reverendsteveii @ reverendsteveii @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

the misfits have 3 distinct eras with danzig, graves and jerry only on lead vocals

have you ever played Everyone Is John? I usually pitch it to new DMs because it requires (and frankly encourages) almost zero prep but it's also totally narrative in its storytelling style as well, and the dice system is idiot simple. This makes it ideal for playing over SMS or IRC or other simple media like that. Here are the rules, they fit on a single page with artwork: https://imgur.com/ueKNhc3

The problem isn’t record keeping, but answering the question “if you use an asset as collateral for a loan to purchase that asset, what happens to the loan if the purchase is invalidated”?

And the solution to that problem is good record keeping. Blockchain can improve the record keeping by making it public and verifiable.

blockchain provides a publicly verifiable transaction history. of course enforcing exclusivity eventually boils down to giving some group a monopoly on violence, but the difference between using blockchain and a database in tracking who has the right to use that monopoly on violence to enforce their exclusivity is whether there's a verifiable public record of all transactions or just the current state of the data. It allows for the dispute of falsified records, and the automatic verification that all terms of the transfer between owners were met. It doesn't allow someone to sneak behind the scenes and do a quick "DELETE FROM home_owners WHERE owner_name='jrandomhacker'" and then go "Sorry, we don't have a record of your transaction 🤷🤷". You could make the logs of the database public, of course, but then the question just expands from "who has access to the database?" to "who has access to the database and logs?"

raging hardliners

you're not wrong, politics is about compromise and in the most successful nations no one gets what they want and no one leaves the bargaining table happy. the question is, how does one work the politics of coalition and compromise when the people you're supposed to coalition-build and compromise with are raging hardliners. How does one find a middle ground with open christian nationalist fascists?

we pick from the menu for dinner tonight, and for future meals we fight to have more of a say in what's on the menu. there's too many people calling for my head right now for me to protest vote or sit out because the guy who doesn't want to kill me is problematic about some niche policy position. remember that a lot of trump's money in 2016 went toward campaigning for democrats to stay home, with reasons alternating between "clinton is an awful candidate" (she was) and "she's got this in the bag so your vote doesn't matter".

That’s just called a database.

That's the rub. Eventually blockchain will be useful for tracking ownership of things like land and cars, whose current ownership is tracked by an analog token minted by a a validator and stored offline (which is to say, the government has a piece of paper on file). I recently bought a house, and I had to buy mortgage insurance in case it turns out that 50 years ago someone fraudulently or mistakenly sold this house to someone else when they didn't actually own it, and then I bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who bought it from the guy who sold it illegally, so it's not really mine. Blockchain will eliminate that. Game companies mint tokens to represent digital "assets" that they say you "own" but in reality it's the asset creator that can make more of the asset, destroy the asset or deny others usage of the asset (which is the real, functional definition of "own").

I'm still working my way through my thoughts on this after Bored Ape Money Pit but I think that blockchain is one of the infinite number of ways that traditional ownership models are trying to impose themselves on digital assets when it's the fundamental nature of digital assets to be infinitely replicable for a cost so low as to approach $0/per, and to make it very hard to exclude people from having or using these replicas. I work in software. We're getting to a point where the real value in software is in designing ways to stop people from using it unless they've met certain conditions (usually, having paid for a license). Most of what I do is authentication and authorization. That is to say, determining who a user is and what they're allowed to do. These are external, artificial controls. In real life when you eat an apple the apple is gone. When you and your family live in a house, that house is full of people. When you "eat" (or in some other way extract the value from) a digital apple that apple can still be there. An infinite number of people can exist in one digital space via instantiation without ever having to acknowledge one another. Digital assets defy exclusivity, and without exclusivity their can't be ownership. So what we end up with is a million people who have the same bit-for-bit perfect picture of a monkey, but one guy who has a certificate from the monkey picture center that says he's the "owner" of the monkey picture when ownership doesn't really confer any rights, privileges or abilities that everyone else didn't already get for free.

We're at the stage of capitalist indoctrination where even the games we play have to generate a sellable artifact of some sort or another. The number of games I see on the app store where you pretend to buy and sell land using real money has kinda become ridiculous.

yo what am I missing with that edit? you tagged yourself and then engaged the Universal Reactionary Pushback Defense. What were you trying to do with that?