lesmurples

[lesmurples]

READ THIS IF YOU PLAN TO BOYCOTT YOUTUBE LONG-TERM

get an invidious account. it is an alternative front-end to youtube, allowing you to make an account, subscribe to channels, make playlists, and all the other things you use youtube for; all without giving the company a single cent. swearing off youtube long-term is a tall ask, so you can use this to still follow the creators you want to keep up with while continuing the youtube boycott. it has a built-in adblock and anti-tracker, meaning that you can really keep fucking them over.

it doesnt interact with the API at all, it scrapes the metadata to make sure they get as little as possible.

[lesmurples]

Unrelated, Best Boy Hank Green made a cute, no subscription, not invasive and full of malwares app.

It's a cute lil app that helps you step away from your phone and leave it alone for a time you set, to stay away from distraction. If you pick up the phone, the knitting lil bean loses all of his knitting... So if you say "I'm setting down my phone for half an hour so I can efficiently clean the table and bag up the trash" it helps resisting the call of the screen. Because you can't make the bean sad. The bean is too cute.

4th place in the downloads jfc. I think people are starved for simple and honest softwares with no evils schemes and data stealing

[lesmurples]

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.

[lesmurples]

One of the foremost reasons I like solarpunk is that in the mainstream, being eco-friendly is about sacrifice. Don’t buy new things, don’t buy plastic, don’t take unnecessary trips—etc. It’s not sustainable unless you’re a saint. It’s exhausting to abstain from consumerism without having alternatives like the things Solarpunk emphasizes: community, resources held in common, sustainable hobbies like gardening and mending (and all other sorts of repair), free and accessible public transportation, etc. Solarpunk is about creating a world where being eco-friendly is about joy, not deprivation.

[lesmurples]

Help me avoid homelessness SEPTEMBER 1st due to my mom passing away by suicide

Hi everyone. As many of you know, my mom passed away by suicide in April. It has been such a cruel time trying to recover from this loss. She was my best friend, caregiver and my everything.

The problem is my mom paid half of all the bills so I have fallen severely behind on everything (rent, food, household supplies, etc). After my mom passed, my employer basically forced me to resign as they would not give me the time off I did and still currently need to grieve her loss.

Funds from this fundraiser will go towards rent, food, household supplies and any other necessities I may need. Thank you for your help, it means the world! 🥰💕

[lesmurples]

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

[lesmurples]

I don't know if what is being said is that there is a possibility of reaching a ceasefire deal or not, but I am sure of one thing, which is that Israel does not want to end the war, but rather wants to end the Gaza Strip (for your information, it is not only Israel that wants this, but America also wants this, as it supports Israel with money, weapons, and everything to fight a defenseless people).

[lesmurples]

[lesmurples]

[lesmurples]

[lesmurples]

Yoooooooo

So the government just defunded PBS and NPR which is fucked. That being said, the public can cover the damage if we orginize and donate.

Only about $1.60 of tax dollars per US citizen per year are spent on the public broadcasting budget. NPR and PBS offer beong able to make small monthly donations, some being 7$ per month or lower if you want.

If you want to donate 1.60$ per month to your local station, you can multiply how much funding they get from you by 12. If you do their monthly donation of $7 per month, your donation can equal the tax dollars of 54 people spent on public broadcasting per year.

If you want to donate to your local station, look them up by your town here to make sure your local stations get helped specifically:

[lesmurples]

[lesmurples]

A little thing I've noticed about very specific certain multiplayer games where the players are supposed to inhabit a "blank slate" player character to act as their vehicle of interaction it usually comes in one of 3 flavors.

1) completely generic white guy.

2) a person fully garbed head to toe showing absolutely no skin and they tell you isn't gendered but is still given a fully masculine body with no option to alter its shape

3) something not even really recognizable as a human. More of a approximation of something with two arms, two legs, a head and (maybe) a face.

All of them will generally share the trait that differentiated your blank slate from other players is done via dressing them up with clothes colors or accessories.

Generally this doesn't get remarked upon at all by people playing the game.

And then there's Satisfactory where there are numerous people on the community page saying that they loved the gameplay but are bothered by the fact that unlike other games the devs of this one made their "blank slate" player-character models all explicitly women but also not super femininely rail-thin.

And a bunch of guys don't know how to cope with being not only "forced" to play as a girl but also one that isn't really designed to be sexy.

I dunno, I just think it's neat.

[lesmurples]

"There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?' And someone else said, 'A poor choice of words in 1954'," he says. "And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we're having now." So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics. "It's genuinely amazing that...these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text," he says. But, in his view, that doesn't make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, "but no one wants to use that term, because it's not as sexy".

'The machines we have now are not conscious', Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023

[lesmurples]

the circle mage origin is so wild like you can prove yourself completely untrustworthy to any authority and duncan will be like "you know what? i like that. shows initiative. also blood magic isn't even that bad you're all pussies."

[lesmurples]

Hey what’s your Rooks biggest fear?

[lesmurples]

hate the weird self-infantalizing “but i’m just playing with my dolls” shit people will pull in response to any critique of overall fandom trends, especially wrt racism, misogyny, transphobia, etc. very embarrassing to be a grown ass adult yet still so myopic and devoid of self-reflection