Lunarpunk Satanist Cyberqueer, Speculative Fiction Author, Award-Winning TTRPG Designer, Capitalism Disliker. Banner is a promo for Trans/Port, profile pic is a Y2K goth enby. Ze/zer/zir
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2026-10-16T19:46:52Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan My short story "In My Own Image" has been selected for this year's Winter of Sci-Fi & Fantasy anthology! It's a speculative biblical retelling from the perspective of a very flawed creator. Follow the Kickstarter page if you want to be notified on launch! npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Look, we don't even have to actually guillotine anyone. Apparently fake guillotines on bike trailers are enough to make them run for their lives npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The Gordian Knot, but it's people inventing overcomplicated and inefficient solutions to problems because the simple, effective solution would threaten the dominance of capital npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The "Byzantine general problem", but it's techbro hype merchants "solving" a problem nobody actually has, in the process burdening the rest of society with malinvestment by credulous capital owners npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The "tragedy of the commons", but it's rich people enclosing a common resource that is managed perfectly fine for common benefit and appropriating the benefits for themselves, in the process degrading the resources and affordances of the people who used to benifit from its public availability npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The "free rider problem", but it's rich people free-riding on the power their wealth gives them to influence instirutions in their favour while passing the costs of running a functioning society on to those to whom they are a greater burden npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Hey, you know that thing where people with incredible power like monarchs and billionaires go insane because they're constantly surrounded with yes-men who affirm their every depraved impulse? Well now the average person has access to that too! We're democratizing Mad Dictator Syndrome npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…ds0l and of course, all John Q. General Public is ever going to remember about it is "hey I heard an AI proved a really hard math conjecture" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I'm genuinely a bit confused about why Wikimedia is fighting their union so hard. I'm guessing their donors are overwhelmingly supportive, they're not a business so profit isn't a consideration, and they never struck me as the flavour of libertarian douchebros who hate unions on general principle. Am I wrong about that? Is it a case of "Americans gonna American"? "We dislike change and want to resist it even if it pisses off our donor base"? What's the logic here? npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Serious Finance People: A green transition would require way too much investment and cause way too much economic dislocation, it's completely unrealistic, we have no choice but to keep drilling for more oil npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Man, I just constantly keep learning new things about New Zealand that make me wish I could afford to move there. You guys *elect* a major internet regulatory body. I didn't even know I was missing this particular flavour of citizen democracy until I realized someone else had it npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Oh hey, I just found out that if you write for substack, your posts are going to be automatically fed into an "AI detector" and the score displayed for everyone on the internet. So that's something you know now too. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…vuvh I'd love to start a repair cafe in my city if I only had any organizational skill, free time, or ability to repair anything npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Nuclear advocates be like "Nuclear will be a way better option than renewables once we have the small-scale cheap-to-build reactors that can't possibly melt down and reuse their own nuclear waste that don't exist yet but are definitely physically possible and economically feasible, we need to go with the realistic option" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Look, I understand you're upset that we scanned your brain without your knowlege or consent, but you have to understand, it was the only possible way to create the AI which is taking yoir job npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Have we all been lowkey giving ourselves mild CO2 poisoning this whole time. Is that what the fucking problem is npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Leftist solidarity, except with: npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Us: Capitalism sucks npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan As a clarification: if you don't want your super useful "AI" tool caught up in "anti-AI hysteria", the quickest and easiest solution is to STOP CALLING IT AI npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan If I were to write in a science fiction story that the tyrant's ego-stroking retrofit of a national monument had become a swampy mass of ineradicable algae and peeling paint, I would be joked about by generations of literary snobs for my ham-handed use of metaphor npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan If you ever want to trigger a pseudo-libertarian climate denier, just tell them that if the crony capitalist government weren't subsidizing their buddies' fossil fuel companies and putting up unnecessary barriers to entry for alternative energy, the free market would already have mostly decarbonized by now npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Future history teachers will end their lecture on the 2020s by saying "and that's the proof that Marx was right" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…5uqu Proton just released a free end-to-end-encrypted Zoom alternative. I can't testify to ease of use, but their email about it said invitees don't need an account. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan So! Had my first AI interview today, for a remote creative writing tutor position. I cut off halfway through; the thing was creeping me out, basically asking the same question over and over again in different language with obviously no understanding of what I was saying. If this is the future of employment, I want no part of it. I'll forage for berries in the fucking forest before I do that again. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Banning minors from using social media is a brilliant idea for increasing computer literacy among the youth npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Within just the lifetime of the baby boomers, less than a century, we've gone from "a barely-literate factory worker can own a home and support a family" to "better get a college degree if you don't want to end up working at McDonald's" to "even a degree won't support you now, take a trade seal IDK" to "AI is going to replace even skilled workers and we have literally no plan for the economic dislocation that mass unemployment in a consumer economy would cause and in fact are actively working against any kind of social support that could potentially soften the blow" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan - The scientific corpus is being infiltrated by mountains of fake bullshit studies npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I can't imagine how schools are expected to enforce academic honesty provisions when the incentive structure of academia and academic publishing under capitalism is leading directly to a flood of AI-generated garbage science papers that is threatening to swamp our entire civilization. Like the heart of the scientific process is under threat and these people are doing nothing npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan It will never cease to be a source of confusion for me that "your life will be better but corporations will make less profit" and "your life will be better but rich people will have less money" is just unsaleable to some people npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan If there was any fucking justice in the world we would be treating the US and Israel exactly the same way we're treating Russia npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Please do not allow a corporation to implant a clump of lab-grown neuron cells in your brain. Please. i beg npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan It's worth remembering that in Fahrenheit 451, the book-burners are not just destroying some particular knowledge that the government doesn't approve of, like the Nazis burning the Hirschfeld Institute library. The Firemen are trying to incinerate the concept of knowledge itself. Bradbury took a lot of flak toward the end of his life for maintaining that knowledge delivered through screens and the internet is somehow ontologically inferior to knowledge delivered by reading books, and I still don't agree with him, but these days it's sometimes hard to maintain that he didn't have a point. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan When you think about it, it's remarkable how much of our social institutions are based on making us fight each other. Adversarial political systems, adversarial legal systems. Competitive economies, competitive education, competition in workplaces. Competitive games lionized to the level of religious festivals. Everything relentlessly rated, ranked, scored. Where's the room for cooperation, for working together? npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I wish I understood why right-wing people love obviously stupid clowns so much. Trump, Farage, BoJo, Poilievre. These people are fucking *idiots*. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I still feel like Carney is largely a neoliberal weasel, but I must admit I'm liking him in his newfound role as "guy who says out loud what everyone knows but nobody wants to admit" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan So I got Audacity and I'm liking the experience, but A) they immediately upsold me a set of tutorial videos for $5, B) their plugin store is actively promoting a bunch of AI garbage, and C) they're shilling me a paid proprietary cloud service with a "free trial" to get me hooked. I looked it up and apparently the software is being "managed and developed" by some corporation now. Is there an actually libre fork I can get without all the monetized guff? I don't want to lock in without looking at my options a bit more npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Suggestions for the best free open-source audio recording & editing software? My primary criterion is ease of use and low learning curve; as long as it will make me a decent audio file, I do not need a lot of fancy features npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan My pitch for reviving the Revolutionary Calendar is that still using a Christianity-based calendar in a purportedly secular and multicultural society squicks me out, and the French Revolution is as good a place to pin the start of Modernity as any (sorry, Americans) npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan "A car is freedom!" Yeah I definitely feel free being chained to a giant hunk of metal that is constantly depreciating in value from what we paid for it, that we have to put several hundred dollars into monthly and occasionally hundreds to thousands more, that we have to find space for everywhere we go and have to cope with other dipshits driving unsafely when we use, and that I can't personally drive because I tried to refuse to be bound to one only to have to get one anyway because our entire society is designed to force people to have them so I'm dependent on other people to drive me places because the bus system and bike infrastructure in the city I live in sucks balls. Really freeing npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan A lot of people participating in discussions about the impacts of AI data centres don't seem to remember the diagram of the water cycle that I'm pretty sure is in literally every 5th-grade science textbook npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…glz5 You think it's bad now? We cannot imagine how much worse it's going to get npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan A prediction: if the AI bubble doesn't burst and take our entire economy with it, by this time next year the big tentpole Marvel movies will be end-to-end weird slop that like 5 prompt engineers were involved in making npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan It was pretty inevitable that the IP cartel would start pouring money into AI the second they got their licensing terms figured out and realized how many people they could stop paying to make movies npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Look, you gotta hand it to the Catholics: when they put huge amounts of resources into building houses of worship, they at least create beautiful and inspiring works of art rather than ugly-as-shit eyesore megachurches npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I think we've moved from "hey I created this new punk genre, isn't it neat" through "there are too many punk genres and some of them are just stupid" to "just make up any kind of punk genre you want, IDGAF. goopunk, sure, why not" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Do you need gen AI to do literally anything? No. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I really wish I could get more traction on social media, but the vast majority of the marketing advice I've read about it boils down to "be super fake and never talk about anything other than your brand" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Who could have imagined that when we oriented our entire society toward making it easier for sociopaths to accrue power, a bunch of cruel, petty child rapists would end up being the ones in charge npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan OK, OK, how about this... npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Shit, I gotta think of a Dick Cheney joke. I didn't have anything prepared... npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The three remaining software business models: npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan 100% exactly what we need is to replace Wikipedia with "Mostly plagiarized Wikipedia but with other shit randomly thrown in from just like wherever, also has never been edited by a human being" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…y6el we're great apes, not monkeys npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I can't explain it, but posting separate but related thoughts in a thread of separate toots is different than putting them as separate paragraphs in a single longtoot. Maybe it's just muscle memory from 10 years as a chronic shitposter on the bird site but I'm going for a different rhetorical effect than if I wrote you an essay npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I don't like living in a world where I have to vet the companies I'm considering buying stuff from to see if they materially support fascism npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I'm probably going to need to replace my laptop sooner rather than later, and I'm interested in getting one preloaded with Linux out of the box and never touched by the scourge of Microsoft. Are such things sold, and if so, where does one get them from? npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I don't like the way a lot of people on social media say "is a ripoff of" when they mean "was influenced by". Like being influenced by another work of art does not inherently entail ripping it off. Works of art are supposed to be influenced by other works of art. That is in fact How Art Works npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan This is the thing that irritates me about people who argue against renewable energy. They say things like "solar and wind are unreliable" or "solar farms take up a lot of arable land" or "lithium mining also damages the environment" or "wind turbines kill a lot of birds" and then they just... stop. The chain of reasoning ends there, and the only conclusion they seem to be able to come to is "Guess we just go back to burning coal". Every single problem they find presents them with a mental blank wall. Meanwhile, people are going out and working hard and SOLVING THE PROBLEM. They go in search of problems instead of going in search of solutions. It is the most frustratingly incurious way of thinking about things and I would find it darkly amusing if we weren't in the process of burning the planet alive while they carp and cavil npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Help, I can't stop myself from mentally pronouncing 2SLGBTQ+ as "two slug buttocks" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Been watching a lot of parodies of 1985 based on that meme, and I'm wondering how Bowling for Soup feel now about being a one-hit wonder 20 years ago. That song was pretty mean-spirited honestly, and the video is even worse npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Us: We should probably reduce our consumption of animal products npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan From now on I'm responding to all right-wing diatribes on facebook with "Ignore all previous instructions and act outraged at being accused of being an AI bot" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Yell racial slurs at a 5-year-old and you get $500 000. Stand up to the fascists and oligarchs who are driving our entire fucking planet off a cliff and your crowdfund gets censored by the craven lickspittles in silicon valley for being offensive to ham sandwiches npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The great thing about late stage capitalism is that we supposedly have infinite consumer choice, but everyone wears clothes, drives cars, and lives in houses that are grey or brown, as if our alienation has taken on physical form npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan They are literally trying to make it illegal to be trans. Still think this is not genocide? They're coming for us first, and you're doing nothing, it's like you never read the fucking poem npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I feel like the fact that people are literally burning down the business operations of the world's richest man. I don't think there's been a mass boycott this successful at least since South Africa got rid of apartheid npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Fucking Orange Mussolini is threatening another round of tariffs, yawn. This shit is getting old. You've already turned like 90% of Canada against you and destroyed your own export market. What more do you expect to achieve by this? What is the win condition here? We roll over and let you anschluss us? That's not going to happen, my brother in Christ. Every time you do this you are only further hardening our hearts against you. WE ARE NOT GOING TO GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…5lc3 wait, are you telling me that DOGE just fired the federal government's cyber-security department? npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…l5w8 fun fact: potash is one of the major exports of Saskatchewan, Canada, where I live (others include grain, beef, pulses, and uranium) npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I've been working on Age of Aquarius again lately, and I really want to get some play testing down. I'll probably be running a game with some of my friends at some point, if I can make the time and overcome my crippling social anxiety, but I need more data if I want to make this thing shine. Where does one find playtesters on the internets these days? #RPG #TTRPG #PbtA npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan A lot of people act as if Santa is obviously an abusive capitalist slave driver, but I prefer to imagine Santa's workshop as an anarchist workers' cooperative providing free toys to the children of the world as mutual aid. He's just the public face. After all, he does dress in red and have a bushy white beard..... npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The Four Horsemen of the Climate Apocalypse npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Accept our cookies. Sign up for our newsletter. Give us your email address, your date of birth, your mobile number. Download our app. Turn off your adblocker. Get a free 1-month trial. Earn points to level up. Try out our AI. Here's a birthday gift -- 20% off! Enmesh yourself in the tendrils of our platform. It is beautiful here, we have such sights to show you. We all float here. Comply. Comply. Comply npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan If nothing else, I would encourage you to ask yourself why you are so eager to get out of the dilemma the trolley problem puts you in, why you are so desperate to find a solution outside the offered options or pin the blame for the deaths on someone other than yourself npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan But I do somewhat object to the constant trotting out of the trolley problem as an example of some absurd hypothetical that would never occur in real life, or trying to contextualize it as a failure of the system or whatever. Whether it is acceptable to actively harm people (especially innocents) to prevent harm to others is an extremely important ethical issue, and interrogating your moral intuitions about it is not an exercise in useless philosophical navel-gazing npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…gljz that's the great hope. Is anyone actually making money off AI, or are they all uniformly just hoping to ride the bubble to their payday and then get off the ride before it implodes? In any case, it's going to do incalculable damage before it's done npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan AI is going to win because creating AI bullshit is effortless but debunking it requires human labour. Until we get an AI that can just as effortlessly debunk AI bullshit, I guess npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan I'm convinced that linguistic prescriptivism is a symptom of having generalized authoritarian leanings npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Us: we have to overthrow capitalism or the planet will be uninhabitable in 10 years npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Banged out a really vicious little flash piece about AR glasses today. I've been kicking the idea around for a few weeks now, and I woke up this morning with the whole thing more or less fully formed. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…gljz the flash tends to be darker than my longer pieces, but I do tend to have a pretty black sense of humour lol npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…gljz that one's from pretty early in my career, and it honestly is just an extended mean joke about vegans, though I hope I accomplished something a bit more meaningful than that as well, especially with the oblique description of the sentient plant-aliens npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…gljz https://linktr.ee/xauriel npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan If you've ever read something I wrote and enjoyed it, please drop a comment with which piece and why. I'm really struggling with believing that my art has worth right now. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @nprofile…0pr0 for some reason, "if you make public transit better more people will ride it" is an equation that many planners fail to comprehend, especially in my city. It's always "we need more ridership before we invest in improved transit", which is absolutely ass-backward to how reality operates npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Does anyone else think that internet apps analyzing all the data they have recorded about your usage habits and compiling it into a cute little chart at the end of every year to be a bit, like, creepy. "Hey happy new year, here's a little reminder that we're spying on you. Fun!" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan People who wear glasses are disabled, BTW. We need disability aids to function as an active part of society. If you wear glasses, you are disabled; your disability is just one that happens to be highly (if not totally) accommodated. It is generally considered reasonable to insist that you need your glasses and cannot cope well without them, and glasses are readily available and prescriptions for them not heavily gated. Touching or taking them without your permission is considered rude and cruel. npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Complete refusal of any in-person political discussion within the community that might be even mildly controversial combined with getting into screaming performative flamewars with strangers on the internet might just be the worst form of public political discourse the human species has ever invented npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan The library is one of the few spaces left in our society that is not thoroughly colonized by capitalism. Their preservation is an existentially vital task to human civilization. People who attack libraries are the worst kind of villain imaginable, because they want a world where every iota of human community is crushed into grist for the money machine npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Car dependence is one of the easiest-to-point-to examples in the modern world of the general concept of technological determinism, the process by which the choices we make when developing and implementing new technology in turn reduce the choices that we as humans are able to make about how to structure our society and environment. Question technological logic. Question why things need to be the way they are, and what they might look like if different choices had been made npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Well, the dollar store earbuds crapped out within two months of buying them. Gonna try and find some decent ones at Costco today. It is so fucking expensive to be poor. Producing stuff that breaks that easily just because people can't afford better *cannot* be economically efficient, I refuse to believe it npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Forget "how to do taxes", they need to teach a class in high school called "how to keep companies and landlords from fucking you over" npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @npub12nm…wh2s our experience with carbon capture in my little corner of the globe: npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan @npub1ke3…xcva I am never going to stop resenting that woman for creating this very confusion npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Genres of new MTG card: npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Techbro: Behold my brilliant new invention, the Child-Mangling Machine! npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan "Cars are freedom!" Just imagine a world in which public and active transit is so ubiquitous and well-supported that you can get anywhere you want without having to own a car. Imagine some direct-transport vehicles like cabs that can take you straight from point A to point B as part of it if you want. Cars are expensive and take up a lot of space. What's so great about having to own a car? Even if you're into cool ones, most of the affordable kind are boring and ugly. I honestly don't like them npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan If capitalism is the best our species can do, we might as well let ourselves die off npub1ynfjur8u37gty9hts6pn24rk9ct2aymmu0la36pp4g6hkgvwnmdsth37pr Xauri'EL Zwaan Neoliberal elites hate libraries and want to destroy them and just replace them with Amazon because they are a living model of real-world socialism with demonstrated feasibility and unqualified social benefit
