Mastodon Brought a Protocol to a Product Fight | by M.G. Siegler | Dec, 2022 | 500ish:

But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.

I mean, who thinks this “Web” thing is ever going to unseat Prodigy or CompuServe - I’m don’t trust these link things, and it’s ludicrous to think people are going to host their OWN servers.

Snark aside - It’s probably dubious to expect everyone to host their own ActivityPub/Mastadon servers… But the idea should be sharding much more by identity/community rather than jumping onto the same service. That’s where the power begins, taking the control of identity and server control closer to people you trust, and spreading the social footprint far enough that no single pillar can take down the roof.

Daring Fireball: I Wish I Could Tell You This One Is Not All About Twitter:

I would love to regale you with fun links and clever commentary about subjects other than Twitter “2.0”. I really would. I’m as thirsty for such subject matter as you surely are. But, alas, the continuing saga is simply too entertaining, and moving too fast. If you’ve been successfully ignoring the drama, I salute you.

Year in Review: 20 Best Tabletop Roleplaying Games from 2022:

It’s been an incredible year for tabletop roleplaying games, from both large publishers and indie outfits. Crowdfunding has firmly established itself in the ecosystem, and both small indie games and massive core rulebooks are making the most of the model.

I didn’t have space for all the incredible games that came out this year, but here, for your entertainment, in no particular order, are some of my favorite games of 2022.

-via Boing Boing

Amy Grant pisses off conservative Christians, again | Boing Boing:

"To me, it's so important to set a welcome table. Because I was invited to a table where someone said 'Don't be afraid, you're loved.' …Gay. Straight. It does not matter," the longtime supporter of LGBTQA+ rights told Proud Radio podcast host Hunter Kelly in 2021.

The world’s oldest narrative art has been discovered. It’s a picture of a guy jerking off to horny leopards | Boing Boing:

• via Boing Boing

Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch’s composer on Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and more, dies aged 85 | Music | The Guardian:

Angelo Badalamenti, the acclaimed composer who created haunting music for David Lynch projects including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, has died at the age of 85.

Lynch and Badalamenti would become close friends and collaborators, working together on Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive. Badalamenti also appeared on screen as the coffee-loving gangster Luigi Castigliane in Mulholland Drive, and played piano with Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet.

The classically trained musician also worked with the likes of Nina Simone, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Shirley Bassey, Marianne Faithfull, Liza Minnelli, Pet Shop Boys and LL Cool J over his varied career, and composed themes including Inside the Actors Studio and the torch theme for the 1992 Olympic Games.

On 1986’s Blue Velvet, his first collaboration with Lynch, he was brought in to work as a vocal coach for Rossellini. Lynch asked him to write a tune for the score, saying “let it float like the tides of the ocean, make it collect space and time, timeless and endless”, which became the song Mysteries of Love, performed by Julee Cruise. Eventually Lynch tasked him with writing the film’s score, asking for Badalamenti to be “like Shostakovich, be very Russian, but make it the most beautiful thing but make it dark and a little bit scary”.

Diablo IV developers allege mismanagement, crunch and disturbing creative decisions in new report | Rock Paper Shotgun:

Employees also spoke about the "disturbing" creative decisions by Sebastian Stępień, the former creative director on The Witcher 3 and head writer on Cyberpunk 2077, who became creative director on Diablo 4 in 2019. Stępień allegedly undertook a rewrite of Diablo 4's entire script, creating what multiple employees called the "rape version" due to repeated references in the script to the rape of a love interest, and to the script referring "to this female character as the raped woman as her primary description," according to the Washington Post.

Two employees also told The Post of a line in the script which read, “And then she was raped, brutally”, and that employees would repeat the punctuation out loud to each other, “comma, period - alarmed by the direction Stępień had gone with the script."

Maybe it’s time to just let Blizzard burn.

Cryptex: how a custom iPhone is changing macOS updates – The Eclectic Light Company:

Big Sur brought us the immutable boot volume, signed and sealed, with the SSV. This makes it almost impossible for malicious software to change anything in the System, as it’s a snapshot with every last bit verified using its tree of hashes. Its downside is that making wanted changes to update macOS or any components on the SSV is cumbersome: changes have to be written to the System volume, a snapshot made, the tree of hashes rebuilt and verified against Apple’s setting for that build of macOS, and macOS rebooted from the new snapshot.

Initially, the solution for apps like Safari, security data such as that for XProtect, and other components like Rosetta 2 that need to be installed separately from macOS, was to store them on the Data volume, where they can only be protected by SIP. That’s how Big Sur and Monterey worked, but this started to change in late versions of Monterey (in 12.6.1, if not before), and Ventura, with the introduction of the cryptex.

Cryptexes first appeared on Apple’s customised iPhone, its Security Research Device, which uses them to load a personalised trust cache and a disk image containing corresponding content. Without the cryptex, engineering those iPhones would have been extremely difficult.

MarsEdit 5 - Powerful web publishing from your Mac.:

Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them. Web browsers are wonderful for reading articles, but not for creating them. If you're writing for the web, you need a desktop blog editor. And if you're lucky enough to have a Mac, nothing is more powerful, or more elegant than MarsEdit.

Marsedit is such a great app for interacting with weblogs. On every other platform I’ve touched - Windows, Linux, even iOS and iPadOS - I have searched for something similar, or even close, and fallen short.

My only wish in relation to this is that there was an iOS/iPadOS version so I can keep up my workflow across my more personal devices. It would be an insta-buy for me, and I’m sure many others.

Toad Poses For Adorable Dollhouse Photos:

I so adore this set! Too bad it’s instagram so I can’t easily link to any of them withot ugly embed code…

Daring Fireball: The Onion’s Supreme Court Amicus Brief Defending Parody:

Speaking of entertaining legal documents that address serious issues, I’ve been meaning to link to the amicus brief filed by The Onion on behalf of Anthony Novak, who is suing the police department of Parma, Ohio in a case now before the Supreme Court. Long story short, Novak created a parody Facebook account for the police department; the police arrested him and he spent four days in jail, simply for having mocked them; and when Novak subsquently attempted to sue the police department for civil damages, the Sixth Circuit court of appeals held that the police could not be held responsible under the bullshit doctrine of “qualified immunity”.

“Robert Moses Is A Racist Whatever”:

I remember his aide, Sid Shapiro, who I spent a lot of time getting to talk to me, he finally talked to me. And he had this quote that I’ve never forgotten. He said Moses didn’t want poor people, particularly poor people of color, to use Jones Beach, so they had legislation passed forbidding the use of buses on parkways.

Then he had this quote, and I can still hear him saying it to me. “Legislation can always be changed. It’s very hard to tear down a bridge once it’s up.” So he built 180 or 170 bridges too low for buses.

Institutional Evil.

Left-Wing Activists Banned From Twitter After False-Report Campaign:

Several left-wing activists on Twitter have been suspended from the platform after far-right users launched a false-report campaign. 

Prominent left-wing accounts have been banned from Twitter since Musk’s takeover, the Intercept reported first. This includes Chad Loder, an anti-fascist researcher who identified a Proud Boy member involved in the US Capitol Riots on January 6 2021; Vishal Pratap Singh, a journalist who has reported on far-right protests in Southern California; Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, a group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in Texas; and CrimethInc, an anarchist organization that publishes books and podcasts.

Twitter is now Musk’s toy, and he can use it however he wants, but he isn’t defending free speech, and nobody should feel like it’s the “World’s Town Hall” to be defended from regulation anymore. He can’t have it both ways.

Five Speculative Fiction Books Featuring Tarot | Tor.com:

The tarot’s history as a tool of divination goes back to the late eighteenth century, and its use as a deck of playing cards goes back centuries further; it’s no surprise that genre writers have repeatedly incorporated tarot and tarot analogs into their works. Although there’s a lot of fun in characters consulting a fortune teller or a diviner offering crucial insight at a key juncture, some writers have gone deeper. Here are five works of genre fiction that incorporate the tarot or a tarot analog into the worldbuilding of their novels.

jwz: PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet:

As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web. tl;dr avoid Hive and Post.

If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way.

Consign that app to oblivion.

Neuromancer: Miles Teller Eyed For New Apple+ Sci-Fi Series: Exclusive - The Illuminerdi:

“But Doctor…":

Bogswallop:

Previously, previously, previously.

If Alejandro Jodorowsky filmed a Tron sequel:

Easily my favorite use of AI image generators yet: Jodo Tron. Outstanding work by Johnny Darrell, which should wake up anyone, like me, that tends to downplay the impact of the technology. (Though note that to animate and film this credibly, you would have to have humans painstakingly recreate every detail as costumes, sets and 3D models)

It's too bad this is on Facebook, I'd be intritgued to see the rest of the set.

Daring Fireball: Report: Amazon Alexa Is a ‘Colossal Failure’ on Pace to Lose $10 Billion This Year:

The thing about Siri is that it was always at heart about making Apple’s platforms more accessible. Siri is there to make iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, and even AirPods better. And Apple isn’t losing money on any of those. Siri will serve the same purpose on future platforms from Apple, too. Apple’s investments in Siri are part and parcel investments in their OS strategy for everything they make.

Study Finds That Female Octopuses Intentionally Throw Debris at Males Who Harass Them:

Scientists have discovered that female octopuses will deliberately hurl shells and other debris at males they feel are harassing them.

(351) Disney Classic Voice Actors | Behind the Scenes | Side By Side Comparison | Compilation (1928-1977) - YouTube:

In Honor of the 99th anniversary of the Walt Disney Studios, I have made a mega compilation of all the voice actors behind the characters up until their 54th anniversary. Or at least the ones I could find footage of.

via: Laughing Squid

Elon Musk uses Twitter to tell Independents: “Vote for a Republican” | Boing Boing:

There’s no way to spin this except that Twitter is now in its darkest timeline. Apologists about the purchase can have their own circle in hell.

Amazon’s PAC is now backing Republicans who voted to nullify Trump’s election loss:

After top leaders of the Republican Party aided and abetted an actual damn coup in 2021, mostly by promoting hoax claims meant to discredit the election and justify Republican efforts to nullify its results, a number of United States corporations announced that they would no longer support lawmakers who participated in the effort.

This was because a good number of U.S. corporations did not want to be seen as backing the overthrow of U.S. democracy. Our corporate betters are fine when it comes to backing politicians that support pretty much any vile act you can name, whether it be political corruption, prisoner torture, or the slow destruction of the planet’s oceans, lands, and atmosphere, but supporting the violent overthrow of American government was a bit too on-the-nose for any company that depends on the wider public to buy their products. We finally found where the line was drawn: You’re not allowed to participate in an attempt to overthrow the government.

Except you are, because the corporate promises to not back lawmakers who engaged in a scheme to undermine democracy lasted (checks notes) zero election cycles. That’s right, zero.

The online buy-everything company Amazon, under the control of billionaire Jeff Bezos, was one of those companies that promised to cut support for lawmakers who voted to override the voting results of the 2020 presidential election. Judd Legum of Popular Information now reports that Amazon quietly resumed donations to those same lawmakers as of last September. Amazon’s PAC donated $17,500 to nine House Republicans who voted to overturn the election results in September, even though none of those Republicans have expressed remorse for their votes or for promoting the hoax election claims that they used to justify their votes.

Lawyer in Florida who fought against helmet laws killed on motorcycle while not wearing a helmet | Boing Boing:

The most shadenfraude form of FAFO.

jwz: The Terrible New Normal:

Because there is basically no chance that things are going to materially improve any time in the next 2, 3 years, or maybe ever. There comes a time when "I'm just waiting for things to get better" is self-delusion. Because they aren't going to get better. This is the new normal. Forever.