Not an apostate but a heretic

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

Here are some of the scripts I’m using to email University Research Librarians and department chairs/assistant and associate deans who I know oversee faculty who use resources from data.world for their lessons:

in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.

in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."

what is a side-slip, you ask?

it's drifting.

the guy goddamn drifted his 767.

in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.

and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

deport part of me to Norway, part of me to Wales, and part of me to the Philippines by mistake

Little-known fact: you can exploit a text-to-speech glitch in Rodrigo Duterte to speedrun decolonization by reclassifying the Philippines as white, creating a valid deportation target for Europe and North America not associated with an Ethnic Atrocity, and thus not carrying the Ancestral Sin trait.

Normally you wouldn’t be able to do this due to the population cap, but if you unlock the Arcologies special technology (doable by 2030 if you devote points away from culture war, which is the default use of ideology energy), you can increase the maximum population cap of the Philippines to 1.4 billion, allowing you to subject every white ethnic on Earth to the Enhanced Migration action, skyrocketing the population density to 3,333 per square kilometer. This consumes the entire mineral exports of Africa, South America, and Australia for ten years (which will lower your ethics score due to a colonialism penalty, but you can use Deep Sea Mining to accomplish it in 40 years with no ethics burn) and converts all settleable area in the Philippines to the Post-Industrial Megacity classification.

Okay, so that gets you the Decolonization achievement, right?  But that’s not the fun part.  

You see, you can pull this off while playing as the Philippines since the AI always pursues Decolonization.  Having created a valid migration target, which doesn’t normally exist in the game, every other country will send their white ethnics to you for free.  (It costs less than e.g. the Reeducation civic.)  Prior to around 2050-2080, subjects of Enhanced Migration also take their life savings with them, which is mostly going to be dollars/euros, and the effects on the money supply are not modeled(!).

So you have plenty of money to build things like Sea Crawlers, though you can accelerate the process by importing minerals, so I like to do both.  

You enter the mid-game.  You have high education levels.  You have high development levels.  You have a population of about a billion.  You have maxed out experience with the Arcologies special technology.  You also have a lot of population pressure.  The last two combined allow you to pursue the Space Colony special technology about 50-60 years before you’re normally supposed to, despite being a future tech.

You can create new megacorps almost at will (the maximum of 10 per turn).  A ten billion-dollar funding round is nothing to you, so you can go through megacorps like kleenex, which is good, because you’re going to use about 50 of them.  The Space Colony special project is supposed to be tough, and it receives a penalty for every decade it’s built before 2160.  It will take between 20-50 megacorp bankruptcies before it can be completed.

Now, astute players will note that the World Union Government always seems to emerge about 10-20 years after Decolonization is achieved.  That’s not an accident.  The developers did that way to avoid exactly what we’re about to do next.

After the Decolonization achievement is unlocked for the game, your ethics penalty will drop by more than half due to your population no longer having Ancestral Sin.  (Make sure you have the Space Colony completed before this point.  Refuse some Enhanced Migration from the other powers to drag out the process if you have to.)  

Immediately switch your government type to Dictatorship.  Set your Space Colony to produce only powered exosuits with the “high-mobility” modification.

The World Union period is supposed to be about mopping up the last remnants of Imperialist Colonialist resistance, and the developers didn’t want to show that they knew much about military technology.  As such, you can apply the Militarized template to any vehicle.  Powered exosuits are designed for deep sea and extreme environment operation, and as such they have a high Armor rating despite being construction vehicles.  The maximum attack power of the Militarized template is based on a unit’s physical strength, and powered exosuits also have a very high physical strength, allowing them to mount almost any weapon that doesn’t have the ‘naval’ requirement.

When the World Union demands that you join, refuse.  Every other government in the game will declare war on you, but this doesn’t matter.  The Space Colony will churn out 10 new powered exosuit units (amounting to about 500 exosuits) every turn, and it can only be attacked by space weapons, which no other government can produce enough of to stop you.  You have an invincible fortress beyond the reach of the WUG and can drop military units anywhere on the planet.

Since your massive ethics penalty has been lifted, you can now fight a war with every other government on the planet without your Morale dropping so low that it causes your government to dissolve.  This allows you to get the World Conquest antiachievement (in the same game as Decolonization), which will ban you from the game.

But we’re not done yet.  The Developers HATE that people are doing this, but there’s a next step.  (Also, they claimed that they didn’t patch it because they were sending the funds from sales to the Decolonization Action Group, but actually they can’t patch because they sold the copyright to a Brazilian pension fund.)

Appeal the ban to Steam on the grounds that “the right of space colonies to political self-determination” is your “sincerely-held religious belief.”  If there is ANY gamer in your family tree, you will be instantly un-banned as this is constitutionally-protected as ruled by Unicorn6888 vs Activision.

I believe that (within reason, but with quite liberal boundaries) children deserve the right to pick out their own everyday clothes and hairstyles and other aspects of their personal presentations (including in gendered aspects), like all people do.

I also think that we Live In A Culture and part of that involves cultural norms restricting what kinds of things can be worn (really at what level of formality) to different occasions, and it's not denying a child their humanity to make them wear something more formal for a school picture or a wedding or a recital if that is the norm, any more than it's denying my humanity that I have to wear "nicer" but less comfortable clothes to certain events. For instance, I didn't enjoy dressing in a blazer and black pants and shoes and going around all day like that for a campus job interview, but part of Living In A Culture is knowing that dressing a certain way is a method of signaling and that my chances of being hired are jeopardized if I don't, whether I find it comfortable or not. We also, to some degree, have to teach children how to Live In A Culture, even though sometimes the cultural norms aren't entirely based on rationality of fairness (for which we can and should express sympathy to the children: "I'm sorry, I know wearing these clothes is annoying and might not feel natural, I don't really enjoy it either, but it would mean a lot for us all to look a little fancier for this"). I would make an exception for dresses vs. masculine formal wear as gendered norms cause certain issues, especially as apparently there are a decent number of transgender children or children with severe Gender Feelings, and as I consider enforcement of gender norms to be purely ridiculous. But I'm not convinced that making a child wear something 'nicer' for a certain appropriate occasion (according to our cultural norms) rather than the shorts and T-shirt they'd prefer is denying them their humanity.

Beyond the quip though, OP clearly mentions a formal suit, so I find it weird you’re using “a bit more formal” in your examples of “we live in a society”, since clearly formality wasn’t the axis OP cared about.

Regarding “we live in a society” and clothes, as my kids are old enough, we talk about how places like school try to come up with rules that make the smallest number of people uncomfortable. Lots of people have strong traditions about what clothes to wear, so dress codes usually try to find the minimally distracting compromise given all the different kinds of people who go to your school. Nobody gets to run around topless and no one is required to wear hats; if we went to a different school the balance might be different.

Try as I might, I am struggling to locate the person who lives in a society who benefits if my kid wears a dress to picture day. If it’s not me, my kid, the photographer, her teacher… then I’m dressing my kid up to please strangers? That’s honestly a bit creepy, emotionally, and ethically it’s not at all compelling. I don’t even know they’ll like it! Meanwhile my kid is right there, telling me what they want.

I admit I was being sloppy and vague about which part of the thread I was most responding to at different times. It's true that the examples given in the thread were purely about gendered clothes, and I agreed that we should be extremely liberal in letting kids choose what they wear on the gender axis (because gender rules are just so utterly pointless and strong gender feelings are clearly a thing) and demand that our schools and institutions exercise a similar liberalism. I was responding more to Max and the person below them who showed their tags summarizing the issue as a more general "not letting your kid make all the decisions on what they wear is not treating them as a human being".

When I talk about us Living In A Culture, I'm not talking about our decision to not follow norms necessarily affecting some larger pool of nameless, faceless people; it's often the case that we're talking about just a few closer people in our lives being affected, but they're part of our culture and interpret things within the framework of those cultural norms. Dressing "nicely" is the default for school picture day, and the teacher as well as the school and the people involved with the making of the yearbook are typically going to react according to how the child is presented relative to that default. In fact, the parent will be affected in that their kid being the only one in a ratty T-shirt on school picture day will result in assumptions being made about the parent. (Yes, classism is unfortunately entwined with this, I don't deny that.) On top of that, the child's future self may well be affected once they grow to be 12 or 13 years old and figure out the signalling effect of something they saw absolutely no meaning to at age 8, and feel weird about what they see in their 3rd grade yearbook -- I remember vividly how I went through this evolution, beginning with elementary school age where everything clothing-related seemed so completely and profoundly annoyingly arbitrary to me that I couldn't possibly have understood all the social implications of what we wear until a few years later and then was grateful that I hadn't been allowed to wear anything I felt like at any occasion when I was younger.

Here's an adjacent personal example that doesn't imply some thesis, exactly, but may show how my thinking is colored. My entire life, up through my current age of nearly four decades on this earth, I have hated with an absolute passion the idea of having to smile for photos; for whatever neurological reason I find it unusually difficult to put a smile on my face on demand; I actually consider it a loathsome cultural expectation because of the insincerity involved and gaze longingly at cultures (I think some Eastern cultures) where smiling for photos is less of a norm; and most photos of me where I'm posing make me look some degree of awkward as a result. On top of that, I blink easily, especially under pressure, and multiple attempts are often required for getting a picture of me with my eyes totally open, at least if the camera is set up with flash. One of the little regularly recurring struggles of childhood was my parents stubbornly making me smile for pictures and look directly into the camera. One year -- I think maybe it was 4th grade -- for the school photo I wound up not smiling properly and having my eyes either closed or looking down, and copies of the photo came back in an envelope to my parents (it was a much less digital age than now) with an insert headed "WE'RE SORRY!" and (I think) an offer to retake the photo for a discount or something. I still remember my parents' feeling of embarrassment over this, particularly the heading "WE'RE SORRY!", which made me feel rather ashamed as a result, especially knowing that I may well have been the only kid in the class whose photo had to be returned with an expression of regret and an offer to take it again.

this is such a cute research programme.

Recent evidence suggests that the human brain automatically constructs a rich model of other people’s attention, beyond registering low-level cues such as someone else’s gaze direction. This model is not a physically accurate representation of attention, but instead appears to contain simplifying and physically incoherent features. For example, without explicitly realizing it, people treat the attentive gaze of others as though it exerts a gentle force pushing on objects. Here we specify another aspect of that implicit model of attention. People treat the attentive gaze of an agent as though it were travelling through space, with an implied motion encoded literally enough that it causes a perceptual motion adaptation effect. This implicit model of other people’s attention may facilitate the process of keeping track of who is attending to what, which is essential for reading and predicting the minds and behavior of social agents. This implicit model of attention may also have shaped culturally widespread ideas about mind and spirit.

I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it, and the science is conflicting. When in doubt, however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion. I also try to get proximate, and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56. 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah. 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah. 1 transgender student playing girls sports. 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality. 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide. Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live.

And a happy anniversary!

Hi all,

We have more details about the pre-registration event! You can find them linked on our website. Pre-registration means you can come and pick up your badge/any relevant materials (e.g. your voting token) the evening before, skipping the line.

Pre-Registration

DATE: July 31st, 2026 TIME: 4:00 PM – 8:30 PM LOCATION: Wilket Creek Park Picnic Area #4, 1000 Eglinton Ave E, North York, ON M4P 1E2

We’ll have a large multicoloured flag with the DashCon 2 logo on it identifying our picnic spot :)

As a reminder, the pre-registration event is a Cosplay Picnic and Little Guy Show-and-Tell.

COSPLAY PICNIC

You are invited to dress up in cosplay and bring snacks/packed lunch to eat on the grass. DashCon 2 will have some pre-packaged fruit and veggie plates for you to sample, but we don’t expect supplies to last, so please bring your own food if you’d like to eat!

LITTLE GUY SHOW AND TELL

In cosplay or not, we encourage bringing a little friend to introduce to folks around! It’s a great conversation starter. Examples of Little Guys include stuffed animals, crochet plushes, rocks with googly eyes—any inanimate object that brings you joy and you want to introduce to other people. Please do not bring live animals.

Con-Going Crash Course

For many of you, DashCon 2 might be your first convention. But even veterans might benefit from the tips & tricks Con-Going Crash Course, an all rounder guide to attending a convention. This video is currently available on our Youtube for you to watch to get an idea of everything you need to know/consider for attending a convention!

An absolutely massive thank you to Cinnacorn and Duskroads for the tremendous amount of time and effort you’ve put into this. Your efforts are greatly appreciated!

Just one more thing.

As some of you may have noticed, although it’s pretty late now, today is July 5th, the official one-year anniversary of DashCon 2.

It hasn’t felt like a year, really—time moves so much faster now.

I’m a different person now that DashCon 2 is in my life. Event planning is my career now. I have new friends, a small but not inconsequential internet presence… and when I go to friends’ weddings, sometimes my reputation precedes me??? Absolutely shocking to get hit with I like your shoelaces completely unironically IRL.

As an organizer, I can never truly attend DashCon 2. That day was a blur of adrenaline and Monster Energy. I was building a castle I’d never walk inside. So I feel DashCon 2 through the contours—the effect it has on other people. Through you.

I am beyond grateful for all of you. Sometimes I rewatch the montage of the ending dance party, with the headbanging Miku circle, and I cry. I’m being serious. The greatest joy of my life is getting to make all of you happy.

Rock on, Mikus. Happy Anniversary.

looks better than this

Pointed nose buses are decended from trucks, and have their engines located in the front. This requires the larger nose in order to provide the space for the engine as well as adequate ventilation.

Meanwhile, flat nosed buses are actually descended from city buses (which in turn descend from trolleys), and were domesticated due to their greater maneuverability and capacity.

Contrary to popular belief, flat nosed busses typically do not experience breathing problems. Their engines are located in the back of the bus, with a large breathing vent located in the rear.

And oh, what can WWX say to that, should he be regretful, should he apologise, but he doesnt find it in himself to be sincere about such things, not when he didn't know and not when it was either kill them or let them kill his peers, his shidimei, Jiang Yanli, or Jiang Cheng who was on the frontlines with him.

Jiang Cheng who he gave up his golden core for, Jiang Cheng JiangCheng JiangCheng Jian-

Then uncle Four tells him, I have killed for my clan as well, some of your shidimei, perhaps.

WWX has nothing to say to that, but WQ's cousin goes rigid with fear as his eyes pass between WWX and Unclr Four. They are in a room with people who have done bad things, killed each other's families. Uncle Four is pouring WWX his homemade fruit wine, and WQ's cousin is peeling the radishes he grew - ones that they are surviving off - and WWX is tinkering with another talisman for the wards for their home. They can't look at each other in the eyes when clink their mugs of wine and drink, every gulp equal parts sweet and bitter on their tongue.