@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-02 10:55:31
Day 9: Eniko Fox
Edit: added a store link for Kitsune Tails.
We're back to videogames, and with another author who's on the fediverse: @…
Fox has developed a few games, but the one that I've played and love is Kitsune Tails. It's a sapphic romance take on Super Mario Bros. 3, and (critically for a platformer) it's got very crisp controls and runs smoothly. I think one thing a lot of indie platforms devs struggle with is getting those fundamentals right, because on the technical side they require very challenging things like optimization of your code and extremely careful input handling that go beyond the basic skills necessary to put together a game. From following her on Twitter and now the Fediverse, it's clear that Fox is a deeply competent programmer, and her games reflect that. Beyond the fundamentals, Kitsune Tails has a very sweet plot with a very cool twist in the middle, and without spoilers, that twist made both the levels and gameplay very difficult to design, but Fox rose to that challenge and put together a wonderful game. Particularly past the plot twist (but in subtle ways before it) Fox is able to build beyond SMB3 mechanics in ways that gracefully complement the original, and the movement in the game ends up being difficult but extremely satisfying, with an excellent skill/speed response allowing for both slower, easier approaches that work for a range of players and high-skill extremely-fast options for those who want to push themselves.
There have been plenty of people I follow with indie game projects that are kinda meh in the end, and I'll still boost them without much comment if they're decent. Fox' work is actually amazing, which is why if you've followed me for a while you'll know I tend to mention it periodically, and which is why she makes this list of authors I respect.
You can buy Kitsune Tails here: #20AuthorsNoMen
@mpsgoettingen@academiccloud.social2025-10-02 07:17:11
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-30 10:05:59
The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz2025-09-03 01:19:50
Wow. So much implicit trickle down economics. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2019002510/how-excited-should-we-be-about-the-amazon-announcement Come on, Paul, AWS and Microsoft having…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-10-01 17:49:00
All eyes on #3I/ATLAS ☄️
Our Mars Express & ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter will observe the comet around its closest approach to Mars on 3 October 2025, when 3I/ATLAS will be around 30 million km from the red planet.
@cyrevolt@mastodon.social2025-10-03 08:58:46
Oh fun find, there was actually something called Oxide in the history of #Rust already - a formalization attempt:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00982 🦀
cc @…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-11-02 04:45:55
How the Venezuelan government is using crypto and stablecoins like USDT to manage the downturn; Venezuela sells most of its oil to China and is paid in crypto (Anatoly Kurmanaev/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/20…
@whitequark@mastodon.social2025-10-02 21:11:22
i might be the only person in the world who wants cURL to PUT a 2 GB request* body to some URL, show progress while streaming, and do this with a `Transfer-Encoding: chunked` so that it doesn't buffer the entire stdin upfront
(am i? @…)
@gratianriter@bildung.social2025-10-03 08:05:20
Part of the trick is to sell a computer with a microphone and a speaker and call it a phone.
From: @…
https://hostux.social/@don_atoms/1152890009292…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-11-02 19:45:08
Donald Trump is dialing up pressure on the Justice Department to freshly scrutinize ballots from the 2020 election,
raising tensions with administration officials who think their time is better spent examining voter lists for future elections.
In recent private meetings, public comments and social media posts,
Trump has renewed demands that members of his administration find fraud in the five-year-old defeat that he never accepted.
He recently hired at the White Ho…
