#matt in meatspace

[goron-king-darunia]

TRANS RIGHTS!

(Medibang, Watercolor brush, 50 minutes, controlled pallet of 18 colors. Riffing off the "colorblind art challenge.") Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door finally confirmed Vivian is Trans in the English rerelease and transphobes can die mad about it. I've been scrolling Youtube shorts in my free time between meatspace tasks and Stardew Valley. I'm months behind here on Tumblr. But I wanted to pop back in with a doodle inspired by those "colorblind" art challenges you sometimes see where the basic idea is to turn your screen to black and white and paint based on values instead of colors so you get really interesting results. I have never been adventurous with color and usually just pick the main color, then start with a darker value, paint the main value on top of that, and then add a lighter value for highlights. So what I did instead was I painted Vivian's shape and blocked her in with the main colors and picked a trans-flag inspired color palette to choose from, then switched the monitor to black and white and used the values of the colors I picked to inform my shadows and highlights. She came out better than anticipated. I love how the colors on her body make her look sort of jelly-like. I think the shadow people would have that kind of texture, even though they're pretty matte in canon. It's a bit early for Pride, but y'all deserve her. I know it's mostly rainbow capitalism, but Nintendo of America said "Trans Rights" and that's still important. I have always loved Vivian and I'm glad she gets to represent the trans community in one of the best Mario games. Enjoy my doodle!

[objectivistnerd]

good blogs to follow for politics stuff?

I can't in good conscience give a recommendation without first telling you to try going outside (or failing that, trying video games) instead of developing an interest in politics.

This isn't total do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do because I used to be way, way more politically-engaged and can't say I got too much for it. The combination of circumstances that led me out of that darkness probably aren't easy to recreate, though I can say that reading The Sequences went a long way to helping me see through the fog of tribalism. More actionably, I basically quit Twiblr for a few months earlier this year because I was too busy bingeing fantasy novels and playing Civ VI. (Having good coworkers and meatspace friends probably helped.)

The best stuff probably isn't on Tumblr. If you want blogs, I recommend Scott Alexander's substack and the archives of his old blog, and usually appreciate the posts I read from Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias, though I wouldn't describe myself as a regular reader of either. Sadly, most of the Neoliberal Project crowd seems stuck on TwXitter, and I'm not going to tell you to spend time on a website where you gotta pay to longpost. A few notable blogs (which I don't read) from that cluster include Some Unpleasant Arithmetic and Word Rotator.

Tumblr is superior among the socials for enabling actually meaningful discussions. Often the best stuff comes from people you wouldn't expect. Posts are usually better than the blogs that produce them. I try to collect good posts more than I try to follow good blogs, because actually good blogs are few and far between.

If you must have recommendations of Tumblr blogs, though, a few accounts which are more likely to produce or surface good political, economic, and meta-political content while not spewing total garbage constantly or posting lots of non-politics content include: @centrally-unplanned @eightyonekilograms @iates @isaacsapphire @marginal-cost and @powermonger. Any omissions naturally represent direct personal insults and I expect all of you to name your seconds before the week is out.

In all seriousness, I do not necessarily endorse any particular view the above take (and in fact do not even follow several of them) so much as appreciate their commentary on particular subjects. You can, of course, follow @argumate to be exposed to more discourse bloggers than you could possibly ask for and sort at your own leisure. Due to his continued efforts many old posts from good bloggers no longer active still circulate; many of my favorite bloggers fall into that category, which I have not included. I will make an unprincipled exception to point out that @theunitofcaring wrote some excellent posts before getting a real job.

You'll notice I'm recommending a lot of people from the Less Wrong diaspora. That's because talking about politics with people who haven't read Politics is the Mind-killer, Meditations on Moloch, and I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup is generally a waste of time. You'll get so much mileage and insight out of Yudkowsky and Alexander's top posts that it's hard to put into words.

That's a long answer to a short question. Hope it helps.

[antikorpersession]

NASALROD - The Maker Nasalrod release star-studded The Maker-video featuring members of Ministry, Dead Kennedys, Fear, Poison Idea, Dead Moon, Quasi, Mudhoney and many more. Featuring: JELLO BIAFRA (Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School of Medicine, Dead Kennedys) TOODY COLE (Dead Moon, The Rats, Pierced Arrows) AL JOURGENSEN (Ministry) LEE VING (Fear) JERRY A (Poison Idea) JANET WEISS (Quasi, Sleater Kinney) MATT PIKE (High on Fire, Sleep) STEVE TURNER (Mudhoney) MIKE SCHEIDT, AARON RIESEBERG, DAVE FRENCH (YOB) GREG MELENEY (Danava) SEAN CROGHAN (The Mistons, Crackerbash) JASON RIVERA (Gaytheist) BIM DITSON & RYAN NEIGHBORS (Help) KYLE ELFERDINK & KALEB HARRISON (Black Shelton & The American Dream)

Shot & directed by James Rexroad The Maker is from last years split album ‘Victims Family & Nasalrod In The Modern Meatspace’ available via Alternative Tentacles Records & Nadine Records

NASROD is MANDY MORGAN (bass, vocals) SPIT STIX (drums) MUSTIN DOUCH (guitar, vocals) CHAIRMAN (vocals)

[terresdebrume]

So for those of you who feel like this blog lately is like

*extensive breakdown about my missing cat*

*extensive breakdown about my missing cat*

*Post about my remaining cats*

*extensive breakdown about my missing cat*

*extensive breakdown about my missing cat*

*Critical Role* *Critical Role*

*extensive breakdown about my missing cat*

*extensive breakdown about my missing cat*

*random queue post*

That's because it's exactly what's happening and the reason that's happening is because that's pretty much my life right now, except sometimes I switch to rereading W.I.T.C.H. between videos, and also meatspace doesn't have a queue

[acephysicskarkat]

@squarehere tagged me in a thing so let’s do this.

Name: Matt, although everyone just calls me Dorku outside of meatspace.

Sexuality: In case the blog title and header didn’t tip you off, ace/aro.

Hogwarts house: Ravenclaw

Dogs or cats: I like both, but cats are worse for the Australian environment, so.

Current time: About 2:30 in the afternoon

Favourite animal: I’ve got a soft spot for corvids.

When I made this blog: Like 2013

Reason for URL: The blog started as a roleplay exercise where I answered science questions in-character as Karkat. I later realised I was ace, and frankly the whole roleplay thing had long-decayed by that point, so.

I’m not going to tag anyone specific; I tend to perhaps err on the side of respecting people’s privacy too much, although if anyone reads this and wants me to know about them, @ me.

[cxncordia]

So, where have I been?

On hiatus.

I’m so sorry to all of the people I was playing with before my hiatus. One thing led to the other and eventually I just didn’t have a single ounce of desire to be here. Sorry I did not announce it or make a big deal out of it, work sprung on me, then life, then other commitments and before I knew it a whole month had came through. Then I simply decided to just not even give tumblr a chance and let it simmer for a bit.

So I decided to use that time to do some soul searching.

To be absolutely honest, I don’t like to RP in this place. Except for a few friends who are always up to whatever I throw their way, I’m not happy to be here.

My big main problems:

I rarely get the plots that I want picked up. I don’t know if it’s my verbose threads, my faulty grammar or my lack of desire to play “fan favorite face claims”, but I am normally struggling to get my plots picked up. Case in point, the last single verse idea that was meant to last a month: at first I thought “well, people aren’t so much into the idea of a horror verse”, but then I switched it to something Disney-y and DnD-esque and still got 1 hit back only.

I rarely get the FCs that I want against me. I only have this problem when playing bottom, but not when playing top. Mainly because some of the fan favorite face claims are boys that I want to fuck... but I get so many hits with those faces that I tend to lock those out normally and reserve them only for my friends and close people. So, let’s not talk about my desire for a dom top Matt Barr to pounce my guys that has yet to be materialized.

I like plotting before sexing. Everyone says this, but I think I really do. This past month I’ve been live roleplaying through discord in both English and my mother tongue. Though my experience has not been the ideal I had in mind, I realize that I don’t really mind if my character has sex. What I do mind is having a story that I can push forward and get a conclusion. Most threads never get past the fourth round of replies and when it’s something super complex and super interesting I rarely get people support me (except for these few friends who do).

I really hate the SJW rethorics of tumblr. Everything is a fight. There is always a fire. The angrier the post, the bigger the likes... aren’t you guys tired of putting out fires every single week over the most unconsecuential and irrelevant stuff? Ships? Writing? If a show is problematic or not? if an actor is woke or not? And god forbid I post an opinion that is not recognized as popular because all these labels come flying right at my face. Well, whatever, call me what you want but the label says more about you than it says about me. Yet, I have enough of this shit going on in the meatspace to be worried about it in the rping sphere. 

This is not anyone’s fault and I’m not going to be pushing it down anyone’s throat. This is the current state of tumblr rping from my end and I currently don’t have any real strategies to solve these issues.

So, until these strategies are found or established (by me) consider that this blog is under hiatus, currently archived, all threads are dropped and I’m going to be around. You can still reach me through this blog which will be periodically (but not constantly) checked on. If you’re a friend, ask for my discord and we can talk through there if you need.

So, it’s not really a good bye because I’m still around, I’m just not playing at the moment.

You can still come for the hot men, though. Those are going to forever be reblogged here.

[dotsayers]

Dear Yuletide Writer

hello!

this year i am prompting for The Goblin Emperor Series (specifically The Cemetaries of Amalo), Fandom for Robots, and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace.

General ❤️: Presumed Dead, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Porn, Established Relationship, Time Travel/Time Loops, Outsider POV, Curtain Fic, Humour

General DNWS: Rape/Non-con, Non-Canonical Major Character Death, Infidelity, Crossovers with non-requested fandoms

The Goblin Emperor Series (Thara Celehar, Iana Pel-Thenhior, Anora Chanavar)

i love thara celehar’s web of relationships very much but particularly (of course) i love anora’s concerned yet slightly bitchy best friendship and iana’s head-over-heels but still sensible about it love.

what i would like to see in a fic is something set nebulously post-canon (aka not too much certainty about whether the significant development from grief of stones remains permanent or not) where thara, anora and iana go out to a teahouse together and thara immediately regrets his life choices. teasing celehar is a group activity now!

otherwise, anything featuring a general ❤️  would be great

pairing: thara/celehar is preferred but if an ot3 appeals to you i am open to anything

Fandom for Robots (Worldbuilding)

while i can accept the premise that computron is the world’s only sentient robot, i am fascinated by the possibilities presented by the rise of AI as a tool for software development, etc.

who’s to say that in this universe the gpt-3 algorithm doesn’t love a bit of slice of life anime? that midjourney isn’t weeb trash for the latest shounen nonsense? i’d love to see some of the other intelligences that are forming their own fandom circles, and how they interact with meatspace while being very much not present in it themselves

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace (Lucien Sanchez, Rick Dagless, Liz Asher, Thornton Reed)

ever since i read an interview with holness where he said a theoretical season two of darkplace would’ve included a christmas episode which parodied the thing i have truly not known peace.

my crackship for darkplace is sanchez/dagless, both because the tension is sizzling (matt berry could have convincing sexual chemistry with a chair) and because garth marenghi would lose his mind trying to pretend he was fine with gay people but was not himself a bisexual on the vt as sanchez and dagless were going at it.

so, christmassy thing parody is the ideal here - i feel like an infectious mistletoe incident resulting in godawful special effects transformations is about par for the course. and perhaps we could mention sanchez’s broccoli experience for the extremely important continuity

otherwise, anything featuring a general ❤️  would be great

[anr-art-blog]

Last Ever Official Netrunner Cards

Two things are happening right now, as I post this (9/9/18) - one, Netrunner is, officially ending. No more sets, boxes or cards. The Android universe, with other board games and fiction, that carries on, but netrunner ends within a month.

The other thing that’s happening right now, is that netrunner is going out with a bang - the last ever World Championships is ongoing, and as part of a larger event, Magnum Opus, (with more Netrunner, and other Android stuff outside the tournament). For the main tournament, the entire group was split into two - partly for admin reasons, and partly so that with their victories, the players would be able to vote on the creation of the last ever netrunner cards. The split organisation will also be used in the Android Universe RPG events, and the eventual winners will have some effect on the setting’s overall lore. Given two options, the players picked their choices for various sections of the cards, and FFG’s on-site printers created them while the games were played (and will be putting them up as PDFs for the non-attending public). The artwork and names were decided beforehand, but everything else was chosen by the players - a great way to send off the game into fan-formats. 

Speaking of the card art, it’s amazing, as to be expected from two excellent artists, both long masters of art production for netrunner -  originally Tanaka’s goons, now “Hired Help”, by Matt Zeilinger, originally made for Worlds of Android (I will come back to that, I swear)

The other, titled Los Scorpiones, now “Watch the World Burn”, by Emilio Rodriguez, and he rose to the challenge of pretty much the only "action" shot he's done for netrunner - everything else is locations or fairly static pieces, with Projects Ares, Atlas and Vitruvius probably being the closest to it. 

Excellent stuff from probably the two premier artists for meatspace in netrunner (Liiga and Adam S Doyle being their counterparts for cyberspace IMO).

To get back to the non-Netrunner events at Magnum Opus, both sides will be battling it out in RPGs (the first public showing/testing/previews of the Android Splat for Genesys - FFG’s general-purpose RPG) will be there, and the tournament and other results will be used to influence the Android world after this event, seeing which of the two Orgcrime factions - the descendants of 14K (actual IRL criminals) or Los Scorpiones, a more cyberpunk crime organisation, both covered in detail by FFG here - will come out as more dominant in the published Android Universe to come. A great way to have the games people play have a wider impact, and to make these last Netrunner Worlds really special.

[comicsmithy]

Take a minute to watch the trailer for our comic-book “Frozen Angel Symphony” and share the Kickstarter page:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshgorfain/frozen-angel-symphony-issue-1-of-cyberpunk-fantasy

It’s the brainchild of Josh Gorfain, a writer who already has a few successful comics Kickstarter campaigns under his belt. I first met Josh after he Kickstarted “Meatspace” a sad, funny, brilliant, weird, family-focused, virtual reality, sci-fi murder mystery genre mashup just around the time the comics store I owned then opened its doors to underground self-publishing creators. We sold his comic out then also hosted him and the cast & crew of to shoot a web-series taking place in a comic shop called “True Believers” that he wrote a year or two later.

Josh is collaborating for the second time with the brilliant artist J. C. Grande, whose intricate line-work and dark cityscapes have brought the terrifying city of New Arcadia to life.

Rounding out our team is the absolutely fantastic letterer Matt Krotzer, who has really made Josh’s words sing with perfect design and font choices throughout.

I am but the humble editor offering my opinion, as needed! I’m proud to be involved in this project I genuinely have been excited to read even as I’ve seen the thing cone together from the early stages. Share the page so we get backers and I can hold a printed copy in my hands!

[kenyatta]

The Ironic Nazi exists in part because the internet minimizes friction. Friction includes anything that might stop someone from using a particular service; things like having to create a user account, tying that account to an email address, filling out a CAPTCHA, filters that prevent obscene messages from being sent or published, or even long load times. By reducing the mental overhead required for publishing, it becomes easier to think without acting. Online platforms benefit significantly from this approach, meant to lower inhibitions. Making it easier for people to share and post means making it easier for people to share and post heinous things. It’s why 4chan, which does not require an account, and Twitter, which limits the verbosity of what people say, are thought of as potent breeding grounds for the Ironic Nazi. The rise of frictionless, anonymous spaces has been an important test for the strength of free speech, because they remove the friction that the real world insists upon — anything from the difficulty of finding a wide audience for your racist pamphlet to the social consequences of spouting hate speech. White nationalists hiding behind the label of “troll” — like Weev, Baked Alaska, Millennial Matt, and their thousands of anonymous comrades — can spout shit online with no work or investment, and when called on it, dance away with more jokes or claims that it’s all just talk. It’s why horrible stances are framed as “satire” or “social experiments” when the blowback happens. After all, you can’t definitively prove the intentions of an anonymous online comment, and there are a lot of bored teenagers (and adults) operating with impunity. What happens when that modus operandi translates into the physical world, as it did in Charlottesville, when torch-bearing, flag-waving Nazis and white supremacists turned the city into a violent arena? It’s far easier to write “Hitler did nothing wrong” online and send it to nobody in particular than it is to approach someone on the street and say it to their face. The meatspace is all friction. And I don’t mean conflict here; I mean that there are constant barriers of entry. The Ironic Nazi is framed as a product of how easy platforms make it to be an asshole online. The ones who came to Charlottesville were the exact opposite: focused, methodical, and intentional in their efforts. For Gionet, it meant coordinating travel, lodging, and times to meet up with other demonstrators. It meant going out of his way to stand with literal white supremacists, and investing time, money, and possible bodily harm to do so.

Baked Alaska, Charlottesville, and the End of Ironic Nazi

[fmservers]

The nation-state of the internet

The internet is a community, but can it be a nation-state? It’s a question that I have been pondering on and off this year, what with the rise of digital nomads and the deeply libertarian ethos baked into parts of the blockchain community. It’s clearly on a lot of other people’s minds as well: when we interviewed Matt Howard of Norwest on Equity a few weeks back, he noted (unprompted) that Uber is one of the few companies that could reach “nation-state” status when it IPOs.

Clearly, the internet is home to many, diverse communities of similar-minded people, but how do those communities transmute from disparate bands into a nation-state?

That question led me to Imagined Communities, a book from 1983 and one of the most lauded (and debated) social science works ever published. Certainly it is among the most heavily cited: Google Scholar pegs it at almost 93,000 citations.

Benedict Anderson, a political scientist and historian, ponders over a simple question: where does nationalism come from? How do we come to form a common bond with others under symbols like a flag, even though we have never — and will almost never — meet all of our comrades-in-arms? Why does every country consider itself “special,” yet for all intents and purposes they all look identical (heads of state, colors and flags, etc.) Also, why is the nation-state invented so late?

Anderson’s answer is his title: people come to form nations when they can imagine their community and the values and people it holds, and thus can demarcate the borders (physical and cognitive) of who is a member of that hypothetical club and who is not.

In order to imagine a community though, there needs to be media that actually links that community together. The printing press is the necessary invention, but Anderson tracks the rise of nation-states to the development of vernacular media — French language as opposed to the Latin of the Catholic Church. Lexicographers researched and published dictionaries and thesauruses, and the printing presses — under pressure from capitalism’s dictates — created rich shelves of books filled with the stories and myths of peoples who just a few decades ago didn’t “exist” in the mind’s eye.

The nation-state itself was developed first in South America in the decline and aftermath of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Anderson argues for a sociological perspective on where these states originate from. Intense circulation among local elites — the bureaucrats, lawyers, and professionals of these states — and their lack of mobility back to their empires’ capitals created a community of people who realized they had more in common with each other than the people on the other side of the Atlantic.

As other communities globally start to understand their unique place in the world, they import these early models of nation-states through the rich print culture of books and newspapers. We aren’t looking at convergent evolution, but rather clones of one model for organizing the nation implemented across the world.

That’s effectively the heart of the thesis of this petite book, which numbers just over 200 pages of eminently readable if occasionally turgid writing. There are dozens of other epiphanies and thoughts roaming throughout those pages, and so the best way to get the full flavor is just to pick up a used copy and dive in.

For my purposes though, I was curious to see how well Anderson’s thesis could be applied to the nation-state of the internet. Certainly, the concept that the internet is its own sovereign entity has been with us almost since its invention (just take a look at John Perry Barlow’s original manifesto on the independence of cyberspace if you haven’t).

Isn’t the internet nothing but a series of imagined communities? Aren’t subreddits literally the seeds of nation-states? Every time Anderson mentioned the printing press or “print-capitalism,” I couldn’t help but replace the word “press” with WordPress and print-capitalism with advertising or surveillance capitalism. Aren’t we going through exactly the kind of media revolution that drove the first nation-states a few centuries ago?

Perhaps, but it’s an extraordinarily simplistic comparison, one that misses some of the key originators of these nation-states.

Photo by metamorworks via Getty Images

One of the key challenges is that nation-states weren’t a rupture in time, but rather were continuous with existing power structures. On this point, Anderson is quite absolute. In South America, nation-states were borne out of the colonial administrations, and elites — worried about losing their power — used the burgeoning form of the nation-state to protect their interests (Anderson calls this “official nationalism”). Anderson sees this pattern pretty much everywhere, and if not from colonial governments, then from the feudal arrangements of the late Middle Ages.

If you turn the gaze to the internet then, who are the elites? Perhaps Google or Facebook (or Uber), companies with “nation-state” status that are essentially empires on to themselves. Yet, the analogy to me feels stretched.

There is an even greater problem though. In Anderson’s world, language is the critical vehicle by which the nation-state connects its citizens together into one imagined community. It’s hard to imagine France without French, or England without English. The very symbols by which we imagine our community are symbols of that community, and it is that self-referencing that creates a critical feedback loop back to the community and reinforces its differentiation.

That would seem to knock out the lowly subreddit as a potential nation-state, but it does raise the question of one group: coders.

When I write in Python for instance, I connect with a group of people who share that language, who communicate in that language (not entirely mind you), and who share certain values in common by their choice of that language. In fact, software engineers can tie their choices of language so strongly to their identities that it is entirely possible that “Python developer” or “Go programmer” says more about that person than “American” or “Chinese.”

Where this gets interesting is when you carefully connect it to blockchain, which I take to mean a technology that can autonomously distribute “wealth.” Suddenly, you have an imagined community of software engineers, who speak in their own “language” able to create a bureaucracy that serves their interests, and with media that connects them all together (through the internet). The ingredients — at least as Anderson’s recipe would have them — are all there.

I am not going to push too hard in this direction, but one surprise I had with Anderson is how little he discussed the physical agglomeration of people. The imagining of (physical) borders is crucial for a community, and so the development of maps for each nation is a common pattern in their historical developments. But, the map, fundamentally, is a symbol, a reminder that “this place is our place” and not much more.

Indeed, nation-states bleed across physical borders all the time. Americans are used to the concept of worldwide taxation. France seats representatives from its overseas departments in the National Assembly, allowing French citizens across the former empire to vote and elect representatives to the country’s legislature. And anyone who has followed the Huawei CFO arrest in Canada this week should know that “jurisdiction” these days has few physical borders.

The barrier for the internet or its people to become nation-states is not physical then, but cognitive. One needs to not just imagine a community, but imagine it as the prime community. We will see an internet nation-state when we see people prioritizing fealty to one of these digital communities over the loyalty and patriotism to a meatspace country. There are already early acolytes in these communities who act exactly that way. The question is whether the rest of the adherents will join forces and create their own imagined (cyber)space.

Via Danny Crichton https://techcrunch.com