Benjamin Esham @bdesham@parcel5.social

For real like Bandcamp is exactly the kind of service we *hoped* the internet would give us: “hey, people make things, they set their own price inc. free, we provide the storefront, you buy it and the money goes to the creator, you get it in a DRM-free format and can play it however you want, we just make money to keep going & improving and aren’t a VC-funded nightmare company of rampant reckless growth that will do something nightmarish and implode.”

We need more media platforms like that.

i feel like i should get into org-mode because i do a lot of things with spreadsheets and i like plain text and stuff but it feels like the dwarf fortress version of notepad just saying

do you understand? it was never technology that made humane relations possible. it was you and i, and our commitment to each other.

a courier arrives from the next village on horseback with books, zines, letters, art prints, and a hard drive full of music and movies. we offload the drive while the courier joins us for lunch, sharing news — harvests, births, deaths, the goings-on of various governance councils — while we load a drive with our own new media. the courier leaves as full as they came, and well-fed besides.

in the alternate socialist present, i am herding goats with a cane and melody while replacing batteries in the mesh routers the ‘ware guild has hung from trees. later i dine at the village commissary and watch a movie projected on the side of a barn.

The fight for diversity, equality and inclusion is the fight for software freedom. Our movement will only be successful if it includes everyone. RMS does not speak for these values.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/16/rms-does-not-speak-for-us/

@ptvirgo @deejoe @gid I strongly agree with Matthew Garrett in that I don't want to see RMS replaced; we need to remove the necessity of having a single figurehead leader in the free software community: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html

We have now reached the part of the boarding process where the bus is full, but one more person squeezes on, proving one more can squeeze on, proving one more can squeeze on, therefore by induction, all of these people can squeeze on.

Abstracted from a discussion on lobste.rs: the most energy-intensive thing most people do on their computers is watch streaming video. Displaying plain text, on the other hand, is very energy efficient. Therefore, to reduce your carbon footprint, you should stop watching porn and start reading the alt.sex.stories.moderated archives.

2004 mood: Rushing to create an account on every new service so you can have the same name everywhere

2019 mood: Using a different name on every service because the internet is now a Dark Forest

Intellectual Property is when you dress up a peanut in a top hat and a monocle and get a lawyer to make sure no one else ever does this

one of the best parts of webdev is having to implement input validation on both the client and the server

The year is 2419, and my navigator absolutely insists on doing the plotting for all our hyperspace jumps from within emacs.

stolen from the interwebs