BLOGGING LIKE ITS 2004

due to an expected family death that just happened, the holidays, and avoiding The News - i'll be peacing out offline for a week or two (and working on the last few projects i owe folks as good distraction, y'all know who you are.)

well wishes not needed directly; just be kind to yourself and each other <3

(crossposted from tumblr, tags included.)

on the Fire Emblem series' general trend towards marrying as a gameplay gimmick, at least beyond the "yeay"/"nay" polarization.

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not even 20 pages through (aka just the introduction) of 'addiction by design' - a book about gambling, and i'm already staring in the middle distance of how word for word this type of addiction psychology could go for basically every social media algorithm & UI dark pattern & gacha & viral bait engagement post/media & ai addiction.

necessary read, can already tell it's going to be one of those books that's mission critical.

but man! genuinely nauseated over here to see how virulent it is across media/technology as a whole.

one of the many weird little things i've learned about being in the ex-/k/ server is the concept of "flag cones" (for when a general country flag is displayed on a pole but has a suspiciously conical shape). some are less "fake looking" than others; but for a particularly fake-looking example, see this reddit post. generally this depends if the flag is straight up painted on, or if there's more like a conical mannequin shape underneath where a real flag is draped over (aljazeera screenshot example).

once when you've seen one you can't *not* notice them everywhere in news screenshots/NATO briefings, etc, lol. sometimes it makes for a fun drinking game to spot when you need something other than The News

there's technically similarly adjacent things called "flag spreaders" that are another step closer to how flags authentically drape but i don't see those as much in big news screenshots.

I was recently reading an essay on babyfur vtuber .... wank? (the actual execution of the essay was pretty nuanced, but the topic was... yeah. nothing the world hadn't seen before.)

but what was interesting is the way said essay referred to "communities" almost exclusively meaning "personal discord servers of vtubers". and it made it click in my head of how baffled i've always been at this recent post-2018 merging of identity/community = a specific sense of moderation policies (for example the anti/pro fandom alignments) and moderation choices which made no sense to me with how "community" was defined in real-world terms before then.

because if we are exclusively talking about personal discord servers, i can see how young folks could come to the assumption that identity is a narrow set of moderation choices.

what's allowed in a personal discord of an influencer strikes me as a mix of pure "brand" (say, artwork that they draw or videos they create), brand-as-shared-interests or genre (shared artwork topics or cool inspirational art everyone likes), and once when one's locked into that kind of enforced bubble it pretty quickly spirals into myopia given how discord server social politics roll. it takes some pretty extensive "old school" moderating to keep the general server populace from getting incestuous; most influencers aren't interested in keeping a wide variety of folks in their server (assuming they're using it to make money/engagement); it's much more of a parasocial dynamic to extract something. money for access to the influencer (reminds me of the onlyfans model), other perks, etc.

(one of many reasons why you could not pay me to run a discord server lol; modding nazine's is the closest i'll get and that's only because it's tiny and full of mutuals with a weirdly high degree of media literacy; much less of the usual modding issues).

i'm not going to attempt to define what real-world "community" means as a term in contrast to discord-server-as-community (DSAC?) but the latter feels exceptionally more fragile in comparison to the former, and the implications of that sure explain a lot of current online issues.