Started playing Crimson Desert today. The main character is called Kliff. With a K. He's got longish hair and a beard. Easiest headcanon ever.

Methinks proudly proclaiming that AI is being used in the coding of a social media site just before the site shits the bed over multiple days, WASN'T the best idea ever conceived. 🤔 (The other, more egregious idea was extensively using AI in the creation of a social media platform to begin with)

A safety net that is fully open to those who need it will always be prone to cheaters. A safety net that is fully insured against cheaters will always end up excluding people in genuine need. It would no longer be a safety net.

Ah, I see I'm going on a week long Fugazi binge. The cicadas must be about to hatch.

I would just be very happy with the fediverse thing taking off, whether it was Mastodon or something else. But not in the half-baked way that Threads and Bluesky are doing it.

That's a lovely word. If I was still in the business of running open mics I might have used "urtication" as the name of one.

I'm going to have to film myself doing this tomorrow. Done think I've done it for twenty years. I already feel like my hubris will be my downfall.

I was a gardener for ten years young man, it was all about grabbing it low down at the stem betwixt the fingers and yanking out. It was, if you forgive the lapse in my usual self-deprecation, a piece of piss.

At some point some kind of shit will happen here and loads of us will find ourselves in the house again and it won't be empty any more but then the next shiny enshittification-phase-one startup will pop up and the house will empty out again.

I still have a little scroll of Mastodon now and then. It often feels like an empty house that lots of interesting transient people pass through and leave cool things behind. There's more cool stuff every time I come back but it's still empty.

From all my years gardening I just got used to the constant stings, but she's right. I grasped them with my fingertips rather than my whole palm though.

When I read it, I kept asking myself "is this satire?" and wondering why the NYT would print it if it wasn't. I think the current climate made me go with "not satire" but this has made me think differently. I still kind of hate it because it's toothless smirk-fodder either way.

This is one of the worst things I have ever read, but I also look forward to the Sofia Coppola adaptation.

Whenever I read a headline about the Pope saying something I keep thinking it's the previous Pope and then a moment later I remember it's a new one.

I think the internet might have really helped with this. There was a kind of secrecy to it before but being able to find more people that are into the same stuff and seeing them being visible online might have diminished the secrecy and accompanying shame?

I do keep thinking back to that clip where Graham Norton tried to shame Henry Cavill for his Warhammer figure hobby and Tom Holland perked up and says, "Wow, can I come round your house and see them?" And then Norton quickly moved on. That felt like a threshold moment.

I'm often identified by train spotters as one of their own (often when I'm waiting for my own train or getting off at Didcott). I get approached like I'm being solicited. They say things like, "I can tell why you're here today..." or "So ... do you like steam?" I might give in and join them.

Listening to a podcast when the acast ads kick in and someone I've never heard of exclaims something like, "Hi, I'm Ed Beddington from the 'Check your Head with Ed Beddington' podcast..." And I think, "You just said your full name twice in the same sentence. That's why I already hate you"

We just need a few more petitions, AI generated Trump as Minion cartoons and acerbic, resistance lib Substacks. That'll do it.

I mean, they headlined the final ever Slough Festival. That's some clout right there.

Being that it was Dave Allen, I was waiting for the barbed retort at the end. In vain.

I never bought the whole "that us/all our worries and dramas/ look how unimportant it all is/Pale Blue Dot" spiel. It's like seeing someone getting murdered at one end of a big field, quickly running to the other end, looking round again and saying, "Ah, doesn't seem so bad from this perspective".

Being that we're going through a particularly violent and brutal episode of human history while the human race manages to travel further from earth than ever before –⁠ can we now all agree that the grand theory of a unifying cosmic perspective is absolute bollocks?

I should add that this is an earlier draft than the published version. This is particularly noticeable with Kae Tempest's name and pronouns. They came out as nonbinary after it was submitted but it was fixed before publication.

@markantonyowen.com @emmacaldwell197-06.bsky.social

Here you go, I'll probably delete later so grab it while you can.

drive.google.com/file/d/1Nvc9...

Cruelty and violence too. I’ve heard the “I’ll do anything for my kids!” line used by parents at my kids’ school as a way of turning the horrible thing that they have just done (normally verbal or physical assault of another parent or member of staff) into a virtuous action.

I walked through an alleyway in Acton yesterday and the man that was a bit ahead of me did two massive farts and then looked back to see if anyone heard it, locked eyes with me for a second and kept going. I wanted to say "better out than in" to make light of it but I couldn't. #masculinitycrisis

I just wish that we could all be a bit more clear visioned about what Stage 1 looks like so we don't have to keep hopping to the next bright shiny new platform.

You can't save a platform that you don't own.

Honestly Dave, I think this article by Cory Doctorow should be required reading. It succinctly explains why this happens to all centralised platforms with lots of venture capital backing. It's about the owners, not the users.

pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/p...