Hi, I'm Jess! In my day job, I make games, do game research, and teach game design from middle school all the way up to postgraduate work. In the rest of my life, I read voraciously, sing, embroider, foster assorted cats, and spend time with my awesome family.
I'm hoping to reach folks who know me from G+, so please boost if you can. I'm also excited to meet new people in this community. Maybe it'll become my new home!
Anyone interested in #linguistics looking for people to follow (boost if you please)
Righto, here’s my fedi-tips:
- it’s slower here, less addictive than corp social media. This is a good thing, try and enjoy it.
- you see what you follow. No ads, no obscure reshuffling, no manipulating your emotions. Enjoy that too.
- please consider using CWs. Could it hurt, shock, upset, harm?
- please describe your pictures if you can
- give benefit of the doubt: text easily misleads
- shared something negative? Maybe follow with positive action.
- fash, queerphobes, bigots: fuck off 💚
In a way that, you might notice, mirrors a well-functioning human society: the direct consequence of an absence of trust is a tectonic amount of wasted and redundant effort. That’s what zero-trust systems are. Waste.
Once you make even the slightest concession to the notion that trust might matter, the entire cryptocurrency exercise just… dissolves into meaninglessness. If you admit that the double spend solution only needs to be good enough, you can run the whole bitcoin exercise on five year old Android phones, thousands of times faster and for a vanishing fraction of the energy cost.
A couple of things that have been proven true in practice recently: first, the people who benefit most from zero-trust systems are people who shouldn’t be trusted. The primary utility of these systems is to give people who are not trustworthy a way to claim their untrustworthiness doesn’t really matter. That claim is demonstrably false.
Dan Fixes Coin-Ops (welcome to fedi @ifixcoinops !) put up a great thread earlier today on online community-connecting and mutual support. I'd strongly encourage anyone to read it: https://mastodon.social/@ifixcoinops/108164769201676440
I have a couple of reactions to it, which I will refrain from dumping into Dan's mentions and share here, instead.
How you used to get people looking at your website before "going viral" was a thing, in the Web 1.0 days when people surfed the information superhighway by clicking on links to go from site to site.
1. The "Links" page! Every site had a page that was just links to other websites that the site owner thought were cool. You could email other site owners whose sites you thought were cool and ask if they thought your site was cool too, and they'd link back to you.
religion, state violence, holiday
tbh I feel like Good Friday is the one we should have secularized
(not, uh, that Ostara was secularized, but... well it just took me this long to write this thought out XD)
I think there would be a lot of potential good works derived from a widely-observed date centered around the idea that the justice system can get it extremely wrong, that executions are cruel and beneath us, that a state should not have the power to silence its opponents in this way.
I really dislike joking and such about the crucifixion, by itself, because if we assume the person Jesus actually existed, we have that one day which marks a painful and prolonged unjust death and grief from those who lost a good friend who tried to do good things. If you don't believe in the resurrection and ascension bits, the whole affair is extremely sad and also becomes senseless, a testament to our cruelty and a call to action.
We could be using that day to call for the release of political prisoners, honor victims of lynching, reassess whether our laws can reflect our hearts. Every year, around the world, leaders could commute sentences, grant pardons, introduce initiatives to transform the justice system, call for the striking down of unjust laws.
The crowd saving Barabbas twists the story and takehome point somewhat. Because we don't know anything about Barabbas, other than that he opposed the state. Maybe he led a prison escape or protected against overpolicing. Maybe he sponsored political candidates calling for reform. We don't know... he was an "insurrectionist." We have only the Bible implying that when the crowd made the (likely ahistorical) choice to free him, their choice was a wrong one. This is taught to young kids; that's where I internalized it. "They got our guy, and let the actual criminal go in some sort of mass bad judgment." I think as an adult of faith, I'd read that as "Jesus' sacrifice would be willing even if just so that one man could live" (and I think I'd end up a confused adult and wondering a lot about the others killed).
Anyway I sent some letters in the spirit of this line of thinking. We need more mercy in the world.
Had to drop Allie off at an appointment downtown. It’s right near this cute café with tons of ambiance I’ve wanted to check out. And the café is great, it’s where I am right now.
But to get here, we cannot but be reminded of the extent of homelessness in Vancouver. Acutely, I’m thinking of the fire in the SRO hotel near here the other day. So many folks suffering. I’m still trying to learn what I can do to help here.
sea fever af
be the eldritch horror you want to see in the woods.
I belong to the Delaware River and Lenapehoking, but now I live in Coast Salish land.