Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Why are megadungeons great?

    We all know the reason they are not great: there's so mega much to read!

    A well-written megadungeon doesn't require you to read it all, however. You should be able to run your first session by just reading about the area around the main entrance to the first level. Everything else should come later.

    Do not waste time role-playing in the nearby town before adventuring in the dungeon.

    Do not waste time exploring the wilderness around the main entrance before adventuring in the dungeon.

• Politics and World Events

  • Realizing Abrahamic evil

    I get text messages from my province's Conservative party every once in a while. Most people do. I have no idea how they got my phone number so they must have bought it off some data broker I'll never know about. Today they sent me something particularly nasty: they asked me if I agree with their plan to "remove tent city".

    Right off the bat, I have to wonder what exactly they mean by "remove," but I know it can't be good. Residents of my town's tent city can barely be called "residents." Infamously, they aren't allowed to physically be there for most of the day; legally they're only allowed to be there at night. But "legally," they're barely allowed to "be" at all. Like most places that basically need to have some sort of tent city for the town's own failure to deal with houselessness, the city bylaws that govern living in tent city don't really seem to interact at all with material reality. I mean, the law never interacts with material reality; that's not really what it's for, but usually we write laws in order to guide behaviour in material reality. These laws feel more like they were passed to ensure that it's materially impossible not to be breaking them at any given moment.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: xx about SSH

    What I meant is, there is no scenario I can come up with, where a bad actor has access to one key and one passphrase, unless you deliberately take steps to further secure other keys and every key would need a different extra measure. The time/skill required to get one set, is the time/skill required to get all.

  • News spectrum

    A mixed bag of news this month, so I approximately ordered them from worse to better ones: the first one I would count as bad, the last two as good, and the ones between those as more or less just the things that happen.

    [...]

    Now YouTube videos do not load at all via Rostelecom without DPI circumvention, which had to be tweaked again to keep working (as RKN works on throttling it more aggressively, while it still did not admit throttling it at all).

  • Truth

    Someone claimed to be training an AI thing with the code, an outdated wiki, and various chat logs to, in theory, produce answers about a game, at which point various chat log producers began (or had been for a while now) talking about how good enchanting your starting darts is. Now, certain folks will scold you for spreading untruths, though untruths are in truth very popular. Santa, for example. Probably if you only told someone truths they would be tripped up by the very first person who can lie, something that, spoiler alert, may be a point in the book "City of Illusions" by Ursula K. Le Guin. So the trick for humans is to feed them enough bad data (and in such a way?) as to instill "trust, but verify" tendencies. On the other hand, some humans really do not like having to think (it costs energy, and they may not have much practice at it) so they may be desirous of easy answers from an AI, or whomever. Or maybe "set up an AI" is, at present, more fashionable than cleaning up and editing a wiki, or diving into the code to see exactly how the flammable gas from bloats sometimes does not catch on fire after you kill the bloat with a bolt of fire, or whether the glowing effect of a creature with the explosive mutation is visible on a creature that is not visible. Various features of the game rogue, by the way, were added to defeat rog-o-matic.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • No ROOPHLOCH, and my October Gothic

      Just a general status update. I didn't manage to do ROOPHLOCH this year. Partly, I was busy, but a bigger part is maybe just that I didn't have anything new to do. Post from my phone, post from a modern but obsolete computer tethered to my phone, post in a park, post in a nature reserve. It just feels like I've done the easy levels, but the next level up is unreachable for me. People posting over LORA, people posting over tin cans and string, the bar is set too high. So I didn't do it. Nothing stopping me except not wanting to do the same low-effort thing again.

      On to better things, now that it's October. Every year, I read or re-read a classic Gothic novel during the month of October. I started with the 19th century classics that remain popular today, /Dracula/ and /Frankenstein/. Then I went back to the 18th century origins of the genre, /The Castle of Otranto/, /The Mysteries of Udolpho/, and /The Monk/. This year, I haven't been quite as sure what I wanted to read, but it's a week in, and high time to pick. Let's look at the candidates.

    • It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Instagram

      In early 2021, I published an article on my website where I talked about dark patterns spreading in the UI of the fediverse.