krad

could somebody go back in time about a week and tell past!krad 'one does not simply speedrun through a fucking flu (during the holidays no less).'

:D; no wonder my usual zicam + gatorade regime wasn't doing shit

anyway. multiple 15 hr night sleeps later. krad is alive for some definition of alive. and back at home. finally!!!!!!

there's a game i've started playing with myself when i'm stuck *somewhere* just observing the environment - basically called "spot what the architect actually designed and what was tweaked after by the developer/client/company/regulations/future updates".

* checking a row of lights or ceiling tiles; is one light/tile a different color or randomly stuck in a corner not parallel to the others? are there fire sprinklers in random places and not spaced apart equally?

* is a piece of stone exceptionally worn away like compared to the surrounding ones like people have used it excessively? is a sign suddenly anachronistically metal with machine modern font instead of wood if it's in a castle?

* is a house/historical place mostly symmetrical except for one weird random room? does the room have a different structural design to it? is the wood floor a different texture?

* is an outlet super obviously on a really big bare wall at a different height than another outlet?  (was a tv screen planned there to hide it and then later removed?)

etc etc

it's been an unexpectedly fun way to train the mind to recognize all the little details that often go unnoticed in the surroundings, and to also ask oneself why (do people use things differently). a lot of times my biggest issue with people drawing interiors/settings is it doesn't feel "lived in", which this observation seeks to help with.

* neat gamedev writeup on LoZ: Ocarina of Time talking about some meta-gameplay difficulties the devs had to work through in regards to designing the first 3D action game. Fascinating to see how most modern games like Elden Ring today still operate off of similar spatial principles.

* i was talking to a friend on bsky about LLM's and reducing friction of delusions; bellingcat's founder Elliot H. posted a really good thread a while back that I keep thinking about. (I have my reservations about bellingcat in general and where they get their funding but this feels insightful.)

copy/pasted thread text below: 

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* Bart Ehrman's last lecture - "The Most Significant Discovery in the History of Biblical Studies”.  haven't been in these circles for a while, this was a refreshingly thoughtful lecture/sermon of sorts.

* one of the latest pieces of news this week is firefox has a new CEO who apparently is commited to driving a perfectly decent product off a cliff; they're forcing AI upgrades and there's rumors of disabling extensions in the future, but that's less concrete. While there is a follow-up clarification  that the devs are trying hard to keep AI explicitly opt in / have a kill switch for it, i'm less certian that they'll be able to keep that from CEO pressure.

if you feel strongly about this, i've given feedback at https://connect.mozilla.org/ and suggest you do as well. For immediate AI-free alternatives, waterfox and vivaldi are the two strongest ones I consistently see in rec lists.

* thin desires vs thick desires - thoughtful articulation on a concept i've been seeing a lot lately. (though i have my reservations that quote unquote pornography in its entirety is a thin desire since to me sexual desire in media is pretty nuanced; i see where the thought line comes from, but that's a side tangent.) 

* escape clause - a blogger decides to move away from the apple ecosystem after seeing another dev elsewhere get locked out of mission critical email accounts.  (i really liked the empathy to apple devs at the same time of concretely outlining why he's moving away)

'man this reminds me of one of those ICU weeks' < not what you want to hear from me lol

was. another one of those days.

real glad i remembered a bunch of tricks like typing up all the detailed notes/timestamps in a 3 page file with multiple copies when there was an hour of lucidity since it's what got her in a specialist place tonight back in the big city again. (docs tend to take one a lot more seriously if you come in with a notebook of shit that can be cross-referenced with discharge papers. also helps to summarize things when your higher function brain is absolutely fried from lack of sleep. bonus if you speak that medical acronym language.)

now it's the waiting game again.

guess who was in *two* er waiting rooms *another* nine hours last night until 4am ..... x.x

we're uh. ruling things out? slightly more stable-armed-with-more-knowledge-and-levers but still waiting on a specialist appointment later.

it's been a week ngl.

due to an expected family death that just happened, the holidays, and avoiding The News - i'll be peacing out offline for a week or two (and working on the last few projects i owe folks as good distraction, y'all know who you are.)

well wishes not needed directly; just be kind to yourself and each other <3

(crossposted from tumblr, tags included.)

on the Fire Emblem series' general trend towards marrying as a gameplay gimmick, at least beyond the "yeay"/"nay" polarization.

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not even 20 pages through (aka just the introduction) of 'addiction by design' - a book about gambling, and i'm already staring in the middle distance of how word for word this type of addiction psychology could go for basically every social media algorithm & UI dark pattern & gacha & viral bait engagement post/media & ai addiction.

necessary read, can already tell it's going to be one of those books that's mission critical.

but man! genuinely nauseated over here to see how virulent it is across media/technology as a whole.

one of the many weird little things i've learned about being in the ex-/k/ server is the concept of "flag cones" (for when a general country flag is displayed on a pole but has a suspiciously conical shape). some are less "fake looking" than others; but for a particularly fake-looking example, see this reddit post. generally this depends if the flag is straight up painted on, or if there's more like a conical mannequin shape underneath where a real flag is draped over (aljazeera screenshot example).

once when you've seen one you can't *not* notice them everywhere in news screenshots/NATO briefings, etc, lol. sometimes it makes for a fun drinking game to spot when you need something other than The News

there's technically similarly adjacent things called "flag spreaders" that are another step closer to how flags authentically drape but i don't see those as much in big news screenshots.

I was recently reading an essay on babyfur vtuber .... wank? (the actual execution of the essay was pretty nuanced, but the topic was... yeah. nothing the world hadn't seen before.)

but what was interesting is the way said essay referred to "communities" almost exclusively meaning "personal discord servers of vtubers". and it made it click in my head of how baffled i've always been at this recent post-2018 merging of identity/community = a specific sense of moderation policies (for example the anti/pro fandom alignments) and moderation choices which made no sense to me with how "community" was defined in real-world terms before then.

because if we are exclusively talking about personal discord servers, i can see how young folks could come to the assumption that identity is a narrow set of moderation choices.

what's allowed in a personal discord of an influencer strikes me as a mix of pure "brand" (say, artwork that they draw or videos they create), brand-as-shared-interests or genre (shared artwork topics or cool inspirational art everyone likes), and once when one's locked into that kind of enforced bubble it pretty quickly spirals into myopia given how discord server social politics roll. it takes some pretty extensive "old school" moderating to keep the general server populace from getting incestuous; most influencers aren't interested in keeping a wide variety of folks in their server (assuming they're using it to make money/engagement); it's much more of a parasocial dynamic to extract something. money for access to the influencer (reminds me of the onlyfans model), other perks, etc.

(one of many reasons why you could not pay me to run a discord server lol; modding nazine's is the closest i'll get and that's only because it's tiny and full of mutuals with a weirdly high degree of media literacy; much less of the usual modding issues).

i'm not going to attempt to define what real-world "community" means as a term in contrast to discord-server-as-community (DSAC?) but the latter feels exceptionally more fragile in comparison to the former, and the implications of that sure explain a lot of current online issues.