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
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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.
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A Sociable Web
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…
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I'll make a more thorough post about this at some point, but the short answer is that all you really need to do is tell my Webmention receiver the URL to your post and the URL to the post it's reblogging. You can do that manually by pasting the link to your post in the little webmention form beneath each of mine, or automatically by hooking up your blog's RSS feed to webmention.app.
The only bit of markup that can help here is adding either
class="u-repost-of"
orclass="u-in-reply-to"
[1] on your post to indicate what it's reposting or replying to. Useu-repost-of
if it's just a plain repost without any additions, andu-in-reply-to
if you're adding any additional content. You can put these on:-
A simple
<a>
tag whosehref
is my post. -
The root element of an
h-cite
that provides more metadata about my post. -
The root element of an
h-entry
fully embeds my post in your blog. (This is technically non-standard but it's what I do and it seems to work with everything I've tested.)
I've set up my site so that it hides Webmention likes and reposts, but displays replies as comments below the post. See this post for an example of that in action.
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Technically you can also do
class="u-like-of"
to indicate a like but that's not something that makes a lot of sense in a static site context. ↩︎
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A simple
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claiming the third of the three slots. I'm Natalie
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This is a mystifyingly horny film. It's not mystifying why it's horny—I'm the world's biggest defender of the idea that vampires ought to be horny!—but in the way it goes about it. There is of course the almost softcore blatancy with which the camera constantly caresses Mathilda May's massive tits, but that really just serves to set the stage for the pervasive sexuality of the whole thing. The one-two punch of "I can read her mind and she's a masochist" / "well I'm a natural voyeur", in a scene notionally about tracking a monster that's actively killing people, stands out in my mind, as does the sweaty desperation of the prime minister. But really I think there's barely a moment here that's not sexual in one way or another.
The film draws an immediate and firm connection between sex and the theft of lifeforce (General Ripper would be right at home). Even the first time we see it in a human-to-human context, the emaciated guard grasps at the air as though to initiate an embrace and the doctor who becomes his victim approaches out of tenderness. We can then read the fall of London as a sort of self-destructive orgy, a modern Sodom. Our two heroes are defined as heroic by their abstinence: Caine just likes to watch and so always has an objective position and knows what to do, and Carlsen has the astounding ability to choose not to have sex with a beautiful woman—or, at the movie's climax, to stop having sex just before it reaches the point of no return.
This is an approach to sex that sits at the particular crossroads between heteromasculinity and Christianity. It conceptualizes the ultimate horniness as an overpowering urge to overpower, and because overpowering others is wrong it conceptualizes everything about sexualith as immoral. But this totalizing view is in turn undermined by the film itself clearly existing to titillate the (presumedly heteromasculine—note that the only reference to queerness in the film is from the perspective of men wanting to watch lesbian sex) viewer. The film gives itself a gentle cloak of irony, playfully casting the viewer in the role of Caine the voyeur and the reframing the film's Christian bent as more of an erotic roleplay than a genuine expression of values.
It's a fascinating artifact, and one that—despite the intense heteromasculinity that no amount of irony can purge—I'm inclined to appreciate. Because at the end of the day, I think vampire films should be about sex, and I'll be damned if this is not a vampire movie that is well and thoroughly about sex.
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once again buying way more stickers than I have places to put stickers, even given that I keep layering them on my water bottle like sedimentary deposits
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there's an article on these (in Vietnamese), with more photos of La Quốc Bảo's work
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This post is by now a bit late for National Coming Out Day, but I did enjoy Dr. Davis's history of its observance and the political background of the concept of "coming out" and I particularly appreciated Shel's additions. She considers her experience specifically as a straight trans woman, the value of being out to her, and its value to the community. It feels a little silly to repost a link roundup, but this is definitely one worth reading!
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I'm the guy they hire to come up to the protagonist and make weird, vaguely threatening faces at them when they first enter a new city or the underworld or whatever. just to emphasize that they're out of their depth. pay's shit and I'm always on call but what can I say I love the work