zdl

zdl, 8 months ago

@ArchivistSHD @yassin @JorgeStolfi @overholt Going that far into China's past is delving into where history and mythology merge into one and it's very hard to tease out which is which at any given point. I'm nowhere near qualified to help you sort out that mess, I'm afraid. 😞

zdl, 8 months ago

@sven @ErikUden I'm as technically declined as they come. On top of that I hate computers, software, and the people who make both. (Nothing personal: I just want you all to die in a fire until you get replaced by people who understand what a good UX is.)

And I did not find Mastodon any harder to use than Twitter or Facebook (and indeed in the aspect of staying where I want it instead of changing shit out from under me it's far superior to both!).

zdl, 8 months ago

@jwz @fraying Is the the social version of enshittification?

zdl, 8 months ago

@jens @fraying Nah. Bad would be if you were speaking in bad faith. This was a mild misunderstanding easily cleared up!

zdl, 8 months ago

@gerrymcgovern White supporters of the Green Transition. Who live half a world away and thus aren't faced with the direct consequences, only the indirect, later ones.

zdl, 8 months ago

@aurochs @pixelfed Pixelfed needs to be used by more people! It's a nifty project.

zdl, 8 months ago

@mongrel @dansup @pixelfed Thanks a lot! I think I understand the feature now. I'm not sure I have a use case for it, but it's nice to know what it does should I get one.

zdl, 11 months ago

@jens Evergiven, no question. Xin Hai Tong was refloated and moved on in no time. Evergiven was there for weeks.

zdl, 11 months ago

@jens I found the Ever Given thing really funny.

Of course that's because I wasn't even mildly inconvenienced by it, being at the SOURCE side of the shipping equation, not the receiving. 🤭

zdl, 11 months ago

@adr @ubiquity75

...

...

Are they being sarcastic? It's genuinely hard to tell because the world is just crazy enough it's plausible they're serious!

zdl, 11 months ago

@ArneBab I don't see this kind of stuff being directed at, say, German companies. Hell, I didn't see this kind of stuff being directed at even RUSSIAN companies until Russia started actually invading other countries.

Sorry, I think race is a huge component. I've seen too much press bullshit in the form of double standards in the past 20 years to unsee this.

zdl, 1 year ago

@mike @maria @dangillmor Journalists have NEVER given a shit about the safety of their sources. Ask the disappeared activists in China who foolishly followed western journalist advice about how "Signal" was a "secure" app, only to get nailed anyway because it's anything but.

You'll still get journalists recommending Signal to locals here as "secure".

zdl, 1 year ago

@maria @mike @dangillmor There is an enormous hole in the Signal model that has been pointed out time and again for multiple years now. The Chinese woman who pointed out said hole was first gaslit by Signal's founder, then dismissed, then, finally, after a LOT of negative attention went his way, he "documented" that hole in an off-hand comment buried deep under the covers of the documentation.

(1/n)

zdl, 1 year ago

@maria @mike @dangillmor Signal's app blurb still lies, however, with "Privacy isn't an optional mode, it's just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time."

So what is this hole?

The keyboard. Chinese sources are likely to be using a keyboard app ("IME") because, well, you need it. And there's absolutely nothing in easily-seen space (go to https://signal.org/en/ and see how long it takes you to find it!) that warns you about that massive hole.

(2/n)

zdl, 1 year ago

@maria @mike @dangillmor Signal could ameliorate the threat by incorporating their own keyboard independent of the system one. They choose not to do this, however, relying instead on marketing blurbs and end-user ignorance instead.

And people get disappeared.

It doesn't have to be "widespread" to be an issue. Don't recommend shit if you don't know the threat model. And now that you do, don't continue recommending shit.

There's a reason journalists aren't trusted now.

zdl, 1 year ago

@jens It almost literally opened with the lead character's wife getting fridged. That put me into a far more critical mood almost immediately. Some of the observations:

Characterization is weak, the most egregious example being the Tiefling environmental activist living among the elves who makes a huge point of saying she hates humans. Which doesn't show up as an issue AT ANY POINT DURING THE STORY despite her being in a group with two humans and a half-elf…

(1/n)

zdl, 1 year ago

@jens In its defence I'll say that it does feel like a D&D campaign written down as a story, which is to say random events strung together with thread-thin links that don't really stand up to more than about three seconds' worth of thought. (Of course there's a reason why I dropped D&D back before AD&D 2nd Edition was released, so this isn't a selling point for me, but could be for others.)

(2/n)

zdl, 1 year ago

@jens The inconsistent characterization aside, the acting was quite good in individual scenes. Some of the individual set pieces were good. It was nice to see actual D&D monsters show up in a D&D movie and be as threatening as they really should be (unlike the beholders of the old D&D movie!). There were individual BITS that were really well done … they were just not well assembled into a coherent whole.

(3/n)

zdl, 1 year ago

@jens I got the feeling there were lots of little easter eggs for people who play in (or are at least familiar with) the Forgotten Realms settings. Some of the places, for example, are names I've heard by osmosis by just being in the #ttrpg scene, even though I don't ever play #DungeonsAndDragons. Same with some spell names and other such little details.

(4/n)

zdl, 1 year ago

@jens TL;DR summary: for me, I didn't hate it. I didn't like it either. It was a movie. That I watched. That is pretty much my entire reaction.

But I'm probably not in its target audience. The target audience will probably at least have mildly positive responses to it (though that opening fridging may knock it down a notch).

The set pieces were good. The SFX were decent to excellent. The writing was shambolic. Maybe they could have hired a writer for a slice of that SFX budget.

(5/5)

zdl, 1 year ago

@jens I'm possibly not quite getting across at how DISJOINTED the writing felt to me. People just sort of appeared in one place, then another, then another, then back to an earlier place, then... And the hooks linking these sets together were wisp-thin.

Rather like my early-days D&D games when nobody involved had any clue how to actually tie things together and transitions were literally, "Well after you left the tavern at Seaville, you found yourself in Outer Cactus of the Plains of Fire".

zdl, 1 year ago

@jens That's true. They did say they were going to go somewhere before jump-cutting there.