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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • The latter, but I also don’t really mind paywalls in the form of “get early access” like SMBC comics or “get exclusive special content” like a lot of bands do.

    You can just straight paywall with those too, but you don’t have too. A band I like crowdfunded a music video and you can watch it free on youtube, but if you didn’t crowdfund it you missed out on perks that go all the way up to being in the music video


  • Probably my favorite set of stories is by qntm, who writes lots of short fiction you can check out at his site. He wrote There Is No Antimemetics Division, which I think is best described by the intro he wrote for it:

    An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

    Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…

    But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

    Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

    No, this is not your first day.

    There’s a lot of other good entries too. They generally take the form of a wiki entry at https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/, as a classified file describing some anomalous thing or event. They have a shared canon but only loosely, individual stories can conflict with one another. Here’s a couple good ones:

    I’ll post over in [email protected] too, to see what other people recommend for getting into it













  • On a related note, I think libraries do need a bit of a facelift, and not just be “the place where books live”. It’s important to keep that function, but also expand to “a place where learning happens”. I know lots of libraries are doing this sort of thing, but your average person is probably still stuck in the “place where books live” mindset, as you allude. I’m talking stuff like 3D printers, makerspaces, diybio, classes about detecting internet bullshit, etc.


  • Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like

    americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are

    They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?

    Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.

    Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.

    I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.




  • Not the person you’re asking, but I’d say yes. Don’t bother charging for bits, except for something like the bandcamp model, i.e. “yes, i could pirate this but i want to support the creator and it’s really easy to do so”.

    We have better funding models now that we’ve solved the problem of copying at zero cost. Patreon is a good and popular one, as well as kickstarters. You can’t pirate something that doesn’t get made, which is the perfect solution. Other art like music also makes money off of things like live performances that can’t be digitized.

    Note that the one aspect of copyright that I like is attribution requirements. I think it’s perfectly fine to hand out information to anyone, as long as you say “here’s this cool thing, this is who created it, and this is how you can give them money”.