People keep asking me, and I haven’t really had an answer, but now yeah, I’m thinking I’m back.

  • 3 Posts
  • 123 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: March 18th, 2025

help-circle

  • I used to think that was a good idea too: sequester 4chan, make it the sin-eater of the internet at large.

    But as we learned through 2014-2016, from Gamergate to the alt-right to MAGA, 4chan didn’t need to break for them to go elsewhere. And not just elsewhere, but everywhere. A single 4channer could make multiple reddit accounts, twitter accounts, and fake facebook profiles. But what allowed their work to reach larger audiences was to use /pol/ to coordinate their brigades across the internet. 4chan’s anonymity and lack of persistent logs made that easy.

    Russian state actors infiltrated their ranks as other anons. As obnxious trolls looking to get a rise out of people, they had huge blinds spots and failed to see this for what it was (or looked the other way). Once installed, they could launder propaganda by making it look like it was coming from seemingly American sources, all across the internet, all at the same time. The anons were Putin’s useful idiots.

    The argument of sequestering the social pariahs to 4chan implies they are physically locked up there, imprisoned but satisfied, uninterested in engaging the internet at large. But clearly that isn’t true. You can’t leave the Nazis in one corner of the bar - it becomes the Nazi bar. If you want to fight them, you have to remove them from the common spaces, and then remove their own spaces. Unfortunately, the cancer of fascism has metastasized all across the internet, now originating from people who have never heard of “this four chan.” Fighting that is going to require us to stop falling for the paradox of tolerance and start kicking the Nazis out, whether we have laws to do so or not.




  • Bocchi the Rock!

    I don’t know who decided that a 4koma should get some of the most inventive and expressive animation of this decade, but they’re a fucking genius.

    I only learned about it from seeing a webm of the Blender scene, and I thought “ok, this is kinda hilarious, I gotta give this a shot.” I was watching happily until episode 5, when I thought “wait, are they gonna play the whole song? They are aren’t they. Wait a minute, this song fucking rules.” And every single episode after that was banger after banger. One hilarious bit, stylish animation cut, and kickass song, one after another.

    As an aside, I watched My Dress-Up Darling season 1 before Bocchi, and watching season 2 now, and you can tell how much Bocchi the Rock influenced Cloverworks. Season 1 had good animation, but it was fairly standard. Season 2 they’ve been much more experimental and it has been a joy to see it all.






  • The problem is that the audience of lowest common denominator doesn’t really care about the dismantling of the post-Cold War world, nor do they understand it. If anything, they prefer the Cold War era because that’s the era in which “they made things like they used to” and “the minorities knew their place.”

    So if you’re a news organization, even one that did care about truth and decency and not just profits, how do you get those people’s attention? The terminally online MAGA/QAnon doesn’t seem to care that he’s losing Medicare, or that his children’s schools are being gutted, or that his elections are being rigged by billionaires. But he does care about theatrics and drama and outrage. That’s what drew him to Trump in the first place. So you run the Epstein/Trump story because nothing else seems to work.

    Or… you run it because you know it guarantees clicks and ad revenue, because MAGA/QAnon are the most gullible drooling imbeciles on the planet. Either way, the loss of US democracy is merely taken for granted. It’s already happened, it’s not news anymore.











  • I’m a big fan of Special K as it effectively fixed Nier Automata on PC for me. Kaldeian has done excellent, thankless work on making PC games work better and for more people.

    And though Valve shouldn’t always be given the benefit of the doubt, I don’t really agree with his arguments.

    Games you purchased on a Windows 98 machine later had their system requirements bumped up to Windows XP, then to Windows 7, then to Windows 10…

    Is there any connection between the hardware your initial purchase was made on, and the hardware you would run that game on right now? You can buy games from your phone, or your Steam deck, or at the public library, or on your father’s Gateway. Maybe he means the game’s original system requirements, as listed “on the back of the box” so to speak. But if I want to play SWBF2 from 2005, must I find an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 and an ATI Radeon HD 5570? No, I just need parts with equivalent/better performance that I can find today. Steam updating those system requirements for newer hardware makes those games MORE accessible, not less. It considers new gamers discovering older games and gives them a path to playing it.

    The inexorable passage of time, and the eventual security flaws that can no longer be patched, means that every single one of those devices will be retired. But that’s why emulation and tools like Special K are important to game preservation. It’s why Stop Killing Games is not retroactive and does not ask for infinite software support.