Merus

it was right there and I took it I'm not sorry

Oh snap, excellent catch. I didn't realise you could pull the OS name like that. Yeah, this is very credible.

Well if anything happened, it'd be their cross to bear.

I think like Twig said, the problem's not so much with your emoticons as with emoticons in general. Which is why the emoticons on the forums are the garbage default ones and ridiculously specific/bizarre ones (and the weird alien thumbs because of course). We're not going to use a picture to describe how we feel when we can just describe how we feel.

I know it was true for 95 and Vista's version numbers, where lots of things would break if they changed them too much, but I don't think anything is able to check the name of the operating system and get 'Windows 9*' back.

I think there's one Taco Bell in Australia? We have access to a lot of great cuisine but Mexican is definitely not one of them.

So there's two things: 'de-excites' isn't a word, and it's unclear which noun's being referred to as 'de-exciting'. Is it the photon? Has the electron immediately de-excited? What does that even mean?

We finally have a soccer team in the AFC final! It's the Western Sydney Wanderers, who are a fairly new team that basically set the standard in Australian soccer. Good on them, I say.

God, I was just thinking about William Gibson's Pattern Recognition just the other day, and how it was a near-future book written in 2004 and ten years later it feels like it could happen in our present. It's easier, doing near-future, but it's nice that one of our most prescient writers can also write worth a damn. (Even if I didn't care for Neuromancer.)

I want to state, for the record: don't fuck with my mum. She is a licensee of three post offices - it's how Australia Post manages to maintain a network of post offices in every town without going broke, they have licensees who do the smaller ones - and was unhappy with the way the relationship with Australia Post had soured (as, it turned out, it was being set up for privatisation. This will become important later) and with how the payment structure hadn't really changed over the years and was becoming an increasingly terrible deal. She decided that she needed to do something about it. Negotiating with Australia Post didn't work, so she joined the Licensee Advisory Council, who were supposedly consulted on Australia Post's decision-making. Long story short, they kind of weren't. She made an enemy of one of the executives of Australia Post, who decided the best way to get rid of her was to try and get her charged with fraud on a technicality, which is when she was raided by the local police on Australia Post's orders. Mum did get access to the executives of her representative group, who are called POAAL, and was basically told that this was how it was, they weren't going to rock the boat and if she didn't like it she could start her own organisation (but good luck getting Australia Post to take them seriously, it's not the first time someone had). So she did. As they were preparing to sue Australia Post, two things happened: they managed to contact a few senators who seemed interested, and my brother, as he charmingly puts it, headbutted a fist and then the pavement. One of the senators is the independent wildcard, Nick Xenophon, who is one of Australia's most famous/infamous senators. He asked for more information, and got a meeting with a room full of licensees going broke, some of whom had flown in from across the country. He set up a Senate inquiry into what had been going on. The result was handed out last week, a consensus report (that is, politicians from the major parties agreed with each other, so, that doesn't ever happen). They were alarmed at how Australia Post conducts its affairs. They were aghast at the incompetency of POAAL, who turned up to the Senate inquiry and were dismissive of the Senators and couldn't remember who was on their executive board. (Other than the nepotism appointments, of course.) And several senators, in their prepared remarks, noted the assistance and professionalism of Mum, her 2IC, Andrew, and their organisation. The privatisation of Australia Post is off the table almost entirely because Mum gathered too much dirt on how they'd tried to ruin the network to prepare the sale. (Interestingly, it was the left-wing party that was pushing for it.) In the meantime she'd gotten a reputation for knowing her way around Parliament House better than the senators who worked there. At some point, she became part of a political action group, involving the unions, pensioner advocacy groups, and rural advocacy groups, to try and right Australia Post. The unions want Mum elected to the board, which she finds hilarious because she's always hated unions. She's become friends with what appears to be one of the most powerful lawyers in Sydney, who is delighted that Mum has given him a perfect test case for reforming franchise law in Australia, and in return he's willing to provide access to the Minister responsible for Australia Post and his favourite auditors as well as copious legal advice for a reasonable fee. She has the personal number of one of the most powerful and popular politicians in Australia. Because she wanted her small business to have a contract that better fitted the work she actually does, she had to become a top-tier political operative and get the Senate to strongly recommend that Australia Post do what she wants. So she did. (This supplants my previous favourite story about why not to fuck with my mum - while i was in high school, she uncovered an honest-to-god conspiracy in the education department while part of the P&C (Australian PTA). She didn't dismantle it but she sure as shit made sure the statewide P&C knew about it, which kind of defeated the purpose of having it.) Do not fuck with my mum. She's very nice but she will end you if she has to.

Whoa, is this true? If it is, I guess I'm holding off.

Yeah I think that's fair enough, let's get back onto fundin-- Whoa ho ho hold up pardner If it's a tiny minority on Reddit how come, for instance, Anita Sarkeesian attack videos can get up to the front page of general subs like /r/gaming? While they might not have condoned of The Fappening, there was a lot of unrest over ViolentAcrez being unmasked. Reddit's most observed rule is 'no personal information' (except private images don't count somehow) which is well in front of something like 'don't be a douchebag' or even 'don't harass other people'. That is not cherry-picking: Reddit does have a problem with the way it allows people to use its service, and it's disingenuous to claim that it doesn't or that it shouldn't be considered a problem.

It's possible, but he's also changed his name and deleted a tweet from two weeks ago approving of Cracked in reply to Zoe Quinn. So either he's been super-thorough, or he just deleted his account.

Reddit did try an ad network that gave users control over what was seen, and it's only when they started putting a bar up on the front page that filled up when they broke even for the day that they started to make enough revenue. Kickstarter take their cut from the deal between content creators and backers, and while they've been slow to deal with some abusive kickstarters they generally get to them before the funding period finishes. I wouldn't treat either of them as ad-supported in the way that Twitter or Facebook are. Their users are their customers, and that makes it a lot easier to treat their users with respect. (With the exception that JonCole points out, where everyone who's not on Reddit can go fuck themselves apparently.)

So I just had a fun discussion on Twitter with someone extremely angry at Cine for having an opinion on TotalBiscuit. He accused him of complaining about marginalisation while not knowing anything about it, which I thought was amusingly ironic and said so. Apparently he wasn't sure what I meant, so I figured I'd see how long it took for him to work it out. I'd got back from a friend Miss Manners' Guide To Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour, and I thought I'd engage in that spirit. With a little prompting, he brings up the issue of there not being enough voices of people of colour in gaming, which piqued my interest. He agreed that it was a big problem that gamers seemed to be really hostile to people of colour sharing their opinions. At this point I couldn't take the suspense anymore, and explained that Cine was an American Hispanic, that this guy opened with accusing him of not knowing anything about marginalisation when that was part of Cine's daily life, and that by dismissing his experience, he was saying that Cine's views on gaming culture aren't welcome. He was contributing to a problem that he recognised was a problem but didn't realise he was a part of. When I came back from hanging out my washing, he'd deleted his account and all his tweets. And that's the story of why I didn't make a storify of the exchange. Edit: I do have the emails Twitter sent me though. Maybe I'll make a storify tomorrow. I don't think I've ever won an internet argument so hard the other guy deleted their account. Miss Manners is on to something.

The problem is that there's a fundamental conflict between your audience as product and your audience as customers. Ads mean your audience is the product, and advertisers are your customers. With that model, you have an incentive to treat your free users as product, and force them to behave in ways that make them more valuable as a product that you'd never ask a customer to do. Facebook's recent insistence on real names, and Twitter's non-response to attacks by their users are both borne out of this problem. There have been examples of services that are free for personal use but have a 'business' version that keeps the lights on, where the personal version is to get people invested with the product enough to consider it in business. The two big successes I can think of are Dropbox and Trello; what they have in common is that it's not hard for them to ensure that their paying customers get the lion's share of resources. Either free users are either limited in a way that the service is still useful but can't be too much of a drain on resources (Dropbox) or that it's more useful for business and creative work, which the punters aren't going to do much of (Trello). I'm not sure you can sustain a social network on the same model because your initial audience is going to be full of punters.

This is weird because he's been very fond of the bully pulpit for years. It is not shocking to me at all that the man who started out mocking and belittling WoW players he disagreed with would end up doing the same with a much larger audience. He's a Nice Guy of video game journalism. Burying the lede here a bit, aeolist

Oh so it's what I hoped The Big Lebowski would be, excellent. I'm on board for that.

So I'm probably going to use Ello as a microblogging kind of thing; thoughts that don't fit on Twitter, little essays, that kind of thing. The problem is that this seems to basically be the job of tumblr and maybe I should just have a tumblr? Except from the outside the user interface of Tumblr seems a nightmare, with the 'notes' where reblogs and people who comment on what you've said are intermingled, and it doesn't seem like there are enough people of interest on tumblr to sustain a feed. Are there people who use Tumblr that can give me a comparison?

It's based on a Thomas Pnychon novel, so I ain't holding out hope for that I loved The Master, though.

I tried The Dollop. I subscribed to The Dollop. It is an hour-long or so story about a real historical event, interspersed with riffs on the story and on what people were thinking when they let this happen. Pretty great.

Also if we are changing emoticons a) can we add something to express 'fuck all this' and let's get rid of this fucker

you might have noticed the conversation has a dark underbelly, that university is where the party stops let's just say that it took a decade for me to be willing to try and get a graduate degree again and leave it at that there are many things I brag about but brains are not one of them

I don't think it has been in this thread but I've definitely read it.

Oh no, gifted programs are super-helpful because most teachers don't have the training or skill to deal with students who can work things out during the first explanation - when they're staffed by teachers who are trained for it. I know the one I was in wasn't, it was mostly just more assignments. It's hard for them to teach kids the value of hard work, because they've probably heard they're "smart" their entire life, even outside the gifted class, and so they're more likely to believe that if they have trouble with the class that it's the class's fault. It really needs to be something that the parents are told when they first find out they've got a gifted child.