Conscientious spectre making a home in the threadiverse.

I also toot as @tojikomori.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • Just tried the demo yesterday. The tutorial’s integrated into the gameplay in a way that didn’t feel obstructive to me. It’s less like an old-school sandbox tutorial and more that the game makes it obvious what you have to do for the first mission. And it seems to focus on the new mechanics since the basic stuff is already made obvious by overlays showing the controls.

    There will be people who have no capacity for nuance and see this as a boolean thing, and for them: the tutorial’s not skippable, no. But for most people, it shouldn’t be an issue.




  • Yes but note the specific details of that assumption and their reasoning: it’s based on reddit’s announcement of the security incident a few months ago which starts:

    Based on our investigation so far, Reddit user passwords and accounts are safe…

    Now, look again at what BlackCat has promised in this leak:

    Instead, BlackCat is teasing such revelations as “all the statistics they track about their users,” and data concerning how Reddit “silently censors users.”

    80 GB of “statistics and data” about Reddit’s users is a lot. It may not contain raw IP addresses, but we know that IP matching is one of the ways Reddit catches sock puppets, so there may at least be a hash that could be used to identify accounts held by the same users.

    Am I going too far worrying about PMs and other details? Maybe. It really depends on the honesty and competence of BlackCat and Reddit, and the article author’s assumptions based on their statements.


  • I’ve seen a few sites welcome the news with glee, as though Reddit’s leadership is going to be strongly affected. That’s childish and myopic. This is bad news for everyone.

    Whether or not Reddit pays, we should assume the data will make its way into the hands of people who (further) weaponize it against Reddit’s users, e.g. people who’ve post risque photos of themselves or shared compromising details through throwaway accounts can be doxxed or paired with their normal accounts via their IP or other common details. DMs and other private account details might contain addresses and other private or compromising information, too.

    If Reddit knew about the breach earlier and didn’t do their due diligence to alert users, then that’s further condemnation of their leadership and priorities, but it doesn’t undo the damage this might cause users.

    If Reddit were to pay BlackCat, then it would further enrich, reward, and encourage them. If, as is more likely, it doesn’t, then the blowback it receives (especially from any high profile consequences of the leak) might encourage other companies to pay up in future.








  • The first time I stumbled into superbad.com and it clicked with me immediately like art sometimes does. Total recognition in an ineffable language. It’s my first memory of a distinctly internet culture.

    alt.fan.pratchett and specifically the sprawling, unending hedgehog song that exhausted every rhyme there is to be made about bestiality. (That man really earned his knighthood.)

    The Star Wars Cantina. I hadn’t even seen all the Star Wars films, but I somehow fell into this clunky HTML chat room, and managed to role-play along just well enough to feel part of a community.

    Finding music. Discovering bands on mp3.com when that was a thing. Typing odd combinations of words into Napster to discover songs and artists I’d never have been exposed to otherwise and still love today. Buying digital albums for the first time and feeling something so personal and special about not having to go to a store and rely on what they have in stock or order from a website to have shipped in several weeks. Reading eMusic editorials and putting my credits to obscure reissues and international releases I couldn’t possibly have found out about any other way. (Now it feels like every service wants me to listen to music that sounds like music I’ve already listened to. Bandcamp’s editorials are my last oasis.)