SemioticStandard

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
 

This'll be cool, I'm a huge fan of Dead Space

 

It’s beyond wild to me why anyone would have any kind of “loyalty” to Amazon. I’m also somewhat astonished at how popular it’s become to hook everything in your house up to the Internet, including door locks. I understand these aren’t new observations or concerns, but it still surprises me how people go “all in” on anything corporate, and anything smart home. (I say, posting from one of the many Apple devices in my Apple-only home. Well, I’m fairly agnostic about my servers, at least, running a mix of Rocky and Ubuntu, depending. Whatever gets the job done.)

Seems like corporations the last couple of years have been leaning HARD into giving people reasons why they can’t be trusted.

 

It’s beyond wild to me why anyone would have any kind of “loyalty” to Amazon. I’m also somewhat astonished at how popular it’s become to hook everything in your house up to the Internet, including door locks. I understand these aren’t new observations or concerns, but it still surprises me how people go “all in” on anything corporate, and anything smart home. (I say, posting from one of the many Apple devices in my Apple-only home.)

Seems like corporations the last couple of years have been leaning HARD into giving people reasons why they can’t be trusted.

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

IMO it’s fine to just make a post about it in one of the larger communities that seems appropriate. Now is exactly the time for us to promote one another! And Lemmy doesn’t have an algorithm, so you’re going to have to do some leg work to get the word out. I think people will be appreciative and understanding of that, I would be.

 

I saw Grady Hendrix recommend this on Facebook (sigh, yes, Facebook...I know, but plenty of people--like Grady Hendrix--still use it) and thought it looked fascinating.

Founded in 2019 by writer and editor Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, with art direction by Nathaniel Hébert, HELLEBORE is a small press devoted to British folk horror and the occult. As well as the magazine of the same name, HELLEBORE has published a travel guide (The Hellebore Guide to Occult Britain) and a card game (The Magical Card Battle of Britain). A World Fantasy Awards finalist in 2022, HELLEBORE has been featured in Fortean Times, Starburst Magazine, Rue Morgue, SFX and others.

 

I'm nearly of a mind to start a couple of Lemmy instances and front them with a load balancer--I have the resources and technical ability to build a Lemmy instance for scale--but I have zero interest in moderating the thing. I don't want to deal with the headache of everything that goes along with that, and don't want any responsibility for the users or content.

Would anyone be interested in a 'Lemmy Infra as-a-Service,' where I keep things running but hand off the management keys to you?

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The Internet, sadly, has always been an awful place for women and minorities. I hope we can build a culture here where that kind of shit isn’t tolerated, and all (sans trolls, bigots, racists, and Nazis) are made to feel welcome and respected.

Except the Dutch. Fuck those guys.

 

Whereas I might’ve been less generous with upvotes on Reddit, I think it’s important in these early formative stages to let others know that I appreciate their contributions. I hope it encourages growth and activity!

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Someone did, though there’s nothing on it now https://lemmynsfw.com/

 

I'm one of the recent Reddit converts, and one of my favorite subs is /r/comics. It's one of the few places that makes me laugh, a bright spot in my day, and as someone with dogshit mental health (like everyone else I guess), losing access to that sub is going to hurt, bad. If you follow artists there, please consider posting their work here!

 

The /r/earthporn subreddit was one of the top 5 subs I was desperately going to miss, thank you so much for making this!!

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Spammers and other bad actors are typically more likely to make the effort than people who might well add a lot of value.

Why do you think this?

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I disagree with that. The larger subreddits have significant moderation problems. Only through extraordinary efforts by the mod teams, such as at /r/askhistorians, are things kept in line. It's simple math: the more users you have, the more likely you are to have people posting in bad faith. If a subreddit of 1 million users has only 0.05% of its users posting low quality content, that's still 50,000 people that need to be moderated for.

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

The more popular a community becomes, the shittier it gets. The easier you make it to join and interact with, the more popular it will become.

In the case of places like Gab, Truth Social, Parlor, and other right wing nut job havens, while the quality of users might not get higher if you raised the barrier to entry, those places certainly wouldn’t have become as popular as they have.

But the barrier to entry isn’t the only reason they’ve congregated there, they have other cultural reasons driving them, primarily the owners or moderators being friendly to that kind of mindset. I don’t think the same crowd would be able to gather here as they’d just get defederated.

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Okay. Well, we're all hungry. We're gonna get to our hotplates soon enough, alright?

 

I was riding my bike a few weeks ago and came across this couple parked in their old MG, watching the sun set. They allowed me to take a few pictures of them. Wish I hadn't cut off the back part of the car in the composition, but alas.

Taken with a Canon EOS R7, 18mm, f/5.6

(Also I know this is my 3rd upload in the past couple of days, but I'm trying to help get this community going!)

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I want Lemmy to succeed, I want to be optimistic about it as an alternative to Reddit, but OP is correct, and we need to be honest about this very simple fact:

The Reddit we knew and loved is gone, and that’s a sad, tragic thing, and there likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement for a long time, if ever.

It’s okay to admit to ourselves that this whole situation sucks, because it absolutely does. That doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy Lemmy and other federated things like it, and it doesn’t mean that federation doesn’t have advantages over Reddit, but let’s be honest: most of us were happy at Reddit, using our favorite 3rd party app (like Apollo), and we wouldn’t be here if the admins weren’t happy to kill what we once loved.

All we can do is try to make the best of it.

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Agreed. This is depressing as hell. Apollo is a joy to use. There are so many niche communities on Reddit that I enjoy, and even if Lemmy or other federated things like it take off, those communities are largely going to die. This is a tragedy, no matter how you look at it. We are losing.

[–] SemioticStandard@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Juniper for R/S, Palo for firewalls. At home I use pfsense and UniFi APs and in that environment they’re great.

 

These kinds of monsters are totally cliche, but even as a veteran horror fan and late-30s male, this one still creeped me the fuck out. Anyone else?

Supposedly Valak first appears in The Lesser Key of Solomon: https://allthatsinteresting.com/valak

Solomon features King Solomon of Old Testament fame who was renowned for his wisdom. At some point around the second century B.C., the idea spread that the king’s realm of knowledge had also included certain secrets of astrology and magic. The grimoire bearing his name lists the 72 demons that the king supposedly vanquished during his reign, providing readers with their names and instructions for expelling them should they come in contact with such spirits themselves. Valak, which is sometimes also spelled Ualac, Valu, Volac, Doolas or Volach, is the 62nd spirit listed in Solomon, according to which he “appeareth like a boy with angels wings, riding on a two-headed dragon.” His special power, according to the text, is finding snakes and hidden treasures while leading an army of 30 demons.

I don’t believe in any of that and I’m not at all religious, but it’s creepy and interesting to me anyway!

 

StokerCon is next week! I'm going, and will be moderating a panel on AI. I also have a story that's in an anthology (Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, by Weird Little Worlds) that's up for a Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Anthology. Is anyone else going?!

 

Early impressions sound like Apple may have actually pulled this off. Here’s what The Verge had to say:

Was all this made better by the wildly superior Vision Pro hardware? Without question. But was it made more compelling? I don’t know, and I’m not sure I can know with just a short time wearing the headset. I do know that wearing this thing felt oddly lonely. How do you watch a movie with other people in a Vision Pro? What if you want to collaborate with people in the room with you and people on FaceTime? What does it mean that Apple wants you to wear a headset at your child’s birthday party? There are just more questions than answers here, and some of those questions get at the very nature of what it means for our lives to be literally mediated by screens.

I definitely agree with that. I’d like to try this but I don’t know if I’d ever want one.

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