really but the new format tarot-show has to be seen to be believed.
Set in the colourful exciting virtual tarot-drome, we do the question “What’s up with the state of the world lately?”
We find that the world has oppressive elite ruling powers who subjugate the powerless and cause strife to the hidden majority. It appears to external observers as though they have total victory, but through science and moral progress we can end the evil patriarchal oppression and institute a new world order based on solidarity and equity and peace.
Watch here: https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2024-04-02-whatswithstateofeverythinglately/
Reading
Read James OBrien’s “How They Broke Britain” in which he names the ten people he blames most for how screwed up everything is now and dedicates a chapter to each of their various corrupt shenanigans.
A fairly brief and bitter read, the villains here are mostly indeed villainous and their corruption and malevolence is clearly described.
I have some issues with his chapter on Corbyn and the lack of any confutation of OBrien’’s own bit-part role in the mass smearing of Corbyn and the Labour party during his time, but it’s certainly true that Corbyn (and more importantly the reactions to him) was a big part of the whole processes that lead Britain to the terrible situation it’s in now.
Felt like I already knew just how terrible all these people are but probably a good summary for anyone who’s clueless and wants to understand how we broke this country.
Links
Things from around the web.
Tax & Money
• Why Are Taxes So High? - YouTube
Gary Stephenson says the reason the tax burden is high and the government-services quality is low is all the privatization. Governments don’t own their own building, and they’re being bankrupted by rent like the rest of us.
Guy with a book out this week reckons there’s no housing shortage really, just an excess of landlordism which is easily defeated and simple measures could collapse the cost of housing again just by better tennents rights and fewer perks so the landlords all sell up.
Satire
Two from Existential Comics this month, and a funny one from Normal Island News.
• Orangutan Freedom - Existential Comics
Slack and freedom and cages from Existential Comics. Who is in a cage?
• Occam’s Razor - Existential Comics
Existential Comics on Occams Razor. Ha.
Every theory could have one but not more totally extraneous unnecessary objects thrown in
• Landlord chancellor generously gives tax break to landlords
Budget analysis from normal island news:
You will be pleased to hear the government that couldn’t make the country work on current tax revenues is confident it can make things worse with lower tax revenues (that will totally be higher). This is why it’s introducing National Insurance cuts, with 46% of savings benefitting the richest 20% of households and only 3% benefitting the poorest 20%. It was either that or turn poor people into animal feed and personally, I think they’ve made the wrong choice.
Galloway
Galloway got elected
• The Panic Of the Ruling Class - Craig Murray
Craig Murray finds the establishment dismay at the election of Galloway surreal:
The idea that democracy – i.e. voting for somebody – is an attack on, err, democracy was so crazy that, had we any kind of independent media, it would have been ridiculed to death.That of course has not happened. We are sonorously told we are a nation in crisis. Ordinary forms of democratic activity – free assembly, free speech and free voting – all threaten our society.
Gaza
• Israel’s ‘Flour Massacre’ – When A Crime Becomes A ‘Tragedy’ – Media Lens
Media Lens detailing how reports of massacres end up in the passive voice and the biases in the terrible British media, worst in the world.
• We were lied into the Gaza genocide. Al Jazeera has shown us how
Our media can’t be trusted on anything, least of all a war:
Its continuing refusal to report on the mounting evidence of Israel’s perpetration of crimes against its own civilians and soldiers on 7 October suggests it has been intentionally whitewashing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Video/Podcast
• The heinous crimes of the West with Craig Murray, TSBC (LIVE) - YouTube
Craig Murray talking to a podcaster for a couple of hours about Julian Assange, imperialism, crappy media and his life fighting those things.
• Ex-City Trader Exposes Capitalism: Gary Stevenson Explains Why We’re Trapped In This Mess - YouTube
Gary Stephenson’s book tour continues, here he talks to Owen Jones about the inequality for nearly an hour.
• What If Gravity is NOT A Fundamental Force? | Entropic Gravity - YouTube
The fundamental laws of nature are derivable from theorems in combinatorial maths. Maybe gravity is just holographic entropy?
• Israel Assault On Rafah Means “Annihilation”: w/. Unicef’s James Elder, Live From Gaza - YouTube
Unicef worker in Rafar in Gaza describes the plight of the people there to Owen Jones.
• But what is a GPT? Visual intro to Transformers | Deep learning, chapter 5 - YouTube
3Blue1Brown teaches us about Generative Pre-Trained Transformers, like GPT etc.
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
Remember when “going viral” used to mean that people liked a thing so much they shared it with their friends?
And now it just means the algorithm picked it and forced it into everyone’s feeds.
Not these things though, these best-of-fedi links are hand-picked.
Politics
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social tells us about landlordism:
One of every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord. Britons who privately rent spend just under a third of their income supporting these landlords each year. Nearly a hundred billion pounds a year. So a Briton who privately rents spends just under four months laboring each year just to support these landlords.
All that work, all that time, all that commuting… just to generate revenue to pay rent.
@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@treehouse.systems Analyzes the way the Media fails on Trump:
Frankly, I don’t think it’s much of a secret that corporate media has for the most part, egregiously dropped the ball when covering noted fascist and former US President Donald Trump in our current political environment; in fact, I’d suggest that they’ve spilled more ink talking about their own failures in this regard, than they have discussing how they intent to address the problem. Many observers have chalked this up to a series of mistakes, or structural deficiencies in the modern news industry, but when most of the mainstream media remains completely silent while Trump openly endorses a genocide in Gaza, being conducted by the military of US ally Israel, well “oops, we screwed up” simply doesn’t hold enough water.
@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@treehouse.systems also talked about bi-partisan support for genocide:
So what exactly do I mean by “supporting the genocide of the Palestinian people is a bipartisan position in American politics?” To answer that question, let’s take a look at a story that *was* reported by the corporate media complex…
Craig Wright is Not Satoshi
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io tells us about the trial
Justice James Mellor:“Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper.Second, Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” in the period 2008 to 2011.Third, Dr. Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin System. And, fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software.”
FediForum
There was an online converence,
@deadsuperhero@social.wedistribute.org reports:
Takeaways from today’s #FediForum thoughts, although my brain is filled with all kinds of tangents right now: Onboarding new devs sucks. There’s way too many assumptions of what developers are supposed to know before they write a single line of code. There’s cultural hostility towards things people barely take the time to learn about or understand. There’s not really much of a welcoming committee for new devs. Sash’s experience definitely came up here.
@ricmac@mastodon.social Tells us about it too:
At #FediForum this week, we saw that the #fediverse encompasses many more applications than just Mastodon (and soon, Threads). In this article for @TheNewStack, I review the event and discuss a few of the more promising apps/services that were demo’ed. I also look at @fedidevs, a new network of enthusiastic fediverse #developers.
Artists
@gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz Has a new novel. I loved all his others:
My new novel MORPHOTROPHIC will be published on 9 April.Amazon is now accepting preorders for the ebook; other venues will follow soon.There will also be print-on-demand editions from Amazon available on 9 April, but they can’t be pre-ordered.https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CZ46L396
Software Security
@AndresFreundTec@mastodon.social found a bug, that turned out to be a deliberate attempt to compromise all computers:
I accidentally found a security issue while benchmarking postgres changes.If you run debian testing, unstable or some other more “bleeding edge” distribution, I strongly recommend upgrading ASAP.
That was a big deal. We narrowly escaped disaster.
@Mer__edith@mastodon.world is is the Signal CEO has a talk online:
📢 My @NDSSSymposium keynote is up! On how we lost the crypto wars, why surveillance advertising must be understood as the foundation of “AI”, & why the tactics of the past won’t serve us in defending privacy today.
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