Science fiction has ALWAYS come with a sizable dose of social commentary.

Shelley was writing about the dangers of poor empathy and pride in creating new beings, with Frankenstein.

Wells was talking about the arrogance and inhumanity of colonialism when he wrote "War of the Worlds".

Even Verne, who was relatively apolitical, gave us Nemo, who was anticolonial.

Heinlein's politics were loud, if not always consistent.

Asimov's main political interest was that science itself should matter.

@xarvos

A list of confusable-unicode characters would be kind of handy, in general. Surely there must be one somewhere by now?

A suspicious case would be a URL that has characters from such a list, mixed in with other characters from the alternate set.

I.e. if you encounter a Cyrillic 'а' in a URL composed mostly of Latin characters (or any mix of the two, really), that's probably suspicious.

A legit Cyrillic domain name probably wouldn't do that (I think?).

@silmathoron @xpil @rysiek

@rysiek

That's all extended latin, though, right? And the accents are visible.

Not like having 'е' and 'і' instead of 'e' and 'i'.

Or even 'г' instead of 'r', though you can technically see that one.

Thing is, Cyrillic and Greek character sets are generally used independently, which is why they have confusable characters in the first place. It's pretty rare to have a legit need to mix Cyrillic or Greek characters in with Latin.

@xarvos @silmathoron @xpil

@hhardy01 @ajroach42

NOT Star Trek TMP (1979).
He's talking about Star Trek (2009).

"The Abramination" as I prefer to call it.

Seriously, it wouldn't actually be a terrible movie if it just weren't claiming to be part of Star Trek, IMHO. It reads like SNL parody of Star Trek, not like the real thing.

@natecull @ajroach42

I've always thought it would be pretty cool to have a GUI based on flow-programming (like the Blender node system). Where programs would be programmable nodes with defined inputs and outputs.

It's very similar to the notion of Unix streams and pipes, but actually more flexible, since you can have more channels.

There's a Qt library for doing this kind of design, called "Floppy", I don't know if it would apply as a GUI shell.

https://github.com/JLuebben/Floppy

@clacke
Hmm. Sounds interesting.
How are you watching it?
HBO's streaming service?

I have started using this metaphor when recommending friends to use it.

The metaphor extends to the available feeds:

'Home': chat w/ my friends circle, including neighbors and visitors you invited in.

'Local': building party, hang w/ neighbors.

'Federated': take a walk down the street, see weird stuff, chat w/ random strangers, but keep your guard up.

Of course, it's not a perfect match, but I think it quickly conveys the social experience and trade-offs between different instances.

The most daunting thing for me about joining Mastodon/Fediverse was picking an instance.

Having joined one, a RL metaphor emerges for me: "it's like picking an apartment building."

You need to evaluate the management. Do they respect tenant rights? Is the desk clerk skeevy?

Do you want to live in a big impersonal complex? Or a little boarding house, where people share a lot and have house parties? You can even be a "home owner" and run your own instance (pay the bills, fix the plumbing).

@n8 @lgm

I guess you mean in person?
I can see how that would be sad for people who went to them.

But I could never afford to go, so the last couple of years of LGM being available online have really been fun for me!

https://conf.tube/c/lgm_2021_online/videos

@clacke

It's sort of an "enemy of my enemy" thing.

DeSantis is enacting severe homophobic legislation in Florida. Disney opposed it. DeSantis threatened to revoke their cushy special tax status in FL.

So, yeah, liberals would normally like to see Disney pay more taxes, but (many) are more interested in defending Disney's resistance to DeSantis.

This, despite the fact that Disney has not historically been a terribly progressive company and generally has backed conservative politics.

@clacke

Elizabeth Warren was a good choice. Bernie Sanders was also pretty good. This is of recent candidates, of course.

The President matters less than the Senate, though. Our biggest problem is that we have partisan gridlock and can't pass any but the most tepid and anodyne legislation.

The 2nd biggest is that one of our two major parties has run off the rails into fascist crazytown. Not that they were ever really good, but they weren't batshit crazy before.

@petros

This can, of course, be thought of us a tool for figuring out how to build a good, pro-social community platform.

I'm going to shut up now, but I'm still playing with this thing!

THANKS!

Empirically, the problem with the "humans are basically bad but for the 'thin veneer of civilization'" theory can be summed up simply:

"If civilization is so fragile, then WHY is it EMERGENT?"

We didn't slide to our present state from some past state of grace. We climbed here from a complete lack of civilization.

Humans are self-organizing by nature. If we have a fault, it's probably that we tend towards _too much_ order.

@ajroach42

"Rights clearance" for a free/open production is almost as much of a challenge as for a proprietary Hollywood venture.

The difference is that, for me, the question is "how is it licensed?", whereas Hollywood is structured around "who owns the rights?"

My goal is to ensure everything that goes into my film is compatible, one way or another, with "CC By-SA 4.0", the release license.

Hollywoods is to make sure they "own" everything they need for a given release.

@ajroach42

I see memes a long the lines of "If you can't pay $15/hr, you can't afford to be in business".

And I'm like, I paid nothing even close to that to the person who did most of the character animation in Ep 1 (I did some of it, but to be clear, I SUCK at character animation).

What I paid was a pittance of an advance to give her an excuse to keep working on it pro bono.

I feel BAD about that. And she's gone. I can't just HIRE someone to replace her on those terms. That's HARD work.

@ajroach42

To be clear, we're still on good terms, but she's not animating anymore, and I do NOT blame her at all.

She WAS happy about the computer I built for her when I found out she was animating on her boyfriend's computer because she couldn't afford one. Damn.

Meanwhile, I am left sucking at character animation, and trying to somehow stumble through it on my own, anyway.

Skipping over the part where I put my self in the hospital from burnout.

This CAN NOT BE THE WAY WE MAKE FILMS.

@calcifer

You mean "first publication rights" with a sunset clause that gives them a fixed time in which to publish, before the rights revert? I think that is a clause in some contracts.

Also, I think this is what it means to "option" film rights to a story. You have a certain period to deliver, then you lose it.

I really wish I had insisted on a three year sunset when I signed an NDA on a concept art job. I had intended to use it for my portfolio.

@ajroach42

@ajroach42

This is not quite that simple. Few films are made by one person and self-funded.

So that means that getting the RIGHT to release the film under CC license is hard.

Investors balk (or I think so -- I've never had conventional investors, but I do know that "exclusive IP/rights" is a pretty standard idea in investment.

Contributors balk, too, sometimes. Particularly peripheral/passive contributors like music artists on the soundtrack.

@ajroach42

Oh, absolutely. TRAP.

But it also has really great BAIT 💰.

Film-making, even on an extremely low budget, is EXPENSIVE.

Investment is often the only practical way to support it. And investors want that ROI, which in our economy, is coupled tightly with IP rights.

Crowd-funding is NOT the whole answer, I can attest from direct experience.

[Damn, I have so much to write here...]

@ajroach42

E.g., my "Lunatics!" project is VERY low-budget. But even so, I've spent an estimated $25,000 cash and 10 years of full-time work on it (very privileged to be able to do that!), and I'm still not done with the 17-minute PILOT episode.

Now that's the actual cash cost, you understand. The labor is at least an order-of-magnitude higher cost (probably higher).

And that's just MY contribution. There are over 30 people in my credits.