A lot of my friends don't like star ratings for media, and I get it. It's inherently reductive, boiling down your complex and contextual mental-emotional response to a single linear scale that's often taken to approximate some absolute notion of "quality" that probably doesn't even exist in the first place. That's why I always make sure to write down actual textual thoughts about everything I review—to have a place to capture the nuance and context that's never going to be visible in a star rating.

At the same time, I always enjoy the intellectual exercise of comparing very different things across the same lines. Back in the day I did yearly "Natto Awards" among all the media I'd journaled that year, and I'd always have a lot of fun doing cross-media categories like "best horror" where movies, video games, and novels were all in competition with one another. It's not particularly fair as a way of determining quality, but that hardly matters when quality is fake anyway. What it does do is get you thinking about what it means to successfully inhabit a genre across media, and what each medium brings to its takes on the same ideas. I find star ratings do something similar, pushing me to really think about how much I appreciate a film or video game and to try to articulate why.

By far the biggest reason I use them all the time, though, is just that my memory for these things is awful. My subconscious is particularly liable to just toss out memories it deems "irrelevant" by its own mysterious criteria, and it turns out that what I thought of a given film—or even whether I saw it at all—is roundly considered irrelevant. But not to my conscious mind! I actually care a lot about being able to remember how much I enjoyed something long after the fact, and star ratings are a major way I do that.

To that end, I also try to keep a pretty consistent rubric of what each rating means, so I don't shift too much over time. I do inevitably move somewhat and have to self-correct, of course. This post was itself inspired by me realizing that I've been giving out ★★★½ and to a lesser extent ★★★★ ratings too eagerly. So, as much as a reminder to myself as anything, here's my schema. It's presented as whole-star tiers only; I'll add a half-star if it's particularly enjoyable or well-made relative to its tier.

• ★ : Corresponds to the "#bad" tag on my old media journal. Actively poorly-made, offensive, and/or otherwise miserable, either with minimal redeeming qualities or simply irredeemably noxious.

• ★★ : Corresponds to the "#eh" tag on my old media journal. Did not vibe with me. Nothing is egregiously wrong, but nothing is outstandingly right either. Alternatively, there are things I liked about it but somewhat more things I disliked.

• ★★★ : Corresponds to the "#good" tag on my old media journal. Solidly enjoyable. Not a barn-burner,…

Hatkirby posted on www.fourisland.com

Solving Puzzles Through Walls, and the No-Wizzies Snipe

On July 18th, I documented my Low% route, including a discovery I'd made. It is possible to snipe Hedges 2 while standing on the top of the mountain. The description of the trick included the following picture and caption:

This statement is false.

It was an understandable assumption to make. There's no reason why that wall needed to have collision coded into it, since it wouldn't be occluding anything in normal gameplay. It's common for game developers to cut corners in places that don't really matter. But it remains an incorrect assumption.

…

I don't do speedrunning myself, but I find the act fascinating and delightful to watch and especially to learn about. There's an intrinsic human drive, distributed across the entire species, to fractally explore every aspect of the world we live in. It's what drives us to do science, it's what drives us to understand mathematical structures, and it's at least a part of why art speaks to us as strongly as it does. I find speedrunning to be a particularly pure expression of this drive, the progression from enjoying something to wanting to enjoy it to its fullest to diving so deep into it that it expands into a world of its own.

Hatkirby's writeup of the process of discovery and the fallout of one particular trick in The Witness is fascinating and at times hilarious. I recommend giving it a look if only to discover why specifically it's called the "No-Wizzies Snipe". I bet you won't be able to guess.

people always talk about "old souls" but it's way funnier when people have mismatched young souls. like I've met seven-year-olds who are spiritually twenty-two. still an absolute idiot child but not in the way you'd expect at all

I keep bringing up "Webmentions" in the context of discussing the sociable web and advocating for more people to adopt more social technologies on their websites, but I always run into a wall: there's no good place to link people to so they can understand more about what that means. All the existing explanations I've found are deep in the weeds of how Webmentions work on a technical level, which isn't a very helpful place to start for people who just want to post.

I want to fill that gap with this post, and give people who don't know the ins and outs of HTTP a working understanding of what Webmentions do and how to get them up and running for your site. To that end:

Webmentions are a way to let a website know that you linked to it.

That's it! At it's core, it's just that simple. If a website supports Webmentions, you tell it "Hey, here's the URL of a page with a link to you", it double-checks that the link actually exists, and then it does what it pleases with that information.

What can you do with Webmentions?

Notifications

The simplest thing you can do is just look at the Webmentions you receive like a notifications feed on a social media site, and appreciate that people like what you're up to. I get all my Webmentions delivered to me as an RSS feed (more on that below), and I'll always check out the links to see what people are saying.

In addition to being the easiest to set up, I think this is actually the most useful thing to do with Webmentions. Having a way to see when people reply to your posts makes conversation possible and seeing people's appreciation encourages performance. Even if you never go beyond using Webmentions as pure notifications, it's a great way to become more interconnected.

Replies as comments

If someone makes a post on their blog that's replying to yours and sends you a Webmention, you can display that reply like a comment underneath your post. This is pretty common for out-of-the-box Webmention plugins, like this one for WordPress^[1]. You can see it in action on Liz's WordPress blog where my reply on this blog shows up as a comment on hers, with my avatar and the original posting date and everything.

Making this work nicely requires a bit of setup on the part of the page that contains the link, though. A computer isn't smart enough to take any old webpage and figure out which parts of it are the author's name, the author's avatar, the text of the reply, and so on. In order for all of that to work nicely, the linking page needs to use h-entry metadata to explicitly indicate all this information. Fair warning: h-entry is unavoidably a bit technical to…

Liz posted 20 October 2024 on seaslug.garden

10 (official) Years of Type 1

(cw: talk about death [specifically mine, theoretically])

As of today I have (officially) stayed alive with Type 1 diabetes for ten years¹. I’ve done a little bit of reading on the history of Type 1 treatment, one of the first acute conditions turned chronic through medical intervention (thank you, Drs. Banting, Macleod, and Best). The longer I live, the more “I would have died by now” milestones I pass, and the more I am reminded of how grateful I am for advances in diabetes treatment. I have passed the “I would have lived this long on a starvation diet” milestone. In a few years, I’ll probably make it past the “lethal atherosclerosis” line, then the “renal failure” line, assuming I retain access to current diabetes and other medical technology². I’ll probably also mostly avoid the non-lethal sequelae, the blindness and the amputations and the peripheral neuropathies. Apparently in a few years I’ll need to start taking statins even if my cholesterol is good, because diabetes often brings vascular complications. As good as diabetes technology is, I am, fundamentally, manually running one of the primary metabolic loops in the human body. It’s decidedly imperfect even when running at top performance.

…

• #diabetesposting

It's really tough for me to read this post which is, to a substantial degree, about the hypothetical of my wife dying. But I think it's worth sharing both as a celebration of the fact that she is very much alive and as a meditation on what life is like with only the ongoing application of modern medical treatment between oneself and the void.

Also, I gotta say, I am pretty proud of that beverage. The flavors meld really well—I wanted to make sure the black sesame was still very much the primary note, which it absolutely is, while giving it a bit of richness with the scotch and cacao as well as a touch of liveliness with the amaretto and absinthe. I might actually seek out more black sesame ice cream to be able to make this for friends.

I have formed the opinion that Silent Hill 2's "health drink" is an unflavored yogurt/raw quinoa smoothie with no other ingredients and I will not be swayed from this

Okay I set up a new comment system! Shouts out to Damien for hosting it. It's definitely better than CommentBox: it's got real formatting, you can change your avatar, and you can link back to your homepage.

The catch is that CommentBox didn't actually include commenter emails in its data export, so you won't be able to update your old comments by default. If you want to do so, send me an email at ask@nex-3.com with a link to one of your old comments and I'll manually reset the email associated with that account so you can go through the password recovery flow.

The process of building out this site has inevitably involved design choices about how to engage with various technologies and other people's web presences. It's a truism that you can't solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?

I think it's most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and only with that understanding firmly in hand can we start usefully interrogating the way technology gives rise to or fights against the sort of interactions we want. My ultimate aim is to articulate a clear vision of a way to interact with people's websites that's not just a pastime or a research process, but that can meet social needs—to imagine what I'll call a "sociable web".

Sociable Web not Social Network

I'm using the term "sociable web" as a conscious contrast to "social network". Social networks have unavoidably shaped our understanding of what form of socialization is possible online, and I don't even think it's always been for the worse. But now they are fragmenting and rotting, and whatever was good about them—their casual usability, the massive network effect of "all your friends are here"—is falling away like so much decayed flesh. I want to envision something new, and when doing so I often find that a new name can help.

"Web" versus "Network"

I'm not interested in a "network" in the sense either of a single company overseeing many users or a decentralized collection of nodes like the Fediverse that is nevertheless tightly coupled technologically. I don't think either of these forms are sustainable in a capitalist world. They are either fed by boundless venture capital coffers which inevitably move to capitalize their userbase, or they're built on the backs of massive amounts of unpaid labor and poorly-understood power structures. The exploitative conditions under which these networks are produced run downstream and affect their social dynamics.

I'm interested in a social form that uses as its foundation the web itself. Where anyone can participate just by having a website. Where the existing networks are, to some degree, part of that form already simply by virtue of being accessible over HTTPS.

"Sociable" versus "Social"

"Social" is unopinionated. "Social" is throwing a bunch of people into a room and seeing what happens. A party can be social, but so can a witch hunt. "Social" is thinking about the technology as primary and allowing the social dynamics to fall out from that. When things are built to be merely "social", they force the real humans who use them into chaotic interactions both healthy and harmful, a…