Mastodon Brought a Protocol to a Product Fight | by M.G. Siegler | Dec, 2022 | 500ish
December 28, 2022
Mastodon Brought a Protocol to a Product Fight | by M.G. Siegler | Dec, 2022 | 500ish:
But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
I mean, who thinks this “Web” thing is ever going to unseat Prodigy or CompuServe – I’m don’t trust these link things, and it’s ludicrous to think people are going to host their OWN servers.
Snark aside – It’s probably dubious to expect everyone to host their own ActivityPub/Mastadon servers… But the idea should be sharding much more by identity/community rather than jumping onto the same service. That’s where the power begins, taking the control of identity and server control closer to people you trust, and spreading the social footprint far enough that no single pillar can take down the roof.
Daring Fireball: I Wish I Could Tell You This One Is Not All About Twitter:
I would love to regale you with fun links and clever commentary about subjects other than Twitter “2.0”. I really would. I’m as thirsty for such subject matter as you surely are. But, alas, the continuing saga is simply too entertaining, and moving too fast. If you’ve been successfully ignoring the drama, I salute you.
Year in Review: 20 Best Tabletop Roleplaying Games from 2022
December 27, 2022
Year in Review: 20 Best Tabletop Roleplaying Games from 2022:
It’s been an incredible year for tabletop roleplaying games, from both large publishers and indie outfits. Crowdfunding has firmly established itself in the ecosystem, and both small indie games and massive core rulebooks are making the most of the model.
I didn’t have space for all the incredible games that came out this year, but here, for your entertainment, in no particular order, are some of my favorite games of 2022.
-via Boing Boing
Amy Grant pisses off conservative Christians, again | Boing Boing
December 27, 2022
Amy Grant pisses off conservative Christians, again | Boing Boing:
“To me, it’s so important to set a welcome table. Because I was invited to a table where someone said ‘Don’t be afraid, you’re loved.’ …Gay. Straight. It does not matter,” the longtime supporter of LGBTQA+ rights told Proud Radio podcast host Hunter Kelly in 2021.
Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch’s composer on Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet and more, dies aged 85 | Music | The Guardian
December 13, 2022
Angelo Badalamenti, the acclaimed composer who created haunting music for David Lynch projects including Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, has died at the age of 85.
Lynch and Badalamenti would become close friends and collaborators, working together on Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive. Badalamenti also appeared on screen as the coffee-loving gangster Luigi Castigliane in Mulholland Drive, and played piano with Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet.
The classically trained musician also worked with the likes of Nina Simone, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Shirley Bassey, Marianne Faithfull, Liza Minnelli, Pet Shop Boys and LL Cool J over his varied career, and composed themes including Inside the Actors Studio and the torch theme for the 1992 Olympic Games.
On 1986’s Blue Velvet, his first collaboration with Lynch, he was brought in to work as a vocal coach for Rossellini. Lynch asked him to write a tune for the score, saying “let it float like the tides of the ocean, make it collect space and time, timeless and endless”, which became the song Mysteries of Love, performed by Julee Cruise. Eventually Lynch tasked him with writing the film’s score, asking for Badalamenti to be “like Shostakovich, be very Russian, but make it the most beautiful thing but make it dark and a little bit scary”.
Diablo IV developers allege mismanagement, crunch and disturbing creative decisions in new report | Rock Paper Shotgun
December 8, 2022
Employees also spoke about the “disturbing” creative decisions by Sebastian Stępień, the former creative director on The Witcher 3 and head writer on Cyberpunk 2077, who became creative director on Diablo 4 in 2019. Stępień allegedly undertook a rewrite of Diablo 4’s entire script, creating what multiple employees called the “rape version” due to repeated references in the script to the rape of a love interest, and to the script referring “to this female character as the raped woman as her primary description,” according to the Washington Post.
Two employees also told The Post of a line in the script which read, “And then she was raped, brutally”, and that employees would repeat the punctuation out loud to each other, “comma, period – alarmed by the direction Stępień had gone with the script.”
Maybe it’s time to just let Blizzard burn.
Cryptex: how a custom iPhone is changing macOS updates – The Eclectic Light Company
December 8, 2022
Cryptex: how a custom iPhone is changing macOS updates – The Eclectic Light Company:
Big Sur brought us the immutable boot volume, signed and sealed, with the SSV. This makes it almost impossible for malicious software to change anything in the System, as it’s a snapshot with every last bit verified using its tree of hashes. Its downside is that making wanted changes to update macOS or any components on the SSV is cumbersome: changes have to be written to the System volume, a snapshot made, the tree of hashes rebuilt and verified against Apple’s setting for that build of macOS, and macOS rebooted from the new snapshot.
Initially, the solution for apps like Safari, security data such as that for XProtect, and other components like Rosetta 2 that need to be installed separately from macOS, was to store them on the Data volume, where they can only be protected by SIP. That’s how Big Sur and Monterey worked, but this started to change in late versions of Monterey (in 12.6.1, if not before), and Ventura, with the introduction of the cryptex.
Cryptexes first appeared on Apple’s customised iPhone, its Security Research Device, which uses them to load a personalised trust cache and a disk image containing corresponding content. Without the cryptex, engineering those iPhones would have been extremely difficult.
MarsEdit 5 – Powerful web publishing from your Mac.
December 7, 2022
MarsEdit 5 – Powerful web publishing from your Mac.:
Browser-based interfaces are slow, clumsy, and require you to be online just to use them. Web browsers are wonderful for reading articles, but not for creating them. If you’re writing for the web, you need a desktop blog editor. And if you’re lucky enough to have a Mac, nothing is more powerful, or more elegant than MarsEdit.
Marsedit is such a great app for interacting with weblogs. On every other platform I’ve touched – Windows, Linux, even iOS and iPadOS – I have searched for something similar, or even close, and fallen short.
My only wish in relation to this is that there was an iOS/iPadOS version so I can keep up my workflow across my more personal devices. It would be an insta-buy for me, and I’m sure many others.
Toad Poses For Adorable Dollhouse Photos
December 7, 2022
Toad Poses For Adorable Dollhouse Photos:
I so adore this set! Too bad it’s instagram so I can’t easily link to any of them withot ugly embed code…
Pocket Realities 