Ryusui @theryusui@computerfairi.es

One of the most pervasive myths is that modern capitalist societies are "more advanced" or "more civilised" than the societies they're still trying to compete the genocide of.

If you are having trouble thinking outside of this myth, consider one simple metric for comparing societies: will they have any descendants 10,000 years from now, and what kind of resources will be available to those descendants?

Note that many of the standard metrics capitalists like to point to don't really matter if you fail this metric. You can supply the best healthcare in the world (not that we do) but if the price is everyone will be dead in a century, that's not exactly a deal I want to take. Three are really deep structural problems with even the idea of "comparing societies," but the point is: modern capitalist/imperialist (and yes, also fascist & "communist") fail alarmingly at this metric. They are collectively on pace to trash the entire planet in a mere handful of centuries, let alone millennia, and their sci-fi promises of some kind of miraculous reversal of that sound increasingly like a con.

Once you stop accepting the idea that capitalism is "advanced," you'll have a much richer space to imagine what you'd like society to look like. One of the next steps is to start disentangling positive and negative technologies, and to think about how both physical and social technologies might advance in a lot of different ways. What kind of society would invent the MRI machine but not the bullet, for example (and if you think that's impossible, why are you so sure and who told you so)?

All of that to say: #LandBack

So everyone's like, don't use github! Get off github, Microsoft is going to steal your teeth! And they're right, they're completely right. But here is the problem: *Basically every time* someone is using a github alternative, if I have an issue to post, I am unable to post it, usually because of problems with their spam detection (must wait 3 days to file your issue so a moderator can approve you, etc)

alright so y'all know how sometimes telegram etc kinda work on airplanes, without paying for the free wifi, but without, say, being able to load media?

has anyone figured out what, exactly, is able to make it through, and how to route a full internet connection through it?

asking on Mastodon because this is where the computer people went

Big, dumb fight with my boss on the genie job over my telling people who ask that the genie operation is run out of Wishconsin.

"C'mon, people want to know and it's so perfect!", I tell them. "The whole operation runs out of Made-a-some, Wishconsin."

"Save that for the Groucho Marx podcast," they tell me.

"Groucho Marx? That's *totally* a Chico Marx line," I protest but the more I think about it the more, yeah, I *can* hear Groucho pulling off that line.

The one piece is stored on treasure planet!

I'd be a lot more willing to believe the whole "what if reality is a simulation?" hypothesis if I didn't know speedrunners.

some people have been going around saying the unity news isn't so bad because "it doesn't affect very many people" and

1. there are plenty of reasons to be nervous about a move like this even if it doesn't (currently) affect you

2. the indie studios that aren't getting millions in budget from venture capital but are still doing gamedev full-time professionally are already squeezed enough without unity skimming even more off the top

some of you are acting like grossing 200k in a year for an entire studio is like winning the jackpot, when in reality between platform holders, publishers, and governments taking their cut 200k what's left could well be far below subsistence wages for team members

so yeah, a large percentage of unity users won't be affected, but a large percentage of the indie "middle class", who make a large number of the indie games most people enjoy, *will* be highly affected. and i don't think that's okay. i think that's worthy of some panic

@dgar

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Sent by Paul Kearns from Costa Mesa, California, U.S.A. on July 24, 1994. https://postcardware.net/?id=15-55