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Drawn in Rebelle 5

Ah yes. Those are the people leaving Twitter because of all the horrible, horrible “hate speech” on that platform. I guess it’s okay when you do it to someone else, isn’t it?

Just one post of many that nicely demonstrates that a) Bisky isn’t a nicer place populated by nicer people than Twitter was and b) that labelling something as “hate speech” has nothing to do with fighting hate, but that it is simply a propaganda term used to excommunicate opposing viewpoints.

While I don’t agree with the conclusion of this piece — nothing will change, I fear — and some of the more flowery language not withstanding, there’s some very sharp analysis on display here.

Under the direction of our ruling class and the educators who rely on its largesse for their tenure and their grants most recent activism has been confined to the realm of manners, microaggressions, and most of all, an endless litigation of the past. Because nothing can truly be done about it. You can’t free slaves that have been dead for 150 some-odd years, unlike the victims of today’s slave markets, which are far more numerous and also have the benefit of still being savable by virtue of still being alive. But you don’t hear very much about them. To focus on them would create a demand for meaningful action. The kind of action that could upset corporate relationships, manufacturing deals, international geopolitics, the price of labor; in short, profits. Much better to hunt down racism in the human heart, which, like the hunt for sin, can never really be concluded, and like the war on terror, can make its proselytizers a fuck ton of money.

→ It’s Alive! Social Justice Movement Turns On Its Creators, Russell Dobular, Due Dissidence

He pressed the Transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged from the office Telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the Electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all Electrosecs were ‘she’), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. In any event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electronics.

— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)

Leaving aside the obvious cultural sexism of the 1960s, I find it fascinating that Clarke not only anticipates AI here, but also the cloud (“dictation from a dozen sources at once”). And, to top it all off, he also anticipates the inherent problem with all of this: That humans still have to check the output of this magical AI cloud, because no matter how advanced, you trust machines at your own peril.

As I’ve recently played around with coding games for PICO-8 again, I’ve also been playing a lot of games other people made for the platform to learn about programming techniques and tricks other developers have used. While doing this, it has occurred to me, that I might as well start sharing some of the amazing games for this platform on my blog, so that other people can learn about them, too.

As a start, I would like to tell you about probably the most famous PICO-8 game: The hardcore platformer Celeste. The version most people know was built with Microsoft’s XNA, but the original version of the game, now called Celeste Classic, was a PICO-8 game. If you own a copy of PICO-8, you can load the following cart to play the game. Just download the PNG, put it into the carts folder of PICO-8 and run: load celeste.p8.png

If you don’t own a copy of PICO-8, you can play the game online here.

I’ve been hacking around with JavaScript for a bit … I know, I know … I can hear Jonathan howl in triumph up north in Copenhagen at this point. Why? Well, I’ve had a nice JS clock on my start page for years, but I also wanted something to emulate the Nixie clock on my desk. When I found this JavaScript project by Čestmír Hýbl the other day, I just knew I had to implement it.

Since I’ve also wanted a countdown timer to track deadlines for a while — yay, the joys of print journalism! — I dug up this code, hacked it all together very haphazardly, and deadline.fab.industries was born. Feel free to use it if you like Nixie tubes and want to track some deadlines.

When I go to someone’s Wikipedia page these days and it says on there — probably in the very first paragraph — that they are “a conspiracy theorist”, I immediately conclude: Now here’s someone who likes to think for themselves. It is likely that, going forward, I will have more respect for the person thus branded by Wikipedia. I don’t think that’s what the original intention of their edit was, but hey…

Ah, I forgot to post about this as I was busy with deadlines and the like, but I released this podcast episode last week:

→ The Private Citizen 162: The Westminster Declaration

What do Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, John Cleese, Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Dawkins and Walter Kirn have in common? They are all, despite holding very different political beliefs, very concerned about the future of political discourse in Western democracies.

Continuing my development of my new PICO-8 game Tinyhold, I have now implemented animated map tiles:

A year ago today, I started bouldering. By now, I’m going two to three times a week. Who would’ve thought? Such a fun pastime!

Sometimes, I get the feeling I’m not living in the European Union, but the Cardassian Union … Is this still a democracy? Is the rule of law still in effect? Why is Gul Dukat smiling all the time?

Answers to these, and many other, questions on this week’s podcast:

→ The Private Citizen 161: The EU’s Ministry of Truth

EU bureaucrats maintain that the Digital Services Act is not a censorship regime, but is meant to save people from misinformation by deleting it from the internet or hiding it from view. Which, in fact, is the very definition of censorship. Welcome to the Cardassian Union.

I love the PC game Battletech. It’s one of my favourite strategy games of all time – I even prefer it to the XCOM reboot it is based on. Battletech’s story is great and the mechanics are even better. I’ve played the game for about 500 hours in total.

As such, I was anxiously awaiting that the game’s publisher Paradox would announce the development of a sequel. Which will probably never happen now, as The Lamplighters League, the latest game by Harebrained Schemes (which developed both Battletech and the PC adaptations of Shadowrun), has flopped massively. Paradox seems to have seen this coming and laid off most of the Harebrained Schemes staff pre-emptively during the summer.

Apparently, Harebrained Schemes did pitch Battletech 2 to Paradox at some point, but the publisher didn’t want it to happen because the IP for the project wasn’t owned by neither party.

• Paradox to write down Lamplighters League costs, confirms layoffs at Harebrained Schemes, GamesIndustry.biz
• 80 percent of Harebrained Schemes' staff have been laid off + Battletech 2 was pitched to Paradox, but it wasn’t a Paradox IP and Microsoft got a revenue cut so the sequel was rejected, Reddit