Zarasophos's recent activity

  2. Comment on Rate my homepage! in ~creative

    Zarasophos
    Link Parent
    Thank you very much, that was what I was going for!

    Thank you very much, that was what I was going for!

  3. Comment on Rate my homepage! in ~creative

  4. Comment on Rate my homepage! in ~creative

  5. Comment on Starting a zine in ~creative

    Zarasophos
    Link
    Very much yes. I was once Editor in chief of a magazine (first online, then print), that was run by volunteers, organised only through Discord and Google Docs. It takes a lot of time, but...

    Very much yes. I was once Editor in chief of a magazine (first online, then print), that was run by volunteers, organised only through Discord and Google Docs. It takes a lot of time, but mechanically, it's very doable. My main input would that from a certain point onward, projects become impossible to run alone. You need to have collaborators, and regular and helpful ones at that. It really helps to take stock and see if and how you can get those, and if you have them, working with them on something you're all excited about really can be a blast.

    7 votes

  6. Comment on Being Finnish: A Guide For Soviet Spies – An archived booklet reveals how communist spooks were instructed to blend in with Finnish locals in ~humanities.history

    Zarasophos
    Link Parent
    If you defend Lukashenko, you probably also think RT is the pinnacle of free media?

    If you defend Lukashenko, you probably also think RT is the pinnacle of free media?

    1 vote

  7. Comment on Being Finnish: A Guide For Soviet Spies – An archived booklet reveals how communist spooks were instructed to blend in with Finnish locals in ~humanities.history

    Zarasophos
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Calling the protests in Belarus NATO-guided is the most feeble attempt at defending a murderous dictator that I have heard in a long time. There's pictures of hundreds of thousands of people...

    Calling the protests in Belarus NATO-guided is the most feeble attempt at defending a murderous dictator that I have heard in a long time. There's pictures of hundreds of thousands of people marching through Minsk, there's video of the KGB shooting a person in the streets, there's hundreds of articles detailing exactly why and how normal Belarusians want that autocrat gone. Are they all paid off? Has the CIA bought 80% of the population in Belarus, who chose the opposition candidate in an election that was massively falsified by the Lukashenko regime that didn't even let independent reporters into the country out of fear that they would show even more harshly what a joke those "elections" where?

    It really makes me wonder when I read stuff like this. Do you think people outside of the US and the EU are just structurally unable to want things on their own? Do you think they need the CIA and GHCQ to pay them to go out on the streets? How deaf can you really be to anyone outside of your "anti-imperialist" bubble to think that everything in the world is about NATO or opposition to it? The opposition in Belarus has stated numerous times that they're neither pro- nor anti-EU/NATO, all they want are their dictator gone and fair elections.

    7 votes

  8. Comment on Donald Trump administration announces nationwide US eviction moratorium through end of the year in ~life

    Zarasophos
    Link Parent
    It's a Google thing. News sites use it, their websites go faster, Google ranks them higher and gets more control over the web. In practice, I find it more irritating than anything because it...

    It's a Google thing. News sites use it, their websites go faster, Google ranks them higher and gets more control over the web. In practice, I find it more irritating than anything because it breaks normal URL structure and sometimes gets hosted directly on Google servers. If you want, you can use Redirect AMP to HTML to open the HTML version whenever you click on an AMP link.

    4 votes

  9. Comment on Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot... in ~talk

    Zarasophos
    Link
    I watched V for Vendetta, perfectly timed for Big Ben to hit the mark on midnight. Great fun, have done before, will do again!

    I watched V for Vendetta, perfectly timed for Big Ben to hit the mark on midnight. Great fun, have done before, will do again!

    5 votes

  10. Comment on Previously-unknown "easter egg" discovered in the Fairchild Channel F game "Spitfire" from 1977, could be the earliest one ever added in ~games

    Zarasophos
    Link Parent
    This is quite a bad thing to spring on someone just before they wanted to go to bed... Okay, cursory internet search brought no almighty algorithm(tm) capable of solving the thing. Wolfram Alpha...

    This is quite a bad thing to spring on someone just before they wanted to go to bed...

    Okay, cursory internet search brought no almighty algorithm(tm) capable of solving the thing. Wolfram Alpha didn't spit out anything either, so I got into it a bit by hand. What I find interesting is that there are three passages with obvious patterns, but they are broken up by parts that seem to have none:

    343242 (1. Pattern: X4X)

    124133231

    432142314322 (2. Pattern: Variations on 4321)

    1323423341

    112233 (3. Pattern: Self-explanatory)

    24443

    And even these three patterns seem a bit of a stretch, to be honest. What was the input method on which this was programmed / used? Maybe it was some kind of graphical pattern when done on a gamepad?

    3 votes

  11. What do y'all think about the new Twitter design?

    ~tech Ask (survey)
    It's obviously unfamiliar, but I have to say that I don't think it's that much worse than the one we had before. It does obviously follow the trend of making everything look so much more mobile-y,...

    It's obviously unfamiliar, but I have to say that I don't think it's that much worse than the one we had before. It does obviously follow the trend of making everything look so much more mobile-y, but unlike Reddit they haven't really messed with the core display of content - in fact, I'd say the tweets themselves have gotten a bit larger. I've heard that the timeline gets reset to algorithmic sorting every 24h, which is an absolute no-go for me, but I haven't experienced that aspect myself.

    Related: I've recently started using Tweetdeck and honestly have no idea why I should ever switch back to the main Twitter feed, redesign or not. Columns, lists, the customisation - it's pretty much everything I've ever wanted. Any tips or opinions on that?

    14 votes

  12. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~humanities

    Zarasophos
    Link
    No. I can recommend all of Chinua Achebe's work, especially the seminal Things Fall Apart, as a literary look on colonialism and its effects by an African author.

    No. I can recommend all of Chinua Achebe's work, especially the seminal Things Fall Apart, as a literary look on colonialism and its effects by an African author.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on What are you an "expert" on? in ~talk

    Zarasophos
    Link
    Early 20th century progressive Muslim intellectuals from Russian Central Asia. Yeah...

    Early 20th century progressive Muslim intellectuals from Russian Central Asia. Yeah...

    9 votes

  14. Comment on International literature #3: Portuguese in ~books

    Zarasophos
    Link
    For what its worth, I think this is a great thread!

    For what its worth, I think this is a great thread!

    2 votes

  15. Comment on What are you reading these days? #11 in ~books

    Zarasophos
    Link Parent
    Currently waiting for Cancer Ward to arrive at my doorstep, so good to hear Solzhenitsyn is worth the time!

    Currently waiting for Cancer Ward to arrive at my doorstep, so good to hear Solzhenitsyn is worth the time!

    1 vote

  17. Comment on What are you reading these days? #10 in ~books

    Zarasophos
    Link
    The King in Yellow - A few shortish stories from 1895 that share the motif of a fictional book called, well, The King in Yellow. They also all share a similar demented tone and subjects, somewhat...

    The King in Yellow - A few shortish stories from 1895 that share the motif of a fictional book called, well, The King in Yellow. They also all share a similar demented tone and subjects, somewhat comparable to Lovecraft (who's on the cover with the quote "One of the greatest weird tales ever written"). And yes, I came to it through True Detective and no, you won't be disppapointed if it's the same for you.

    The Circle - I figured it would be a very interesting read considering the problems of internet social media platforms are the shit right now, but either it hasn't aged very well (a lot of stuff has happened in that regard since 2013, after all), or all the praise on the first few pages was just too much hype even back then. It just feels very flat - "a novel of ideas", sure, but they're all dealt with in a manner so mechanical you may as well just read an instruction manual on how to break society.

    For Whom the Bell tolls - Been stuck on this one for a while now. While a fascinating perspective on the Spanish Civil War, it just reads very dryly. I'll definitely finish it, but it'll probably be almost as much of a slog as killing your village's fascists when the Revolution comes...

    3 votes

  20. Comment on Inside Facebook’s secret rulebook for global political speech in ~tech

    Zarasophos
    Link Parent
    I think the issue the Motherboard reporters are having is more that throughout the extensive reporting on Facebook in this year, these two stories are reporting on extremely similar sources, with...

    I think the issue the Motherboard reporters are having is more that throughout the extensive reporting on Facebook in this year, these two stories are reporting on extremely similar sources, with the NYT story coming later. So it's more of an issue of "you're just rewriting the same story from the same parts of the same source" than "you're also working on the same source we worked on". I'm really more on the NYT side as well here, but the author definitely seems to have been aware of how similar the Motherboard piece was and a bit of credit would probably have been good form. All in all, it's probably a bit of not being nice on the NYT side and a bit of not being nice about that from the Motherboard side. But at least we got two good articles out of it, eh?

    3 votes