val @[email protected]

If your experience does not suit you, mod it. Mod your games, mod your OS, mod your hardware, mod yourself.

As long as you're not in a fair competition, cheat. Cheat if it's an unfair competition. Hack everything, level the playing field.

Remove unwanted mechanics, adjust difficulty, change your perceptions, change your experience. Online, in games, in meatspace. You are the final arbiter in what you experience.

Fuck anyone who claims this is wrong or cheapens an experience.

tbh i kinda hope mastodon and the fediverse stays a place where autistic and neurodivergent weirdoes run wild and it never attracts the attention of the mainstream

no ads, no fucking VCs, just bizarre people who meow at cats and make weird art with thinking rocks

About the only tip I have for people landing here post-birdsite is the habit of defensively misspelling/obfuscating terms is not just unnecessary here but harmful.

Search is harder to do due to the federated nature, being a search-botting reply-guy is harder to do. However a lot of people can and do mute hot-button words for their own health.

If you think you need to obfuscate to prevent discovery there's probably a better privacy tool to deploy.

happy Vivian VVednesday!!!

Here's the start of a Vivian-centered fanfic I will be working on for awhile, a multific series! i will probably rt this a lot lol as i will be pouring a lot of passion into this.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/38336866/chapters/95795839

The Amazon warehouse collapse reminds vee of my own brushes with companies that put their profit over worker safety in such a flagrant manner.

The thing is, from the inside, it's never quite so flagrant. There's never a human being telling you to your face "Yes we're putting you at risk to keep our profits up". It's always a policy, an oversight, a glitch, something that's being worked on.

My first real job was a call center in Florida. I remember when hurricane season hit and we were given a number to call each day before leaving for work to check if the office was open. It always was. Every time.

I remember one particular day we had a predicted hurricane landfall set for my commute hours. I decided not to go; I'd be spending half an hour on the road right when it was projected to hit; no way. I tried to call in, using the automated PBX garbage we were instructed to. It was "down".

I tried to call my manager, couldn't reach him. I eventually called HR directly and was told if I didn't submit my call-in to the PBX I'd be considered a no-show and terminated. When I explained the PBX was down, the rep repeated their statement verbatim. I explained again, they repeated again.

They didn't know (or rather wouldn't tell) who to contact about the PBX being down. They said it was an oversight in process and they'd look into having someone to call for next time.

That's when it kind of clicked for vee, you know? I refused to go in; I got "lucky". The office got closed basically by order from the state. Next time I went in for work, parts of the building were damaged; I got seated next to a blown out window. I got rained on during my shift.

In my next manager meeting I relayed this story to him. He nodded slowly and jumped into an obviously rehearsed speech about "Yes our policy says you must call the PBX to call in. It being down is an oversight. We will consider revising the policy in the coming weeks"

They never did. They didn't because this was all deliberate. Never tell your workers "We're abusing you", but put up velvet ropes so they can't exit the planned path. The planned path being abuse.

It's never flagrant. They never bold-faced tell you. They just wall you in, force you to follow a protocol, and claim any abuse baked in is "a glitch", then never fix it. They blame the slow wheels of business, every time. A fix is coming, once all the stakeholders sync up.

Then people die because with no humane, basic respect for their safety and dignity, they're left with the choice to submit to the abusive system or be victimized "by policy"

I'm not surprised this happened.

So you had the "Cloud to Butt" extension that replaces every instance of the word "Cloud" with "Butt" for humorous effect, right?

A couple years back someone filed an urgent ticket with ops at work claiming someone was vandalizing the internal knowledge base. A coworker took it and went "I don't see anything wrong can you look?"

I opened one of the linked articles and someone had cloud-to-butt'ed it. I checked the edit history and the person who did it was the person who initially took the ticket and saw nothing wrong. So I went "History says you did this, is this a prank?" and then it hit vee.

They were using the extension and any time they edited a document, the extension replaced "cloud" with "butt" in the <textarea> for the content editing, and then it was getting saved back to the KB article.

They saw nothing wrong because they were expecting the "Butt"s.

I still chuckle at that sometimes.

Alright it's time. Big Bad Game-a-thon is live and in pre-roll. The actual content begins in 15 minutes and will be live until Sunday night PDT.

We're a bad/weird/jank game marathon focusing on speedruns with a splash of showcase content for those games that just can't be speedrun in any real sense. I'm one of three founders/admins and this is my favorite event of the year >:3

https://twitch.tv/bigbadgameathon