Green on Both Sides

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

The discussion isn't about whether or not complex, graphically indulgent games shouldn't be allowed to exist, they always have and they always will, but I think it's telling that a game with hundreds of actors on-screen at once already existed in Rollercoaster Tycoon, which could do that in 1999 by being written almost exclusively in Assembly and being extremely optimized as a result. Granted, doing something like that in a modern game is functionally impossible, but the limitations of hardware meant that really efficient game design could enable a surprising amount of detail and moving parts could be fit into a really compact space.

Now, with hard drive technology being accessible and cheap, and incomprehensible power being relatively inexpensive, you can fit thousands of gigabytes and multiple teraflops into a cheap hard drive and a medium-strength APU, games are enormous in size (100+ GB per game), and very textured without being very big.

Is the equivalent of Rollercoaster Tycoon possible anymore? Not really, games are way too complex and have way too many fancy lighting engines and models to be hand-stitched, but it does mean publishers like EA and Ubisoft can churn graphical powerhouses on a regular basis without bothering to optimize, or account for bad UX decisions. Games could be cleaner, smaller, more efficient, and less bloated, but they don't have to be, so they don't.

Your $4,000 bit-cruncher could be even cooler, look even better, and use less energy if developers had the time to make their games better, but instead, they're forced to crunch, don't have time to optimize, and produce games that look really good by requiring a bunch of power under the hood simply because publishers want to make more, better looking games faster.

In 1969, we landed humans on the mood with computers that were fractions of a fraction of the power of the computer most of us carry daily in our pockets. Now we can barely load a webpage in under 30 seconds despite having the fastest internet ever in history and computers that are doubling in power every handful of years.

I haven't seen anyone talk about this yet, so I might as well.

They've updated their content policy to comply with payment processor Stripe and Paypal's censorhip. They gave 24 hours. On March 16th 2024, Gumroad TOS will no longer allows sales of any written or drawn nsfw content.

This is going to hurt for so many creators. Giving that little time leaves people's source of income wildly unstable, especially with such a huge overhaul of what content is allowed.

I hate this. I hate what censorship is turning the internet into. I hate that nsfw content creators keeo getting pushed to the fringes, that they need to digitally migrate so often, because nowhere can be trusted to allow their art for long.