Notices by Velocirooster adminensis :bc: (theropologist@beige.party), page 2

I have defederated from fediverse-lite(.)com. It promotes Christian facism and homophobia. I'm feeling ambivalent about including receipts because even with a CW it can serve to amplify hate speech. And I really don't like writing out the alt text for screen caps of hateful bigoted posts. If anyone would like to confirm for themselves just take a look at their about page, specifically their block list and the reasons given.

#fediblock

I recommend defederating from shortstacksran(.)ch. The admin is an obvious troll.

#fediblock

@BeAware @amiserabilist @BruceMirken Oh, that suspension would have only affected people trying to view the account on beige party. There may be something additional going on with your instance if you can't see the account.

@BeAware @amiserabilist @BruceMirken Also, the Cosmically business was because it became more than just being anti-Israel, he was starting to rail against Jews in general.

@BeAware @amiserabilist @BruceMirken I did suspend him pretty early on in the life of this instance, but I think it was a bad call on my part, so I have now reversed it.

As someone raised by a single mother, who, once I got my license, often got sent on errands to go buy pads, and who has continued to do so, having been married for over 20 years to a real live woman who's a whole fucking person with bodily functions and everything, I really appreciate the type of masculinity that doesn't wilt in the face of totally normal and necessary sanitary products.

If there's one thing these fascists have made abundantly clear is that they value women primarily for their reproductive systems. And then they are gonna get squeamish about the normal functioning of that reproductive system?

And these are the same people who think you should have no problem seeing some white dude cosplaying in tactical gear carrying around an AR-15 in public.

Fuck these Nazi clowns and their fragile china-doll egos. I don't claim to know what it means to "be a man" but I sure as hell know it doesn't involve making women feel shitty about their bodies and forcing everyone around you to wonder if you're gonna murder them at any given moment.

How about just trying to be a decent human being?

Calling the fascists weird isn't ruining weird. Weird can be a compliment if you don't happen to be an insecure chest-puffing man-child. The fact that they are so triggered by it is the point. It makes weird even better.

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

State of The Instance - July 2024

Well, better late than never! I'm in the Pacific time zone so it's technically still July over here. It's been another busy month so I'm running behind again, but I did want to briefly go over moderation policy, because I've gotten a few reports related to an issue that's not covered by our current server rules and I would like to have a more defined policy in place.

New Rule Proposal: Content Attribution and Generative AI

When I started this instance I pretty much just ripped off mastodon.social's instance rules because I figured they knew what they were doing over there and their rules seemed like a good place to start. Over time I have tweaked them slightly to further clarify things that I thought were too ambiguous, and for the most part I think they have been sufficient to effectively moderate this instance. But I adopted these rules in late 2022, before generative AI really took off.

Since then, mastodon.social has adopted a new rule:

Rule #6: Content created by others must be attributed, and use of generative AI must be disclosed

Content created by others must clearly provide a reference to the author, creator, or source. For adult content, this should include performers. Accounts may not solely post AI-generated content.

What I like about this rule is that it's founded upon the principle of proper attribution. If we are posting content that is not our original creation, we should provide attribution so that it is clear who the original creator of the content is. This is generally good manners, and if we're talking in terms of copyright, it's the law. I live in the US, so in order to start this instance I had to register as a DMCA agent, which means I'm legally required respond to DMCA takedown requests.

Unfortunately, as we all know, Silicon Valley tech billionaires are exempt from such trifles as obeying the law. They designed large language models that are basically automated mass-copyright-infringement machines. They knew that they were violating the law, but they did it anyway because they figured that if they could get generative AI to the point where it actually worked, everyone would be so amazed by the technology that nobody would care about the massive copyright infringement going on under the hood. This tactic seems to have worked, which is, to put it mildly, not great. Like it or not, however, this technology exists, and it will continue to exist, so we need to deal with it.

I know there are those who will disagree with me on this position, but I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to punish people for using these tools. The fact of the matter is that it's not us who funded this technology, it was billionaire assholes like Elon Musk. Generally speaking, most AI-generated content I have seen here has just been silly fun, and I think that living through the slow decline of global society, which has been instigated by billionaire assholes, entitles the rest of us to have a little silly fun as a treat. Given all that, I think a fair compromise is to require that AI-generated content at least be attributed as such, so that people are aware of the source of the content and can make their own decisions about how they choose to interact with it.

I'm not really sure what to make of the adult content clause. I haven't had to deal with that much here, and to the extent that I have, most of it has fallen into the "original content" category. I don't see any reason not to adopt it, so I am proposing that we adopt mastodon.social's rule as written.

I invite you to share your thoughts in the replies. As always, whatever policy we adopt, I want to make sure it's something that we can all understand and build a consensus around.

Ok, on to the numbers!

New sign-ups:

In the month of June we gained 25 new party-goers, for a grand total of 460 nifty non-fungible fedizens. Of those, 260 accounts have been active in the last month.

Welcome new party-goers! if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly.

Finances:

For the month of June we received $290.00 in donations. After PayPal fees, that comes out to $253.53. We had $1,803.44 left over from May, so our total available funds for paying the June hosting fees was $2,056.97.

The hosting fees for June break down as follows:

VPS Hosting: $129.57
Foreign Transaction Fee: $3.49
S3 Storage: $10.87
SMTP Relay: $17.00

Total: $160.93

After paying the hosting bills for June, we have $1,896.04 left in donation funds. That's enough to keep us running for about a year, so we are in good shape. Thank you to all who donated!

I've already mentioned this in a previous post, but I'll restate it here for greater visibility. I have recently come down with a spot of that awful affliction known as hope, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that most of you are here, at least in part, because you really don't like fascists. That was a big reason why I started this instance in the first place. So, if you are a US citizen, and were planning to donate to the ko-fi this month, I would encourage you to consider donating to ActBlue instead:

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/kamalaharris2024

I know this is specific to US politics, but unfortunately the consequences of US politics do not remain politely confined within the borders of the US, and a fascist takeover of this country would have disastrous effects around the world. I won't make a habit of mentioning US politics in my official capacity as admin of this instance, but the stakes of this feel too high for me to just stand by and say nothing.

For those who are unable, or would just prefer to donate to the ko-fi, you can do so here:

https://ko-fi.com/drinky

The link can also be found in my bio and on the about page for the site.

And once again a big thanks to all the Beige Party-goers. I am really proud of the community we have created here, and that has everything to do with you fine folks.

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

I just defederated from nationalist (dot) social. I would have done it based on the name alone, but of course it also contains all of the Nazi garbage that one would expect.

#fediblock

@LoganFive

The US men's team won a football! Not bad!

This is my candidate for best headline from the US presidential race so far:

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

I've gotten several reports on the account of the Nazi that runs poster.place. Naturally, I was confused because I had long since defederated from that cesspool. I did a little investigation and found out that they were using some redirect service at momostr.pink to mask their actual alt account at coracle.social. I have neither the time nor the inclination to play web sleuth with these idiots, so I have defederated from both instances.

There were some folks following accounts listed under momostr.pink, but it seems this instance's main goal is to obfuscate real account names by generating obnoxiously long aliases that redirect back to the original account. This is highly suspicious behavior and I already have one example of it being abused, so I'd rather play it safe and just defederate from the whole thing.

If anyone at Beige Party was negatively impacted by this, please let me know and I will consider changing the suspension to a limit, so that people can follow individual accounts on that instance, though I would be highly suspicious of anyone trying to obfuscate their identity in this way.

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

#fediblock

@simsa03 Or is that OfficerGPT?

@simsa03 Thanks for explaining my own lived experience to me, OFFICER.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s was to understand that the revolution had occurred long before you were born, but that its failure was the reasonable and correct outcome. The counterculture was too wild and wooly, drug-addled idealists playing sans-culotte, trying to tear down all the guardrails that were there for good reason, ever slouching towards Bethlehem for no good reason other than it was "far out, man".

Popular media reinforced this, the erstwhile wild and wooly drug-addled idealists themselves blushed a bit even as they wistfully recalled how simple everything seemed when they were young and naive. Caring about things and wanting to make the world better was safely relegated to a developmental phase of young adulthood. When you get older, you'll understand, they told us as they patted our heads.

Implicit in all of this is that while the counterculture had failed at almost all of its goals, we had achieved some state of synthesis between the freaks and straight society. We had settled on rational and inevitable new order where culture was more open and free but corporations were still free to make a profit off of it, and who could begrudge them this basic right, which after all was the common teat we all suckled at, freaks and straights alike.

Reaching middle age in the 2020s is to realize that all of that was complete and utter bullshit, and the world that you were born into and believed to be a stable compromise between revolution and the status quo was just a myth cooked up by the reactionaries, to soothe our addled brains and give us just enough to lose so that we will fall in line and accept the world as it is, and not trouble ourselves with such idealistic absurdities as imagining a better world.

It's an odd thing to realize that your entire life has been a slow march into revanchism, not to the status quo of the 50s and early 60s but to some darker fever dream of an imagined past order. At least in the 60s, the John Birch society was seen as a joke by most political thinkers. Now it almost seems quaint compared to the sudden ardor for full-throated fascism on the right.

Though to call it a "sudden" ardor is to fall prey to the propaganda I was reared on from birth. This was always the goal. Nixon wasn't inevitable. Reagan wasn't inevitable. For fuck's sake, Trump was not inevitable! These were all coordinated attacks on the part of the motherfuckers who have always been at the wheel and who constantly need to remind us that they have their foot on our necks.

And it worked. At some point in my 30s I slipped out of the notion that the world would inevitably become a better place in time and into the hope that at least I'll be dead before the shit really hits the fan. At 42, I don't really even have that hope anymore. This is how a hegemonic minority suppresses the majority of people who are their natural enemies, by squeezing out even the hope that things could get better, or at the very least, not worse.

I don't have a lot of hope to offer here, except to say that none of this is inevitable, it's being done to us. And for God's sake, don't let the motherfuckers win.

A four-year-old could imagine a better world than this.

Currently watching Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. and at this point rebuilding Tokyo Tower again just seems reckless

The closed captions on live sports are always entertaining. Just now it said there will be a 2-minute warm yum up, and that is too cute for me to handle right now.

Well it's happened, I have ventured forth from the house. There's no way to watch #euro2024 in the US without buying a $70 streaming package, so I will just have to console myself with a nice beer and some tacos while I watch Germany in the round of 16 at my local soccer bar.

Is it bad that when I see "Schmeichel" written out, half the time I read it as "schmeckle"?