Stray Amanuensis

Achieve your dreams!

I was a year above most of them at school so they threw a "goodbye" murder mystery for me just before graduation, and about 2/3 of the way through the game we all realized that everyone had at least attempted to kill the victim. The game then shifted from "whodunnit" to "who succeeded in dunninit" which we all felt was not only super fun but above the usual level of narrative complexity for those games.

The Royal Armouries let me play about in their armour!

consistent practice opens up whole worlds of skill that you couldn't imagine

making mistakes in the process of learning is not only natural, it is also essential

activities that you enjoy can give you more energy back than you spent on them

IN THE LEGEND, THEY BASICALLY SENT SOMEONE TO TROY TO SAY “THIS HORSE IS FOR ATHENA, NOT YOU, SO OUR RETREAT BACK TO GREECE IS SAFE. DON’T TRY TO TAKE IT. IT WON’T FIT THROUGH THE GATES OF YOUR CITY, SO THERE’S NO WAY YOU DICKS CAN STEAL IT AND PRETEND YOU GOT IT FOR ATHENA. NOT FOR TROJANS.”

AND THEN TROY WAS LIKE “YOU’RE NOT OUR DAD. WE WON THIS WAR AND WE’RE TAKING YOUR STUPID HORSE AS A TROPHY SO WE’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER HOW BAD GREECE IS AT DESTROYING TROY.” 

AND A FEW TROJANS WERE LIKE “THIS IS A TRICK” AND TRIED TO EXPOSE IT AS A TRICK BUT THE REST OF THE TROJANS WOULD HAVE NONE OF IT BECAUSE EVERYONE WAS SWEPT UP IN THE THRILL OF VICTORY, AND ALSO BECAUSE THE GODS KEPT SENDING SNAKES TO STRANGLE ANYONE WHO SAID ANYTHING, BECAUSE THE GREEK GODS HAD NO WORD FOR “SUBTLETY”

To explain why, I want to say that even though I've only been programming since high school, I hung out in techie communities and knowledge spaces way before that. And in these kind of circles, there is a way of thinking about openness and knowledge-sharing that is treated as basically a truism:

"Free/libre open-source is ipso facto better than closed-source. Anyone who says otherwise is, with near-total certainty, an Enemy looking to exploit and oppress you for their own profit. FOSS is, while not sufficient, an absolutely necessary precondition for preserving your rights and freedoms. Attempts at Closing the Source must be vociferously opposed, wherever and whenever they appear, and we should make extensive organizational and legal apparatuses to fight these fights; we can assume that there will be counterattacks by the Enemy and we must be organized and ready to repel them."

This stuff gets repeated, in various forms, every single day on technologist fora (Usenet, once upon a time, followed by Slashdot and Groklaw and Hacker News and Techdirt etc.), and any kind of disagreement is treated at best with a presumption of wrongness where the speaker is assumed to carry a large burden of proof, and honestly even that is less common than just naked hostility. You can assume that this stuff is a fundamental meme in these communities, in the same way "democracy and human rights are Good; anyone saying otherwise is deeply sus" is a fundamental meme in developed Western countries.