MateRhyu @materhyu@scholar.social

I wrote a novel about a bunch of queer, neurodivergent TTRPG nerds and their portal fantasy adventure.

It's cosy and strange and I think you might like it!

You can learn more about it and pre-order the ebook here: https://victoriacorva.xyz/books/non-player-character-by-victoria-corva/

🎲 ✨ 🧙 🌱 🐉

@aral yes! It is 'the glue' of the #SmallWeb as it were. And it represents how we "do social" in the real world.

I imagine the #Fediverse to evolve towards a hybrid model of #decentralization, where there are server instances that host small to medium-sized communities, and more and more individual people connecting with their personal devices in #p2p fashion.

The nodes and servers themselves will be more of the technnical infrastructure layer. A 'community fabric' is layered on top of that.

Make Sci-hub legal

Abolish copyright on academic papers

Then every paper will be open access

I haven't been on Mastodon in forever, but last week I led a group meeting talk+disussion for my lab about global inequities in COVID-19 diagnostics & vaccines; and structural alternatives for technology & production, with an eye towards our climate emergency. If that sounds interesting to you, here are my slides and speaker notes: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1OqKqICzt9mmcQWQA5TsTDt1CWBe0870sMrsWrA9I07Y/edit?usp=drivesdk (feedback welcome and appreciated!)

[deleted and reposted because the previous version of this toot used a link shortener]

I made a whole book containing a SolarPunk themed role-pay in Mars.

The book is CC Licensed with LGBTIQ+ anti hate protection clause. In game characters are mostly female and nb.

The manual has:
Background, strategic table top game based in Arabic patterns, illustrations, explained map, character details template, educational and technical tasks optional for tech and open source teachers and the suggested main storyline for the master to drive.

https://terceranexus6.itch.io/junos-lineage

It's free and tips are optional!

"I expected someone..."
"Taller?"
"Yes," the knight said, looking down at the dragon.
"Dragons grow in proportion to their hoard."
"I heard your hoard was huge, thousands and thousands of books."
"It is."
"But?"
"I went digital," the dragon said, showing the SD card they lay on.
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories

PSA: if anyone emails you from krita.biz, krita.io or krita.com with this "proposal", DO NOT FALL FOR IT, it's a scam. We don't own those domains and we will never spam you. Please spread the word!

It is no measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Command-lines are wonderful. You talk with your computer in *words*, it's so much better vibes than pointing. But the only command-line we have is unix, and it kinda sucks. People attribute as essential to command-lines what is really historical defects, or not even defects but just lack of concern.

<aside>it's curious today to revisit how Unix was seen in the 80s:

> To be sure, the UNIX community has its own measure of technical parochialism and nerdy tunnel vision, but in my experience there seemed to be a suspicious overrepresentation of polyglots and liberal-arts folks in UNIX shops.

> […] The common thread was wordsmithing; a suspiciously high proportion of my UNIX colleagues had already developed, in some prior career, a comfort and fluency with text and printed words. They were adept readers and writers, and UNIX played handily to those strengths. UNIX was, in some sense, literature to them. Suddenly the overrepresentation of polyglots, liberal-arts types, and voracious readers in the UNIX community didn't seem so mysterious. (Scoville, "Unix as literature".)

If the classist undertones in this is making your skin crawl, yes, that's the core issue: The Unix command-line was made by a bunch of privileged American white men desperately clinging to an ethos of intellectual meritocracy so that they don't have to think too hard about whether their cubicle jobs justify their access to material wealth. This is both Unix' strenght and weakness:

> UNIX offers something else prized in literature: a coherence, a consistent style, something writers call a voice. It doesn't take much exposure to UNIX before you realize that the UNIX core was the creation of a very few well-synchronized minds.

The strenght of Unix is that it has a literary voice. The weakness is that it reads like David Foster Wallace.
</aside>

How could the command line – *linguistic request-response interface* – be better? The two biggest lacks are discoverability, and accessibility. These are so bad in a Linux terminal that people now think GUIs are inherently more discoverable and accessible. Think about it: It's *words*, it has the potential to be the most accessible interface ever.

This can't be solved by a better shell, the solution is social. #FOSS has historically privileged the voice of programmers; so we have terrible design everywhere because we don't honour the skills of designers (the average techbro seems to believe "design" means "style and themes"), we have poor or no documentation because we've long abandoned writers, we have poor translations because we have relied on "people who know both languages" instead of experienced translators, we have terrible art because whenever an artist asks for a feature they're told "code it yourself". (And then half the Linuxers I know migrate to OSX, "dunno it just feels nice").

Then there's the little detail of material conditions. Because we devs are the gold star little servants of capitalism, because our work is praised to high heaven as mankind's destiny and the solution to everything, because we earn *money*, it's easy for us to do work in our spare time as a hobby. Most designers, writers, artists etc. get their skin crawling just by thinking of doing something "for love". They're used to their skills being devalued and underpaid, they're used to be treat as disposable, and learn quick that the only way to make rent is to make sure you bill every little billable second, get in on contract, insist.

Now people will still find ways to contribute to communities they believe in, but they won't believe in a community that's putting you down at every little interaction. I don't know how to fix this, I can't change a whole community. But I've been getting more and more enthusiastic about ethical licenses, like the Nonviolent Public License (https://thufie.lain.haus/NPL.html) or the Anti-capitalist Software License (https://anticapitalist.software/ ). Not because I think social concerns can be addressed by licenses, but because these are "nonfree", so the movement forming around them represents a clean break with libertarian broism. Sticking something like the Cooperative Software License (https://lynnesbian.space/csl/) on your repo is a manifesto; it's like putting on a talisman to ward off channers and rationalists. FSF hates them, so we must be doing something right.

Plus they address the very important concern with exploitation; many ethical licenses restrict commercial use, or restrict use by capitalists (=companies whose owners are not the workers), cops etc. This won't *stop* the capitalists, of course, they have armies, but you can at least point your fingers at them. It's communal bonding.

Think about how confederalism (Rojava etc.) works; not all communities have necessarily the same ethics, but you can collaborate with those compatible. I imagine a social Debian: your sources.list flags which principles are important to you, and your package-get filters by licenses with those tags.

There is now a Delightful List on #OpenScience, a curated list of resources, organizations and free software that are supporting open science.
https://codeberg.org/teaserbot-labs/delightful-open-science
https://www.reddit.com/r/Open_Science/comments/p62wcq/there_is_now_a_delightful_list_on_openscience_a/?utm_source=ifttt

Happy 109 anniversary to this little nugget of an article. We've known what the problem is for over a century.