Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Just a personal heads-up for everyone I interact with: we've reached a point where if I see you in *any* way aligning with Trump or Musk, you are immediately going on my mental 'fascist' list with no further discussion and I will not speak to you anymore.

I don't care if you "didn't know how bad it is". The time for learning that is well past, so if you still "don't know", then I'm going to conclude that you didn't *want* to know and decide accordingly.

Time for the - I guess yearly by this point... - toot again:

No, I will not be at #38c3. I *could* have squeezed it into my schedule despite an upcoming transplantation, but they have *once again* failed to implement any COVID safety measures.

A few days of Congress is not worth the risk of brain damage or (in my case) severe illness or death.

If you want to see me at your event, push for appropriate safety precautions like sufficient ventilation/filtering and (particularly where that is not possible) mask distribution and ideally masking requirements.

#CovidIsNotOver

If all goes to plan, I will be receiving a kidney transplantation on November 12 (2024), followed by an unknown recovery period. What to expect:

After the transplantation, I will not be around online for a while; this could be anywhere from a few days to a few months depending on how well (or not) the surgery goes. Even after I return, I will likely be avoiding stress for a while, which also means I may drop out of things unannounced.

In the time leading up to the transplantation, I will become less and less consistently available, and you may see me around less, as I deal with the preparations for the surgery.

I'm receiving a kidney from a living donor, under pretty much best-case circumstances (no dialysis), so the chance of success is high, and the chance of complications is low, but it is not zero. Likewise, survival chance is high but not 100%.

If the transplantation succeeds, I will be able to live a mostly normal life, but I will be on immunosuppressive medicine for the rest of my life. Among other things, this means that you're probably only going to see me at (hacker) events that take sufficient precautions against COVID and the like.

So if you want me and other immunocompromised folks around at those events, ask organizers to take those precautions! Ventilation/filtering and CO2 measurement is a good baseline.

If you have any questions about all this, feel free to ask, but I may or may not have the spoons to answer them.

Because they're like oppression lootboxes.

The liberal viewpoint is not one of intersectionality; they might sound very progressive and recognize one or more types of oppression, but do not (wish to) recognize the way these interact, or the structure and patterns that underlie all of them.

This means that it's only a matter of time before I hear them say some extremely shitty and/or bigoted stuff about a topic that they don't recognize as a form of oppression, but I can't know upfront which topic it will be, or when it'll happen.

With my intersectional friends, I could then just point out that it's a form of oppression, and they will take it seriously, introspect, and work (over time) to understand it. Mistakes happen, but they will try to learn. All I need to do, is remind them.

With liberals, however... they do not recognize it as another occurrence of the same thing, and so I am left having to "prove" from whole cloth that yes, it really is a form of oppression, before they are even willing to put in *any* effort to understand the problem.

Every time this happens, it takes hours of my time, and energy that I do not have to spare.

I am already running on fumes most of the time, and I honestly just don't really want to hang around people who put that sort of price on not being shitty.

#introduction:

I've actually been here for a while already, though mostly inactive! The Birdsite Situation prompted me to pop in here again. And I'm terrible at writing introductions, so I usually just say "I do stuff on the internet".

But uh, I do all sorts of activist-y stuff, work on radical FOSS (see http://cryto.net/~joepie91/manifesto.html), write (educational) stuff, am more or less a lonely polyamorous gender blob of indeterminate sexuality who likes both cuddles and kinky things, and I always have 10 times as many projects as I have time for, as is customary with ADHD brain :) Sometimes I even finish some of them!

While I'm an introvert and need plenty of time to myself, I *am* happy to meet like-minded people and spend time with them, and as long as you're not a bigot or apologist, you should feel free to interact with me and/or follow me!

Also, I live in Rosmalen (near Den Bosch) in the Netherlands, and honestly would like to get to know more local folks, and I also have some vague intention to start a queer hackerspace around here if I can find enough interested people. Eventually!

I feel like the 'management game' genre is severely held back by the capitalist assumptions that people make, like always centering around 'money' or 'material resources' as the metrics to optimize for.

You could get such more dynamic gameplay if you focused on (balancing) complex and realistic needs of people instead of just optimizing for 'number go up'.

Imagine a management game where you build up and maintain a variety of public city infrastructure (like street furniture and public toilets), having to account for the varying and sometimes conflicting needs of different demographics, with 'budget' only playing a marginal role.

Wouldn't that be way more interesting than yet another 'build a shop with shelves' tycoon game?

Also, what's up with PlayWay seemingly publishing anything with a pulse?

Also, I wish such games would experiment with novel research systems more! Surely more interesting things are possible than "provide resources, wait, ta-da, scientific discovery"?

What is it with so many of the first-person simulation games feeling terrible to control?

I have an annoying conundrum when playing base-builder-style games.

When playing in sandbox mode, I enjoy the building flexibility, but it all starts feeling meaningless because there is no failure condition at all.

When playing in 'challenge' mode, I enjoy that there is a challenge to meet, but I get frustrated by my building plans being interrupted by stuff like "being just barely short on resources/funds".

I wish more games had something inbetween the two, that provides purpose to the building, but also makes it low-friction.

I genuinely do not understand how one can build such a broken system and remain in business, and it's all the more baffling considering how *old* MapQuest is and how they used to be a major provider of map data for mapping and navigation software!

(Their data in the US is a little better, but not by much)

Also it feels like they got their satellite imagery from a dollar store; there are visible seams between every 'tile', clearly no stitching having been done, and there's horrible JPEG compression everywhere, as if they saved it in like 50% quality

I thought I'd seen a lot of awful and broken websites, and then I learned about MapQuest