Fediverse admins are not amused. They don’t mind if Lord Elno intermittently sprinkles some extra pixie dust over his daily dose of birdie powder and fucks up Twitter in new and exciting ways, so that fresh waves of exiles hit the shores of the most prominent instances, including mastodon.social. What they do mind, however, is that this almost always happens on weekends. So what has he done this time? He restricted the number of tweets you can read if you’re logged in, and he closed off Twitter for anyone who isn’t. With this absolute genius sandwich, he scored the following achievements: severely curtailing the number of eyeballs who can see the remaining advertisers’ ads, about which they will certainly be thrilled; making maintaining official government/administration accounts next to impossible; preventing people from following hashtags in cases of emergency (like storm warnings, for example); and managing to self-DDOS his own services to a standstill to boot. The part that initiated these measures Lord Elno doesn’t talk about is that he’s not paying his fucking bills; the part that he does talk about—incessantly, at that—is his intention to prevent data scraping (mostly by his fellow tech bro grifters to train their “AI” models). And this official part is what really should piss everyone off. The infuriating thing about Elno’s Gollumesque obsession with his precioussss #Twitter data is that this data isn’t *his* in the first place. We all poured our lifeblood into it—in my case for 16 years, from January 2007 to December 2022—under the explicit premise and understanding that Twitter’s a forum-like participatory open space, a space now seized and occupied and cordoned off in the course of a billionaire genius cosplay act.
So what else did I do last week, besides being mad at Twitter, giving lectures, finalizing a book contribution, seeing my own book sent to print, and enjoying the DoKomi convention? There’s my weekly AI/LLM/GPT Roundup “A Whiff of Doom” at my secret level just drafts; a Voidpunk blog post about ethercoil technology; a new album on Flickr with 14 shots from Hutongs in Beijing; my daily vintage-style travel-squaries at Pixelfed; and a number of pretty pictures and pulp artifacts, respectively, that I uploaded to my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.
Still in lieu of the Sunday funnies, which will resume in the near future, here’s another game worth checking out that was presented at the Indie Game Fest: It’s a Wrap by Chanko Studios. It’s a puzzle-platformer combination, none of which I usually play. But this one—arranging timing, props, and other stuff for a take as a film director, and then making it through that take alive as the daring, but not too bright action movie star—is so mechanically clever and hilariously enjoyable that I fell in love with it right away. You can wishlist it and/or download the demo at GOG.com, or if you’re on Steam, you can do the same over there. Enjoy!
J.
So what else did I do last week, besides being mad at Twitter, giving lectures, finalizing a book contribution, seeing my own book sent to print, and enjoying the DoKomi convention? There’s my weekly AI/LLM/GPT Roundup “A Whiff of Doom” at my secret level just drafts; a Voidpunk blog post about ethercoil technology; a new album on Flickr with 14 shots from Hutongs in Beijing; my daily vintage-style travel-squaries at Pixelfed; and a number of pretty pictures and pulp artifacts, respectively, that I uploaded to my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.
Still in lieu of the Sunday funnies, which will resume in the near future, here’s another game worth checking out that was presented at the Indie Game Fest: It’s a Wrap by Chanko Studios. It’s a puzzle-platformer combination, none of which I usually play. But this one—arranging timing, props, and other stuff for a take as a film director, and then making it through that take alive as the daring, but not too bright action movie star—is so mechanically clever and hilariously enjoyable that I fell in love with it right away. You can wishlist it and/or download the demo at GOG.com, or if you’re on Steam, you can do the same over there. Enjoy!
J.