age: ____

age at birth (if different from age): ____

Every year, I help organize Minnebar, largest and longest-running technology unconference in…the US? North America? The Western Hemisphere? We’re not sure. It’s about 1000 people strong every year, and this is its 20th year. https://minnestar.org/minnebar/

The whole thing is volunteer-driven: people volunteer to lead sessions. There’s no application and no screening beyond the CoC; if you want to talk about it, raise your hand and you can.

This year, something interesting happened with the session topics.

🧵

Hey for anyone who lives in Canada:

I've been thinking about trying to do a drive from Vancouver to Calgary, because the drive looks absolutely fucking beautiful and I have reasons to try to do such a thing

however, I don't know what the like. Vibes of the area are. Anything I should try to see if I did? Anything I should extremely avoid if I did? What am I potentially committing to

the thing about “never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence” is that it’s rat-fuckable

when there is functionally no difference between the two, engaging with someone as if they’re incompetent means accepting their frame, that what they’re ultimately trying to accomplish isn’t *bad*, they’re just going about it in a way with bad side-effects, and people use in bad-faith our good-faith willingness to treat them as incompetent to push their agendas

engaging with someone as if they’re malicious, on the other hand, means rejecting the harmful frame, recasting the argument in terms of “why are you trying to do this bad thing?”, and not quibbling about the details of why the thing is bad

these age-verification laws whose implementations are a form of category error is a good example; if you engage with a proponent of them with “well here’s why your implementation is bad” you’re tacitly approving the larger idea that surveliance is good, and you just disagree with the techniques; bad-faith actors use this

If instead you come back with “why are you trying to surveil everyone’s computer use? Why are you laying the groundwork to prevent people from using their own computers?”, you re-cast the frame. Sure, there are probably incompetent people who don’t realize the results of what they’re going to do, but casting the larger idea into question AND KEEPING IT IN QUESTION is the only effective path I’ve found to debating people on things like this

so, instead:

don’t ascribe to incompetence something that is functionally malicious

Alright y'all I need VN recs, my friends have taken to doing livedubs of various ones and we're looking for stuff to add to the backlog

We've done:

• Mice Tea
• I Love You Colonel Sanders

Current considerations are (I have 0 clue how fun these would be to riff over):

• Class of '09
• Hatoful Boyfriend
• Date Everything
• Namco High
• Katawa Shoujo
• Tsukihime
• The Coffin of Andy and Leyley
• Milk inside a bag of milk inside of a bag of milk
• AI: The Somnium Files
• a new life. (I've never heard of this one but it's got girls kissing on the thumbnail)
• her tears were my light

Other considerations that we would not be going in 100% blind for:

• Probably the entire Ace Attorney series
• Monster Prom
• Danganronpa
• Fate/stay night