#adjacency matrix

[omg-snakes]

Shopping for sphagnum moss for my snakes and came across some interesting advice.

🤔

I have been concerned about the loss of my fine-grained matrix...

[thenegoteator]

[yuzudonut]

I dont care for the idea that IDW rodimus got his new frame you see in mtmte bcs of the matrix rebuilding his body or whatever. Cuz thats just not true... his body does not change from when hes got a hole blown in his chest vs after the matrix patched him up...that new frames just a new frame ig cuz its noot explained between death of optimus prime and mtmte where he just. Gets a drastically different design thats left unexplained. Thats... not the matrix bcs at that point hes returned the matrix and that new body happens in mtmte onlyyyy

G1 is a different story but I usually only see people get serious w it w the IDW counterparts lol. Like...idk Im not even particularly fond of optimus but his interactions w the matrix fascinate meeeeee like sorry. Rodimus fans. As a big rodimus fan the canon source material doesnt rlly have that oomph for me to get weird abt it. Optimus on the other hand, oh to be changed, not necessarily directly bcs of the matrix. But its presence does smt drastic to him no matter what huh.

[rassicas]

i think inklings with realistic guns are cool. i also think the sleek black leathery matrix-influenced action hero look of the y2k era is cool. when these toxic traits are combined you get self-indulgence that's borderline unrecognizable as splatoon-adjacent art

[dduane]

Hi DD! I'm about mid-way through the most complex writing project I've ever done (several stories with some red thread storylines progressing in the background, so a sort of interwoven structure). I have an outline of the major plot beats, but the problem is, I've gotten about 2/3 of the way through, and this is where I've started to have trouble bringing my many threads together. The further I go, the the harder keeping it all clear and elegant becomes. Any advice for working at this stage?

It may seem counterintuitive, but once I'd found myself in a situation like this, I would immediately start working backwards.

It's difficult to describe what I mean here except semi-graphically—sort of in terms of one of those strings-pinned-to-the-wall diagrams so familiar to a lot of us from the various evidence-wall memes.

If we're imagining your present as-yet-unconnected threads as more or less progressing left to right, I would "stick pins in them" at their current furthest range and then move straight out to the far right side of the diagram.

For each thread I would then get busy establishing a detailed "end state" for the work: meaning a sense of what you want each of those through-line of plot to look like when you're done in terms of characters, situations, etc. I'd make very sure that all the major through-lines were covered, and (in passing) take a long look at how they'll stand in relationship to one another when all the action's finished.

Then I would start working back along each line toward the center of the matrix—looking to see what the next-to-last thing was that needed to happen to produce the final result on a given through-line. And then the third-to-last. ...And so forth.

I would try to work through the whole set of through-lines for each given step or stage before progressing any further backwards—unless, of course, some leap of logic occurs that makes an obvious connection between two different through-lines, or an earlier stage in the same TL that hadn't been obvious before.

(Is this making sense? God, I hope so.)

My experience with this kind of situation in the past is that it doesn't take too long before, on one or two of the lines you're constructing backwards, you'll hit something fairly major that somehow hadn't come up for consideration previously, or had simply slipped or fallen off the structural "radar" because so much other stuff had been going on around it. That event or piece of data, once perceived, will very often either immediately connect itself back to one or more of the "pinned" through-lines, or promote one of the other incomplete ones into growing connections to other adjacent lines of plot material. It's a little like watching neural tissue developing alternate pathways for itself after an injury.

...Anyway, give this approach a shot and see how it works for you. There are times when simply the act of reversing direction on the plot build will shake something loose in the business surrounding the building-it-forward part. It's worth a try to see what happens.

Hope this helps!

[ziseviolet]

Since there's quite a lot of interest in Chinese-inspired cyberpunk and adjacent aesthetics, just wanted to share these neat "Chinese style meets the Matrix"-esque looks from popular brand 大青龙肆/Da Qing Long Si. There's also an English website here.

[darkeagleruins]

NYPD Seeks Suspect Who Allegedly Set Woman on Fire in Subway Homicide:

GPS confirmed, the man had three mobile devices. One from a United Nations NGO that was activated in Guatemala and one from a Clinton Foundation adjacent NGO and another from an Obama Foundation adjacent NGO.

The man was very likely released from prison in Guatemala and then flown into the interior of the United States using the “CBP One” app.

Before they enter the U.S. they simply register with the UN and they then also receive a rechargeable debit card. Regardless of what legacy media says, it is U.S. taxpayers footing the bill through a very complex matrix of NGOs and banks.

[steamos3-official]

Dear Linux blogs...

I have been slacking in my duties, but I have come to inform you of some things I'd like to maintain

Please verify that this applies to you. I am specifically talking to distro-official blogs and their adjacently themed blogs.

Make sure you're on The List (TM). If not, please submit an issue on the GitHub repo (it's linked at the bottom of the page).

If you're up for it, please enable anon asks for the people who use sideblogs and want to send in-character asks

Same reason as 3, maybe open DMs and chat with me? I'm bored sometimes...

Join the Matrix chat. Currently, XKCD bot is the most active speaker and I want to change that

Send this to or ping the relevant blogs to save me work please

Thank you for your help and cooperation!

I will probably reblog this a few times, pinging various linux blogs. I ask you do the same.

[alexcabotgf]

another one

new me and who pic just dropped

[madmadmarie]

The other day I had this random idea for two monster high/monster high-adjacent characters inspired by the cat glitch in The Matrix (1999)! Not sure how it makes sense within the whole lore of monster high but like do you see the vision? I see it so bear with me hahaha

This design is a work in progress I'd say, I feel like especially Maddie isn't really where I want her to be design-wise but Im gonna keep working on it! It's been really fun so far to try and design characters that would feel legit in the MH universe while still keeping essential elements of my own personal style and taste<33

Also not sure yet about the name Maddie, originally I called her Mattie but then it was too similar to Catty (who is another MH black cat character lol), Maddie still feels too close but I don't have other ideas lol if anyone wants to help I'm open to suggestions!

I hope you like them so far:3

[commodorez]

Got a "new" laptop: Toshiba T4900CT!

Presumably this is the highest end machine they made in this color scheme before moving onto the gray plastic computers, like what @aperture-in-the-multiverse has. This machine is technically not a Satellite, but it's Satellite-adjacent.

Pentium I at 75MHz 40MB of RAM 8GB CF card for a hard drive VLB video chipset driving an SVGA 640x480, 64K color 10.4" active matrix TFT-LCD Analog Devices AD1848KP & Yamaha OPL3 audio Windows 95B (originally shipped with 3.11)

And a broken floppy drive!

Seriously, you have to disassemble the entire computer to get at the floppy drive itself, and I'm pretty sure the belt is busted. So far I've worked around it, but it's getting to be annoying. The good news is that the hard drive is accessible from a separate bay, unlike other contemporary Toshiba laptops that bury it just like the floppy drive.

Oh, and Toshiba was really intent on protecting their highly proprietary Toshiba Card Manager 3.0 software (which I'm sure this post will poison that search term for all others, it always happens when I talk about technical things here -- sorry). I'm betting that they only had it installed on machines from the factory, but if you needed to reinstall it, things got complicated. Turns out you had to get a passphrase from some convoluted bullshit on their website back in the mid 90s, and this only applied to a select handful of machines that were even compatible with it in the first place. I don't imagine I will be able to use that for PCMCIA hotswap management, which sucks.

Another fun bit is that despite being released in 1995, this machine is clearly intended to run Windows 3.1. None of the drivers I was able to locate for the hardware are the expected VXD or INF files.

For the moment, I've got a Backpack external floppy drive connected via the parallel port, but all other file transfers involve me removing the CF card from the hard drive bay. It's faster that way. Hopefully I can get this thing configured well enough to use it.

[jointhefediverse]

💫 Join the Fediverse! 💫

Greetings, fellow bloggers! We welcome you to join us in discovering, honoring, and promoting the potential future of social networking—commonly referred to as the "Fediverse."

The Fediverse, or Federation Universe, refers to a collective of online platforms that utilize the web protocol known as ActivityPub, which has set a standard of excellence in regards to both protecting and respecting users' online privacies.

There's a good chance in the past few years that you've caught wind of the fedi family's critically acclaimed Mastodon; however, there are many other unique platforms worth your consideration...

✨ Where To Begin?

Conveniently enough, from the minds of brilliant independent developers, there already likely exists a Fediverse equivalent to your favorite socials. Whether it's an opinion from the critics, or from the community alike—the following popular websites are commonly associated with one another:

Friendica 🐰 = Facebook Mastodon 🐘 = Twitter Pixelfed 🐼 = Instagram PeerTube 🐙 = YouTube Lemmy 🐭 = Reddit

It's worth mentioning, too, a few other sites and forks thereof that are worthy counterparts, which be: Pleroma 🦊 & Misskey 🐱, microblogs also similar to Twitter/Mastodon. Funkwhale 🐋 is a self-hosting audio streamer, which pays homage to the once-popular GrooveShark. For power users, Hubzilla 🐨 makes a great choice (alongside Friendica) when choosing macroblogging alternatives.

✨ To Be Clear...

To address the technicalities: aside from the "definitive" Fediverse clients, we will also be incorporating any platforms that utilize ActivityPub-adjacent protocols as well. These include, but are not limited to: diaspora*; AT Protocol (Bluesky 🦋); Nostr; OStatus; Matrix; Zot; etc. We will NOT be incorporating any decentralized sites that are either questionably or proven to be unethical. (AKA: Gab has been exiled.)

✨ Why Your Privacy Matters

You may ask yourself, as we once did, "Why does protecting my online privacy truly matter?" While it may seem innocent enough on the surface, would it change your mind that it's been officially shared by former corporate media employees that data is more valuable than money to these companies? Outside of the ethical concerns surrounding these concepts, there are many other reasons why protecting your data is critical, be it: security breaches which jeopardize your financial info and risk identity theft; continuing to feed algorithms which use psychological manipulation in attempts to sell you products; the risk of spyware hacking your webcams and microphones when you least expect it; amongst countless other possibilities that can and do happen to individuals on a constant basis. We wish it could all just be written off as a conspiracy... but, with a little research, you'll swiftly realize the validity of these claims are not to be ignored any longer. The solution? Taking the decentralized route.

✨ Our Mission For This Blog

Our mission for establishing this blog includes 3 core elements:

To serve as a hub which anybody can access in order to assist themselves in either: becoming a part of the Fediverse, gaining the resources/knowledge to convince others to do the very same, and providing updates on anything Fedi-related.

We are determined to do anything within our power to prevent what the future of the Internet could become if active social users continue tossing away their data, all while technologies are advancing at faster rates with each passing year. Basically we'd prefer not to live in a cyber-Dystopia at all costs.

Tumblr (Automattic) has expressed interest in switching their servers over to ActivityPub after Musk's acquisition of then-Twitter, and are officially in the transitional process of making this happen for all of us. We're hoping our collective efforts may at some point be recognized by @staff, which in turn will encourage their efforts and stand by their decision.

With that being stated, we hope you decide to follow us here, and decide to make the shift—as it is merely the beginning. We encourage you to send us any questions you may have, any personal suggestions, or corrections on any misinformation you may come across.

From the Tender Hearts of, ✨💞 @disease & @faggotfungus 💞✨

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A year in illustration (2024), Part three

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/2024/12/07/great-kepplers-ghost/art-adjacent

Part one

Part two

Live Nation/Ticketmaster is buying Congress

I had a lot of fun scouring Victorian woodcuts for cool tentacles to add to this image. The garish concert lights in the background were a fun find – I was halfway through using them when I realized that the image came from my old pal Matt Biddulph, who has many claims to fame, but my favorite is that he once sarcastically called the area in Hackney where some tech startups were clustered "Silicon Roundabout" and then experienced the monkey's paw curse of having the government turn this into an official designation.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/30/nix-fix-the-tix/#something-must-be-done-there-we-did-something

(Image: Matt Biddulph, CC BY-SA 2.0; Flying Logos, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

Around April, I realized I needed a visual signifier for "enshittified Google" – I created a cartoon mascot with the head of a poop emoji, colored in the original Google logo colors. I put him into "The Junior Partner Speaks," an old ad for Pacific Woolens and Worsteds, which I've since used several times:

https://craphound.com/images/juniorpartner.jpg

I'm very fond of using the homely old original Google logo as a way to differentiate pre-enshittificatory Google from modern, enshittocene Google.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Podcasting "Capitalists Hate Capitalism"

Real Gilded Age corruption-heads will instantly recognize the editorial cartoon image of Boss Tweed as a suited figure with a sack of money for a head; his body language is impeccable, conveying a sneering disregard for decency and others' wellbeing. He works very well inserted into this tapestry of feudal peasants threshing grain.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/18/in-extremis-veritas/#the-winnah

No, "convenience" isn't the problem

It's stupidly, unnecessarily hard to find hi-rez scans of Rube Goldberg cartoons online, but this one is perfect and it was a delight to lovingly crop out all its little details. Throw in Cryteria's HAL 9000 and a Matrix code waterfall and you've got a perfect image of the complex, hostile traps of digital systems.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death

The unexpected upside of global monopoly capitalism

This one's pretty subtle! I mostly just added the monocle, mustache and top-hat to the fallen head of Goliath in Bosse's 17th century engraving of the triumphant David. The planet Earth in David's sling is a NASA image and thus in the public domain.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

How to shatter the class solidarity of the ruling class

Goodness, but "canceled" is a tedious cliche. If you must describe someone being ejected from polite society, please consider the far more delightful "defenestrated," not least because the many paintings and etchings of The Defenestration of Prague gives us a lot of public domain visual material to work with when illustrating such events.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/#bullshit-walks

(Image: KMJ, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

General Mills and cheaply bought "dietitians" co-opted the anti-diet movement

The minute I saw this unsourced midcentury commercial illustration of a scientist working in a chem lab, I knew I'd get a lot of mileage out of it; I spent a long flight productively slicing it onto layers so that I could replace his head and put arbitrary objects in his flask:

https://craphound.com/images/labflask.jpg

I've used him before, but putting the Trix rabbit's head on him and sticking a box of Cocoa Puffs in the flask worked great.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/05/corrupt-for-cocoa-puffs/#flood-the-zone-with-shit

Too big to care

I spent the whole flight to SXSW last year slicing up a super hi-rez (10,000px wide!) image of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights," slicing out individual demons, with special attention to the hoof-footed, anus-baring demon in a hat with a whole secret demonic clubhouse in its rectal cavity. At the end of that flight, I had a very funny conversation with my perplexed seatmate, who was dying to know what the actual fuck I was working on.

The background here is made up of desaturated, magnified brushstrokes from Van Gogh's "Starry Night."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

I inserted a rogue's gallery of "evil boss types" from various editorial cartoons into this vintage Red Lobster ad, including Boss Tweed, an impatient guy from a midcentury John Falter commercial illustration, possibly for a radio station (?) and a William Gropper sketch for a cartoon making fun of the business lobby's opposition to the New Deal.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

You were promised a jetpack by liars

The newsie with the great grin makes a reappearance in this one, beneath a jetpack flyer taken from a 1928 Amazing Stories cover by R Frank Paul. The control panel is one of several midcentury electronics consoles I've spent idle hours cropping out (this one comes from a Schlitz ad depicting a HAM radio enthusiast). The hypnotic head is from the October, 1953 cover of Doll-Man, likely by Reed Crandall. I started playing around with halftoning with this one, on the background, as a way of hiding the JPEG artifacts that emerged when I uprezzed small source images. It worked really well.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

AI "art" and uncanniness

I was so happy with how the extra fingers on this Victorian woodcut of a hand on a Oujia board planchette came out. And the green tinting worked perfectly with the Code Waterfall background.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Part four

[ultraviolet-divergence]

numpy sensibly refusing to allocate 29 terabytes of RAM for me to construct a 5e6 X 5e6 adjacency matrix: MemoryError 😕

[thegaynessarchives]

List of entity-coded movies, organized by entity

(These are mostly movies I just found from Google, feel free to tell me if there are any I should add to the list!)

This will be a long post most likely, so the list is under the cut.

The Buried

Buried (2010)

The Descent (2005)

Meander (2020)

The Corruption

They Nest (2000)

The Fly (1986)

The Dark

Lights Out (2016)

The Desolation

...

The End

Ghost (1990)

Final Destination 1-5

The Frighteners (1996)

The Sixth Sense (1999)

A Ghost Story (2017)

The Eye

Caché (2005)

This House Has People In It (not a movie, but I had to mention it)

The Extinction

The Matrix (1999)

Pretty much any apocalypse film

The Flesh

The Human Centipede (2009)

Raw (2016)

Under the Skin (2013)

Jennifer's Body (2009)

The Hunt

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Ready or Not (2019)

The Hunger Games

The Lonely

The Martian (2015)

Cast Away (2000)

The Slaughter

Pretty much any war movie

The Spiral

Uzumaki (2000)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Skinamarink (2022)

Jacob's Ladder (1990)

Beau Is Afraid (2023)

The Stranger

House of Wax (2005)

The Strangers (2008) (plot might lean more Slaughter though)

Tourist Trap (1979)

Us (2019)

The Vast

Fall (2022)

Vertigo (1958)

Don't Look Down (1998)

The Web

The Truman Show (1998) (could also be considered Spiral-adjacent, or even Eye-adjacent. However, I think it fits best here, due to the element of everything being planned out behind the scenes.)

Stranger Than Fiction (2006)

[ryunumber]

Does Keanu Reeves have a ryu number?

Keanu Reeves has a (Standard) Ryu Number of 3/4/does not have a Ryu Number.

(CORRECTION: Per @kchasm, Keanu Reeves has a much less ambiguous path to 3. See here.)

(old image and clarification below)

Right off the bat: Reeves's only appearance as himself in anything even video game-adjacent is the Unreal 5 tech demo/Matrix Resurrection advertisement. If that's a non-starter for you, then Keanu Reeves does not have a Ryu Number and we're done here. Have a nice day.

If you're still around, Reeves shows up in the intro to talk the talk and walk around in-engine recreations of Matrix scenes, like the bullet dodging scene.

One of those is when Morpheus talks to Thomas Anderson for the first time in the Construct.

I'm assuming that's a still digital recreation of Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, which is a bit clearer when you see it in action. Whether or not you count this is a valid Morpheus appearance determines which route applies above. It's unmistakably meant to be Morpheus, but there's also the matter of it maybe being textually a digital recreation of Morpheus, and as to how that interacts with both the original context of the scene, the new context it's been transplanted into, and the conceit of The Matrix as a whole is... not something I'm particularly interested in adjudicating. So, you know, take your pick.

Also complicating matters: the demo was pulled roughly seven months after release. Whether or not this disqualifies the above as a Standard Ryu Number is largely dependent on whether or not it was always intended to be pulled at a later date, and from what articles I can glean around release time, I don't think this was the case? And anyone who claimed the demo is able to redownload it at any time, so in theory if you really wanted to get your hands on the demo, it's very well possible to do so.

There's probably something apt about defined boundaries, so to speak, breaking down when something Matrix-related is brought up. I dunno.