Melody Fwygon

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  • 74 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • I mostly agree here.

    Although; I have a slightly different experience as well that makes me highly distrustful of people who tout being ‘sapphic’ as well; as I’ve seen quite a few people who identify with that label participating in the same kinds of toxic and exclusionary behavior that the self labeled ‘lesbians’ that are referenced in this article are participating in.

    In general; excluding members of the rainbow who are less numerous than our identity group is; is in fact punching down on them and is not cool. If you bear any label in the whole spectrum; you should at least try to know better, and reject exclusionary behavior.

    Of course people will be exclusionary to the extent they can get away with it. Don’t let them get away with it when you see it. Call it out and educate them kindly if possible; especially those who should know better.

    As someone who is as deeply queer as she is transfeminine; I do experience some strange bouts of gatekeeping; especially around people who think I am inherently less feminine than they would prefer.


  • This actually doesn’t surprise me. Valve is getting greedy.

    But; to be clear; by using these tools, to unlock the DLC without paying for it, you are cheating in the game. That’s a mere fact; and not a moral judgement of anyone choosing to do so.

    Personally, I don’t judge anyone for doing so; and would use these tools myself if I thought a DLC were too predatory, expensive or otherwise unfair to not have it available.

    That’s not saying it’s fair or right for Valve to do so; nor is it saying the VAC bans or account suspensions are deserved. If you get hit by this; you absolutely should pirate every title you already own/purchased via Steam right away, and pirate anything else you want in the future.

    The only way to make them regret doing things like this is voting with your wallet; and asking others to do the same. Stop spending money on Valve. Once their earnings fall they’ll be forced to hear people’s concerns.





  • What happens is what’s intended.

    Everyone is going to do it; and it will cause companies, artists and creatives to step back and rethink a bit on how they monetize their creations responsibly. The ones that refuse to rethink and adapt will fail and flounder under the tiny handful of straw that Piracy adds to the load.

    That’s a GOOD thing.

    What’s unfortunate is that companies and people still think it’s productive to worry and handwring over piracy as if it’s killing someone; instead of being the thing you “don’t fly too close to, lest your wax wings get melted off and you plummet to the ground.”


  • You can automate this; but you have to make sure that the automation you create is going to respect the ratelimits. I’d recommend something simple like using a command alias or short script written for your specific IRC client.

    It’s what I used to do with that sort of thing; and there are plenty of well known Open Source scripts in the wild as well

    As an example; I would use mIRC with it’s scripting system and write my own event trigger scripts to automatically request, wait for and then accept the DCC chat requests and route them appropriately in the interface. There were also scripts that helped with getting the lists; unpacking them, and displaying those lists in my client…so I didn’t have to extract the text from the zip myself, and could select what I needed from the bot.

    All of this was lightweight automation that was intended not to flood the bot with commands and fed into command queueing modules that let the bots have time to process.

    Sometimes in those days you could get actually (+b)anned, Auto/KILL’ed or /(G/K):LINE’ed for causing a bot to crash…so you had to be careful and respectful with regard to scripts.

    TL;DR; know your bot, source channel & network rules, and write your own scripts for safety or read any scripts you import in carefully and understand what they’re doing.



  • So much for using airplane mode to conserve battery.

    Your understanding is slightly off.

    Airplane mode Does In Fact Turn off your CELLULAR Radio This radio is what powers your (2/3/4/5)G and LTE (This is 4G btw) connection to the cell towers.

    Most international radio communications laws can prohibit the use of Cellular Radio in flight; however they often don’t prohibit the use of shorter range radio technologies such as WIFI or Bluetooth.

    It’s all about ‘loudness’. Think about it. Your phone must ‘scream louder’ at a farther away cell tower than it would need to communicate with a nearby WiFi router or a Bluetooth headset.


  • I’m not going to agree with you on this. I think it’s unfortunate that your focus is on the assumption that it’s a purely white and cis male dominated decision; without providing any evidence that the museum is run strictly by cis white men.

    Furthermore, you focus on problematic behavior; which is important to document completely if we are trying to present that history in a complete and educational manner that allows us to avoid repeating past mistakes. There should be no room for censorship in education, because that’s how bigotry, racism and such will breed…in the shadows of ignorance that the censorship casts upon it’s recipients.


  • Does the museum have an ethical obligation to do the following? 1. Make the artist’s racist history, and apology, public at the show and in its publicity; 2. Allocate profits from the show to a program that benefits local Black artists; 3. Ask the artist to fund an art department in a historically Black college or university.

    I think the museum may be wise to warn patrons that the content of the art is potentially offensive to people. They may also inform the viewers that the views and concepts expressed in the artwork may not reflect how the artist currently feels. They are a product of history, a sign of the times of when the artwork was created and based off of.

    They may choose to provide as much additional context to the art as needed to ensure people are warned about what may be viewed as offensive these days. I see no reason to censor or soften the art though.

    People do deserve the right of some content warning though; so that they may practice appropriate viewer discretion. Nobody needs their day ruined by unexpected racism, in a content context when they’re not mentally prepared for it, and informed of the historical context in which it was expressed.

    If the art otherwise stands out and expresses a worthwhile message; I think racism can be safely ignored by a prepared viewer who understands that the racist messaging is not okay by modern standards and is willing to look past it to see the other themes in the art work. I don’t believe any museum of a respectable nature would present this art if it did not have some redeeming quality; as they’re typically concerned with preserving our history. Hiding the darker facets of our history, such as racism, from our descendants will only ensure that they repeat those mistakes.

    As for points 2 and 3; I think this decision should be left up to the museum and the artist as a whole. I wouldn’t expect contributions to a charity to offset the harms; nor do I feel they would genuinely “offset” the racism in the art. Let the art stand alone, in it’s darkness and it’s light, separate from it’s artist and the museum presenting it. Judge the art alone.

    It is okay to dislike an art piece but still have learned something from it; or to appreciate parts of it’s message but not others.




  • While this feed issue is manageable if you Pause Your Watch History and Clear Your Watch History before doing so; it does disable a lot of suggestions.

    Unfortunately Google and YouTube do not make these options easy to find and they are quick to nag you about turning them back on; and You Must Refuse This and ignore the errors and whines at every prompt for a while before they leave you alone.

    So by it’s very nature NewPipe completely defuses this garbage by simply being a much saner front-end than using the “Native” YouTube apps ever were.

    You know I think YouTube might start learning their lesson if more and more people began refusing to use their scummy front-end more than strictly necessary. Unfortunately they’re going to go through the usual stages of grief while doing so and they absolutely are currently trying to attack apps like GrayJay and NewPipe with spurious lawsuits.

    So instead; maybe those of you who “Pay” for YouTube Premium should simply cancel your service and start donating that amount to projects like NewPipe, when that is possible. (Yes I know Team NewPipe will not accept donations for legal reasons, but similar projects do exist, like FreeTube or Invidious, that can and do accept donations to cover costs for server hosted things in their developments.)






  • With that being said; I do fully support an Instance’s choice to federate, not federate or even limit their federation with them.

    In most cases this should not affect instances; but unfortunately there are people who will ignore all warnings and use the Fedi Garden as a whitelist instead of a list of instances that you know will handle policy violations quickly.

    On the other hand I absolutely also respect the needs of communities who ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY WILL NOT TOLERATE instances who choose to federate with either X, Threads, or any other instance they deem to be too toxic to play nicely. As instance operators you absolutely have the right to block problems BEFORE they happen, and if you happen to KNOW an instance will absolutely be a HEADACHE, you have every right to say NO. If the users do not like your decision; they are free to find a better instance for themselves; or spin up an alt account on a better instance.