Notices by peterb (peterb@mathstodon.xyz)

@HauntedOwlbear The Black Hole

@HauntedOwlbear My galaxy brain take is "It's ludicrous that we have to care at all about the orthography of invisible glyphs, and the actual failure here is that the magic space genies in front of us require us to have an opinion on this issue instead of just making decisions that solve the problem for us."

If I looked at the text of a program you wrote but had to decide what Unicode code point every single character was before being sure I could compile it, we'd all agree that that was insane.

I'm in this photo and don't like it.

@HauntedOwlbear Absolutely!

@HauntedOwlbear A lot of their music is steeped in the early 1970s production + the urge to be very avant-garde. Their (final? maybe?) album from 1998 is called Ça Va and was pretty much a conscious effort to get over themselves and apply their aesthetic to "hey let's make an album of pop music and not feel bad about doing so" and is thus maybe more approachable for modern audiences.

Related bands: Henry Cow, and somehow Robert Fripp was plugged into the same scene, so they're at least tangentially connected to King Crimson.

Dagmar Krause (the vocalist) has an album called Supply and Demand where she sings Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht songs (in both German and English) that is very much worth listening to.

https://youtu.be/X4-poEEGeK4?si=QK22ezQIkv8N4uOJ&t=2973

@HauntedOwlbear I see SOMEONE has been reading Michael Moorcock's Dancers At The End Of Time series.

Stock market: I don't know who made this image, but it's perfect.

@poundquerydotinfo @cstross Younger folks simply *do not believe me* when I explain that in the 1970s, because at least 25% of your uncles and aunts smoked, *every single place you could exist in* including the house of your non-smoking parents, smelled like stale cigarette smoke (or, if you were really unlucky, stale cigar smoke) 100% of the time. Your car. Your clothes. Your hair. Everything. Always. All the time. Forever.

@HauntedOwlbear Might be the best movie that I will never, under any circumstances, watch again for any reason whatsoever.

@HauntedOwlbear @dosnostalgic @lunarloony @Tijn My perspective on this is different, no doubt because of my legal background. To me, the word "monopoly" has a very specific meaning, and I don't think Steam rises to that level. I'm not disagreeing that maybe it sucks to be in that market if you don't want to work with them, but this is true of a lot of competitive businesses. Lots of industries have 800-pound gorillas, and just because they exist and have lots of influence (and real power!) doesn't mean they're monopolies.

@HauntedOwlbear @dosnostalgic @lunarloony @Tijn It's never fun to be in the role of Big Company Defender in any thread, but I'm gonna do it here. I resisted Steam mightily when it first launched but I came around because I realized that the 30% they were taking - from my POV as a consumer - was in fact giving me value for money.

Might they turn evil someday? Sure - I spent money on other platforms (drengin.net anyone?) where the games are lost forever. But I have games I bought on Steam in 2003/2004 that I can still play today, and in practice they work better than many DRM-free games I bought *on disc* in the same timeframe. And I don't have to keep track of the disc.

@dosnostalgic @HauntedOwlbear @lunarloony @Tijn Sure. Lots of products work that way, not just games. It seems to me the key question is whether the 30% devs are paying to Steam is worth the value they get from it. Whichever way that question is answered I think leads to an obvious answer.

Have the banks considered eating less avocado toast?

Me, encountering literally any podcast recommendation:

"This sounds really interesting. I'd sure like to read a transcript of it instead of listening to it."