Andrew (making toys)

I'm just so tired of this Regression to the Mean in every aspect of society. Can't have interesting looking buildings, too hard to re-sell. Can't have fun colored cars, fleets only want black or white or grey. Can't have any personality, personalization, human curation, have to trust the algorithm. Can't have art, gotta have statically generated slop.

I'm not watching tonight's #Monsterdon because I've seen this one a lot. We watched it for a lockdown era movie night at my lockdown era gig, distributed through a self hosted Rabbit clone (the name of which I have forgotten), while sharing fancy mocktails that the company mailed us. There were like 10 or 15 people in the groupchat while we watched, and I was playing it on a projector while half a dozen other people watched along at the cafe. One of my best lockdown memories. Anyway, it's a perfect movie for monsterdon, and I hope y'all love it.

@scott@social.linux.pizza This is the first good reply I've gotten to this post. The car replacing cablecars and trains made our society measurably worse.

Movies from 1931 include:

• Dracula
• Frankenstein
• M
• Little Caesar
• The Public Enemy
• City Streets
• City Lights
• Monkey Business
• Pardon Us (the first all talking Laurel and Hardy feature film)
• Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
• Mädchen in Uniform (among the earliest surviving films to depict lesbians)
• Three Hitchcock films
• The Champ
• Tabu

And a bunch of others.

Today, I got to visit a wonderful Asian market, eat some Malaysian food, and wander through a makers market and art exhibit. Then we drove home, and then to our makerspace. She opened the kiln and started cleaning pots while I assembled action figures and started working on packaging design, promotional materials, and store displays. Then we drove back home, walked into our bookstore, and priced and organized pottery and toys while listening to a concert performed by now distant friends, as taped live several years ago, and now broadcast through our cable network and streaming platform. This, I recognize, is something of a charmed life.

In 2027 we get 1931 in the US for everything but recorded sound. (For recorded sound, we'll get 1926, which I'll get into later or tomorrow or something) 1931 is a fascinating year for the US. We're in the midst of the great depression, things are bad. But it also puts us firmly in the early days of the modern era of cinema.

@adhdeanasl@beige.party in my last corporate gig, I said to our exec team "I'm not interested in assigning blame. If a small mistake can take down the system, the system is broken." They let me go.

Oh! I also saw a highschool performance of a A Midsummer Night's Dream, but it didn't leave much of an impression on me.

Now the tv is playing violet's score and re-titling of Filibus the mysterious air pirate (episode two). We really do get to do some cool shit.

(Apple failed. My laptop still has a headphone jack. My current phone does not, and the one I ordered to replace it also doesn't. I was willing to make that sacrifice because they have full physical keyboards. I chose my battle. But consumer phones with headphone jacks are making a return, because the demand is still very present. Sony will fail too. Either because consumer demand will force them to start shipping physical games again (or, more likely) consumer demand will cause them to abandon the playstation platform entirely. Then we get to have this fight with Valve, where we've already ceded so much ground.)

I'm excited about this one.

Right now, she's pricing her latest creations and putting them on the pottery shelf at the bookstore. Which means I have a few minutes to myself in the bookstore, so I'm watching new ellijay television. So far I've caught an episode of This Is Ellijay, a New Clear Lawn Chairs performance, and Just Dance by Hurly Burly and the Volcanic fallout.

@DoctorDeathray@retro.social I have plans for more of this kind of thing, when the studio is ready and you have the bandwidth.

I spent my childhood alternately deeply relegious and entirely agnostic. I spent a lot of time listening to religious music, and especially "Contemporary Christian" and "Christian rock" Occasionally one of those tracks will worm it's way back into my head and I am filled with resent.

Seatbelts: Seatbelts existed for a long time before they were mandatory in cars. Seatbelts pre-date cars. Car companies had been engaged in a decades long propaganda campaign against the idea that cars were unsafe or needed seatbelts. When seatbelts were made mandatory in cars, people were resistant because they had been the victims of a propaganda campaign. People are bad at internalizing risk and understanding risk reduction, and car companies had been very successful in their anti-seatbelt propaganda. Seatbelts were not a new or revolutionary technology, just an obvious thing that people had been trained to resist.

How many Shakespeare plays have you read?

Hey! Do you do youtube or peertube videos (or a podcast) about pop-culture, toys, video games, cartoons, or labor organizing? Are you interested in a free review copy (digital or physical) of one of our gameboy color games? Or early access to one of our upcoming cartoons? Or a little press kit of our handmade toys and comics, including #kumiai-ki the Mighty Labor Union Mech? Hit me up!

Am I correct in my understanding that both the internet archive and the EFF posted something pro AI this week?

Telephones are a really interesting case that end up in a similar situation to Cars, but for different reasons. Many people loved the concept of the telephone and were eager to use it. Public phones and communal phones and the phone as a replacement for the telegraph were all pretty popular. But private ownership of telephones resulted in a major upset of etiquette and an erosion of the separation between home and public, an encroachment. Many people of the day resented that. I've never know a world without a telephone, but I knew one without a cellphone. I miss being unreachable. The telephone was, ultimately, more good than harm. The cellphone (though perhaps not the smartphone) probably the same. But I can absolutely understand how and why some people would have been resistant to it. I still know people without cellphones, I knew people without a phone of any kind not that long ago ("Write me a letter or come over. If it's not important enough to tell me in person, it can wait on the post")

I watched one youtube video about greek mythology and now my recs are like 25% "history" videos with fascist undertones. Point me towards some history youtubers that aren't monsters?

(telephone sidebar: The advent of the telephone coincided with a serious reduction in mail service, which had previously run as often as 4x a day in large cities, and generally resulted in the further isolation of people from their communities (even as it enabled people to connect to new communities!) I think the telephone is good, and I'm glad that it reached widespread adoption, and I think it would have done so regardless. But I also love to think about what adoption of the telephone, or the cellphone, might have looked like if there was less money to be made in monopolizing the system. It's a useless thought experiment, but it compels me.)

I'm not going to talk about GenAI or LLMs. I am going to talk about seatbelts, vaccines, and looms.

@farah@beige.party @adhdeanasl@beige.party I can't remember if I read the screaming clock. I remember The Talking Skull and Terror Castle very well, and I know I read a lot more of them, but I read Terror Castle several times as a kid.

I've seen Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard III, and Taming of the Shrew. I've seen Romeo and Juliet ... three or four times, maybe 5 if you include film, and I've been in it once. (I was Mercutio) I've never seen Twelfth Night, but I've played Sebastian once (in an adaptation) and Antonio in a straight performance. I saw Julius Caesar with the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern as a highschooler. I've only seen taming of the shrew on film, and I've done table reads of a couple of the parts, but I've never performed it or seen it live. I ... I swear I've seen Richard III, but I honestly don't remember when or under what context, so maybe I'm lying.

So, to my original point, people fought over who would own and control the looms and sewing machines. People were tricked into not wearing seatbelts. And there's a concerted effort to keep people from taking vaccines that has, at various points, included intentional infecting people with illnesses under the pretense of vaccination. In each case there was a fight over these technologies, but the fight was not simply a one sided campaign from people in power to force the use of a given technology or kill all alternatives.

So, first, who the hell am I? I've been doing web stuff since I was like 8? I started building websites professionally at 16 or so, and then slowly bounced my way around the tech industry from 18 to 35, working as a developer, a sysadmin, a support tech, ops, an SRE, and then a bunch of leadership titles that were all mostly meaningless. And while all that was going on, I've been running web services for the public, this mastodon instance, multiple peertube instances (including the one for our cable network), and a bunch of other shit. I've worked in data centers. I've worked on teams dedicated to efficiency. I left the tech industry around the time they were bowing down to AI, and now I make toys. That is to say, I know what I'm talking about. (mostly, sometimes, when I can remember what things are called.)

I guess it's time for me to address them.

I've assembled 75 kumiai-ki toys this week. Our mighty union of mighty labor union mechs is growing stronger by the day. Packaging will be done soon!

Wow, I got so many smug "well actually" responses to this thread.

Alright, so I've worked in a couple of datacenters. They were huge, they needed absolutely overblown power and water hookups, and they were mostly built in former farmland or other rural stuff at the edge of suburban areas. The one I spent the most time in was across the street from US-EAST. It was one of 12 DCs on that road, and there were at least three other roads in that area that had at least as many. They were average size for datacenters, but that meant they were Huge buildings. The one I worked in had ... maybe 25 people working inside it on any given day, and that was on the high side. These things mostly don't have many people working inside them.

We really loved those shows, and got a lot out of them. And we've got this great new toy, and nowhere to show him off! So, this is Kumiai-Ki, the Mighty Union Machine. He fights on behalf of Amazing Workers United against evil billionaires like Geoff Bozo and Elmo Tusk. He's hand made, by me, in north GA. He's made in a retro 3.75" style, inspired by the Shogun Warriors figures of the 1970s, and he's looking for a home. https://www.mountaintowntoys.com/kumiai-ki-the-mighty-union-machine/

SAMURAI PIZZA CATS

@JonBaker@mastodon.social Big mood

Hey!

Do you have a favorite book on Chinese history, politics, media, or culture that:

• is available in English
• is not written from a US centric or Western centric POV
• is not imperialist propaganda?
• is approachable by a casual audience?

I'm specifically looking for studies on Chinese literature, but also just generally looking to learn more about China and the culture and people of China with a minimal amount of the kind of hangups that come with most books about China available in the US.

@computerywar@infosec.exchange dice are complicated, but if you don't need casino quality there are dozens of us shops that will make them. This seems exaggerated and sensationalized, and largely like a marketing ploy. Shame, really, I know so many much more interesting board game makers based in the US.

One of the things I've seen people bring up in this thread a couple of times is the Luddite movement, and their pushback against automated looms and sewing machines. This was raised, I think, as a way to say that these were technologies that were also being forced on people, and that they were not good. There's nuance to this discussion that I'm probably not correctly equipped to capture, but I'll do my best. The Luddites weren't against the adoption of tech in general, they were against that technology being used to push people out of work, to make worse products, and to create a less safe work environment. It is my understanding that, by and large, they were in favor of sewing machines and automated looms when those things were owned and controlled by workers, and used to make good things faster or better things. They were against these technologies when they were used to make worse things, or when they were used to displace workers, or when they were used to create an unsafe working environment. Many people make the argument that this directly parallels LLMs and GenAI. That if this technology was in the hands of individuals and being deployed to make good things better, or to make good things faster, or something to that effect, that it would all be okay. This is bullshit. If no one forced factories to use automated looms and sewing machines, they probably would have adopted them anyway because they enabled new ways of making things, but many people would self select out of that group, continuing to do things by hand. (and, in fact, many people do.) If no one forces workers to use AI, the workers who do not want to use AI will continue to not use AI and the workers who choose to use AI will get rugpulled when the full cost of the machine bears down upon them or when the bubble pops.

Man, whoever facebook bribed to get this settlement definitely didn't get enough for how hard they sold us out.

Hello Sharks, I'd like to present to you today the future of computing. I call it Stephen. Stephen is an intern. You submit prompts to Stephen, in the form of Jira tickets. Stephen then asks lots of questions, and then delivers something almost, but not entirely, unlike what you requested. We're asking for 1.2 billion dollars for 30% equity, so we can scale Stephen.

@farah@beige.party @adhdeanasl@beige.party In english too. I wonder how different the Bangla series is from the English series, and how different those are from the German series. It looks like there are Many more books in the Bangla series and the German series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox This is a "paradox" that I just stumbled across on wikipedia. It says, basically, that traffic gets better when public transit gets better and gets worse when public transit gets worse, and is otherwise essentially unaffected or only negatively impacted by improvements (or degradation) in the quality of roads. If you want traffic to get better, build trains.

@grmpyprogrammer@yac.grumpy-learning.com How weird do you want to get? Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, Deepin, Pantheon, Sugar, i3, Sway, Budgie, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, Openbox... ROX is probably still out there, I used to run FVWM, but that was 10 years ago.

Absolutely fascinating to hear that the 7 up series will be concluding, 63 years later, with 70 up. If you're not familiar with British television (and maybe obscure British television? I feel like I only know about the series because of my work in video art, and not because of TV) 7 up was a documentary series that started as interviews with 14 random seven year olds, and became a series of interview's with those same 14 kids ever seven years as they aged. That crew, of course, is now 70. The original director is gone, but the 14 people were interviewed once again, and a new director is bringing the series ot a close. Apparently, one of their number passed away shortly after shooting his last interview, solidifying the idea that this will be the end of the series.

@farah@beige.party @adhdeanasl@beige.party This is the series that, in the US at least, was billed as "Alfred Hitchcock's"? I *loved* those as a kid in the 90s. They were exceptionally hard to find when I was a kid, so I'm very surprised to hear that they were available internationally. I'm discovering now that there were 200 additional books in the series produced for the german market! Do you remember them well? Did you have a favorite?

I got lots of responses pointing out technologies that had to be forced on people. I've thought about them. The ones I agree with are:

• Internal Combustion Cars
• Telephones
• LLMs and GenAI

The internal combustion engine in general didn't have to be forced on to people (farmers, for example, loved it both for their tractors and also for other makeshift machines they'd construct around their farms)

Cars as a class didn't have to be forced on people, high society types in big cities loved having electric carriages. They were clean, easy to maintain, and quiet. They were also reliable enough that they didn't get replaced often enough to become an industry.

But, while the rich were driving around in their electric carriages and the poor were walking, taking horse-carriages, taking trains, and riding cable cars (and people were experimenting with electric and steam cars) Henry Ford decided that, if he could get the US government to heavily invest in a roadway system and trick a bunch of municipalities into giving up a bunch of green space and pedestrian space to cars, he could make a lot of money while also leaving people responsible for both driving (which is dangerous and should be left to those who are interested in learning how to do it effectively, not a requirement for participation in society) and maintenance (which is expensive, and prior to Ford was largely a public expense for a public good.)

Cars introduced a lot of new freedoms for people, but were perhaps the worst of the several available alternatives to do that in dozens of ways, and we're still trying to overcome that fallout. There were significantly more (and significantly safer!) transit options in my region before cars.

Cars, as I've said before and taken blowback from, are usually bad. They are, at best, a necessary evil. There was a time when they were not necessary.

Vaccines fall into a similar boat. Vaccines were absolutely a revolutionary technology! Continue to be! But Vaccines relied on science that most people didn't understand, and felt like magic, and still depended on people internalizing external risks but then also added doing something painful that many people were afraid of, and then feeling sick for several days (and, to be fair, the absolutely abhorrent and racist Tuskegee experiments was more than enough evidence for many people that vaccine mandates were untrustworthy.) In both cases, these were not technologies that we were asking people to use on an ongoing basis, but preventative measures that were put in the hands of people who had not been effectively educated about the mechanisms at play or the efficacy of the preventative measures, and who had (or, in the case of vaccines, continue to have) huge amounts of anti-education propaganda fed to them.