@fasterandworse Published a book about hypertext two years before the Web… but two years after Hypercard.
Middle-aged SRE, he/him. Brexit-afflicted resident of Austria. Once defeated a Beholder with nothing but a sharpened gourd. Profile picture is reasonably accurate.
@fasterandworse Published a book about hypertext two years before the Web… but two years after Hypercard.
@raoul Strong “that kid at primary school who took a few weeks of karate lessons then told you he could easily kill you so he had to be careful not to lose his temper now” vibes.
@strangebirds @V0ldek I’d like to think that every human cryo facility has a “Days Since Last Accidental Thawing-Out” sign. Or maybe “Days Since Last Midnight Dumping of Several Lumpy Sacks”.
@gerikson “Adraste wishes to send a private message to Beroe, but suspects that Erebus is intercepting their scrolls…”
@dgerard Eric the Arthur B.?
@Soyweiser Must be the earlier discarded version of Newspeak where instead of compressing the vocabulary to make nuance impossible to convey they did the opposite. It worked okay until a Party member was heard by a 10 year old Junior Spy describing Big Brother as “a doubleshit maxipompous arsetalker” and was last seen being beaten senseless by the Thought Police.
@gerikson Not just right wing. Orwell abuse is pretty much universal - I have a rule of thumb that anyone who describes something as “Orwellian” has either never read any Orwell or read 1984 once many years ago and remembers that it had cameras in it or something. It’s popular because it’s seen as an argument-stopping intervention - a more intellectual version of making Hitler comparisons. Reductio ad Orwellium?
@self So basically it’s like a science fiction novel, except that they haven’t realised that it’s one of those novels where the author develops an entire society based on some weird totalitarian cult just so they can spend the rest of the plot demonstrating how nutso said society is?
@dgerard Oh, the Antiversity! I remember that. I think it was one of the first Lovecraftian horrors I was exposed to when I first started to take an interest in this particular rabbithole of weird.
@dgerard me: what is an urbit
wikipedia: look, you really don’t want to know, but if you insist…
me: 🙀
@andrew_bidlaw For most people who suffer from paedophilia in the ICD-11 sense (which is a mental health disorder) and undergo years of treatment and therapy while living in terror that they might one day give in to their own instincts and do something unspeakable… it’s not surprising they prefer to not give interviews.
@sc_griffith It’s true. The bakery just down the road has both male and female staff and it’s really pretty inconvenient that every time I go in I have to ask if they’d mind taking a quick break from the constant fucking in order to serve me. And don’t mention the time I asked if they had “a couple of nice floury baps for me”.
@gerikson Yeah, that’s a point well made. In this particular instance - did a bit of digging and the “Global Priorities Institute” is funded by… Open Philanthropy, which is run by… EAs. Lordy.
@mountainriver (Another great example is Churchill - went to Harrow and his father had decided he was joining the army so he was put in the “army form”, which existed solely to prepare them for the Sandhurst entrance exams. Still took the old racist three tries to pass)
@mountainriver Uh, yeah, no. It’s more that it’s a massive university which is seen as a very prestigious place for various people with money to splash it about funding research institutions or whatever and because government funding for higher education and research is in a dire state they’re very enthusiastic about taking the cash. It’s also got a whole lot of weird little colleges and private halls. The military types who did the colonialising wouldn’t have dreamed of wasting time on higher education - straight from Eton or Harrow to Sandhurst and a commission in their father’s old regiment. Orwell went straight from Eton to the colonial police in Burma.
@dgerard He’s such an amazing engineering genius he can’t even build a racist chatbot?
@dgerard Thiel and Andreessen. I love the way that as soon as the Hondurans started saying mean things these proud libertarians went crying straight to the US State Department.
@grumpybozo @swlabr We’re more of an exclusive ore, I like to think.
@swlabr To be fair to the authors, they found that pretty horrifying too.
@gerikson Eh, I grew up in a family of doctors. They’d discuss their workdays at the dinner table. I fear nothing. Let’s have a read, see what all the fuss is ab… (turns green, excuses self)