Up next: Terry Pratchett’s Discworld: Adventures in Ankh-Morpork
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alisxEeey! I backed this on Kickstarter a while back, promptly forgot about it, then was pleasantly surprised to get the PDF download link (and shipping notice for the physical copy) this morning.
July Writing (on the home stretch)
anneapocalypseLong time no post, I know! June was Junelezen over on tumblr and I spent the month gposing my little heart out; if you want to take a look at what I made this year, you can see it all here!
July has been for writing. So far this month I've written 27637 words, my highest wordcount month this year by more than 100%.
Goal this month has been simple: finish the draft(s) of Harsh Light/Gentle Dark (separate but parallel fics that explore Ariane and Urianger in late and post-Heavensward) or get as close as possible. Write as many days as I can, but don't create guilt for missing a day.
One of the big things I came into this month needing to write was the Warring Triad quests, as I'd realized they needed to be incorporated into both fics but hadn't full figured out, how, where, and what they'd add to the story. Yesterday, I wrote the last Warring Triad scene I needed to write. As challenging as it was to figure out how they fit into the story, I'm really glad I did it, because Unukalhai adds a lot to both Ariane and Urianger's stories. To the extent that I really want to have him play a larger role in the Scions going forward, and I'm not bound by the restrictions of writing an MMO, so I don't have to leave him standing alone in the Solar until Shadowbringers and have all the other Scions basically forget about him!
I still need to write the end of Urianger's fic, and both need some interludes written and incorporated into earlier chapters.
So, with eight days left in July, can we make it? I don't know! We'll find out! Even if I don't, I'll have made tremendous progress. I've got a busy few weeks coming up irl, but not in a way that should necessarily preclude writing.
Regardless, we're on the home stretch, and I'm so excited to finally share this when we get there.
Do you, man.
alisxWe use tools to embody their virtues. You use Tails because it’s cyberpunk? That’s beautiful man. Go all in. Get a leather jacket. If you’re doing it for the aesthetics, go all in. Make your life a living work of art. Go backpacking in Bangkok and write a novel on a Gemini and take pictures for your LiveJournal on a 2003 digital camera. Move the family groupchat to Signal. Dial into standup from an ISDN payphone and tell your PM the feds are after you. And write a blog post about that.
Fernando Borretti knows (to use boring tools).
The moment.
alisxIf you’re waiting for a moment where you’re like “this is it,” I’m telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says “things are officially bad.” There’s no launch party for decay. It’s just a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol.
Perhaps you’re waiting for some moment when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re fighting the virus or fascism all the time, but it’s not like that. Life is not a movie, and if it were, you’re certainly not the star. You’re just an extra. If something good or bad happens to you it’ll be random and no one will care. If you’re unlucky you’re a statistic. If you’re lucky, no one notices you at all.
Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.
On the .
A person facing the world.
alisxyour ability to separate politics from who you are isn’t universal nor is it an option for some folks; it’s a privilege to be someone who doesn’t have to worry about whether or not your basic human rights are being taken away. it’s a privilege to know and feel secure that no slur, no vitriol, has any inherent historical or violent weight to who you are as an individual. there’s no slur for open-source developers or apartment renters rooted in historic and prevalent violence; these labels are not who you are as a person facing the world.
On .
Assets.
alisx[I]t’s been a genuinely wild experience watching an industry that spent the last two decades canonizing technical prowess and venerating innovation and chasing semimythical “10x engineers” turning itself around in bare months to declare “we’re fully committing ourselves to using opaque machines that generate statistically plausible outputs.” Funny story but it turns out our people aren’t our most valuable asset at all! Haha, we were all so wrong about that for the last twenty or thirty years or whatever. They’re like third or fifth or something. Our most valuable asset is now the bill we pay every month for this third-party ML SAAS service and our previous most valuable assets can get right with that or get lost. We Are Now An Averaged-Outputs First Company. Remember to repeat ‘do not hallucinate’ a few times every morning while you beg your computer to act right.
mhoye on .
Friday @ 10:35 am
alisxAnyway. On a related note, this morning while trying to find out if I can take my crossbody bag with the three small spikes on it through the airport, I discovered spiked collars and cuffs are illegal in Canada???
Persecution!
Wednesday @ 9:49 am
alisxShout-out to the one person I saw next to the security gates here at the airport wearing Tripp pants. True bravery right there.
Thursday @ 12:36 pm
alisxOh gods it’s “going through old home movies” time at Aunt’s house and I have been far too trained by far too many horror movies to expect this will end well . . .
Cui bono?
alisxSomewhere along the line the idea took hold that every part of public life needs to be efficient, an efficiency exclusively expressed in terms of whether or not it makes money. “Makes money for who, exactly?” is a question that is never asked. If some government service doesn’t make money, the notion goes, then it shouldn’t exist. It should be shut down or given to somebody else who can make money with it. “Who exactly will give that person the money they make from it, and why should that person get more money for something we’ve already paid for?” are questions that are not explored, in case you haven’t noticed.
A.R. Moxon on .
When I was a kid, I remember my parents being super angry for exactly this reason over things like the privatisation of what we now call Telstra (a formerly nationalised telecommunications provider), Qantas (an airline), Medibank (a health insurer), the Commonwealth Bank, and others. The governments at the time explicitly sold the privatisation on the lines that you, citizen, would now be able to “profit” from the organisations by becoming a shareholder. What was never mentioned was the fact that, as nationalised companies, all individual citizens already owned and profited from these companies . . . but did so equally. And this is the real shell game here. Because for a nationalised service, every citizen effectively owns one equal share in said service. But a private service? Well. If you’re extremely rich, you can buy a whole pile of shares, while most other people get zero. And that’s how this game works, right? Money makes more money. And if you don’t have the cash to buy in in the first place? Well. Unlucky for you, hey.
Hello, world!
alisxFirst and foremost, working with technology and writing code gives us control over our own environments in a world where the society we’re embedded in heavily limits that.
Iris Meredith on .
Your children working in their factories, forever.
alisxBut here’s what this future, being pitched by the plain language and plain actions of this administration, is. It is very sad and very small. It lacks imagination. It lacks dynamism. Men will not be allowed in women’s spaces and women will not be allowed in men’s spaces. Women will be tradwives and will be paid $5,000 have babies. Those babies will not have parents who can afford to buy them 30 dolls, they will have two dolls instead, and they will like it. The boys will not have any dolls, though. The rich and powerful will stockpile supplies because they know the impacts of their policies. You will not buy breakfast at McDonald’s as a treat. Your friends will be AI chatbots. Your therapist will be a chatbot. You will pay massive tariffs to try food from other countries. You will work in the factory. You will not own the factory. They will own the factory. You will die at the factory. Your kids will learn about AI at the technical college, and then they will work in the factory. Your kids will not own the factory. Their kids will own the factory. Their kids will go on Fox News and tell you that they have created good jobs, patriotic jobs. American jobs, not Chinese jobs. Jobs that your kids and their kids and their kids’ kids can work at until they die. Your kids will repair the air conditioning. Your kids will screw in the screws. Your children’s children will move the robot arms, like their father and grandfather did before them.
On the .
BAD MEME, chapter 19.
alisx
Nineteen
When she finally woke up, Bich’s head felt like a durian fruit, left too long in the sun.
Her memories of the night before were hazy, motion blurred freeze frames like the stills from a winter blockbuster. She remembered the church, remembered finding Elle in the church. Remembered finding the thing that called itself Elle. Remembered finding Roxx. Remembered the Tooth Girl.
Stuck between a god and a bad meme, and then the Centre’s special ops team had burst in, all I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-tear-gas and tranq guns filled with something Bich had a sneaking suspicion wouldn’t work on anything real. For whatever the term “real” meant anymore.
They’d hustled her out almost as soon as they’d hustled in, and Bich had watched things unfold at twice removed, from the inside of one of the vans parked across the street.
She’d done her thing, now the DDHH was doing theirs.
Original sin.
alisxA . While I do generally agree with the sentiment, I think the piece underplays the role corporate capture played in shifting what we now call DEI towards what is essentially a form of HR department de-risking (for which see). But . . . not every essay can be about every thing. So.