This entirely spoils the experience of first playing The Beginner’s Guide and assumes you’re familiar with the basic plot. If you’re interested, please play The Beginner’s Guide first. It’s a $5-$10 experience that lasts about an hour and a half. It’s so good that I wrote about it.
It’s been eight months since what I’ve jokingly called my Homestuck Divorce. I published The Unofficial Homestuck Collection Takedown and The Homestuck Union Was Always Fake explaining everything, but they’re very long. I think I did need to be thorough in documenting those details, but the information that’s relevant to most people is hard to consume. People kept asking me to summarize and I’d…
This is an addendum to OS-Level Age Attestation is the Good One , where I talk about the potential of legal standards for age attestation as an alternative to age verification. Not already convinced of the dangers of age verification? The extent of the evil waiting behind identification systems and deanonymization is unspeakably vast, and fortunately it’s getting extensive coverage. Here’s a quick…
There’s a coordinated effort to use the “child safety” euphemism to cripple the internet with identity verification mandates. That’s bad. But buried in the mix there’s a genuinely good idea with enough political capital that it might stick around and do some good. Every time I’ve tried to write an article on the topic of child internet safety my energy has fizzled into depression, because as one…
Interloper is an unfiction ARG series for source nerds. It feels like Interloper was laser-targeted to drive me specifically insane, but it turns out that was true for a lot of people. After three years the first episode has 856k views, and the recently released final episode is a feature-length 1:54 film that earns its runtime. Don’t read this before watching the series! If you’re a Source engine…
Fandom is the most important thing in the modern media industry. Fans buy the products and advertise the brand, but are also the primary source of feedback. The media is what the community forms around, but the community is what feeds the media. But the relationship between a work’s copyright holder and its fan community is structurally antagonistic. The IP holder and members of the fan community…
When I was a kid I learned about Lindenmeyer Systems and the fun tree patterns they create. I even followed a Twitter bot that generated and posted random pretty lsystem renders. These are similar to fractals, except unlike traditional fractals they don’t usually expand within a fixed space, they either continue to grow or loop back intersecting themselves. Meanwhile I spent most of my time…
Here’s an advertisement I got from a game company named Rogue Duck Interactive. Rogue Duck Interactive @rogueducknet Start your cozy airport security job!👮🏻♂️ Weigh and scan bags, ask passengers questions, and if you are not convinced, search their luggage for dangerous items. Wishlist on Steam! Thu Aug 28 05:05:07 +0000 2025 The game they’re advertising here — which they neglect to name…
Recently we’ve seen sweeping attempts to censor the internet. The UK’s “Online Safety Act” imposes sweeping restrictions on speech and expression . It’s disguised a child safety measure, but its true purpose is (avowedly!) intentional control over “services that have a significant influence over public discourse” . And similar trends threaten the US , especially as lawmakers race to more…
Shortly after the publication of this article the Homestuck Independent Creative Union changed their name to “Furthest Ring Studios”: Furthest Ring Studios @furthest0studio We are Furthest Ring Studios. Wed Oct 22 18:43:30 +0000 2025 So if you’re wondering about Furthest Ring Studios, this article is about them. Same people, same organization, freshly laundered label. As part of this pivot, the…
This is the originally-published report, including the relevant logs and blow-by-blow narrative. It is very long. If you’re just looking to hear what happened you would probably prefer the summary . Bottom line up front Since November 2023 The Unofficial Homestuck Collection has been entangled in legal discussions with Homestuck and Andrew Hussie. 1 This was quickly revealed to be a false pretext:…
Deltarune came out! Weirdly, that’s kind of a problem? People who care about the game have this immediate need to stay off social media so as not to be spoiled. There is a rush to for anyone who ever wants to play the game to do so immediately, because if you don’t the Internet will ensure you don’t get a blind experience. You’re forced to binge it or be spoiled. I was just thinking about chapter…
SUPERHOT VR released in 2017. Then in 2021 the game’s entire story was removed. What’s happened here is fascinating, but somehow nobody has talked about it seriously. Because it’s censorship in a video game — a topic the gaming community cannot be normal about — it is nearly impossible to even think about the issue through all the noise. Anyone aware of this topic at all seems to be screaming…
AI is a huge subject, so it’s hard to boil my thoughts down into any single digestible take. That’s probably a good thing. As a rule, if you can fit your understanding of something complex into a tweet, you’re usually wrong. So I’m continuing to divide and conquer here, eat the elephant one bite at a time, etc. Right now I want to address one specific question: whether people have the right to…
This spoils Murder Drones! I think Murder Drones is fun and you should watch and enjoy it! Take two and a half hours, go watch the whole series, and then come back. I love murder drones. I think they’re such great little guys. Bring me a robot maid and I am yours forever, etc. But watching through the series itself actually took me a few stabs, and I think it’s due to a few design decisions that…
This was originally published 2020-07-07 as a reward for sponsors of Befriendus A Domain-Specific Compression Algorithm — as I later found out this is called — is a compression algorithm that uses the specific nature of the target data as a way to efficiently compress it. The more you know about the structure of the data you’re compressing and what tools you have to reconstruct data, the more…
Did you know there are still people who think the MCU’s Thanos is a deep character with interesting motivations? For all the CinemaSins “why didn’t he use his powers to end scarcity, is he stupid” types, there are still “Thanos did nothing wrong” chuds. This is stupid, of course. But after seeing people be wrong on the internet, it occurred to me recently that there are a couple of genuinely…
Bluesky has very quickly become a serious social media platform. This means it’s having to deal with all the problems social media platforms have to deal with, including impersonation. A lot of people flocked to Bluesky from Twitter, and so recreating something like Twitter’s verification system seems like a natural step. Bluesky Safety @safety.bsky.app 6/ We also hear your feedback: users want…
I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to “use” something. Except obviously, it’s not theirs, and so it’s absurd for them to make that demand, right? Quick examples I’m not trying to pick on this person at all: they’re not a twitter main character, they’re not expressing an unusual opinion here, they seem completely nice and cool. But I think…
This was originally something I was going to talk about in Corporations have Rejected Copyright , back when that series was going to just be one long post (really!). But since I saw Nintendo apparently sued Palworld today , I wanted to put this up as background information. You should definitely read You’ve Never Seen Copyright first, particularly the explanation of what patents are, because this…
Part 2: Growth, Waste, and Externalities The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean there isn’t a power problem. If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems. But if we’ve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, what’s left? The energy problems aren’t coming from inefficient…
Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people don’t actually want. Worse, it then turns out there’s some reason they’re not just useless, they’re actively harmful. While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes — cryptocurrency, “the metaverse”, artificial intelligence… — all seem to…
or, the many people who said movies like Coyote v. Acme that were killed for a tax write-off should be forced into the public domain were right, and here’s why This is the last post in a series. You can read this entry by itself, but for the full context, start at the beginning . Copyright is busted, now what? A healthy system of creative rights, including a balanced form of copyright, is a…
Remember when Elon Musk was trying to weasel out of overpaying for Twitter? During this very specific May 2022-Jul 2022 period, there was a very artificial discourse manufactured over the problem of “fake accounts” on Twitter. The reason it was being brought up was very stupid, but the topic stuck with me, because it’s deeply interesting in a way that the conversation at the time never really…