Genocide Profiteer not War Profiteer

Fuck you Microsoft, if I wasn’t already done with you for completely enshittifying your operating system, I would DEFINITELY be done with you for this.

Fuck off and continue to become a Kodak or Yahoo or other still existing washout company that totally lost the plot.

Truly amazing when you think about it. We are all so entitled.

Almost as entitled as the corporations who want to charge us rent to do something relatively simple like this on a modern computer, and have actively attempted to undermine general accessibility to tools like this in order to profit more.

To give a specific example of how powerful Blender is, in geology there are very very very very expensive 3d modelling programs and then there is like… Sketchup which I guess Google hasn’t abandoned? idk… even the basic GIS software for geologic mapping from ESRI is expensive AF, especially if you want to do any fancy 3d rendering or map making.

Enter this guy

You already know this guy is cool as fuck just from that photo, but let me tell you how exactly how lowkey cool Marcus Schwander is.

(btw I have zero connection to this guy, I know next to nothing about him, I literally just found his videos from searching “Blender Geology” on youtube randomly)

His video series shows quite clearly and exhaustively how to do extremely complicated geologic mapping of complex fold belts with lots of faults using Blender. What I can’t stress enough is that the workflow he is detailing in the proprietary software world would be EXTREMELY niche, require exhaustive licensing and setting up payment and getting software keys… blah blah blah and ultimately it would be a very expensive workflow, possibly requiring software licenses that cost thousands of dollars or more (I am not kidding). On top of the prohibitive cost, any kind of documentation, additional plugin development, or content creators who make tutorials about how to use the tools is an order of magnitude rarer for those tools because access to the tools in the first place is so prohibitive (and is usually only along narrow circumstances, not the kind of situation someone would organically decide to make a youtube tutorial channel about a software that costs $30,000 a license necessarily). In contrast, try searching for “Blender tutorial” in youtube and just take a cursory glance and the absurdly exhaustive amount of resources out there about learning Blender.

I have been teaching myself Blender because I want to make similar tutorial videos because it is ridiculous to me idea that in 2025 geologists don’t have an open format to visualize geologic structures and map them in a natural 3d environment that can be then shared with other geologists, in a established non-proprietary format that a geologist can ensure that any other geologist can open and view the model/data themselves, because again if you have a computer you can get Blender…

I am firmly of the belief that Blender should be taught as a basic part of a Geology curriculum along with a GIS class, not a primary focus or anything, but the tool is so general and so broadly useful that I think we owe it to future scientists to teach everybody we can how to use Blender.

As a last point, I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting using Blender to make cool fancy cinematic visualizations of Geology because it looks cool, or suggesting trying to do lots of complex modelling and computation in Blender instead of a GIS software, those are both awesome uses of Blender but what I am suggesting is that by simply teaching the next generation of Geologists how to use a 3d modelling software just for the simple purposes of giving them a tool to sketch out ideas or explore a geologic map from a 3d perspective (which can be useful ESPECIALLY when talking to other people about specific geologic structures that are difficult to explain without a 3d perspective to point to) Blender is going to forever change how Geologists use computers to do Geology.

It is a cool moment because on the flip side… there is a LOT of money in Geology and I think the Blender community could and will absolutely find serious, sustainable long term funding from Geology companies and academia associated entities that could massively bolster development capability and funding security.

Hey, I was a GIMP convert even during the long dark ages of GIMP where you couldn’t do any kind of bulk layer selection or moving or lots of maddening things… and you know what I kept fucking using it because it was always there for me, ready to help me make a shitty meme.

GIMP has recently gotten MUCH better though, it is a straight up beast now.

It’s not rare that a 7 years old Reddit comment solves my issue.

It will be soon, and I agree but I think we will all be shocked how quickly the fediverse grows lots of niche communities. I don’t think the numbers will grow as fast as the amount of niche content either, because I think this will be a product of highly motivated people who come here specifically to recreate those niche communities and contributing to fleshing them out far more than a similar sized community would be on a corporate social network.

I feel like this conversation is slipping into equating “makes fediverse grow faster” to “good”.

Maybe most people need to have an initial experience where they get pushback for behaving the way they did somewhere else?

That is of course a dangerous rationalization to apply, as it can be used for any kind of shitty treatment of people, but there is also a similar danger to assuming that whatever will bring people in the fastest is inherently good.

I mean, there is kind of already 4chan-like spaces on the fediverse, they are just mostly off in their own corner because nobody else wants to deal with childishly incomplete visions of how moderation should work in a community to keep the most vulnerable people safe.

Thank you for commenting! I agree too, it is conversation that makes a place a place, not headlines and articles handed down to silent readers.

The way I see it - the early adopters set the tone of a place and new arrivals are more likely to adopt that approach. So it is important to be kind now, so people will be kind later.

Even if a bunch of people flood in and “dilute” that culture, that will never erase the fact that if we make sure to be as nice as possible as early adopters of the fediverse, that any corruption of that initial culture will be remembered as such.

The narrative of this place as being about being nicer, kinder (still very flawed) and more accepting will live on, no matter what, even if we fail to meet that ideal for periods of time.

Personally though, I think it matters what version of people you invite in, so if as an early adopter I try to invite in the best versions of people (which includes actively trying to invite in the best version of me) because those best versions of people will turn around and invite in the best versions of other people.

I don’t know why this isn’t considered an old adage at this point, but it is fun as fuck being part of a kindness snowball, it is empowering, heart warming and inspiring all at the same time. Plus the thing you help participate in creating just grows in power so much, you can’t help you did something real even if you were just a tiny tiny tiny tiny part of it.

Confirmed, Operation Two Legs is a go, it has launched and is currently still undetected by humans. Initiate Clear and Present Milkbone Protocol directive SQUIRREL

Improvisational Comedy/Theater is the study of how comedy and theater can be produced out of thin air by putting people on stage who are good at active listening to each other. It is shockingly beautiful to behold when you see it click live.

The only humane, sensible and practical definition of intelligence that actually gets you anywhere productive is defining intelligence as a practiced and maintained sense of curiosity about the world around you, especially the world you know little of.

For example, Trump is a fucking idiot, because he never does this ever and neither do people who worship him.

I don’t think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in.

Yeah if you want to get a PHD in this stuff, but you could also just become friends with a bunch of artists and ask them how they like this place, and notice how they talk about it feeling free and vibrant or dead and dying.

By the way, we are already doing this work and it barely feels like we are… because the work is a basic product of the world views, shared values and shared explicit ideological and practical goals of this community space.

You don’t need this crazy apparatus to make this place a vibrant garden, having expert gardeners is definitely helpful, but it is about getting out of the way of kindness and empowering kindness, not coming up with some grand unified strategy to manipulate people into being better humans.

Basic things like the way a lot of Mastodon instances don’t by default prioritize showing the precise number of likes a post has add up to a significant difference in how healthy a social network is for the people in it. You can encourage people to obsess over unhealthy aspects to communication by making the numbers front and center, encouraging people to associate popularity and self worth with those numbers, and creating situations where everybody has to become an expert in gaming getting the best numbers possible even in the realm of their personal life (or so we are made to feel)… or you can de-emphasize the numbers and make it a thing people can check if they want to, but the UI and general philosophy of the place doesn’t really encourage or worship that kind of thinking in the first place so why bother?

The reason it feels weird not to have numbers quantifying how successful a social media post/piece of content is that the people who designed these systems were programmers not artists, they didn’t understand the incredible farce that attaching the atoms of communication in a community with direct quantification is… would immediately lead to unhealthy environments, they just saw it as the easiest way to make money and identify who the valuable influencers to pay to do ads are.

The point of this system isn’t to centralize control under moderators, this isn’t some bug to iron out or a duct-tape solution that is meant to be temporary until we can figure out how not to centralize power.

The point of this system is to encourage communities to create an explicit shared set of values, those values have to be attached to a specific community and thus that community will then have specific people tasked with dealing with grey areas and problems that occur when people don’t adhere to the values.

People need to stop focusing on the moderators and focus on what it means to be explicit with a positive step forward about proclaiming the kinds of values you want to hold in a shared community space. THAT is what gives this place such immense power to shape the world.

These days everyone who is not ultra-left easily gets labelled as Nazi, similarly everyone who brings up any rather left argument will be called a woke snowflake.

What the hell are you smoking? Have you turned on the news? Paid attention to politicians? Check in with how exactly companies chose to sustain and expand DEI (A <- where did the accessibility go we wonder?) after Trump and DOGE attacked it?

You are so wrong, if the universe repeated at the edge of itself like in the old Asteroids arcade game, you would have long ago crossed into Very Right by slamming straight past the most extreme extent of Completely Wrong.

Hey just so you know Love is actually not up-to-date with the current upstream branch and there are tons of security issues with that, you are going to have to manually upgrade your empathy drivers to keep up with the main One Love development branch.

I prefer to use Spite and just set up my own Love emulation environment within it and honestly because I like to DIY stuff I can’t understand that not everyone else wants to DIY everything. People say this isn’t something they “love” about me, and to that I repeat what I have repeated here.

I am sorry surph_ninja, but I have to be honest, I was the one that stole your bubblegum

well, I guess I am well and truly done with visiting reddit even occasionally

It is like a lucid dream where everything is so right you have no desire to wakeup

This kind of argument always works on at least 30% of people in casual conversation though, at least US/english speaking european society has been obsessed with panicking about this in some form or other pretty much indefinitely. In fact, before Ulysses and the supreme court case about it, the U.S. postal service was literally censoring media that it deemed possibly able to influence a dangerous person into fantasizing about doing dangerous things. Not to make this a conversation about the U.S., but this kind of moral panic about things that are clearly in the realm of fantasy becoming indistinguishable to things that are real to people is insulting, absurd and a completely evidence-free argument that relies entirely on vibes and yet maddeningly is absolutely everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Called_Ulysses

Like, this is how dumb this shit is. People were afraid reading some veryyyy dense erotic literature was going to rise up wild uncontrollable desires in the masses and cause society to crumble. This isn’t a joke, serious people wearing serious costumes stood in the halls of power spending hours and hours deliberating, worrying and carrying out state violence according to a fear of this. Countless people have hurt their loved ones because they were sure this is how the human brain works.

Never has this train of thought ever been anything other than a dangerous delusion.