sirenthegalaxycollector - Tumblr blog

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

...he is weaving the chocolate. Do you copy, this bitch is WEAVING CHOCOLATE

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

This guy always takes his chocolate art to the next level!!... Omg!!

(Source)

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

i hope that the discussion about student protests does not get reduced to "privileged rich kids faffing around at an ivy league school." setting aside that tenuous claim, over the last week, protests have erupted over the entire country. a few days ago, riot police beat, pepper-sprayed, and arrested NYU faculty shielding students; protests started at the university of southern california when the admin cancelled the valedictorian's speech; encampments appeared at the university of southern carolina, UT dallas, the university of maryland, the university of new mexico, IUPUI, virginia tech, the university of virginia, the university of illinois, the university of north carolina — chapel hill, the university of pittsburgh, uc berkeley, the university of michigan — ann arbor, MIT, emerson, tufts, the university of rochester, rice, swarthmore, the new school, vanderbilt university, with students arrested; students protested or walked out at miami university, northwestern, temple, the 5 claremont colleges: pomona, pitzer, scripps, harvey mudd, and claremont mckenna, stanford, washington university in st louis, students were arrested at ohio state, students were confronted by riot police at cal poly humboldt, after which they occupied campus, students were arrested at the university of minnesota — twin cities, after which faculty walked out; and yes, there are protests at the other ivies, most notably yale, with students facing mass arests after encampments, but there is also an encampment at brown, protests appeared at cornell, princeton faculty issued a statement of solidarity while students are preparing an encampment, and harvard banned the undergraduate palestine solidarity committee. there are thousands of students who are protesting for palestine across the entire country, facing harassment, arrest, and suspension in return

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

(Atheris squamigera) variable bush viper

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

I turn to Ares.

Thanks to Tyler Miles Lockett who allowed me to draw inspiration from his ARES piece for page 2! Look at his etsy page it's SICK

⚔️ If you want to read some queer retelling of arturian legends have a look at my webtoon

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

A Very Human Moment (Part 1)

if y’all ever want to see a part 2 this better do numbers

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

More medieval dyes for y'all!

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

everyone says 'prioritize your health' 'look after yourself' until they realize that making your wellbeing your first priority means making everything else a lower priority. and yeah, that's sometimes ok if it's temporary, but if those health issues are chronic? oh boy do they not like it when you actually take their advice. sometimes prioritizing your health means neglecting your work, your household chores, your social life. 'looking after yourself' means not putting your energy into looking after everyone else first. and the same people who tell you to prioritize your health will get upset with you when they realize it means you're no longer priorizing them.

if you have disabled or chronically ill people in your life and you extend them sympathy and tell them to look after themselves when they're feeling sick, but then you get upset at then because they keep canceling plans. please. reevaluate.

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

I can explain myself (I can't)

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

The games industry is fucking doomed at this rate. This is an INSANE direction to take Subnautica, the amazing single-player survival game.

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

-fae

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

what they are doing is similar to the nazi siege of leningrad or the destruction of the warsaw ghetto after the warsaw ghetto uprising… and instead people are using the memory of the holocaust to justify this horror. ive never seen anything so disgusting

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

The gnolls on the risen road draw this symbol without myrkuls triangle, and the pc and companions comment on it.

I finally put it together on my last playthrough.

Ok here’s a fun question. We know Gortash and Durge came up with the Absolute scam. But who designed the goofy logo combining all of the dead three symbols?

Was it Gortash, thinking he was SO CLEVER for “subtly” hinting at the cult’s true power in a way he was convinced none of the brainwashed cult idiots would even notice? Did Durge help, pointing to the sketches and being like “this part should be covered in blood” and “make this part drip, like blood” while Gortash takes notes and is also genuinely turned on by what a beautiful creative genius he thinks Durge is?

Was the handprint (for Bane) being in blood directly over the skull (for Bhaal) a romantic gesture on either of their parts? Look babe our gods’ symbols are touching..

Was Ketheric unimpressed that all they did for Myrkul (read: for Ketheric) was flip the triangle upside down? He’s like “the skull is for Myrkul too right” and Durge hisses “that’s BHAAL’S SKULL” and Ketheric, ignoring them, goes “well it could stand for both I suppose” and Durge tries to bite out his throat

Or did the three of them all try to collaborate, and the flipped triangle was all Ketheric could come up with? And Gortash is like “wow Ketheric that’s.. so creative of you.. great contribution.. anyway I’m going to stamp Bane’s hand over the entire thing in blood” and Durge is like “can it be my blood. Can it please be my blood. Let me give you my blood Enver please I want you to have it” and Gortash goes “aww babe 🥺” and Ketheric leaves the room

I need to know what happened here canonically because every possible variation is perfect

I.

I.

I'm so fucking stupid. I didn't even MAKE the connection that the Absolute symbol is literally just their three cult symbols combined.

Oh. My. God. THEY ARE SO STUPID. Why would they even DO that?

WHAT A BUNCH OF IDIOTS. They're lucky the people of Faerun are even STUPIDER than they are, omg.

I didn't even think about this anon, you've rocked my world.

YES, Gortash is fucking holding Durge's hand, and it's the MAIN EVIL SYMBOL of the game.

That's amazing.

Durgetash was already the basis for the entire game, this just makes it even better.

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

1963 Refrigerator 🤔

[sirenthegalaxycollector]

How lock-in hurts design

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.

Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.

This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.

Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.

Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.

Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!

But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html

Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.

The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):

https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/

Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."

Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.

Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Image: Belem (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en