luciole (he/him) @ luciole @beehaw.org

Doesn't know the lyrics. Just goes meow meow meow.

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2 yr. ago

3/14 is a weird way to write March 14th, but April 31st is just not happening.

Not gonna lie, I’m excited to see it as a way of defending ecosystems but from a conceptual perspective it feels... strange to me. Maybe because I struggle with the idyllic idea of ecosystems as inherently harmonious and kind. Or the awkwardness of thinking about the "legal responsibility" of other invasive species. Mostly I feel stuff moving inside my mind to make space for this idea. Very thought provoking and a useful device to restrain ourselves as a species, which may be necessary for our survival.

Also somehow I think my cat is already well informed about his rights.

Congrats! I’m pretty socially anxious but for some reason I’m kind of fine at work. Talking in a straightforward way about work stuff I know well gives me heaps of confidence. It just feels good being the one that knows the details and getting that spark of understanding lit around me. Maybe it’s the same for you :)

My colleagues are still surprised I just crumble and disappear at parties though I think.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions is an obvious one.

This is an advertisement for a commercial editor. The blog author is the CEO of said product.

If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

Was that blog post stored on punched cards just in case? I’m nowhere near pretentious enough to waste effort on making whatever I’m doing readable in a century, whatever method that may be. Nobody knows what computing will look like in one hundred years. Trying to solve problems that don’t have any guarantee of ever existing is bad practice.

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service.

Personal devices die at least as fast as the servers making up the cloud. Someone’s iPhone is not a place to store stuff for posterity.

These days I write using [yaddi-yadda] It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last.

Plain text might be great for a writing app, but it’s not doing anything for video, graphics or audio.

Author should take their own cue and stick to chiselled stone tablet given the obvious importance of their work for the future of humanity.

Final Fantasy XV (Windows edition): What a strange experience so far. I don't see myself as a fan of the franchise, but I've played many of its titles over the years, starting with the first one as a child.

The opening title mentions the game has been made for "fans and first timers", so I expected some degree of nostalgia, despite it looking so different from its predecessors. I was served some... but in such weird ways. Let's start with the composition of the Four Warriors of Light:

• The brat: Noctis, emo prince of teen attitude, as well as protagonist.
• The urban dad: Ignis, cooks elaborate meals and drives (always responsibly) the brat around.
• The country dad: Gladio, went to the school of life, must protecc the brat.
• The brat's best friend that eats and sleeps at home so often he kind of becomes family: Prompto.

As Ignis was driving the warriors around in a fantasy rural North America, a desolate car centric landscape in which each road's main destination is the next gas station, Prompto was making comments about playing video games. The car's radio was playing FFIV's Main Theme over and over again. Then it hit me: the nostalgia trip was not limiting itself to referencing lore from previous games, it was aiming to remind older gamers of how it was being a kid infatuated with classic RPGs. (A side note on the embarrassing haircuts the warriors are rockin': back in the 90's there were posters of these all over hair salons despite nobody ever getting one, but I guess this is really about modern jpop/kpop boy bands or something.)

It's like FFXV is aiming for the worst possible kind of nostalgia: the kind that makes you glorify past experiences out of regret for the time when you were a pampered selfish kid.

Anyways I'm probably way off, but that's my thoughts on FFXV. Oh also there's chocobos so it's not all bad. Thanks for reading.

I have a 3DS but it's broken in various ways. Besides I always found the 3DS too top heavy. On the other hand my trusty 2DS is still fine. Nevertheless I'm getting old and my eyes aren't what they used to be. These screens are so tiny... What are these, TVs for ants?!

Bahamut Lagoon is a cool JRPG for the SNES that sadly never was released for the west. You can get your hands on the ROM and some fan translation though. I've played it many years ago, so my memory's a bit iffy, but I do remember having a good time.

Front Mission is another good JRPG entry from the 90's. I loved the SNES version, but apparently the DS version boasts extra features and content, making it the superior choice.

I see this includes the five food groups: fat, sugar, salt, food colouring and bacon.

No biggie! The birth of JS is told in numerous different places (and ways) on the net, if you’re curious you should definitely look it up.

JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich for the Netscape Browser. The job said to embed Java in the browser, but Eich was a Lisp guy and wished he could actually embed Scheme instead. Scheme is about as far as Java as one can get in terms of paradigm. Eich must have been stubborn because the result was JavaScript which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Java. Lulled by the seemingly familiar syntax, decades of coders have been baffled by the wild prototype-based object paradigm and the functional style hiding underneath.

JavaScript being somewhat like Java was an arbitrary constraint that was pushed by marketing and that was very partially honoured during implementation. The kinship between the two languages is slim at best. When explaining tech issues to the layperson, it’s important not to sweat the details and get to the point. Here the point is: JavaScript and Java are like car and carpet.

Also, chill. You have a lot to learn. We all do. Stop saying your colleagues look like idiots.

It's kind of bleak. The web was supposed to be for everybody. I hadn't realized that in the last two decades we had lost the ability for neophytes to chug out HTML pages from desktop in a visual manner and upload them to a server for the world to see. Only non dead software I found that came close was Pinegrow, but it's proprietary.

Apparently they have!

I know you’re not alone with the opinion that a website asking an email address to create an account is dangerous, but frankly I still don’t understand the slippery slope argument attached to it. There are laws governing email marketing nowadays (CAN-SPAM in the US), as any actual business fucking around will find out.

In my humble opinion, an important lesson we can take from the last decades of the web is to be wary of a private free lunch. The Google search engine has never required an email and yet today they sit on an empire based on the exploitation of our data. In that sense, paying for a service is much more honest than mining the users’ privacy and selling it to advertisers (as mentioned in some hermetic Terms of Agreements & Conditions). The system may not be perfect, but asking an email address is the least invasive way to recognize someone that paid for a service.

Also, what do you mean by "self-protectionism"? It sounds like a derogatory euphemism for "making a living". It’s fine for four journalists to live from their profession. I think paying human sized businesses for services is quite different than doing the same with disruptive, market devouring corporations.

Anakin be like: ¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

Endless Sky is a cool space trading game if that’s your cup of tea.

I commend you for your thorough and informative response! Just a nitpick: imho it’s not really correct to present Mindustry as a Factorio clone. Mindustry is its own thing, with a smaller scale approach, an heavier emphasis on tower defence and a cool campaign feature. Factorio-like would be more fair.

I wish I shared your confidence. Mozilla jumped on the VR hype, then the Metaverse hype and now they're specifically betting on generative AI. It's leaving me feeling as suspicious as the article's author about Mozilla's latest ventures.

Someone knows any good Firefox hard forks?

Man I hope Servo pans out. I'm hopeful since it's seen increased activity lately.