The most unruly and least considered, most shameful among various Idiomdrottning components and libraries can be found here.
To contact me, send mail to sandra.snan@idiomdrottning.org
Now that I have video game mania, books are piling up at an even faster rate than normal. Therefore it’s time for some “Compulsive Vowing”:
It’s gonna be five-out-one-in until I have read twelve physical books. I.e. I can only get two more physical books until I have read twelve; and the first of those two has to wait until I have read at least five and the second has to wait until I have read at least ten. Once I’ve read twelve books I’m released from the vow. I’m gonna try to make some sort of page in my Techo that I can fill in with stamps or something to track my progress towards the vow with those three milestones at five, ten, and twelve.
My FOMO around books (most of my ways to get books are time-limited, for example in the freeshop there’s only one of each of a handful of books and the first person who gets it gets it) is usually stronger than my ability to keep vows so I’m really going to have to put effort into keeping the vow.
I have no buffer at all for them right now and as soon as one is finished I usually have to scramble like mad to find a new one. And they don’t clutter the apartment since they are digital.
My apartment has dozens and dozens and dozens of books with bookmarks in them that I have started and not finished. I love starting new books because my dream of how awesome the book is gonna be is usually better than how the book is while reading it. So if I find a book at home that has like 600 pages read and only thirty pages left to read, then reading those last few pages is 100% legit and encouraged in counting towards the twelve books I’ve got to finish to end the vow. It’s not a “get literate” kind of vow, it’s an “unclutter the apartment” kind of vow.
I just said I love starting new books. The vow concerns getting new books. I have plenty of books at home where I haven’t read a single page and if I, in spite of my overwhelming amount of ongoing books, get in the mood to start reading one of these unread ones that’s okay. That doesn’t void the vow. It’s at the risk of being a little bit counterproductive towards getting to twelve, unless the book I just started is so awesome that I finish it pretty soon.
I can get new e-books, no limit at all there, as long as I don’t start reading them. Reading already started e-books is allowed (I wanna finish Queen Mab’s Palace and I have about half a dozen other ones going) but does not progress towards the goal. Starting reading any new e-books is strongly discouraged. I decided that that is going to count as one fourth of getting a new physical book. I.e. until I have finished reading five physical books, I can not start reading any new e-books, and if I do start one then, that is in lieu of getting one physical book but I am then allowed to start three more new digital books. In other words, the two slots that open up during the vow (one after I’ve finished five books, and one after ten), can either be two physical books, eight e-books, or one physical and four e-book. I don’t have to use slots right away, they don’t expire, I can save them, but I can not use them in advance. So it’s okay if I use the first slot for two e-books, then once the second slot arrives I use it for a physical book, and then I still have two more e-books I’m allowed to start before the vow is over.
And, repeating myself: for physical books the prohibition is against acquiring them (while starting reading already acquired books is 100% unlimited), while for digital books the prohibition is against starting reading them (while acquiring them is 100% unlimited).
All in service of simultaneously decluttering my home and making it more digital so I don’t trip over stacks of books when cleaning, while in the short term rewarding paper time over screentime.
Finishing e-books don’t count towards the vow at all.
Most of the books will go into my storage library after I finish them and others will go away entirely (sold or gifted). But some books are bound to stay on the shelf here in my home because I like having them around so much as decoration, self-expression, and to be able to look things up in them. I am acknowledging that this is counter-productive to the decluttering spirit of the vow but deciding that that’s gonna have to be okay this time around. I won’t make any special rules for this but I’ll try to track it. Then if I ever do finish the vow I can evaluate how many books actually left this room and maybe make changes for future iterations of similar vows.
This is hard to explain so I’m gonna give two examples and extrapolate from that:
I needed to make rules around gifts because we have such a great freeshop for books here and I’m gonna have to just not even look at it until I’ve finished five books.
Ouch, I didn’t think of this! I had this essay all written and ready to publish until I realized that I hadn’t thought about comics. I read lots and lots and lots of comics both digital and paper.
Okay so off the top of my head I’m gonna have to come up with some rules for comics:
Digital comics don’t count at all. Starting new ones is fine. It’s going to have to be “it’s own thing” akin to choosing to watch TV or playing video games or playing guitar or something instead of working on the book goal. It’s not really because it does compete more directly with reading books than other hobbies do but this compromise is the only version of the vow I could actually live with.
Getting single issues is okay. Reluctantly. I have maybe 10% room left in my longboxes. My pull list is down to Monstress, Saga, and Knights of the Dinner Table.
Acquiring TPBs and OGNs do count and take up one slot each. They’d count as half a slot for how quickly I read them but two slots for how big they are (on average) so let’s just say that twice half is one and call it a day.
Finishing comics whether physical or digital doesn’t count at all towards finishing the vow. It’d be too easy to read twelve tankōbons in a day and call it done. So comics only count going in, not going out.
Borrowing books count just as acquiring them. They’re not free passes at all. My “to-read” stack already contains plenty of borrowed books.
I’m going to make two exceptions, both comics-related: This winter I read a lot of Terry and the Pirates and I’m planning to borrow the last three volumes so I can finish reading the run. Those three books specifically, as long as I only borrow them and not buy my own copies, do not interfere with the vow at all no matter how long I take to read them.
Second, I can borrow other comics too as long as I:
In other words, if I fail to read them within one week that’s okay, as long as I really tried, but then I only have three more weeks to actually read it.
In the book reader world, to DNF a book means to decide to not finish it. I’m way more prone to not actually cut ties with the book, instead I usually just leave them in the pile. Twice now I’ve decided to stop reading the book but even then I put it into storage, keeping the bookmark in juuust in case I later can muster the will to finish the book. So for DNF the rule is gonna be based on actually getting rid of the book. If I do, it counts. If I only put it in storage, it doesn’t count. This rule isn’t great because I don’t really like getting rid of unfinished books so hopefully I’m not gonna do it. So note to self: it’s better to do the “storage pseudo-DNF” than the actual real getting rid of the book DNF even though the latter counts toward the vow and the first doesn’t. I don’t really wanna finish the vow just by giving away a bunch of unfinished books, I’m just stating the rule this way as a way to prevent impossible states. (E.g. what if I lose all my books through accident? I could never read a new book again if it weren’t for this DNF clause.)
There’s no time limit on this. If I were to quit video games and working, in order to only read paper books, I could be done in a week (especially if I take advantage of the shortcut that finishing a few of the half-read books around here counts. Like, for Dune Messiah I’ve only got 65 pages left). I could also take it easy with the vow and stick to the games and writing and maybe this vow will linger for several years.
Either way or anything in between is completely fine. With ten books gone I will a least made a dent big enough for me to end the vow and start piling them up again until it’s time for a new vow with similar or different rules.
Vow started: 2026-04-17 08:19:09+02:00
Texts • Household • Aesthetics
I’ve longed for so many years for the new Swedish e-id system to finally bring liberation from BankID but it’s going from bad to worse. It shares the incredible drawback of requiring a Google or Apple smartphone, but adds a hard requirement of NFC at all times. (A few years ago I belatedly gave in and got iPad and a GSF/Play-Store enabled Android tablet but neither has NFC (and neither has this Android game handheld) so hello e-waste.)
It’s insane to me that the Swedish police will be literally requiring every citizen to be a customer of one of these two American tech giants that among the richest megacorps in the world. That’s beyond any cyberpunk dystopia I’ve ever seen.
The fact that they trust them (or the OEMs, especially on the Android side) to not spy on their users is also pretty strange but tertiary to the forced customer relationship aspect. It’s as if schools required kids to bring a bottle of Coca-Cola™ every day or the DMV only gave out licenses if you drive Ford™. It’s a complete concession to all ideals whether it’s social democracy or free markets. It’s the billionaire oligarchy stomping on a human face, forever. The only one happy about this is Ayn Rand. She is laughing her head off in hell, making sure the railway there only runs on official Rearden® Metal™.
A new proposal from the Swedish government is to stop welfare and other social help to those convicted of severe felonies.
I’m not onboard with that idea.
We’re not supposed to have the death penalty in Sweden and I don’t like the “once a thief, always a thief” mentality. If they’re not in prison or in psychiatric care, we still wanna prevent more crimes. Not create more homelessness or relegate them to the “shadow society” they’ve been given so much lip service to opposing.
This proposal will create outlaws and lawlessness.
From a “get votes” strategy perspective this move is genius from them. Emotionally it does resonate. It feels bad to have to help villains. So people who protest this law are gonna look bad, look like they’re on the side of the bad guys. It also further conditionalizes the welfare system which is a great win for the employer class. The more miserable the breadline is, the cheaper and more compliant labor becomes, is the idea. They want employing to remain a buyer’s market. Making sure there are “unhelpables” that are just sentenced to die in the streets is a necessary stepping stone for them, it’s a way to try to erode our empathy. (Not saying it’ll work because as long as hearts can beat they can bleed. I know there is love.)
It’s evil genius like that Azarello “Lex Luthor” comic where he tries to make the people of Metropolis to become mad at Superman for saving the life of a criminal. An especially disgusting one that Luthor secretly funded. (That blurb doesn’t spoil the whole thing, there’s more, it’s still a great read.)
Helping the bad guys does feel bad but pushing them into the arms of organized crime feels worse. If you’re declaring them dead this way you might as well pull the trigger for real. One of the best arguments against the death penalty is that it fosters desperation and escalation (“I’m already bound for the mercy seat so I might as well kill a couple of dozen more”) and I agree with that and I do oppose the death penalty and that argument applies even more here, way more actually since they’ll still be living and be even more dangerous and desperate than they would’ve been if they were in the grave.
Another popular argument is that sometimes people are innocently convicted. Yes. Sweden is certainly not immune to that happening. It’s so easy to get tangled up and misunderstood when trying to talk to authorities and institutions.
Being able to quickly write replies to email, real actual email, was very valuable. That was the core of what drew me to Delta Chat.
There are plenty of proprietary email apps set up around that feature but in the free world, not so much. Delta Chat was it and it was a gem because it was in many ways better than those other sparks and spikes and whatever they were called. Not to mention the incredible leap of faith it takes to go for a proprietary mail app since they can read the emails.
Delta Chat is rapidly moving away from being usable for that. If someone forks it or finds a good alternative (that’s FOSS, obvs), I would love to know.
I know I’ve worked a little on Notmuch, and I’ve talked a little bit with the people who make aerc, but for all their conveniences they’re still traditional mail apps where the threads look like files that you have to open up and enter into and work with. The few extra clicks involved with using a normal mail app might sound like no big deal but it really adds up. All the opening, searching, archiving, threads management… Whereas with Delta Chat in its prime, you just see the message right away and can reply right away. Easy peasy.
Maybe K-9 but it got bought out by Mozilla and they hate autocrypt which I don’t. I think WKD is better, sure, but I try to use both. K-9 used to be one of the best autocrypt clients out there.
Texts • Programs • Recensioner
It’s a pet peeve of mine when people still call it Twitter (or variants like Xitter). The exact phrasing “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” isn’t even a callout to a specific person since I’ve seen that exact text string multiple times by multiple writers.
I’m not opposed to appellation activism—I try to always get #ChangeTheName in there if I have to refer to Apache or GIMP. I wish the ill-fated Glimpse project had only been an Icecat-like rename branch. That would still have been an enormous undertaking but with slightly easier merges. Glimpse would’ve been a great name for this image editor. I was not onboard with their UI changes. And I liked it when people on Masto took to calling Twitter “Birdsite” (in the pre-Musk era).
But what I see when I see “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” is “I think Twitter pre-Musk was acceptable”, and that’s the messaging I’m not onboard with. As if it weren’t a silo site, a harassment vector, and part of what was driving the Earth straight of the cliff and putting MAGA tyranny on the throne and having shallow discourse that was disproportionately respected and credited in mainstream media reporting (compared to how few people were actually on there) and with gov’t agencies using it and lending it infrastructure-level credibility.
X under Musk is so much worse than Twitter ever was but Twitter was already a net force for evil. For us long-time Twitter-haters, Musk changing the name and literally destroying the brand as he was already destroying the site was such a tee-up, such a free lunch, such a jumping-off opportunity. It makes me a li’l sad every time I see someone trying to retroactively glorify what Twitter was, is all.
Now, let’s put things in perspective here: A pet peeve is just that, a pet peeve. It’s not a thought crime. The people I’ve seen writing “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)”, I’ve seen it because I’m a fan of their writing otherwise. It’s not bad guys doing this, it’s well-intentioned folk. (The actual bad guys are on X, I guess.) This li’l essay you just read is absolutely not license to go out and try to “correct” people who are doing this. Yeah, yeah, if you who read this have occasionally been doing the “Twitter (I refuse to call it X)” thing, feel free to reconsider that since it does bug me a lot, but it’s really no big deal compared to the real problems we’re dealing with right now.😭
M säger ja till att släppa in SD i regeringen om Tidöpartierna vinner valet i höst.
Okej, det stinker och jag är mot det så kan oppositionen samla sig please?! Ja, jag vet att det är väldigt otäcka typer i dom andra tre oppositionspartierna och att bara just ditt oppositionsparti är bra (oavsett om det är borgfredssmygrasisterna och åtstramarna i S, bensinpopulisterna och ribbentroppaktarna i V, grönvaskarna och kommunistfobikerna i C, eller rödlinjedragarna och småföretagssvurmarna i MP) kan jag förstå, ja, jag håller med, dom andra tre partierna är riktigt ruggiga, men tidöblocket är den större ondskan som vi alla vill rösta bort och då behöver ni alla fyra snacka ihop er lite! Skärpning tack, gör en rödgrön röra genast!
Kristersson säger i Aktuellt att det är naturligt att SD axlar invandringsfrågorna i en ny regering
Det är som att säga att det naturliga vore att låta räven passa hönshuset. Det är den frågeställning dom borde hållas längst ifrån (efter klimatet såklart). Deras rauspolitik är den största mardrömmen vi har här i landet. Hela poängen med att hålla dom borta har ju varit det.
Men här har vi ändå Möjligheten med stort M! Jag drömde igårnatt en mardröm som utspelade sig i en annan tidslinje där Kristersson och Mohamsson och Busch väntade med att gå ut med det här SD-gullandet tills först efter valet vilket gjorde att en massa personer som begripligen avskyr SD lurades att rösta på dom.
Nu har dom sagt i god tid innan valet att dom tänker bilda en koalitionsregering med nazisterna.
Oppositionen, samla er please så vi alla kan rösta bort dom!
Snälla Tand-Ringqvist och Dadgostar, jag vet att ni båda med rätta tycker att den andra är kass för det är hon men jag hoppas att ni båda ändå inser att Åkesson är etter värre!
Snälla Helldén och Lind, jag vet att ni vill dra en röd linje mot precis alla andra sju partier över kärnkraftsfrågan och ni har ju helt rätt i att övertron till kärnkraften är en total irrbåk och rödströmming som försämrar klimatarbetet men om ni sätter ett enat Tidö på tronen igen så blir klimatarbetet ännu sämre än om ni inte gör det!
Snälla alla socialdemokrater, jag vet att eran boss önskar hon hellre var med i ett Tidöparti som också börjar på bokstaven S där hon kunde få “strama åt” invandringen så mycket hon bara kunde och komma med regeringsinviter till Busch och Kristersson men nu har åtminstone M och L sajnat med djävulens orkester så it’s time, yeah, it’s time, yeah, it’s time, yeah, it’s time!
It’s time att skärpa sig och låta oss alla rösta bort Tidö vilket vi har längtat efter since basically ever! Ingen haltande dök eller jök utan ett gediget löfte att vi ska få slippa Jimmie! “Oppositionen” leder i valundersökningarna (inte med några jättemarginaler så fortsätt att skärpa er—och det betyder inte “närma er mitten” utan det betyder att faktiskt git gud!) men det finns ju ingen opposition så länge ni hatar varandra!
Alla jag pratar med hatar blockpolitiken men jag älskar den för att:
Bristande finansiering tvingar Uppsala universitet att skära ned på lärarledd undervisning och laborationstimmar. Enligt rektorn har de statliga anslagen till universitetet släpat efter i flera decennier, samtidigt som lokalhyrorna blivit allt högre.
Det är bra att textteve nämner lokalhyrorna och jag önskar att dom hade skrivit ännu mer om det. Regeringens beslut att samhället ska ta ännu mer betalt av sig självt är roten till mycket lidande och kärv. Våra museum, teatrar, skolor och liknande knakar sönder. Sjukhus skulle, om dom inte redan vore sålda.
Det som hände var att politikerna bestämde att alla dom här gamla husen plötsligt skulle ha in “marknadsmässiga hyror”, alltså helt plötsligt från klar himmel ökade deras utgifter drastiskt utan att få mer inkomster.
Det är så himla orättvist. Det är antingen dumt eller elakt.
Det är dumt eftersom det är ett sånt otroligt självmål att varenda barnrumpa borde ha fattat att det här skulle kärva. Det händer ibland att riktiga ekonomer tycker att jag är lite koko när dom läser min hemsida (“O-inräknade externaliteter, lol vilken tautologi, det är ju det en externalitet är” har jag framförallt fått höra. Ja, jo, det fattar väl jag också men det konstiga är att våra beslutfattare tutar och kör som om det inte fanns nåra klimatexternaliteter!) men det vet ju till och med jag att vi har samhällen för minska transaktionskostnader och till och med företag organiserar sig så när dom kan.
Självklart blir det dyrare och sämre för alla. Om du jobbar på en arkitektfirma och du behöver ett nytt ritblock och penna så går du bara och hämtar en. Det måste liksom inte finnas en liten marknad där du måste vinna små auktioner för att få dina pennor. Än värre som det är här, en hittepåmarknad där nån värderare kommit in och “uppskattat” vad husen “borde” kosta. “Och varför vore det så dumt, pennorna är ju inte gratis?” undrar då du om du är moderat. Det stämmer att pennorna har kostat firman en hel del att köpa in. Pengar som det är bra att hushålla med och inte slösa bort på att kärva till hela verksamheten med en massa gnissel och rost.
Bland marknadsivrarna går det en massa ‘storier om hur systemet i Sovjet var så dåligt och felkonstruerat att det uppstod illegala marknader där dom olika statsägda företagen kunde köpa och sälja sina muttrar och skruvar eller vad det nu var av varandra och därför fungerade dom någorlunda smidigare, ändå asdåligt för det var ju Sovjet men någorlunda smidigare än vad dom annars skulle ha gjort. (Atta mig nu inte med en massa “vadå storier, det är ju visst sant” för jag tycker också att Sovjet sucks.) Dom hade liksom inte kanban och sånt vilket annars smidigt skulle ha löst problemet, utan allt var tilldelat utifrån nån sorts femårsplan som hade kärvat sig. Och nu här i Sverige 2026 så är det den tvångspåförda pseudo-“marknaden” som gör att det kärvar sig.
Jag är inte konspiratoriskt lagd (…längre😅) så jag ska inte slösa er tid med en massa tankar kring att det här ihopbrakande kärveriet är avsiktligt för att dom hatar våra gemensamt ägda skolor, teatrar och museum. Det behövs bara höra på deras urhasplingar i valfritt annat ämne (vindkraft, elbilar, kärnkraft, reduktionsplikt, integration) i fem sekunder för att fatta att det inte alltid är så genomtänkt. Folket är dumt också så dom röstar väl på dom ändå. Inte en och en är ni inte dumma, pretty much varenda en av er är en skinande juvel, men tillsammans är vi det och det är inte så konstigt om inte media blir ännu bättre på att göra sitt jobb att upplysa om sånt här. (Dom är redan ganska bra men ännu bättre please!♥︎ Och här kan vi alla hjälpa till. Bli journalist! I wish I could but it’s too late! Men jag gör så gott jag kan med mina kufiga irrtankar här på Internet!)
Men för att nyansera lite så ja det är ju klart att timrohögern hatar allt det vi som samhälle tillsammans har byggt upp “konkurrerar” med deras lobbyisters företag. Dom har redan lyckats förstöra så mycket med sin privatiseringsvendetta: postverket, televerket, tandvården, sjukhusen, skolorna. Att det här på nån nivå ångat upp ur samma anda som allt det, ja det tar nog varenda kotte inklusive jag helt för givet.
Probably the worst part of original GTD is having a list of calls. That just doesn’t parallelize nor serialize well since nowadays each call is a multi-hour affair if it’s a hold/wait system, or if it’s a “we’ll call you back sometime later today” it’s not great to have multiple such incoming calls hanging over you either.
Even the literal 43 folders (which doesn’t make sense to reproduce digitally over just a normal reminder that just gives yoi the file you want on the day you want it) at least historically made sense as something useful for those dealing with a lot of paperwork, but phonelines and waiting has been real for my entire life.
Prefixet “be-“ behövs egentligen inte på svenska, har jag hört. Så istället för bestraffa kan man säga straffa, istället för befria kan man säga fria, istället för benåda kan man säga nåda, istället för betjäna kan man säga tjäna osv osv.
Att klistra på ett be- sådär kommer från en tid då svenska språket, som då hade funnits länge, plötsligt blev mycket påverkat av tyska som var ett riktigt modespråk typ som engelska är i dag.
Men… jag är för det! En del ord som “behöva” blir jättekonstiga utan. “Jag höver frukost!” Och andra typ gripa istället för begripa funkar men har fått ett annat konnotationsbagage. Eller “befalla” mot “falla”.
Ja, jo, man kan kalla dom kvarvarande be:na för fossiler (en “fossil” i språktöntesammanhang betyder ett ord som bara lever vidare i ett idiom och aldrig används utanför det, typ som “ler och långhalm”) men jag tycker vi ska lägga in be- framför ännu fler ord! Bedöda, behjälpa, betämja! Om du ska trash ett kort i dominion kanske det då blir “beträsja”.
In the Butlerian Jihad (from Dune but popularized by many smolnet posters like Alex Schroeder) we rightly hate bots and scrapers but I’m in a bit of a glass house around that, since I’ve made a few scrapers for my own personal use as a way to get RSS Atom feeds out of sites that don’t have feeds. I love scraping and mashing.♥︎ The JS-laden SPA era was a nightmare for me. I hate browsers and server-side styling. I love getting texts from URLs.
An Inhabitant in Carcosa responds:
Bad in intent: it is intended to do something unethical, whether that be LLM training, denial of service, privatizing the commons, or immanentizing the eschaton. This is pretty subjective in an “I know it when I see it” kind of way. Scraping for a search index, scraping for a full-text RSS feed, and scraping for LLM training are all the same act as far as the server can tell, but only the last one is /evil/.
Having a full-text RSS feed as a way to not have to deal with ads or paywalls—even when the reasons to not be able to otherwise handle ads and paywalls are 100% a11y issues—goes against the intent of the server owners.
And I’m not so sure LLMs are evil.
It may ignore robots.txt, it may lie about being another user-agent
Have done both those too!
Either bad intent or bad implementation is enough; a bot doesn’t need both to be bad.
That’s not exactly my philosophy.
I love the open readable simple web where each document has one URL and you can read it on your own terms. I can’t deal with the junk web.
So me and my friends started a new D&D 5.1 campaign and it’s unusual for me to be running so much homebrew. I usually run modules. It’s strange to me because I feel so much more guilty when PCs die (so far two have died across three sessions) or when I try to find the notebook where the special treasures are or when I’ve missed a prep area and have to fall back to tier three truths much more often than when using modules.
I also did not make the campaign deliberately extra deadly “to teach them a lesson to be careful what they wish for” after they wanted to go back to D&D from Fate but I’m really worried that they will believe I did.
Overall I’m having a lot of fun and loving the campaign because the players have been bringing their A-game. I’m so impressed by them and grateful for them.
I created my homebrew world where instead of “elves”, “dwarves”, and “hobbits” we have Skajra, Daab, and Skirm (pronounced more like “skeerm” than firm or squirm) and so on. And 1960s tech like jeans and guns. Inspired by new wave SF like Caves of Qud and James Tiptree. It’s called Gåvoplaneten which is a bit hard to translate… “Gift-related planet”, “gifted planet”, “the planet is a gift” or something like that.
I practice radical transparency when DMing (even when specific instances of it are really really annoying to players who just wanna immerse I think the overall policy has huge benefits for buy-in and stakes) so I’ve truthfully said things like:
I mean things generally fall into:
…and I’ve been trying to brutally honest about what is what. Maybe that is an overcorrection but I came up in the “cult of GM secrecy” era of 90s gaming and I really belatedly ended up resenting and regretting that playstyle.
It’s actually the year 613 already, diegetically, because our first three sessions have spanned three hundred and seventy-nine days.
We have a ton of houserules in place old and new. We use spell points as per the DMG option, and when it comes to hitpoints, hit dice, and exhaustion, a short rest is 10 minutes while a long rest is a full week, and it takes a year to level up (which is going to become two years later). And we use the “roll high or low, not middle” from Suldokar’s Wake. The players really really hate that rule so far!
As for choosing 5.1 over 5.2, that’s not as slag on 5.2, it’s just that we’re all still on old books. I did give them the option to do PCs that are either…
but that we’re using exhaustion and stuff as per our pre-existing, already heavily houseruled 5.1 setup.
So far no-one took me up on that and all showed up with 5.1 chars and I appreciate that since I don’t have the 5.2 books available yet. We’re not saying 5.1 is better or anything, it’s not edition warring, it’s just what we’re doing practically.
I actually think AI is fun and good. It’s just that if we don’t solve the problems it’s not worth it (if the problems will destroy us all).
It’s like cars. I oppose cars but I actually love riding in the shotgun seat on the open road bopping to that hecking song that goes “and all that I can see is just another lemon tree”. Yeah, yeah, I get motion sick on small bumpy country roads but being in transit, being on the way between places, feels good somehow. And that joy of course pales in comparison to all the good cars do, what they enable, all the problems that cars solved.
It’s just… We only have one planet and so many ways to mess it up.
Humans, like other eusocial species, have a tendency to create systems and structures larger than themselves. We create these runaway processes like whoops we invented the stock market (or it emerged, rather) and now corporations sort of kinda metaphorically are alive and are trying to kill us. So not only are direct fossil extraction and burnination bad, other runaway systems are also risky AF because look at where we are with these billionaires and corrupt policy processes. Yeah, yeah, maybe the solution will also come in the form of a runaway process but let’s make sure we fix the problems before we wreck ourselves here.
People (including me) make fun of young Earth creationism (that has got to be an exonym, right? Because whaddayamean “young” when in their world view the Earth is literally the oldest thing that exists) but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how even though the actual Earth is super old and it’s in a universe that’s even older, and hominids like us have existed for many hundred thousands of years, the world of writing is actually pretty young. Only a few thousand years.
We’ve managed to destroy the planet in an embarrassingly short time. That to me really goes to show that we’re doing something fundamentally wrong and that wrong thing is called fossil fuels so leave it in the ground. And our entire protcol for resource and task distribution thrives on exploitation loops widening wealth gaps and destroying the environment in many ways.
I use the word “exacerbate” way too much and unlike some of my other pet phrases (like “a li’l”, “on the cinder”, “the life-changing magic of”, and “probably better known as”) it’s starting to sound weird to me now.
It’s too fancy and weird and specific of a word to be jammed three times into every essay. Normally I try to not put the same word or phrase twice in the same paragraph (I don’t always catch it for first publication but I go back and edit older essays all the time and this is one of the things I’m always on the hunt for) or even in the same essay if it’s something that’s really out there, pet phrase or no.
The reason for this is that I’m Swedish, I think in a weird mixture of Lisp, English, and Swedish, and in Sweden saying something has made something else worse isn’t some strange X-laden Latin word, it’s just common-place words like “förvärra” or “försämra”.
I like to be specific and not say something “caused” something else when I’m not sure whether or not it did. For example, maybe it’s not money’s fault that people actually are evil (although saint Paul wrote that love for money was the root of all evil in his first letter to Timothy), maybe money just rewards and exaggerates and spreads and… exacerbates it.
Last night as I was lying in bed I was thinking “wait, wasn’t there some book I was reading that I wanted to continue?” and that thought made me happy but then I became sad because I remembered that I already had finished it that morning. Reading this was a mistake because it was so much better than all the, I dunno, eighteen or nineteen other books I’m currently reading and now I almost don’t wanna go back to them.
Yes, it is very derivative of True Grit so if you’ve ever wanted to read a version of True Grit that’s actually good, well, here you are.
Except for the copaganda ending which I didn’t like (I oppose prisons, and the Phantom Zone is a nightmarish version of that), this was a fantastic read.
You really get to feel that you’re Supergirl’s friend on this long odyssey through space. The pacing and scope is masterful. This beats any other novel in the areas this is good at.
Okay, this one was a disappointment. Not that bad but not good either. 3 out of 10.
Having an ingenious timeline and a clever solution and an eccentric detective and a very video-gamey setup are all plusses in my book. The meta-stuff “let us admit we are characters in a novel and not make excuses” is tired now but perhaps wasn’t when this book came out in the thirties.
But what then sinks the book somewhat—not all the way to the bottom, but down from the lofty perches of modern classics, is unclear, dense, overly witty writing without clear attribution to who is saying what when. This would work better as a comic book since it’s a formless of talking heads where you always need to keep careful track of parity to know who is saying what.
In my lefty ancom bubble I’m sometimes seeing rhetoric opposing meal replacements, but I’m not on board with that. Some brands have a low climate impact per calorie. It’s so much better and more empathetic than the usual “carnivore” trends pushed by the fash.
While I don’t necessarily recommend them (as always, be careful with food stuff) the witch hunt against them is growing to be a peeve of mine.
Normally the wedge issue right wing are the ones hating on vegans, pushing keto, or fearmongering against entomophagia. We can do better.
Usually they are the ones punching down and not recognizing that other people might have different needs, capabilities, spoon deficiencies, tastes, or preferences.
There’s only a decade between Lord of the Rings and Dune but the latter is way more post-modern. Not that LotR isn’t pomo, because it is, but Dune takes it a couple of notches further.
It’s so wild to me that this book came out in 1965, a few years before the six days war and on the bleeding edge of LSD hyperawareness, because this book is a trip and a half. Then again, it’s three years after the Lawrence of Arabia movie.
It’s a bummer that, also like LotR, the dose has been so diluted by the osmosis effect of knowing the gist of the story through video games, movies (it’s been adapted directly three times—I had seen the first half of the second movie of the 2020s version—but so many of its ideas have been in other movies like Star Wars), and board games. The “War for Arrakis” game pretty much spoils the entire thing. Because finding this book off a shelf without knowing anything about it and just taking a deep dive into the text as it is would’ve been such an experience.
Even diluted by the aforementioned pre-exposure through osmosis, this book packs a heckuva punch. I’ve been diving into New Wave SF lately (K. Le Guin, Tiptree… and I’m running a new-wave–inspired D&D campaign) and loving it, and wow is this book a tour de showcase for the new wave! Strong worldbuilding, fresh new perspectives, out with the old.
Except not entirely. Some moldy old baggage is still in here. Not only do we have the tired old evil “white, blue-blooded savior with the Magical Royal Bloodline” tropes that plagues Star Wars, there’s also a Cerberus-esque idea about “the only man born to a tribe of women and he is immediately a Marty Stu Messiah of Ganondorfian proportions” with inner lights and voids that seems ripped from the pages of Reads. Not into it!
The translation by Gabriel Setterborg is also hard to review since for the first several chapters it seemed the work of a true poet and then for the latter half of the book it seems he completely dropped the ball and phoned a first-draft in (inluding the glossary at the end, which has several errors). Overall it’s okay and the book definitively stays readable, compelling even.
I’m gonna land on an overall reco for the book and the less you’ve been exposed to Dune already (through other media versions) the more I recommend it. I’m giving it a 7/10 and I immediately started reading the next book in the series (and I’m fifteen pages in on that as of writing this).
I’m writing this a few years before Bitcoin’s twentieth anniversary as one of humanity’s biggest mistakes.
Bitcoin is three things:
I’ll try to be brief on why the token thing is bad.
Y’all know I think a post-scarcity, pay-it-forward mindset can be explosively productive in the digital world. Sharing is caring. Introducing a limited, scarce resource—whether it’s an artificially created one or not—into that mix does a lot more harm than good.
The blockchain ledger exists just to enforce the contracts that emulate those money-like tokens. That is why the ledger was invented and the tokens named the project.
Money is bad and I’ve spent the past twenty-five years arguing against market capitalism. The tokens share all the drawbacks of money and add a whole bunch of new ones.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that either you actually like the token thing, and/or that you’ve found other valuable uses for the ledger, so we can get into where Bitcoin really messed up:
The ledger is built on a peer-to-peer network of nodes. If you’re an Xennial like me you’re thinking “that’s awesome! P2p is great!” with fond memories of things like BitTorrent. Hold your horses for three seconds because BitTorrent becomes better the more reciprocators are connected. That’s actually a problem that PeerTube is struggling with; that so many of the clients and federation approaches don’t connect to the WebTorrent part of it and just hotlink the upstream copy of the video, leaving the servers overloaded.
Bitcoin’s not like that. Bitcoin becomes worse the more people are connected. So much worse. It provides the same block rate and transaction speed whether the entire network ran off one dinky li’l pocket computer as it does now when it’s over 70000 nodes, but the more nodes that connect and “help”, the more energy the whole thing uses.
Because they’re not helping, they’re competing. Instead of just making the network more resilient or better, they are racing each other, distrusting each other. The pool that burns the most gets the most rewards.
I know that humanity has a long history of creating systems that reward and exacerbate greed and injustice but this one is a doozy.
Other proof-of-work schemes like the “hashcash” anti-spam proposal and the new “Anubis” website blockers are really bad and I hate them (it’s not fun when my dinky li’l e-reader hangs for five rapidly battery-draining minutes just because I wanna look up a Dominion game card. If you wanna put a penalty or payment for connecting I’m not stoked that that payment is going directly down the drain. It’s like putting a toll sign on a bridge saying “burn a dollar bill in front of the camera in order to pass the bridge”) but at least they have constant difficulty rates that are manually settable by admins. Bitcoin’s difficulty scale is managed by a computer (and increases automatically so that the block rate is constant) which has led to it increasing to 150 trillions times higher.
“It’s not waste, it’s worth it because of the benef—” It is waste. It’s a penalty for participating. It’s a deliberate deterrent as an attempt to mitigate the “Sybil” attack (the risk of someone starting a bunch of extra nodes to overwhelm the network in order to falsify transactions). So in the infinite unwisdom of Bitcoin’s founders, they put in both a deterrent for participating (the recklessly limitlessly scaling “proof-of-work” hashing) and a reward for participating (the “mining” rewards that will be gradually metered out for over a hundred years, if there’s still a civilization then).
So in our “burn a dollar on camera in order to pass the bridge example from earlier, it’s like if on the other side of that dollar-burning-bridge there’s a two-dollar-payout. So lots of money burnery in order to make money. Destructivity that the clumsy invisible hand of the market can’t distinguish from productivity so it runs amok. Instead of creating good and useful products or services it’s pure destruction (repeating myself a bit but the purported “benefits” aren’t increased).
Except it’s even worse than the dollar-burning-bridge for two reasons. First is that instead of one dollar vs two dollars, it’s about 70 k on either side of the equation (margins are pretty tight—that’s how economics work) so it’s a rich man’s game, and the second reason is that dollar burning was an environmental disaster. It’s as if it was a poison dollar that killed birds and even humans as it burned because energy externalities is an unsolved and urgent problem.
“But (setting aside that almost half of it is dirty energy), when we use renewables, it’s making use of extra energy during peak hou—” It’d actually be less bad if that extra energy from solar and wind were wasted than it going into Bitcoin’s ASIC e-waste poison mill because you’re not helping by mining. You’re only increasing the difficulty scale for those dirty coal-fueled Bitcoin miners out there.
Bitcoin is a runaway train, a headless constrictor, a gray goo apocalypse, and it’s incredibly difficult to fight. Some approaches to stop it involve regulating energy externalities (which we need to do anyway in order to stop climate change) or tanking the value of BTC by making it harder to interface it with other goods and currencies.
Klimatminister Romina Pourmokhtari (L) vill avskaffa ett av de mest omstridda klimatmålen—det så kallade transportmålet—och i stället införa ett annat mål.
Hon dömer ut det nuvarande målet som orealistiskt. Pourmokhtari anser att det nuvarande målet »har brister och fokuserar väldigt mycket på vad som inte ska göras, i stället för vad som ska göras«.
Transportmålet går ut på minska utsläppen från transportsektorn med 70 procent från 2010 till 2030. L vill i stället se ett »elektrifieringsmål«.
Nej men snälla avgå genast, en klimatminister måste förstå att det viktigaste för att jorden inte ska dö är att utsläppen minskar. Under din regim och som en direkt följd av din politik har dom tidigare stadigt minskande utsläppen från transportsektorn ökat med en fjärdedel på ett enda år. Som jag har skrivit om tidigare är det faktiskt viktigare vad man inte gör än vad man gör. Ja, mer elektrifiering skulle kunna bibehålla en del av vår livskvalitet när fossilbrännandet minskar, så den skulle kunna vara ett verktyg, (och därför är det jättekonstigt att din regim avskaffade elbilsbonusen och sänkte bensinskatten vilket krympte dom relativa TCO-fördelarna med elbil med runt tvåtusen kronor i månaden) men vi måste aktivt se till att utsläppen minskar också. Jevonsparadoxen, har du hört talas om den?
Hur mycket av politikernas klimatförstörelse både här och i USA och Ryssland som är okunskap jämfört med hur mycket av den som är drypande illvilja och grymhet är omöjligt för mig att veta. Men vilketdera det än är så är du så otroligt långt över gränsen för vad en kompetent klimatminister borde göra. Det är mänsklighetens framtid du leker med.
Utsläppen inom transportsektorn hade minskat rejält tills du drastiskt och avsiktligt ökade dom. Våra konsumtionsbaserade utsläpp hade faktiskt sjunkit stadigt innan tidöregimen och det är ett otroligt trendbrott hur fort dom har ökat som en direkt följd av er ansvarslösa och/eller hänsynslösa politik.
Att i en sån situation ha mage att säga att du vill ta bort målet är det sjukaste jag någonsin hört. Låt oss säga att det istället hade varit
Målen var ett löfte och Sverige hade inga problem med att dunka sig själv svinhårt i ryggen när dom löftena gavs som om dom redan vore kirrade. Nu när ödets klocka rullat på och det inte visade sig vara så lätt så visar det sig att dom löftena var en väldig hög av inget. Det fatt’ man ju.
The other day, someone told me that “Discord is a good product”. And I’m grateful for that phrasing because it helps me explain why I’m having such a cow about Discord.
Because it’s not a good product. The worst part about it is how mandatory it is. As an analogy, let’s take some soda… what’s a really gross one? Pepsi? Pepsi has a lot of problems but it would be a heck of a lot worse if it was a “mandatory” product. If everytime you went past a grocery store you would loose all control over your hand and it’d drag you into the store and grab a bottle and you’d physically be forced to get it, even though you have water at home—or you’ll lose your friends or not be able to access product support or an event or even in some cases housing.
While normal, free, common-sense alternatives like email, IRC, XMPP and Fediverse are “products” in some senses of the word (they are produced things that exist and you can use them; and this goes extra for commercial but FOSS-friendly forums like Discourse or Vanilla), they’re products the same way breathable air is a product. If someone were to take away your lungs in order to sell you bottled oxygen that’d not be a product I’d be a happy customer of. I might be buying but I’d be pretty sad about what they took away.
In one way it’s even worse than heroin—not in all or even most ways, and not to make light of the opiate crisis, (stay in school, kids!) but with dope there’s at least multiple vendors.
That’s what Discord did. We have free ways to talk to each other, but they made a way that they own.
With Discord you have to make an account with this one company.
There are no other “products” like this, “mandatory” products, outside of the internet. It’s even illegal. Antitrust laws date back to the Roman Empire. But we tolerate it online for some reason (and that reason is that we have to because it’s mandatory).
You might’ve heard this slogan before, but with Discord’s business model, “you are the product”. We’ve known about this stuff since 1973 but people still get sucked in (because they have to).
While the people who participate in a forum on Discord don’t have much of a choice, the people who start the forums do. If you are a community organizer, don’t choose Discord. At least not only Discord. The normal, classic internet tools like email, IRC, Fediverse or XMPP still exist.
And if you’re a lawmaker, a policy-maker, it’s time for you to step up.
I get this a lot from people who have a bad client for email or IRC or XMPP or whatever it might be. Yes, there are bad ones. But there are also good ones.