Perhaps the real trash were the draft reviews we wrote along the way

Ooh, I love that cardigan thing. It’s giving streetwear, which is an interesting juxtaposition with the cosiness of the knitwear.

You should tell your friend that a random internet stranger thinks they’re very funny

Man, I feel so much nostalgia over Halo, especially Reach. It was the first campaign I completed on Legendary. My brother and I used to play the Swat game mode a lot, and we made one hell of a team. It was a nice contrast to arguing all the time. I enjoyed when I was in the zone and reacting so quickly that salty people would accuse me of using aimbot. That’s the highest compliment one can receive in an online shooter.

Oh wow, that is pretty fucked up. That sounds similar to what I’ve heard described as “weaponized therapy speak” — where terms from mental health therapy creep into daily vernacular and, divorced from their original context, are misused in a way that causes harm.

The archetypical example of this might be if a person doesn’t remember a past event that their partner is referencing in an argument, they may be accused of “gaslighting”. It’s not always an intentional misuse, but sometimes it is deliberate and maliciously used to manipulate someone. A big example of that is someone making unreasonable and controlling demands of a person, and then getting annoyed if that person doesn’t comply, because they’re “not respecting boundaries”.

I don’t know whether what you describe would count as misusing therapy speak, but I do know that I feel icky about “consent” being used in this way — in addition to being a hurtful way to put you down, this feels like it obfuscates the actual meaning of consent.

Regardless, I’m sorry that happened to you; that really sucks. It must’ve been hard to feel like you weren’t allowed to express your beliefs — politics are pretty pervasive, so even if you’re avoiding actively political discussions, political subtext can seep into regular conversations pretty easily. Having different political beliefs to you was no excuse to shut you down in such a hurtful manner. I hope you have better friends now.

A friend once said that she finds the invasiveness of this legitimately a little triggering, because it so vividly reminds her of the time she spent with an extremely abusive partner, who would similarly restrict her ability to meaningfully say no to something.

Ever since she made this point to me, I realised that I had been thinking of online consent dialogs as being distinct from the general concept of consent that we use in other life contexts (such as sexual consent, medical consent etc.). Since then, I have started to fold the online stuff into the more general notion of consent, which adds a whole bunch of connotations that makes me feel far more icky whenever I see a dialog that doesn’t let you say no.

Good blog post, thanks for sharing. I like the point about companies double dipping by trying to extract both our data and our money; I feel like I’m probably going to use that at some point when I’m on my soapbox and complaining about big tech.

We can acknowledge that mean people and trolls on the internet are inevitable, whilst also denouncing unacceptable behaviour. If we don’t call out stuff, then that’s a great way for the window of what is considered to be acceptable to slide ever further into hostility.

I think it’s important to try to hold the line, where possible. I’m someone who is pretty good at only engaging in online discussions in a manner that’s productive and/or wholesome, but even I sometimes find that online discussions can make it so easy to slip into needless hostility. I think the anonymous format is a big part of it, as is the lack of context we have for most comments, which can cause people to misinterpret the tone of a discussion and engage in a more argumentative manner than they might do otherwise.

I tend to post positive stuff because I made an active choice to resist that pull of toxicity that many of us feel on the internet. I found that doing my best to disengage from the toxic stuff helped me to be more resistant towards accidentally slipping into vitriolic arguments. Calling out trolls for acting inappropriately probably isn’t going to shame them into treating their fellow online humans with respect, but that kind of denunciation is more for the benefit of the spectators than the trolls — especially if we want to prevent a community from producing even more trolls.

TL;DR:

“You will encounter mean people and trolls, learn how to deal with them (block/report)”

Good advice

“stop crying”

Not good advice. We can encourage people to block nasty people, whilst still retaining a sense of compassion for the people who are being shat on by trolls.

Sorry, I’m not clear on who your “fuck you” is directed towards

I hope it’s an entertaining trash fire for you, at the very least

Iconic

I liked that although Knights of Guinevere was clearly ragging on Disney, it felt like it wasn’t just a cathartic trauma dump from Dana Terrace and crew — it was actually being used to say something meaningful. It’s a good sign when the pilot episode of a show has such a strong sense of themes.

I’d heard a lot of hype when the pilot was released, but didn’t get around to watching it until I randomly thought “I wonder what Dana Terrace is up to nowadays? Hopefully she’s working somewhere better than Disney, because surely there must be someone with power out there who recognised how Disney was squandering her potential”. When I saw that it was her and some of the Owl House team who made Knights of Guinevere, that caused me to immediately go watch it. The only disappointment was that we don’t know when new episodes will be available, but hopefully things will be regular once we do start getting episodes.

Exactly this. I don’t own any Steam hardware, nor do I expect to any time soon. However, I don’t know if I’d be running Linux as my main daily driver if not for how straightforward it is to game on Linux nowadays, thanks largely to Valve’s efforts in this area.

I did dual boot with Windows for a while, but I found that the inertia of rebooting made me more likely to just use Windows. When I discovered that basically all of my games were runnable through Proton, I got rid of Windows entirely.

I feel a lot of gratitude for the Steam Deck existing, because it makes things way easier. It’s not down to Valve’s efforts alone, but providing the solid starting point has lead to the coagulation of a lot of community efforts and resources. For instance, there have been a couple of times where I’ve had issues running games, but found the solution in adjusting the launch options, according to what helpful people on protondb suggest. I also remember struggling for a while to figure out how to mod Baldur’s Gate 3, until I found a super useful guide that was written by and for Steam Deck users. The informational infrastructure around gaming on Linux is so much better than it used to be.

I’m meant to be going to sleep, but I remembered a time when I saw someone use the scary words in a masterfully executed piece of rhetoric.

She acted like she agreed with the word vomit of red-scare propaganda that was coming out of this dude’s mouth, but redirected the topic to how companies like Walmart have effectively lobbied for socialism, but only for them. This confused him and set him off guard, especially because he had coded her as someone who believes “socialism bad” and so had his guard relatively low already.

She explained that because Walmart pays their employees so low that many of them are reliant on social security benefits, this meant that Walmart was effectively receiving taxpayer subsidies from the government. She seeded the idea that part of why there’s so much red-scare propaganda is because the capitalist class want us rallying against socialism, but she framed it like “companies like Walmart are being deceptive because they perpetuate anti-socialist messaging to detract that they are the main beneficiaries of socialism”. She said it much better though.

It helps that the dude already had pretty strong views in favour of the state doing stuff to look after its people, but had just drank the koolaid about the terms. She facilitated him refining his views on that matter until he was vehemently arguing in favour of socialist policies to all his mates in the pub — he just didn’t know that was what he was arguing. She even managed to link up those views to the anti-corporate angle, so that when he was talking about Walmart being a beneficiary of socialism, it didn’t sound like he was being anti-socialist.

I remember watching in awe of how gracefully she manoeuvred through the conversation. The subtle manipulation she deployed was so skillful that I even wondered whether this was unethical. I concluded it wasn’t though, because ultimately she hadn’t got him saying anything he didn’t already believe. I low-key wish I had a recording of that conversation, because I felt like I learned a lot about how to do guerilla class consciousness building.

Okay, bed time now — for realsies.

This is part of why my Lemmy username is what it is. It’s sort of a reaction to feeling like I need to use non-scary terms all the time — I was curious what it would feel like to wear my ideology on my sleeve, so to speak.

Below is a not very interesting anecdote about an example of someone reacting poorly to me saying I was an anarchist. It is a bit rambly because I am quite ill, and by the time I realised this, I didn’t want to waste what I had written. So here’s your disclaimer that the below story may be incoherent and deeply mundane. I’m going to get some sleep and hope I wake up feeling better, wish me luck.

The silliest example of someone reacting badly to the word “anarchism” was when I was at university during the peak of the pro-Palestine protests. We had occupied a university building, and the atmosphere at night was chill, but stimulating levels of social. A varied group meant conversation topics bounced around all sorts of stuff, many of which lined up with either stuff I know from ADHD infodiving, or because my late best friend taught me. The vibe of the conversation often became quite opinionated, but in a friendly way.

There was a dude who I argued with a bunch, and he seemed to be quite impressed by how relatively well informed I seemed on a wide variety of topics (I don’t actually know much, I just know how to shut up when I don’t know shit, and back myself when I do), so he asked me what subject I studied. He was extra impressed when I said “biochemistry”, given that that hadn’t been one of the topics of the night, so he realised that my opinions were coming from things that were side interests at best. I’m not just saying this to brag, but because one of the key parts to the story is how this guy seemed to have a quite deep respect for me based on the breadth of my knowledge and how I’d argued my opinions that differed from his.

I hadn’t used the word “anarchism” to describe my beliefs, but for once, it wasn’t because I was hiding it — the vibe was so political that it was fairly safe to assume everyone there was likely either an anarchist or a communist or something variant thereof (on the backside of the big whiteboard in the occupied lecture theatre, there was a tally chart recording how many anarchists there were Vs communists. This really tickled me because that’s what rivalry between our peoples should look like — acknowledging the differences in perspective between the “factions”, while recognising we were all there because our goals were the same, which is why the “rivalry” was joked about).

Anyway, when I used the big, scary A-word, this guy’s demeanor completely changed. I have never seen such a rapid drop in respect for a person, much less been on the other side of it. He had asked me about what I would envision as a solution to some problem or other, and I summarised the view, and said “so, Anarchism basically”. He had a ridiculously erroneous notion of what anarchism was (he seemed to sincerely believe that anarchists would oppose buildings, because they’re a structure), but he was so set in his viewpoint that literally anything I said from that point was inherently laughable. This probably isn’t a very interesting story, but it will always stick out to me in a cautionary tale kind of way. I’d been talking to this guy all night (which started when I noticed someone seeming a bit uncomfortable with the extent to which he did devil’s advocate style discussion. I joined the conversation initially to deflect him from that person, but ended up relishing the challenge of keeping this abrasive, but seemingly good-faith guy on his feet).

TL;DR: people’s biases are wild. Someone can agree with you all night, and then suddenly that all changes in one word. Sometimes people feel threatened by the big scary words, and sometimes they find you literally laughable. I thought I was prepared for bad reactions, but I wasn’t prepared for the latter kind of bad reaction. It was very surreal at the time.

Glad to see People Make Games cover this. They have a lot of reach

I think it’s useful in conversations like these to distinguish between bans made by Reddit admins, and bans in individual subreddits due to the actions of moderators (even if sometimes, poweruser mods will sometimes mass ban across all subreddits they are a mod for — this is still distinct from the admin bans).

I find the ban of your indie game studio account to be the thing that annoys me most in your post — that ban is bullshit, and such indiscriminate application of policy that it ends up undermining the stated goal of such moderation policies.

Whilst the bans from individual communities do also annoy me, that feels like a less useful thing to get annoyed at — for as long as there have been people, there will have been people who, upon gaining a modicum of power, abuse it in trivial, ego-serving ways. I think this human propensity is especially apparent on the internet. It sucks, but I also think that the most productive thing to do is to acknowledge the tendency and try to think of ways that we can make communities more resilient to the abusive actions of individuals.

The moderator/admin distinction is one such way, and this is especially apparent on federated social media like Lemmy. Whilst heavy handed admin level moderation is probably fine for smaller instances (such as if someone spins up a server for their friend group), it isn’t really viable when things get larger. The best approach seems to be for admins to have an extremely light hand in the day-to-day running of things, rather like a King in a constitutional monarchy.

This inevitably means that sometimes, communities can experience a toxic shift in the culture of the space through the petty actions of moderators, but in theory, people have the power to create a new community, whether on the same instance or otherwise. In practice, this doesn’t necessarily happen, because inertia is powerful (plus even when there is the need for a mass migration, such as if the original community is literally no longer available, not everyone ends up switching over to the new space). Power tripping moderators make online spaces worse, and it’s not viable to expect admins to regularly step in — if we want the admins to be able to act as a safety net for severe problems (such as the moderator team violating the policies of the instance), then it’s useful to preserve the separation between admin and moderator.

One of the reasons I like Lemmy is that it makes me think about problems like this, because the problem of “some mods are power tripping bastards — what should we do about that?” isn’t going away any time soon.

I hate that I have no way to fight this, as someone living in the UK. I get that it won’t directly impact UK GDPR law, but it sets a bad precedent.

It’s not like contacting one’s elected representatives really does much, but it at least feels like something one can do. Fuck Brexit man. The UK has really nerfed it’s influence on the world stage

I wish I had a better answer, but the best that I can suggest is that it might help to find solidarity with other women who aren’t able to become pregnant. I know a lot of cis women who struggle with this, and it causes them stress in a manner that seems analogous to gender dysphoria. A surprising number of cis women experience this, but it’s not spoken about much because of how much stigma there is around it.

What does OC mean in this context?

Vim has long since won the war. I say that as an emacs user who is familiar with using vim because it’s installed by default on the vast majority of computers I interact with nowadays