@suricrasia I really appreciate Inkle game writing, except where it feels like it's pressuring the player.

TR-49 had the same feel to me by back half, and I needed to tell my brain that the game wouldn't unceremoniously end if I took too much time. These are cool story beats (!!), but they also need to build an expectation of player safety around them.

@tknarr I wrote a short eulogy on Bsky (https://bsky.app/profile/goldkin.bsky.social/post/3lvcpefdvtk2b ) that I kinda want to expand here, now that I've had a bit to sit with it:

Tug was one of the friends I got to meet adjacent to the Frolic and SF furry communities, back when I occasionally flew to the Bay for my work. One time he came up and visited, and we chose to take a drive and just chat for a bit. This was like 2016, 2017 or so if I vaguely recall.

Among a bunch of just shooting the shit on random things, he told me that he'd never expected to have made it a day past 40 (which he'd since surpassed, at the time), and that every day to him was a gift. And that he wanted to be authentic to people, because a lot of folks had been inauthentic to him in the past, and he just wanted to do better by folks.

I also remember when he ran his old print shop for folks in the fandom, mostly at cost, so they had a place to get their artwork done. That was Monoceros Media for folks that don't remember or missed it by the way, not sure if it's easily searchable now. Still have a print he ran from his shop on the wall here at home.

He also helped operate FurryMuck for a good long while, also more or less at cost.

Anyway, this is all to say: Tug's a fucking legend. He'll be sorely missed.

And I want to imagine that so authentic and adventurous a spirit like his won't settle for the peace or rest folks customarily wish. That wanderlust of his is unbreakable. If there's an after, he'll be finding adventures again before you know it.

The illustrations here are from me, but some of these were adopts. Character design credits:

* Goldkin (raptorized design): https://bsky.app/profile/tempelina.bsky.social
* Ant dragon adopt (fourth featured character): https://bsky.app/profile/razigator.bsky.social
* Pigeon dragon adopt (fifth featured character): https://bsky.app/profile/yotecoyote.bsky.social

@faoluin Hi! A variation of this post also made it to Bsky, and someone else mentioned something important there:

This is likely already being completely ignored due to Google's contentious edits policy and detections for inauthentic traffic. By all means do this because it's quick, as there's a vague chance the data is being collected internally even with it being ignored, but please pair this with efforts that are likely to make more of an impact.

Some alternatives I recommend:

1. Using 5calls.org to call and message electeds if you live in the States. They provide scripts to do this, and yelling at them about this Gulf of America nonsense is a small effort with a big impact, even if you're phone-shy. Some electeds consider 20 calls or emails a huge response, and unlike Google, they are required to have an actual human being listen to your requests.

2. If you do not live in the states, consider signing up to petitions on this issue owned by your local government agencies. Those have a much higher chance of breaking through and making your voice heard than reporting volume to Google.

3. Separate from them trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico, consider gumming up the snitch lines being set up in the states with emails and texts. Sure would be a damn shame if they had no actionable data to work with on those.

And a probable (4): if you ever need advice on where to provide the most impact that corporations will actually see, consider asking engineers who are sympathetic to your cause.

@solarbird Something I think often gets lost in the noise is _why_ we built the internet as a decentralized place to begin with. Because it contains a ton of salient lessons, particularly for folks who have only ever known the walled gardens of larger social media platforms.

The internet started decentralized because we did not trust any single node enough to fail. That still holds true, even when big companies have purporting convenience at the cost of control and try to make themselves "too big to fail".

RSS is still great if you use it. Masto is a joy, and doesn't succumb as easily to trolls controlling the conversation. Email is still the lifeblood of the world's communication. And a bunch of simple websites keep the lights on because they're dirt cheap by design.

Even in a world that supposedly runs on five websites, DNS and BGP stitch it all together in loose connections of servers screaming at each other about how the internet functions. It's democratized because that was the only way to make sense of complexity. Anything else was a compelling lie or ceding control to a monopoly that would eventually betray trust.

And yeah, there have always been pieces that were centrally controlled (ICANN, TLD operators), and some of what drove this was post-darpanet, post-Cold War paranoia, but for the most part folks did a good enough job to truly make it possible to democratize access. It's all readable via the RFC archives too, so this didn't force people to have to reverse engineer the backchannels to keep communicating, except when proprietary protocols entered the mix.

I get why folks want to view it as one big party that flows from place to place dominated by shitty landlords. That's a very compelling shared experience right now. But I just want to tip my hat to the places that were built to last -- and DID! -- because they were built in a way to empower people to make their own decisions.

That's what "democratizing the internet" actually looks like. Not these sprawling websites who purport to do so then turn on their users when capital demands it. It's someone with a humble copy of an RSS reader or Calibre who uses the tools to make sense of the world, instead of sipping it through the straw of an algorithmic feed that works against their own interests.

Anyway. tl;dr, I agree Bsky is likely destined for its own sudden-but-inevitable-betrayal. I too plan to stick to places where I can build without that same boiled frog feeling of them bending to profit and power. Though I think just treating it as another website that can fail, and building to assume that, also isn't a bad idea.