I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).
As per the uje, I've arrived upon a Saturday with a backlog of links that I have not managed to squeeze into the week's newsletters/blogs, so it's time for another linkdump, 22nd in an erratic series. Here's the previous 21:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
Let's start with some seasonal material, and by "seasonal," I of course mean Hallowe'en. Yes, August is the official start of Spooky Season, and yes, I am a monster for insisting on this, but being a monster is the point of Spooky Season (which is what differentiates Spooky Season pushers like me from the creeps who insist that you need to start prepping for Xmas in late September – they're monsters, too, but Yule Monsters are bad) (with the exception of Krampus).
I was a monster kid and now I'm a monster adult. It all started when I was bitten by a radioactive Haunted Mansion at the age of six:
I am a sucker for all things monstrous, and so I was intrigued when I got a book of "creepy-cute" stickers in the mail from a publicist at Simon & Schuster:
"Creepy-Cute" turns out to be an official designation, embraced by the illustrator GaynorCarradice, who has created several books on these lines, featuring her chibi/monster crossover creations, which do exactly what it says on the tin, by which I mean, there's some genuinely creepy stuff in the mix, along with the cute.
It's when the cute pastels rub up against the gore, skulls, eyeballs and other visceral viscera that these illustrations really kick off some heat – I've rounded up a few of my favorites here:
https://craphound.com/images/creepycute.jpg
One of the surefire signs that Spooky Season is upon us is that the (sometimes NSFW) Tumblr account Halloweenlandmotherfucker emerges from dormancy with a stream of images of vintage Hallowe'en cards (these were a thing!), photos of people in costume and other delightful visual novelties:
https://www.tumblr.com/halloweenlandmotherfucker
Monster culture isn't just for Hallowe'en, of course. The ancient and noble tradition of compiling and publishing bestiaries is alive and well, thanks to RPGs. In the beginning, there was the D&D Boxed Set, with its Monsters and Treasure booklet:
Then came the Monster Manual, the first hardcover D&D book, succeeded by the Fiend Folio, which featured Charlie Stross creations like the githzerai and slaad, Indeed, there was a whole, iconic library of hardcovers that fit perfectly in an oversized backpack that I dragged everywhere so that I could obsessively read and re-read them.
Eventually, these gave way to new hardcovers with new rules as well as new corporate owners (Wizards of the Coast, then Hasbro), culminating in the release of the Open Gaming License, an "open content" license that was a) grossly defective; b) largely irrelevant; and c) hugely controversial in 2023, when Hasbro terminated it:
The Open Gaming License purported to license out game elements that weren't copyrightable (rules, tables, etc), as well as material that you could likely use under copyright exceptions like fair use:
And worst of all, it was revocable, so games publishers who tooled up to publish supplements and sourcebooks based on the OGL could have the rug yanked out from under them at any time (that time turned out to be early 2023).
Hasbro's OGL rug-pull had three salutary effects:
I. It gave gamers a crash-course in what was – and wasn't – copyrightable in an RPG design;
It encouraged game developers to look beyond D&D's OGL rules and into truly open (and often superior) alternatives; and
It inflicted so much reputational harm on Hasbro that, 20 months later, they announced that they would release a new set of D&D rules under the Creative Commons Attribution Only 4.0 license:
Now, CC BY 4.0 is a real-ass license. Notably, it corrects a defect in the earlier versions of the CC licenses that gave rise to a class of predatory copyleft trolls like the odious Pixsy:
It's wild to think that tabletop RPGs are now a cutting-edge way to learn about digital policy, but on the other hand, D&D arrived in my home around the same time as my Apple ][+, which was also around the time I first heard the name Ronald Reagan (rest in piss).
The legacies of the 80s – RPGs, digital technology and Reaganomics – cast a long shadow. Last month, many of us discovered the hard way that Reaganomics – specifically, the embrace of monopolies as "efficient" – has produced a world of unimaginable brittleness. Millions of people around the world found themselves cut off from ATM cash, flights, hospital care, and many other essentials thanks to the Crowdstrike Blue Screen of Death outage. While many of the explainers have focused on how Crowdstrike fatfingered a software update that crashed all those computers, there's been a lot less commentary about how it is that one company had it in its power to do so much harm.
Writing last week for EFF's Deeplinks blog, my colleague Rory Mir tackled that (far more important) issue:
Market concentration – monopoly – is the common thread wound around so many of our daily horribles. Think of the tech billionaires who threw in their lot with Trump last month. How did they get to be billionaires? Monopoly power. Remember back in 2017, that notorious photo of the tech industry meeting at the top of Trump Tower, with Peter Thiel at Trump's left hand?
People were appalled that this group of corporate leaders, who between them controlled virtually all the technology in our lives, would debase themselves by paying fealty to this buffoonish would-be dictator.
But far more consequential was the fact that you could fit everyone who controlled all of our technology around a single table. Once everyone important to an industry can fit around a single table, it's only a matter of time until they find a table to sit around, and that's when it all starts to go wrong. As the Communist firebrand Adam Smith once wrote, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Enshittification starts with market concentration. This is a subject I'm going to be going very deep on next Saturday, when I give my Defcon keynote, "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":
https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861
When I give that talk – and afterwards at my book signing – I will be wearing an N95 mask, just as I did last year. Why am I wearing a mask? Two reasons: first, Long Covid is a horror. One of the best writers I know – a living legend – recently told me that their book-writing days are likely done because of Long Covid brain fog.
A new Lancet article gets deep into the science of Long Covid:
In particular, Greenhalgh describes why some people don't get Long Covid, and some people do – and, most important, explains why the fact that you didn't get Long Covid last time doesn't mean you won't get it next time:
The study shows that wearing any mask, even without knowing how to fit it well, offers substantial protection against both contracting and transmitting covid. Even better: wearing an N95 (even without paying attention to correct fit) offers "near perfect" protection against covid:
I didn't get covid at Defcon last year, and I didn't get it at HOPE, and I didn't get it on our family vacation in July – all events where friends got sick. The difference? I wore a mask. Which works.
OK, I need to go work on my Defcon speech some more, so I'm gonna sign off, but I will leave you with just one more link, the wonderful new public domain image search tool, Public Work, which crawls and indexes the Met, the NYPL, and other sources:
https://public.work/
I rely on public domain, CC and other freely usable clip art to make the collages that accompany this newsletter/blog's stories. While I have very little talent in the visual arts, I'm getting steadily better. I mean, look at this amazing image I womped up for last week's story on Bitcoin bros' election campaign finance fraud:
Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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I think Patchouli knowledge would play Dungeons and Dragons. Not 5e or 5.2024e, though. She'd be a 3.5 or 3e grognard with a gazillion splat books in her library. She mainly plays with Remilia, who sometimes ropes Sakuya into playing too (but other times she has to serve her in normal maid ways). I'm not sure Hong Meiling would be into in, and Flandre might be too active and energetic to sit down for long play sessions. Koakuma joins because Patche plays too, I'm not sure that she'd be much into it herself though. Patchouli could conceivably be an OSR grognard (Emphasis on GROGNARD: She would not play retroclones or OSR-'inspired' games and would look down upon those who do), probably gravitating towards AD&D 2e with its many splat books towards the end of its cycle. I don't think she'd play any of the basic sets, they're too dumbed down for a woman of her intellect. She also wouldn't play pathfinder at all, can't really articulate why but I know she wouldn't. So I think 60% 3.5, 30% some kind of TSR era D&D, 10% 4e. What are your thoughts?
With the understanding that the best game system is the one that enables the story you would like to tell, whenever people claim that indie TTRPG game systems allow for more agency I can't help but think this:
Trollbabe is a unique game, even by our standards, and we had a lot of fun unpacking what just happened.
Mechanically-speaking, Trollbabe is the very definition of lightweight. Character creation, for instance, was a quick experience. The only real decision you need to make is to decide your character’s single stat, a number between 2 and 9 that determines how good your character is at combat, magic, and socializing. After that’s decided, everything else is details that help round out your trollbabe’s personality and history.
This one stat system is both Trollbabe’s greatest strength and weakness. On the plus side, all dice rolls are quickly resolved: roll below your stat to fight, roll above it to cast a spell, and roll with the worst of the two, inclusive, to convince somebody. The downside of this mechanic is that your character will either be very good at fighting or magic, or just OK at everything. This feels awfully like min-maxing.
Trollbabe’s most unusual aspect is its approach to conflict. On paper, it looks extremely complicated, but it actually works very smoothly in practice. Deciding the pace of a conflict is a conversation between player and GM, and once the conflict is underway one can breeze through it quite quickly. Most intriguing of all, the reroll system allows players to introduce new plot elements and NPCs on the fly, allowing the narrative to evolve in unexpected ways. At its heart, Trollbabe is a collaborative storytelling game, and the conflict system embodies that fact.
The world of Trollbabe is a mishmash of Germanic history, Norse folklore, and swords-and-sorcery adventure. If this isn’t to your liking, the book gives you plenty of freedom to define the setting in any way you like. One of Trollbabe’s strengths is that it is extremely adaptable, and the setting could conceivably be adapted to suit any setting.
Overall, we were very pleased with our experience with Trollbabe. It’s a game that’s easy to pick up and play with a small group of friends. If you enjoy a rules-lite storytelling experience that can be picked up quickly, then Trollbabe is an experience that you don’t want to miss. However, if you want a more tactical, mechanical system, then maybe stay away.
To find out for yourself, you can purchase it at http://adept-press.com/games-fantasy-horror/trollbabe/
What do you think? Have you played Trollbabe before? Tell us what you think!
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2: A mystery, dilemma, or conflict
Three of Diamonds - Singing tea kettle
Jack of Spades - Cold snap
Six of Spades - Discover a Pocket dimension
Day the Seventeenth of Greenstem
I woke up today and it was freezing cold, unseasonably cold for Greenstem. I put a kettle on, and instead of whistling, it began to sing. It was a low, wistful tune, one that sounded like something I’d heard a long time ago. I couldn’t place it, but I knew I had heard it before.
I took the lid off to see what was going on. Inside was teeny-tiny city, full of tall, thin buildings painted so white they almost shone. I looked at it with a magnifying glass and saw hundreds of people bustling about, collecting droplets of boiling water and bringing them into the steeple-like buildings.
I took out the cage of the teapot gently, and placed it in a mason jar where the tiny people would be at no risk of steaming or boiling. On a whim, I cut up a single clove of garlic and dropped tiny pieces into the jar, along with a bit of room-temperature water.
I looked again a few minutes later, and saw that blocks had been carved out of the garlic. It was being used as food, as far as I could tell, and also as a building block. I watched the jar, playing absentmindedly with the pink feather. I didn’t think the tiny people in the tiny world could see me, but when I looked in again, I saw them testing out gliding contraptions that looked a lot like they were made from tiny versions of my long, thin pink feather.
Suddenly, steam billowed out of every one of the tiny buildings at once. Each cloud of steam lifted up a huge number of tiny people in tiny gliders. They flew like insects in slow, wide circles around my kitchen. Finally, after a long time just sitting and watching, I opened a window. A cool breeze came in, but only after the tiny people had all gotten out. I dragged Rebecca out of bed to do a spell of clearing and cleansing and make sure I wouldn’t hurt any tiny societies by boiling water, and then, finally, I made a pot of tea. It’s a cold day today, and I ought to keep warm.
I don’t know how the people from inside my teapot will handle the cold, but I believe in them. They’ll find a way.
Apparently WOTC sent the Pinkertons (PINKERTONS???! In 2023???) to intimidate some poor YouTube creator who had posted about a (probably accidentally) leaked Magic the Gathering product. Instead of Y'know. A written cease and desist like a normal company would send. I'll still talk up the DnD movie because I like the directors and it was genuinely good and I want to acknowledge the people who actually created it who are getting fucked over by this insane corporate behavior - they deserve their due for an excellent piece of work. I stand by that. However. WOTC can kiss any more of my money goodbye forever. They already burned that bridge with their previous stunt, but I'll be going out of my way to keep money OUT of their pockets now. I did look up the details and I don't see any mainstream news reports but PC Gamer and a couple of other websites have posted pretty concise and non-inflamatory articles on the incident if you want to look em up. I'm going to have to block so many YouTube dudes with awful video titles who want to cash in on rage clicks now. God. I'm not including the links because I don't want to risk escaping containment, this is just for my little handful of mutuals. Because like. What the fuck.
