Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social), page 2

Now from those last few posts you may have got the impression that I did nothing this year except read yuri manga and play Tetris. And you would be right

Best video game I played this year: "Hollow Knight: Silksong"

Best movie: "Pontypool"

Most *interesting* movie: "Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees"

Best book: Commonweal quintet by Graydon Saunders

Best comic: The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn't A Guy At All

Best TV show/anime: Sanda

Andi Is Not Done Recommending Gay Manga Apparently

- Love Bullet: This amazing manga got an official English release like last week and perfectly nails the tone of being teenaged, pansexual, dead, and incredibly thirsty for love

- My Dear Lass - Manhua I read this year, super heart tugging, has no official English release so you will have to *says something muffled into hand*

- Rock is a Lady's Modesty: I'm not done with this but I love it. Watch this anime if you like metal music or F/F BDSM

Things I feel guilty not mentioning:

- Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, and She Loves To Cook She Loves to Eat: These are oddly similar yuri manga about career women slowly figuring out that they are gay, both involving food?

- Tetris Grand Master series: TGM4 is a flawed masterpiece that is mostly only playable if you're *really* good. If you have an arcade stick and can mod it to an octagon or square gate I recommend playing all 4 games in order. Gamepad players I recommend TGM1 on PS/Switch

Me when American culture accuses me of being a pervert

The way you can identify a person who is drowning is that they do not look like a person who is drowning

@ryanprior @ebooksyearn I think what's happening is there's two versions of the feature and the switch turns off only one. But that's still upsetting

(Note: There is also an off switch. But it does not do anything.)

@ryanprior @ebooksyearn Given the restricted nature of the feature I think I would not object to opt out in this case

However

There is no opt out

And worse there is a switch which appears to be an opt out but in my testing does not actually opt you out, which is… the worst of all possible combinations

There is a system in place to limit abuses of this but I don't want a system in place to limit abuses, I want an off switch

@Infoseepage Yeah. And the defense is "well how would they know your phone number if you didn't give it to them?" and i was like… using methods?! and practices?!

I will never stop being upset about the thing where it is somehow possible for an Android app to send you an SMS message and then Android just tells it the SMS message arrived without me clicking an OK or granting it a permission for this

The Second-Order Streisand Effect is a social phenomenon where if a party makes an effort to censor information, discussion and news about the censoring attempt paradoxically leads to an increased awareness of Barbara Streisand, a musician whom most Zoomers would probably have never heard of if not for the Streisand Effect

@whitequark it does seem more rational to me this way around.

i'm starting to *mistrust* free hosted services because i'm old enough to have had a lot of them pulled out from under my feet. i wonder what happens when enough people/businesses start thinking that way.

@whitequark ;thinks; wait so are we setting up a future situation where github is free to have someone else host for you but costs money to self-host, whereas forejo-actions costs money to have someone else host for you but is "free" to self-host

@whitequark Would lock-in be lower with Forejo Actions, because if the customer gets tired of dealing with you they can self-host Forejo but not Github? That might be an incentive to some customers.

@whitequark If hypothetically, just hypothetically, we imagine that a core design requirement of the protocol was "regardless of what happens in future, it must continue to be necessary that the company Bluesky LLC exists"… the decision becomes a lot less confusing.

Follow up, 2025-12-27: Rudy here confirms the Blacksky appview is still being worked on (eg: blacksky uses bluesky's appview still)

https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3maykethsbk24

The sticking point, as he describes it, is "backfill". This alludes to the issue that makes me compare ATProto to blockchain: to get the features users expect, every node on the network must mirror the network's entire history. This is impractical, which is why bluesky is as of this moment a federated network with effectively only one node.

So. The thread above. An update.

We finally got a live test of the "Gertrude scenario", when a popular Blacksky user got permbanned by Bluesky. I, using my own PDS and blacksky's website, can't see him or his posts ( https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:2aebn3xk5t63net43eeepire/post/3m2iokicegs2b ). What gives?

A lot of people claim this is because Blacksky really is using Bluesky's appview, and gave me a way to verify this looking at headers. This seems to contradict Rudy's previous claims. I've asked Rudy for clarification: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2aebn3xk5t63net43eeepire/post/3m2jve23cf22m

Team/single dude behind Blacksky announces plans to ship an open payments app based on ATProto tech. I am very curious about this, as Rudy has managed to build at least one thing nobody else succeeded at, but also skeptical because:

- Blacksky works well but has not (yet?) lived up to its promises on independence/uncensorability

- I know people who tried to create payment processors and the hard part is preventing the upstream from censoring you, not building web apps.
https://bsky.app/profile/rude1.blacksky.team/post/3may36gw7nc2q