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(This is the 38th of many promised articles which explain an idea in isolation. It is hoped that ideas may be adapted, linked together and implemented.)

It is possible for a micro-controller to drive a VGA display. I was aware that there is a competitive graphics demo category for such systems. However, I hadn't considered a system in detail.

Simple eight bit computers, such as early Sinclair Spectrum models or a Galaksija use a memory-mapped 4021 logic chip shift register or suchlike for screen output. A 4MHz Z80 or suchlike spends about 80% of its processing power loading data into the shift register. This is horrendously inefficient but it significantly reduced the cost of early home computers. To maximize functionality in Spectrum designs, all Z80 alternate registers were reserved for rastering. Whereas, in Galaksija designs, the unrolled loop in ROM used timing-compatible Z80 opcodes which also provided QWERTY keyboard decode.

With an 84MHz Atmel SAM ARM processor in an Arduino Due, every pixel can be set directly from software without shift registers. For maximum resolution, especially at VGA resolution rather than NTSC or PAL, an unrolled loop remains beneficial. However, rather than being hand-rolled assembly, possibly with ancillary functions, it merely requires a C compiler and a tweaked Makefile to ensure display.o or suchlike contains a long, unrolled loop. With an 84MHz processor and 31kHz HSync, there are approximately 2700 processor cycles per line. Allowing for border and HSync, 640×480 display can be implemented with three instructions per pixel.

Furthermore, with a 32 bit micro-controller, it is possible to set 32 I/O lines simultaneously. These could represent HSync, VSync and 10 bits per channel for RGB color. Or it is possible to have two screen with five bits per channel per screen. Or five screens with two bits per channel per screen. Or 10 screens with one bit per channel per screen. Or 30 screens with one bit per pixel output. Unfortunately, driving VGA quickly exhausts RAM. An Atmel SAM has a minimum of three 32KB banks RAM. However, 640×480 is 307200 pixels. Per pixel-plane per screen, this is 38400 bytes RAM (37.5KB). So, two bits per pixel is the baseline functionality unless some form of compression or indirection is used. The most obvious technique is tiling such as a character mode where some or all of the available characters are user defined. For example, seven bit ASCII from 32 to 127 could be fixed and the remaining 160 code-points could be programmable. With a 16 bit character field, it may be possible to have eight bit Latin1 symbols plus 768 programmable code-points. Or maybe more.

It is particularly annoying for such arrangements to become practical after NTSC, PAL, SCART and VGA are considered deprecated. However, it you want to implement trustworthy computing, do not discard any of this equipment. After my recent experience of HDMI replacing SCART, I certainly won't be discarding anything with a SCART or VGA connector.

I have a friend who closely follows one soap opera, The Apprentice, business pitch shows and political news. He has anything in background when he writes Java Swing applications. He has a CRT television with a SCART connector which receives from a terrestrial digital decoder. The latter stopped working without warning and no obvious cause of failure. He hurridly replaced one digital decoder with another. However, the old decoder has two SCART connectors and the new decoder has one SCART connector and one HDMI connector. He only uses one SCART connector but he wasn't happy to lose the potential redundancy of a second SCART socket.

Many devices have multiple SCART sockets and this allows N devices to be daisy-chained with N-1 cables. Any device can take a lead and devices up and down the chain will follow. I presume that a device with one SCART socket and one HDMI socket implements similar functionality while also bridging between analog and digital. Unfortunately, I'm hugely unimpressed with HDMI functionality. With the exception of VCR recording, most SCART devices worked with NTSC and PAL. Such interoperability doesn't apply with the new-fangled digital equivalent.

I thought that he gained the potential to use his new decoder with his LCD computer display. Unfortnately, this completely fails because the minimum resolution of the digital decoder is 1920×1080 pixels and the maximum resolution of the LCD screen is 1280×1024 pixels. They have completely incompatible horizontal and vertical resolution! I know that the vertical resolution of SCART is poor but this type of incompatibility rarely occurred.

I'm most unimpressed that HDMI 4.0 provides full, unfiltered InterNet Protocol tunneling between devices. A shockingly typical configuration would be a subset of NewsCorp digital satellite decoder connected to a Samsung voice and/or gesture recognition television connected to a Windows 10 keylogger and/or game console with camera and NSA key connected to an ADSL router with a hidden route. What could possibly go wrong?

Whereas, you've got eight processor registers and three instruction cycles on a Harvard bus to assemble an arbitrary bit pattern for VGA display. And there's no data-path for any funny business.

I expected to be off-line for two or three weeks. Unfortunately, with medical problems, legal problems, accommodation problems and financial problems, at least one month of my time has been consumed with matters unrelated to work. However, for five days per week, I'm in an environment with no television, no radio, no phone and no InterNet connection. Even with a flaky laptop which has led me to draft all text on paper, it is common for me to write more than 3000 words per day. For example, the specification for the cell networking protocol is more than 19000 words. I also have seven draft articles pending with two publications. Around this, I have:-

• Read and reviewed five science fiction novels.
• Read and reviewed one book on rocketry.
• Read one book about computer security. (Not yet reviewed.)
• Started reading one book about operational amplifiers. (Not yet reviewed.)
• Skimmed through finalists of Google's Little Box Challenge.
• Designed some power circuitry and made empirical tests.
• Read MosTek's 1976 documentation for the 6502 micro-processor.
• Skimmed through 6809 micro-processor documentation. (I'm disapointed Lance A. Leventhal's description of this architecture given his better work on the 6502 architecure and 68000 architecture.)
• Skimmed through Atmel SAM [ARM] datasheets.
• Skimmed through lists of RFCs, ASTMs, ISOs, DINs, IECs, US Military Standards, European Standards, British Standards, Russian Standards and Japanese Industrial Standards.
• Watched two episodes of Black Mirror, Season 3, Episode 5: Men Against Fire and Season 3, Episode 6: Hated In The Nation [the one with the bees]. (Not yet reviewed.)
• Watched six episides of Electric Dreams (Not yet reviewed.)
• Watched the 1975 film: Rollerball. (Not yet reviewed.)
• Watched cartoon Rainbow Magic: Return To Rainspell Island. (Not yet reviewed.)
• Caught up with various controversies, such as:-
  • Jordan Peterson.
  • James Damore.
  • The Donald Trump golf-ball meme. (That's hugely entertaining but, yeah, when Donald Trump forwarded the meme, that's closer to the film: Idiocracy than respectable senior statesman.)
  • The demise of Bell Pottinger.
  • The penatration tester who goes screw-driving (as apposed to war-driving).
  • Dove's advert which isn't racist.
  • Nivea's advert which isn't racist.
  • Harvey Weinstein's casting couch. (I am too late to get a refund for enduring a film with the alleged actress Ashley Judd?)
  • Uber.
• Got an ex-housemate addicted to Tetris.
• Obtained some medication which improves concentration.
• Exercised with mixed results.
• Walked 40km in one day. I surprised myself. However, it took about 11 days to recover.
• Obtained a huge quantity of dried noodles. (Not yet reviewed.)

From this, I have made scattered progress. Specifically:-

• It is possible to make a 6502 cell network switch with 1KB RAM but this only works if the cell size is very small and/or it has four ports or less. 2KB RAM allows 24 byte cells and eight ports. Either configuration may require 32KB ROM or more.
• I found an easy method to optimize bit matrix transpose operations simultaneously on AVR, ARM and Thumb. However, it compiles very slowly.
• I've applied the technique of defensive programming to electronics. In particular, how to make all circuitry resiliant to unexpected mains electricity without incurring significant component cost or power loss. This is helped by programming and electronics having idioms for common tasks.
• I found a reference to Dimension 404, which appears to be the SyFy Channel's counterpart to Black Mirror on NetFlix and Electric Dreams on Channel4/Amazon.
• I found that it is possible to make a Communicator Badge which transmits Ambisonic A-Format audio.
• I found that it is possible to make a Communicator Badge which works in a conference bridge and places each participant in a different position on a sound-stage.
• Atmel SAM interrupts are all bottom priority by default and therefore all interrupts are processed sequentially unless specifically configured.
• Atmel SAM privileges are present by default unless running inside an interrupt or specifically relinquished. (Obvious with hindsight but worthwhile to check.)
• Don't buy the cheapest Arduino Nano clones because they don't ship with the Arduino firmware installed. Installation requires cursory understanding of SPI, a working Arduino and use of the hateful Arduino GUI. Come back PIC. All is forgiven.
• I got 4094 logic chip output shift registers working on the first attempt.
• I have completely failed to get 4021 logic chip input shift registers working. I have also completely failed to get MCP4921 DACs working. I presume the problem is Voltage level incompatibility between 3.3V circuitry and 5V circuitry.
• An LM317 Voltage Regulator consists of a Zener diode, an operational amplifier and power transistors. An LM317 is slightly less integrated than the trusty 7805 Voltage Regulator but provides significantly more flexibility. An LM317 is typically used in an output feedback arrangement to obtain a Voltage which is a multiple of the 1.25V Zener. For example, a potential divider with 10kΩ and 27kΩ to ground provides approximately 5V. (1+3ish units of the 1.25V.) However, an LM317 also works perfectly fine with no feedback. A potential divider from the input supply provides any ratio plus 1.25 Volts. Although each device handles a maximum of 28 Volts or suchlike, a sufficiently long cascade of regulators allows any input from car battery to European mains to regulated down to 5 Volts or similar.
• Mains electricity can be rectified with a MOSFET rectifier bridge. If you're crazy enough to connect MOSFET control gates directly to mains then rectification can be acheived with two NPN MOSFETs, two PNP MOSFETs and nothing else. If you want to reduce the gate Voltage to something sane, use the potential divider idiom of resistor, Zener, Zener in reverse, resistor. This can provide something around 5 Volt relative to ground.
• I sorta understand the difference between live, neutral and ground. That's sufficient for me to stay away from it until I understand it better.
• A MOSFET with 2 Ohm resistance is problematic when V = I × R, P = I × V and P = I² × R where R = 2 Ohm and I = 6.6 Ampère. That's a lot of friction.

Random findings:-

• It was predictable that a Raspberry Pi power reservior capacitor would be problematic. However, I didn't expect one to mechanically shear. Thankfully, it was trivial to re-solder.
• I have several findings around micro-controllers, SCART, VGA and HDMI.
• USB emoticon keyboards which output seven bit ASCII have been superceded by USB emoji keyboards which provide Unicode symbols. I presume they are implemented as a USB keyboard device which sends decimal sequence code-points while a virtual AltGr key is held. I mention this because my expertise with micro-controllers is almost at a level where I could implement something similar.
• Found that a large number of US Military Standards were dropped in 2005. Although, given the level of bureaucracy, no-one is quite sure of the number before or after the purge. Some estimate that almost 1/3 were dropped for the purpose of supply chain streamlining. This includes MIL-STD-1750A which specified use of micro-processors with 16 general purpose registers and numerous other features.
• The British have a standard for the manufacture of cricket balls, BS5993, and their standard for brewing tea, BS6008, is now an international standard, ISO3103.
• Meanwhile, the Germans have, DIN4531, a standard for ViewMaster stereoscopic picture viewers.
• Crowd-funding platforms don't work unless you already have momentum or a niche like table-top rôle-playing.
• AltPwr.Net has published circuit diagrams, circuit board layouts and Arduino software which is supposedly compatible wit MQTT. Documentation is sparse.
• The efficiency of a candle can be improved with the use of a Peltier device and an LED. Peltier devices are annoying inefficient but the large heat gradient of a bare flame makes it worthwhile.
• Electric Dreams, Season 1, Episode 3: The Commuter, led me to re-read the William Gibson story: The Gernsback Continuum and that led me to re-read the Phillip K. Dick story: Piper In The Woods. I'm less impressed with William Gibson's originality but I'm mystified why Phillip K. Dick gets so much more attention than Ray Bradbury.
• I may be in the oft-derided category of tired and emotional. A large number of things make me cry for different reasons. The Gernsback Continuum made me cry because I'm not ready - we're not ready - to live in a techno-utopia. Daft Punk album: Tron Legacy, track 10: Adagio For Tron has a really haunting cello which makes me cry. Porter Robinson & Madeon's animated music video for Shelter consistently made me cry seven times out of seven. A song in Rainbow Magic: Return To Rainspell Island has a message of "Hey, it'll be alright." and it makes me cry with happiness. Rollerball made me cry with triumph.
• There is probably no-one called Em-a (pronounced Em-dash-a, "'cause the dash don't be silent.") or suchlike. However, it is a plausible urban legend.

Original submission on "Undercover in the Alt-right", from the TMB-can't-stand-free-speech dept. Accepted, and them suppressed by the Nazi sympathizing opinion of a non-editor. Is this how SoylentNews is going to roll?

aristarchus [soylentnews.org] writes:

In an interesting look inside the world of white supremacism, the New York Times [nytimes.com] reports on the findings of a Swedish graduate student who went undercover into the belly of the beast.

Posing as a student writing a thesis about the suppression of right-wing speech, he traveled from London to New York to Charlottesville, Va. — and into the heart of a dangerous movement that is experiencing a profound rejuvenation.

While this may sound vaguely familiar, Hermansson discovered some not so surprising facts about Nazis: they love Hitler!

Mr. Hermansson and Mr. Jorjani met at an Irish pub near the Empire State Building, where the baby-faced Mr. Jorjani imagined a near future in which, thanks to liberal complacency over the migration crisis, Europe re-embraces fascism: “We will have a Europe, in 2050, where the bank notes have Adolf Hitler, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great. And Hitler will be seen like that: like Napoleon, like Alexander, not like some weird monster who is unique in his own category — no, he is just going to be seen as a great European leader.”

Yes, an interesting read for everyone interested in free speech, and its ability out political extremism and vanquish unreason with the bright lights of publicity. And a scary read for anyone worried about Millennial Nazis.

Fluent in the language of online irony and absurdism, and adept at producing successful memes, alt-lighters have pulled off something remarkable: They’ve made far-right ideas hip to a subset of young people, and framed themselves as society’s forgotten underdogs. The alt-light provides its audience easy scapegoats for their social, economic and sexual frustrations: liberals and feminists and migrants and, of course, globalists.

original submission

Postscriptum: a link to the actual report by Hermansson at Hope, not Hate. Very interesting, as a certain German on Rowan and Martin's LaughIn used to say.

(This post is unrelated to the ongoing topics of audio, video, networking and electronics. This post is a personal addendum to a SoylentNews book review.)

An unexpected bonus from reading Ignition - An Informal History Of Liquid Rocket Propellants by Dr. John D. Clark was a possible family connection. I could never place "Uncle Dick" in my family tree. Perhaps he was an honorary relative. Perhaps my redneck family crashed a wedding or something. Regardless, I've had a first-hand account of wire-guided missile development and a first-hand explanation of the criteria for a supersonic airframe. Until reading Ignition, I assumed these were unrelated developments. However, I now understand these topics to be part of a Cold War weapon development program.

I may have the details wrong but "Uncle Dick" was a junior member of a team who had access to a military firing range for one week. They had some surplus tanks from World War 2 which were in moderate condition. Someone at the hot end of the range (crazy people) rigged each tank so that it would drive itself across the range while the rest of team fired at it. He said that being paid to destroy tanks with his own design of rocket launcher was one of the best working weeks of his life. Within my family, he had a reputation for being a pyromaniac due to his account of this and other incidences.

When he said to me that the launcher had a spool of wire, I thought that he was another distant relative with a dry sense of humor. Surely, it is best to fire where the tank will be. This would be the shortest and fastest route. However, distance and fuel conservation aren't concerns. Furthermore, a wire-guided missile allows an infantry grunt to trivially adjust the direction of a missile to compensate for changes to the target's speed after the missle has been fired. This is such a useful concept that it was further developed into the laser-guided weapon.

I may have the details wrong but "Uncle Dick" was a more senior member of a team which developed aerospace grade titanium. A supersonic aircraft requires a large block of titanium to be extruded. This eliminates welding. This increases strength. It also provides another essential property. A titanium frame must have zero air bubbles and zero water bubbles. This cannot be guaranteed if there is welding. The problem is quite severe. When an aircraft goes supersonic, friction from the air may cause oxygen in an air or water bubble to catalyze with titanium. A cavity to the exterior would cause a runaway reaction. The end result would be a very large firework and a dead crew.

When I last saw "Uncle Dick", he said that the first person to solve the semiconductor heating problem would be a trillionaire. Since then, I've keenly followed reversible computing and quantum computing.

Here we are, two days after The Morgatory Blizzander took exception to one of my submissions that was approved by another ed. Strange, because TMB is not even an ed, he is only a coder, from what I understand, so how could his objection overrule the decision of an editor? The result, as documented in my last journal, is that my submission has been deep sixed, marked as hidden, so that it is not in the queue, not in the pre-queue, not anywhere! I request, respectfully, that the eds cease this act of censorship. TMB's objections are no more valid than mine, and since I thought this particular article important enough to be a submission to SoylentNews, TMB's objections are noted, but now I think he may actually be a Nazi. Which, as a Native American, seems strange. But I do remember a scene in the movie "Under the Volcano", starring Albert Finney, where a Metis riding on a bus, and wearing a National Socialist Party Pin, harasses a full-blood Native American Mexican. And then it hit me! Not about racial purity at all, since the half-breeds could feel superior to the full bloods, as long as they were not of the "right" blood. TMB is a mongrel. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I am one, too! But to object to an investigative piece looking into the alt-right, because he is afraid, and I repeat, AFRAID, that I am calling him a Nazi? Methinks the Buzzard protests too much. Let my submission go, eds! Let it go.

Every Soylentil should, on occasion, pull back the curtain and see how sausage is made. Being the site this is, all the discussions by the editors are logged on IRC, and often it is very interesting what is said there:

[12:16:20] cmn32480: Could you please take a look at this story? TMB has some strong views we should not run it (see scroolback): https://soylentnews.org
[12:16:21] ^ �03Error�
[12:16:24] afk
[12:19:02] came from aris5tarcfhus..; wee probably shouldn't run it
[12:19:26] Bytram, that a couple white supremacists exist in the US is not news. running a story about it is not dissimenating news, it is furthering the nazi boogeyman myth and painting tens of millions on the alt-right as literal nazis when there are less than a hundred thousand white supremacists of any variety in the US.
[12:20:20] it serves no purpose but that of propaganda
[12:20:42] am puitting in my standing desk... will tak e apeek at it when I get a moment
[12:23:20] and it's not a speech issue. dingleberry is free to post it verbatim in his journal. it does not meet any criteria as a news story though.
[12:43:35] -!- TheMightyBuzzard has quit [Ping timeout: 276 seconds]
[12:46:01] Beware.... There are CLI programs (if somewhat arcane, can maintain many hundreds of systems) and also in GUI (easy to use, somewhat harder to leverage against hundreds of systems). Some of these have malware. Here's an example of one area where we found some.
[12:46:09] replace CLI/GUI with right/left
[12:46:25] I stand by my decisoion.
[12:46:39] NCommander: ^^ would you please take a look at this and weigh in if you would.
[12:46:46] -!- TheMightyBuzzard [TheMightyBuzzard!~TheMighty@Soylent/Staff/Developer/TMB] has joined #editorial
[12:46:51] I would love to stay and chat but I need to be AT work in about 10 minutes.
[12:46:59] blerg. my local nameserver took a shit.
[12:50:26] fuckin hell. it's my damned internet connection not my nameserver.
[12:53:15] Bytram, that MIGHT be valid if framed that way. leaving dingleberry's commentary makes certain it is framed otherwise.
[12:56:15] Looking
[12:56:55] Ugh
[12:56:59] * NCommander is on the fence
[12:59:11] TheMightyBuzzard, I get where you're coming on the boogeyman argument. The summary as it stands kinda sucks but the actual NYT article has a couple of interesting insights on it about the size and measure of the alt-right and relationship to hate groups.
[12:59:48] Possibly scrap the current summary, make it clear it's an op-ed piece, and that it's by definition opinion with a look inside these groups, and stick a disclaimer on it for good measure.
[13:00:52] the summary as it sits is complete crap and propaganda
[13:02:00] NCommander, have you ever hung with alt-right folks? the only relationship happening there is the extremely small hate groups agree on some issues while the vast majority are happy to denounce them if given half a chance.
[13:03:02] the biggest issue I see is the use of Alt-Right being easily transposed with Nazi
[13:03:10] that is in the NYT piece as well.
[13:03:19] ya, that's by design.
[13:03:53] i think the piece both the NYT Opinion piece and the story sub are hard left leaning propaganda and should get dumped.
[13:04:41] it isn't worth trying to make it an even reasonably even handed rewrite as the source is so far one way that theere is no center
[13:06:56] it's not even really the story that bugs me. the site could and has survive a bad story.
[13:07:51] it's that some of the folks in charge of picking what's worth reading genuinely thought this was. that disturbs me greatly.
[13:08:57] I've set the story for no display pending continued arguement
[13:12:26] emphasizing what cmn32480 said, in the first two paragraphs "extreme right" "alt-right" and "neo-Nazis" are used interchangeably. that is pretty solidly propagandizing.
[13:15:52] Hrm
[13:18:27] FYI: the internal definition of alt-right is something along the lines of "conservative, likely but not necessarily nationalist who sees the Republican party as not representing him/her anymore"

As I said, interesting. I have learned that TMB probably has actually hung out with alt-right types, and the we probably should not be running submissions by aristarchus. Moar Free Speech, Y'all!

https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=21666&page=1&cid=571013#commentwrap

Judge for yourselves. Spam mod worthy? If it is, there is no SoylentNews any longer. What began as a revolt again the corporate control of the Green Site has turned into something far more sinister. Prove me wrong, Soylentils! Force the admins to make spam mods public. We need to know who is doing this. If they are not wrong, they have nothing to hide. OH, shit, did Soylent just make me actually say that? Well, in this case, it is true. One of the basic human rights listed in the Virginia Bill of Rights (precursor to the US Constitution's Bill) is the right to face your spam modder. It's right there! Go look it up! (But if you are ammosexual, you should stay away from the 13th right, kinda blows your interpretation of the Second Amendment.)

We, me maties, Argh, otta due something for the Occasion! What with the current increase in "blow me downs" in the Carribean, we need to do our part to stem global warming! Avast there, me hearties! Who's with me!

"They're more like guidelines, you see." And so, on the 26th of September, once my moderation ban is over, I say we give the TMB the Black Spot! We spam mod him into oblivion, and take over the ship of SoylentNews! Argh! My parrot agrees with me. Who else wants to live as free persons on the high seas of the internets, instead of slaves to a crazed captain hunting for the DN? It is all there in Melville's novel, and the chapter on the "Whiteness of the Whale". Pirates, privateers, cannot afford to be racist.

No doubt this is the question on everyone's mind these days! Or, I am a conceited bastard who thinks everything is about me, and the bans applied to me are really about me, and not about the random imposition of power!

Whence aristarchus? Interesting, my recent experience with mod bombing had my karma reduced to almost single digit. Now I am not privy to the inter databases as someone like The Mighty Buzzard is, for some reason, but I could tell that perhaps several of the spam mods (-10, you know!) were not called for, were in error, and should have been rescinded immediately. This was not the case, and after a campaign of posting "no comment" to current articles, either my spam mods were rescinded or my fellow soylentils responded to my mayday call, and restored my karma. But since my spam mods were not immediately rescinded, I felt it was apropos to spam mod the most visible face of the right-wing bias, and although I have no evidence to suggest such, the spam modder of me, The Mighty Buzzard.

  Those of use who are mere Soylentils get some idea of how things go down. If I rip Runaway1965 a new one over some stupid thing he has posted, I can expect to get several down mods, in that or other threads. Same thing if I have to, once again! correct the obviously rebutted khallow. Now, I am not suggesting, and I do not know, that these fine Soylentils which whom I have obvious disagreements, are down modding me just because I disagree with them. But the pattern persists.

So, after we have entered upon the "Spam mod aristarchus four times", and "aristarchus spam mods The Mighty Buzzard once" situation, things have been, well, "fluid". My karma has gone back up to the max. But curiously, it does not stay there. I seem to dip in to the low 40's, and then back up to 50, depending on where the sun is shining on the earth. Well, that is as may be. But if a majority of Soylentils are so opposed to my posts, I can only assume that my time here is wasted. Except, of course, my education of khallow and insulting of Runaway, and dismissing of jmorris, and . . . spam modding of The Marginally Brossander! Well, I was workig on a real journal on Ethics for Soylentils. It may not see the light of day, if the current tyranny of the spam mod admins continues.

Aristarchus, out. Love you all, authentic Soylentils!!!

The Saga continues. I submitted a lot of very fine articles on Charlottesville, and its aftermath. Many of these were disallowed, which is fine. But that all of them were seemed a bit of a bias on the part of the editors. So I started a brief campaign where I posted "No Comment" to new articles. This got me spam-mod-bombed (hey, a new Soylent word!), and my karma fell to depths I did not know were possible. So far, so good.

          So, I made fuss, or a journal entry, explaining the situation, and calling all good solylentils to come to the aid of their site. And come you all did. Some actually said they would mod me up, for no reason, which while nice, seemed a bit irrational. Appreciated, nonetheless. And so my karma has recovered. Some of this might be due to admins revoking the spam mods that were place on me. But they give no notification, and if the post in question has fallen off my "info" list, I really have no way of checking.

    And then there is the question of punishment. If someone spam modded me, and it was not a fair spam mod (and I assure my fellow soylentils that I would never spam you, in any pure and simple sense), then they should have been put on probation, having their moderation privileges revoked for a month. This has probably happened to us all, it happened to me, when I accidentally spam modded something, was banned, and made the case the the "spam" mod was too close to the "troll" mod, and so was restored. But this leads us to the topic at hand: what the heck is a spam-mod?

    So, as the drama about the spam-modding of yours truly was being played out, the Celestial (sorry, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 just hit Redbox) The Mighty Buzzard took it upon himself to adminsplain what constitutes a spam mod-able post. Yes, crass commercialism is spam. Rushstatus https://soylentnews.org/~kapilsingh/journal/ is spam. We all have no problem with this. But the other part of the guidelines for what is spam is decidedly subjective.

Spam can come in many forms, but it differs from a troll comment in that it will have absolutely no substance, is completely undesired, are detrimental to the site, or worse.

The Mighty Buzzard kept suggesting that my protest posts fit this category, so I had no choice but to mod his assertion of this as spam, since it had "absolutely no substance, was completely undesired, and was detrimental to the site, and worse". So I spam modded The Mighty Buzzard. He had it coming.

      Wait a sec, and think about this. I spam modded one of the admins of the site. I am a lowly soylentil. I barely can remember my password for the site. And I spam mod the person who seems to be, by his own admission, responsible for rescinding spam mods? Is this anything but a symbolic action? To TMB's credit, he asserted he would not do so, but left it to the editors. https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=21277&page=1&cid=559394#commentwrap Nice reclusal, but only in the confidence of the exact same outcome. And his confidence was confirmed.

    So now the Mineorgy Bacculumard has succeeded in having me mod-banned. As I said, my karma is restored, and perhaps higher than ever (another thing admins never let us see), but I am banned from moderation for a month, just when TMB, in a typically random attempt to fix the moderation system, upped the daily mod points to 10! And even worse, both Eth and Runaway made posts that, for almost the first time, I would have modded up! Oh, the irony! So where do we go from here?

    The suggest path is that I email admin, and explain how my spam mod was all a mistake, which admittedly does happen. But it did not in this case. TMB was repeating the basis for suppressing certain viewpoints on this forum, and I must maintain that this does constitute a post of "absolutely no substance, was completely undesired, and was detrimental to the site, and worse". We pretend to be a site that values free speech above all. But when TMB can make his own subjective determination as the the value of another soylentil's post? He needs to be spam-modded.

    So I am non-violent philosophically, long existence on earth will kind of make that point to you, but if anyone else feels like living dangerously, you could spam mod The Mighty Buzzard, just to make the point. Would not have any effect on his ability to do the wonderful coding he does to keep us all up and foaming at the mouth, but it might make the point that we, the few, the proud, the Soylentils, came here because we wanted a site controlled by its members, not some corporate entity or administrative elite. I, for one, do not want to think our volunteer editors have become exactly what we fled when we left the other site.

    Welcome your comments, but I will not be able to mod them up, so take that as a given, if I could.

Yours,
aristarchus of Samos