Gomez @gomez@toot.wales

https://mindustrygame.github.io/

An open source #sandbox #TowerDefense game. The #game is free but the developer accepts your support by letting you pay what you think is fair for the game.

#VideoGame #gaming

"He's an uncontrollable flyboy ex-con looking for a cure to the poison coursing through his veins. She's a high-kicking antique-collecting research scientist who dreams of becoming Elvis. They fight crime!"

https://theyfightcrime.org/

When I think about climate change, I think about the Great Stink.

By 1830, London was the largest, richest city in the world. But the city's waste management systems had not changed appreciably since medieval times. Most human waste was handled quite simply: it was just dumped into the River Thames.

The result was a slow-growing crisis that lasted three decades. Cholera outbreaks (from drinking tainted water, though nobody understood that then) periodically wracked the city, killing tens of thousands. The stench from the river gradually grew worse and worse, making life in riverside districts increasingly intolerable. The government was too hesitant to take dramatic action, though; it tried instead to mitigate the problem, by pouring lime into the river to cut the stench.

It all came to a head in the summer of 1858. A dry spell caused the level of the river to drop, leaving the banks coated with mounds of what the newspapers delicately called "impure matter." The stench was so bad that it became known as "the Great Stink." Parliament, whose halls were right on the river, could not conduct business. The smell in the chambers was so strong that all the curtains were soaked in chloride of lime to try and block it. (It didn't work.)

Parliament was now faced with a simple, stark choice: do something to clean up the river, or move itself out of London altogether. Members seriously discussed relocating to Oxford and St. Albans, but in the end, they decided to act. Municipal engineer Joseph Bazalgette was authorized to build a network of new sewers, at the then-staggering cost of £3 million, to be paid for by taxing every London household three pennies for the next 40 years.

Bazalgette's sewers solved the problem. They solved it so well they're still in use today. But democratic government had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making them happen. Only when the problem made their own lives intolerable did they finally act.

How all this relates to climate change, I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink

Can free software/open source/hacky software projects stop using fucking discord as
1. Their primary community
2. Their main support network
3. Documentation

Its genuinely madness the mental gymnastics that community maintainers must have to go through to contribute to open software and then allow this proprietary dogshit to monopolize their communities communication, support and documentation.

A reminder for my British friends in these times of governmental turmoil:

Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

We stopped our hosting server payment. If you know a way to move our work on a service that supports open-source projects, please let us know. Thank you.
RT appreciated.

To future historians—not just of computing, but of humanity—the current period will be a dark age.

How was Facebook used by students in the 2010s? We cannot show you, that version of Facebook is not hosted anywhere.

How did MySpace look around 2009? We don't really know, the Wayback Machine only shows a limited amount of static content, and there may only be a few surviving screenshots

What correspondence did Vint Cerf have as president of the ACM with other luminaries of computing industry and research? We do not know; Google will not publish his emails.

What was it like playing Angry Birds on an iPhone 3G? We do not know; Apple is no longer distributing signed receipts for that binary.

What did the British cabinet discuss when they first learned of the Coronavirus pandemic? We do not know; they chatted on a private WhatsApp group.

What books were published analysing the aftermath of the Maidan coup in Ukraine? We do not know; we do not have the keys for the Digital Editions DRM.

How was the coup covered in televised news? We do not know; the broadcasters used RealVideo and Windows Media Encoder and we cannot read those files.

We have to ask ourselves how we are going to preserve and transmit knowledge about our age to the next generations. Knowledge about an age where information is produced, consumed and discarded within hours, days or months, or where it's only stored on the server rooms of a handful of corporations, with no guarantees that those businesses will exist in the future, and with no way of accessing that information unless a certain set of regulatory, hardware, software pre-conditions are met.

That's why projects like the Internet Archive deserve more recognition and funding. That's why web scraping should not only be a civic right, but a civic duty to the next generations. Otherwise all the knowledge about the great age of information will be transmitted orally - with all the distortions that such transmission implies.

https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/the-digital-dark-ages/