Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

"EULAs of Despair"
https://www.pilotlab.org/eulas-of-despair

As an example, the first three tiers of the Amazon EULA terms total over 642,000 words of text, which translates into OVER 53 HOURS of reading at the rate of 200 words a minute.

Discord EULA is 5.63 Tolstoys

Google EULA is 9.33 Tolstoys

Reddit EULA is 11.58 Tolstoys

Twitter EULA is 15.83 Tolstoys

Snapchat is 17.10 Tolstoys

The Amazon EULA is 1.09 Tolstoys

"A Tolstoy is the metric we are using to emphasize just how large these EULA webs can become. One Tolstoy is the length of the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, or 587,287 words."

Bluesky is the Microsoft Word of social media, which I mean in the derogatory sense, as the fediverse is the LaTeX of social media, which I also mean in the derogatory sense

Serious question: what's the appropriate/respectful reaction, as a non-Māori, to witnessing a Haka? Cause, like, my first instinct is to cheer/woop, but that doesn't sound right, and it's not appropriate for me to join in. But just standing around looking serious seems like I disapprove? #aotearoa

I'm glad a critical mass of Black folks finally got their ass up and left twitter. Been past time for awhile now. So yes I'll be vacationing there de temps en temps when the mayo gets too intense around here, it'll be nice to be around more Black folks again.

The wave should have come here, but y'all fucked it all the way up for that. Well, hopefully we can get our fedi shit together so that in a few years when the corporate overlords put the money squeeze on bluesky, we've got a better setup on here.

Am I optimistic about that? Not so much. But we'll see.

My coworker apparently has a "no agendy no attendy" policy and I'm stealing that phrase 😆

yknow, it would be pretty cool if libraries let the public mirror their digital collections.

more floating copies of things some authoritarians would rather be buried

Rare ‘hidden’ trans archives to be digitized to bridge generations - University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/news/topics/2024+hidden-trans-digital-archives+media-release

TIL: The UVic Libraries’ Transgender Archives is the largest collection of original materials chronicling Trans+ history and activism in the world.

#LGBTQ+ #archives

For trans visibility week, I'm wearing a shirt that says "mh-" on it.

Got rambling on bluesky about it so I might as well post it here to make it official.

Having become frustrated with companies like Piko buying the rights to lots of old games, hoarding them, and generally just kinda being assholes about it, my goal for 2025 is to do what these companies won't and buy the rights to a 20+ year old game and make it public domain. It may be a terrible Klik & Play game that someone made when they were 10, but it will happen.

important context for the whole "The Onion bought InfoWars" thing. unlimited respect to the Sandy Hook families

if i can give one audio tip for people who work with "people talking" type audio it's this: compress dynamics

this marvelous filter in audacity will let you compress the volume into a smaller band. that way everything will have a more consistent volume level and there won't be parts that are loud and other parts that are barely audible

there's a lot more to audio editing and a lot more that can be done but the most important thing is that people can clearly hear everything that's said, and that's a compress dynamics thing

Many of you might already know that due to historical reasons, Japan uses two incompatible power systems with mismatched frequencies

That has its consequence in railways too

Meet Tokyo Central station. As you can see, western and eastern Shinkansen lines terminate here. They're not connected with each other and use different electrification depending on which part of the country the line goes to – 25kV 50Hz or 60Hz

Normal-speed lines use 1.5kV DC electrification

This small infodump was brought to you by @aroma who brought my attention to that detail

#railinfodump