SoylentNews

What a beautiful thing our little cadre of nerd rebels created here together.

The wider world is pretty much screwed by human short-termism and greed but we bucked that trend here by saying "Fuck No" to the relentless pace of corporate-driven change for the worse.

In a rare moment of optimism I previously wrote about creating your own micro-utopia. Well I believe we did it here.

I want to thank everyone who's a part of this site for your participation here, hell, for your love of this community.

I sincerely believe what we made here is a uniquely great concept that needs to live on.

I feel sure we'll make another one (maybe even still soylentnews.org) -- at the worst I'll probably just make a subreddit myself if no-one else makes this work -- and I can't stand reddit!

So preserving a cybernetic home for us arguably isn't our biggest concern -- it's a big amount of work but there's something more important -- we're a small community and we need to stick together through this and not fragment or give up.

If at all possible, our new site should keep an old skool, lightweight interface; it needs to be be a primarily textual forum with user submitted stories and yeah I think it should have user moderation if possible. We're mostly curmudgeonly greybeards -- best not to scare those away.

More importantly though, I really think we should only try one (or at most two) new sites at a time. If there's a backlash to what we try, if we keep it small and simple we can just change it or try something else (ideally under the same domain of course). If there are too many new sites this little community will fragment and eventually evaporate.

In this increasingly brutal, isolating world, don't underestimate the value of the connections and kinship we have here. I believe as the years go on this will become more and more imortant to us, vital even. Now let's get on with making it work! :D

P.S. If anyone finds this weirdo worthy enough of keeping in touch with, write to me. acid, immediately followed by an underscore, soycow, and that address resides at proton.me.

Thank you to everyone who responded to my last journal entry on domestic division of labor. You've all given me a good idea of what a functional relationship looks like, and by extension how to spot the complement of that.

I could be on dangerous ground writing about this topic on here. I thought of making another account to post it, but the way I feel now, just fuck it.

This is a sort of Ask Soylent I suppose. To those Soylentils in a long term relationship, how do you divide up the housework between yourself and your partner? If the arrangement was explicitly and mutually agreed, how was that negotiated and was it a source of friction?

There are obvious daily tasks like cleaning, cooking and tidying, but it's important not to forget all the other types of work that contribute towards a household's wellbeing. Paid work, gardening, repairs of household items, and one that often gets brought up: managing it all, making appointments, keeping stock of what needs doing, keeping track of finances, the so-called "mental load". If you have kids and/or pets that could of course significantly increase the effort required! Are every one of these contributions and the time and energy they take up weighed up fairly by both partners such that each is satisfied with the other's contribution, or do some of these things get ignored (or emphasized) to fuel long, exasperating arguments about who does more?

How many hours a day do you find you are spending on every kind of work? How many would you say your partner is doing? Do you find your hobbies have morphed into things that double as being useful to your household? C'mon don't be shy, you can always post anonymously.

MartyB always did an awesome job with the fundraising updates. As he can't be here, I figured it was time for someone to gently remind you guys and gals...

According to the front page we're just $782.06 from our Base Goal of $3500.00. We can do this!

These are undoubtedly strange and often difficult times for just about everyone. That's all the more reason we as a community should carry on carrying on, with sharing our tech knowledge, experiences and jokes of varying and disputed quality. Let's keep this place going together! :D

Do you ever look back on code you wrote when you were young and maybe start to feel a little queasy in your stomach? A feeling of abject horror strikes you as you cast your eyes over the thrown together mess of naive kludges and cringe inducing comments, full of cocky, misplaced bravado. You might even have a similar experience, perhaps to a lesser extent, with code you wrote ten years ago.

You ask yourself "What the fuck--I mean what the actual fuck--was I thinking, when I wrote that code?" Back in those days, your ego was huge; you were sure you were a coding deity that could do just about anything. Your code was the best. Now, the scales have fallen off your weary, partially deteriorated eyes, and you realize you utterly and hopelessly fell victim to your very own Dunning-Kruger effect. Hang your head in shame, dude!

The flipside of all this in the present day is the loss of a certain amount of confidence. With experience, you set higher standards for the code you write today, but there's a danger of going too far the other way and falling into perfectionism. If you got things done back in the day by throwing them together quickly, you'll probably find it takes a bit longer now to write code the "right" way. For me, open source certainly focuses the mind on spending a lot of time on trying to make it clear, readable and to have some degree of sanity.

I tend to want to get things right first time, as much as I can, when I write code today. I know that taken too far, that goes against the principles of rapid (iterative) application development, but I don't like the idea of leaving code I might be a bit uncertain about in place, where it might end up being forgotten later. When I have to do that, I'll leave clear TODOs for myself to pick up later.

I just feel like crap that I don't get as much time for hobby coding as I used to, and when I do find moments to spend on it, because I've set the bar much higher for myself in the code I write, and I feel a bit less confident than I used to, it feels like it's that much harder to get into it and make progress (even if the progress I had in my youth was illusory).

UPDATE: Since I posted this journal entry, new allegations against aristarchus have been made public by the site staff. If these new allegations are true, then I can only say that I am very disappointed in aristarchus. I consider the alleged behavior unacceptable regardless of any possible justification.

I am leaving the original contents of my journal entry below (in the "spoiler" section), as the words reflect my views based on the information that was publicly available to me at the time I wrote them. I also want to restate my belief that mobbing someone by following the actions of your peers and downmodding comments based on the author rather than the content is unethical.

*SPOILER* (click to show) *SPOILER* (click to hide)

There, I said it. Quit mobbing Ari. I don't support his alleged methods but I do enjoy his philosophy posts and agree, mostly, with his politics. I also have to confess to the guilty pleasure of finding some of his putdowns very, very funny.

I get you're all sick and tired of the offtopic complaints. Some of the downmodding probably is deserved, but if you take a look at his comment history, particularly on his journal, he is being systematically downmodded over and over now (I mean, modding someone down on their own journal, other than in the most exceptional cases, is just petty). He's had plenty of punishment now guys. Don't drive him away from the site or prevent him from posting at all from his account. I'm not the only one that enjoys his more positive contributions.

This community needs characters like Aristarchus. Too many Soylentils have been leaving. So quit it. He'll most likely calm down if you stop persecuting him.

Don't be disheartened. Get re-heartened. With a few resources you can create your own micro-utopia. The human species may very well be a lost cause on a global scale, but do not fret, for you can be a part of success stories on a smaller scale.

I'm not talking about the pursuit of wealth and power. Don't make your utopia by externalizing all the harms. Find a way of living that just minimizes the harms. Find joy in helping other beings and learn not to wait for a dopamine hit in return (there are diminishing returns if you rely on that).

Plant some trees. Feed some birds. Repair equipment other people were throwing out. Pick up some plastic crap from a beach.

Detach your mind from the negative words and actions of the haters--they're on a different journey. The most satisfying aspect of mammalian existence is love. Share it and grow it.

Mr. Hoojgruggwidd very slowly raised his heavy feeling eyelids to open his sore, weary eyes. He was not too surprised to see very little effect of this action. Pitch darkness was of course something with which he was very familiar in what, he had to admit, had effectively become his new home: the boundless and seemingly inescapable wilderness. Something felt different though. A different sort of pitch darkness, as odd as that sounded. He did not think he could exactly see what was different yet but some of his senses were picking up cues that told him there was empty space close to him, with some sort of boundaries to that space a short distance away. Could they be walls? The idea felt very comforting to him after all his endless wandering around the plains. When you could not escape them, even open spaces became maddeningly confining. The usual itchy long grasses were conspicuous by their absence on his lower legs and the ground felt harder and more even and level than the surfaces to which his raw, blistered feet were accustomed.

He strained his vision to try to see these supposed walls. Any surfaces were the same pitch black as everything else, but as he cast his eyes around he began to convince himself that he could just about make out soft sort of edges, a very slightly pale golden color, a pale, golden black. They did not look how he would have expected a room's edges to look. They were more like bands of very dim, soft light. They formed the shape of a cube, a cubic room. That was all he could see. Where had the plains gone? Was this freedom? If it was, then he certainly did not feel very happy about it. Was it safe? Was anyone here? He shouted "Hello" and his own voice sounded hoarse and echoed in a way that just did not sound quite right for an empty room that size.

He sighed. Bizarre environments did not seem to shock him these days. They seemed to be almost the norm for him now. The new normal. His hunger, fatigue and dehydration could not have helped but something in him somehow just knew that all these unexpected phenomena were to be, well, expected, in this place. But he could not remember why. There was so much he could not remember. He had so much time to think but thinking never seemed to get him much closer to figuring out what the hell was going on, so he had started to develop a sort of stoic, resigned acceptance of the inherent weirdness of his new life. And the discomfort of it. There was not much fear of the unknown, or in his case of even the seemingly impossible, anymore. He knew on the plains he could likely die at any moment and he had so little control over it that the fear and even his curiosity had massively faded, leaving his cynicism, impatience and a little arrogance. He could not even reminisce about his past before the plains because his memory of those times was an almost impenetrable fog.

His eyes were still on the bottom edge of the wall in front of him. He could have sworn that the soft, pale golden line had pulsated. As this room, if it even was a room, seemed to be empty, Mr. Hoojgruggwidd decided to walk forwards towards the wall in front of him. With each step he took, the golden room edges seemed to pulsate more vigorously and they enlarged. He wondered if they could harm him. That would be typical, he reflected. He took another step forward and the golden lines were now very clearly visible. At the corners they had expanded rapidly in curves, rounding off the corners like rising orange flames licking at the walls. The walls themselves and floor and ceiling were all still as black as the darkest night sky which made Mr. Hoojgruggwidd wonder whether he could actually just be suspended in outer space. A space without stars at this point perhaps. He took one more step forward and his leg wobbled a little as he put it down. The golden lines shimmered as if they copied his leg's movement. He cautiouslessly pulled his right sleeve down over his hand, which seemed to hurt, and reached his arm out and swung it down at the front wall so that the tip of his cuff brushed against it. A green, blurry, multi-sided shape spun extremely rapidly on the wall around his cuff and instantly expanded out from view, at which point the golden wall edges rotated clockwise in a circle in front of him, changing shape as they did so, such that he was no longer inside a cube. It had many more sides--ten or twelve, perhaps a dodecahedron. So was there a wall or not? The way his shirt sleeve had hit it, it did seem like there was something there but he could not say for sure that it was solid.

He abandoned his cautious approach, quickly thrust his hand back out of his sleeve and raised it up to tap his fingers against the wall. He felt a sort of fuzzy coldness, like ice but immensely softer, not in the way that ice cream is softer but in the way that a gas, or a gust of wind, is softer than a block of ice to the touch. It was more solid than air though, and firmer than a liquid. Perhaps some very exotic sort of fabric. He had no idea. Anyway, it was not anything like a hard brick wall, and there was not a door, so he decided there was nothing for it but to try to push through it. He gritted his teeth and strode forwards, into the soft coldness. He jolted as he felt the strange cold make contact with his face and arms and, continuing through the so-called wall, clenched his teeth tighter as he felt it glide in a chilling band over his whole body. As he had passed the golden wall edges, he noticed they faded into a lush green color and actually seemed to turn into serrated plants like brambles or creepers. It was so dark he could not be sure if they really were plants, but hopefully it would not matter.

Beyond his previously golden cube or golden dodecahedron, there was now a corridor lined with the serrated creepers. In fact, he reflected, rather than being lined with them, it seemed to him it was probably actually composed of them. They were not arranged in the way he would expect plants to grow. Instead they formed an intricate lattice, like a thick green spider's web or perhaps the veins of a leaf skeleton. There was a noise.

"Hellooo!" called a loud, female voice.

"Hello. Who's there?" replied Mr. Hoojgruggwidd uncertainly.

There was silence, so after a moment's hesitation, he just resumed walking along the serrated green corridor.

"It was you! You did it! You!" the voice scolded.

"Huh?" reacted Mr. Hoojgruggwidd.

"You! You! You! Why did you drink the green mud? Why must you stay here? You've ruined it all! It was you!"

"I can assure you, whoever you are, I wasn't sticking around deliberately." he said firmly. Once again there was silence, but the serrated boundaries of the corridor were moving a lot now, in sort of spiky waves, and some of them scratched past Mr. Hoojgruggwidd's shoulders and caught on his sleeves. Although it hurt, he ignored them and kept walking onward.

The web of green that defined the sort of corridor widened out in front of him, but he could still feel the plants scratching his sore skin. He looked up and could see pale, grayish shapes a short distance in front of him. It could be someone's skin visible in the shadowy gloom. Yes, it must be the person that had been calling out to him. Why the hell was she so annoyed with him? How did she even know him?

"Who are you?" he demanded.

A pale hand reached out of the darkness and pointed an index finger with a long, white nail on it, which jabbed at his chest.

"It was you! It was you! You're a disaster, a blight on this land! You!" With each word, her nail spiked harder into his sore flesh. He felt a little faint.

"Y-y-you! I-it w-wa-as y-o-ou!" her words seemed to somehow double and triple up upon themselves like echoes at full volume and at the same time Mr. Hoojgruggwidd shivered as he saw the pointing fingers had multiplied and they continued to do so, a bit like how images seem to spread out when rotating a kaleidoscope, until there must have been about twenty hands all pointing at him, twenty voices all berating him, twenty very sharp nails jabbing in and out. The pain seemed to radiate out from those points until it felt like all of his skin was absolutely burning. He cried out in pain and fell to the ground. Everything was dark again, then there was a very loud rushing noise in his ears, getting louder, like a tremendous roar of air, cold, then the hot soreness of his skin, then cold again, rushing faster and faster, the green web of creepers flew by in elongated streams, the golden lines from earlier flew past as well like fuzzy laser beams, and then they diffused and reformed into sort of crispy, sharp little rainbows that were so bright and intense that his eyes hurt like they had never hurt before, and then the noise and light and motion became so impossibly intense that he could not even form any kind of impression of it; it just utterly and completely overwhelmed every one of his senses.

He woke up, panting and confused. The searing pain was there. All over his skin. It was real. He looked up at the peachy gray clouds. The sun had set, a few minutes ago he imagined, but he was burnt. Sunburn! He had fallen asleep in the sun and he was still on the plains. So that was a dream. What a dream! He felt more tired now than before he fell asleep. He felt sick too and had a headache. He shivered. He needed more sleep and he desperately needed a drink but he could not immediately think where he could find either. He was sure he did not want to try sleeping here again. He remembered the tadpole men. Were they part of the dream? No, they had been real, unless it was delerium. Anyway, he really needed that drink. He cursed at his own thoughtlessness at losing his way when he followed the voice of those weird tadpole men. It would probably take him hours to find one of his little patches of mud to drink now. Still, it would not be the first time. He spent most of his days just walking around these endless plains. Oh, the pain of that sunburn. He wondered if any of his wet drinking mud could soothe it, and he set off in search of it.

In this short supplement to my Humanity Failed series of articles, I reflect on the disheartening nature so often experienced when interacting with a corporation's customer service department, if you even manage to fight your way through to being able to communicate with a human being, that is (Even if they claim to be human, you may find yourself and theirs tightly constrained by a useless flowchart, utterly unable to assist you, entirely by the coporation's design).

Never mind the widespread decline in product quality and longevity, the inflated prices of many goods and services, and the sickeningly superficial, misleading corporate-speak plastered over companies' websites to try to make their customers feel good. Once, as is so often the case these days, you have a serious problem with their product or service and perhaps are feeling annoyed and exasperated by the company's ludicrous levels of incompetence and neglect, and with trepidation you resign yourself to the long Purgatory of dealing with customer service, and politely but firmly explain every detail and every injustice concerning your predicament, when you finally get a response from one of their lowly, overworked customer service peons, you may find increasingly these days just as I have, that you get no apology, no empathy, no glimmer of recognition for the absurdity of their employer's malicious negligence. Has anyone else been experiencing this?

I do my best to be extremely polite to these customer service employees; after all, most of the time it's people much higher up in the organization that are responsible for the wanton neglect. I criticize their company by name rather than them as an individual--they may resent their employer and be able to appreciate this.

It could be a policy not to apologize for fear of it being seen as an acceptance of legal liability for a fault. But maybe it's just a reflection of a decline in good manners among the wider population. I don't even think it's a generational thing as Baby Boomers that were always so keen on instilling good manners in their offspring seem to be getting ruder too.

Maybe this journal entry doesn't really belong in my Humanity Failed series. Bad manners are the least of humanity's crimes against itself and other species. But maybe the bad manners go along with the rest of the rot that is rapidly progressing everywhere. In terms of corporate communication, it's much easier to treat your customers like utter shit when you have monopolistic power over them. For the consumers, maybe it's just the anger, disillusionment and desperation many of them are feeling, stoked by media-created culture wars.

Previously:
Humanity Failed Supplemental: Greta Thunberg is an Optimist
Humanity Failed Part 2: Broken Universe?
Humanity Failed

Anyone who worries that this place might be going downhill--did you ever consider the rose-tinted spectacle effect when you look at the past?

Like, when people pine for the heyday of Slashdot, there were shitposters even in the beginning--maybe SNR was a bit better--but maybe we're just cherry picking the best memories of the past and comparing them against the bad shit that's happening now?

Don't misunderstand me, I'm not trying to say the past and present were really equally bad. Rather, the opposite. The past and present of SoylentNews are both great. The green site, maybe not so much, what with the corporate sell-offs etc.

But meh, I don't know, just throwing ideas out there.

Things change. People come and go. But we're still all nerds interested in tech that enjoy sharing it. Let's carry that happy tradition on together.

Discuss.