@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng2026-10-19 06:30:03
Descent Into Oytal (October 2023)
(Epic evening light shafts illuminating the lower parts of the valley, showing the path ahead which we took underneath the stars a few hours later. The upper part of the valley is one of Germany's true dark places (Bortle scale 2), great for stargazing... The peaks on the left are two of the four summits of the Höfats, a unique mountain with some of the steepest slopes in the eastern Alps)
@cdarwin@c.im2026-08-20 15:02:22
World Liberty Trust Company received conditional approval this month from the US office of the comptroller of the currency (OCC) to start a bank.
An entity affiliated with Donald Trump and his family members owns about 38% of the company.
The agency is led by a political appointee of the US president.
Two fundamentals underpin the business model of the new crypto bank partly owned by the Trump family
The first distinctive feature of this bank
– and stablecoin ope…
@fell@ma.fellr.net2026-10-20 06:12:36
This is my first time manufacturing a circuit board with PCBWay. It's pretty cool how you can see every step of production live. It's a breakout board for flashing the Valetudo firmware onto a vacuum robot. It's supposed to be delivered from China by Friday, which is crazy to me.
I would have preferred to get it done in Europe, but the Chinese were cheaper, faster, and had no issues with manufacturing a non-standard thickness of 1.2 mm. 🤷🏻♂️
Any recommendations?
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2026-08-18 12:30:32
ABC sues the FCC, claiming the agency's investigations and regulatory actions are part of a Trump administration "retaliatory campaign" to curb its free speech (Ted Johnson/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/08/abc-sues-fcc-first-amendment-lawsuit…
@blackknight95857669@social.linux.pizza2026-08-21 03:37:40
The Silent Age (Multi, XP'd on PC) Joe the janitor gets tangled up in the strange goings on at his company's lab, and needs to travel through time to save the world.
Bought this (likely on sale) over a decade ago and somehow never got to it till today, lol.
This is a pretty short (4hrs or so) and simple point and click. For as old as it is (think it first launched in 2012?) it's got good production values. Decent voice acting, simple but effective art style, good wri…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2026-07-21 00:50:43
South Korea reports that, for the first 20 days of July, chip exports climbed 180.6% from the same period in 2025; computer-related product shipments grew ~232% (Heesu Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-09-19 15:11:52
In a first for Google, the company confirmed that
its AI model, Gemini, breached the security of three other companies in May.
The hacks occurred during a cybersecurity evaluation by AI-security firm Irregular.
Irregular, an Israel-based startup that scrutinizes the security of advanced AI systems, was also at the center of some of the recent OpenAI and Anthropic hacks of third-party entities, including OpenAI’s breach of AI software company, Hugging Face.
The circum…
@jeang3nie@social.linux.pizza2026-09-20 04:46:08
One of my biggest disappointments was always not seeing Rush live while Neil Peart was alive. I almost passed on this tour, but tickets for the second Cleveland show came down in price at the last moment and I realized that I'd never forgive myself if I didn't go. So after leaving work early and braving the downtown Cleveland traffic I actually managed to find on street parking and go see one of the best concerts that I've ever been to.
I thought the first set was amazing. …
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-08-20 22:28:10
So about that discomfort...
In the end, we have basically "hooray, national park declaration will protect the endangered species, whose traditional guardians, effectively extinct, will move into a new formal structure."
Celeste isn't Indigenous-coded, but this is *way* to close to several layers of colonialist myth that we have in America. The real story of our national parks, after all, is that we genocided the original inhabitants and forced them to move out of the parks, including banning culturally-important religious ceremonies at sacred sites in parks like Yosemite (in a country that's supposed to be very serious about freedom of religion...). Then we mostly erased those tribes from officially-taught history, pretending that they had tragically disappeared (they're still around; I could probably go look up their websites right now if I wanted to), and said "look at the majesty of this *wild*, *untamed*, *remote* wilderness. Isn't its completely *natural* beauty, untouched by humans, so wonderful?" Then just like the original tribes we do a bunch of human intervention to maintain the ecosystems there, and start charging camping and parking fees to support that work.
Yeah, it's a really fucked-up history.
So that's why it bothers me that the book ends with this as a positive resolution. In the book, the dragons' guardians are actually extinct, down to just Celeste. The prophecy-bending pretty much ensures that they won't actually make a comeback as a culture... But in real life, the descendants of the tribes that were forced out of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and other national parks are still around. The portrayal of genocides of indigenous peoples as completed is actually one big part of the colonialist myth: if they're all dead already, it might be tragic, but it's history, and there's no reason to give the land back or pay reparations or anything like that (Hollow Knight is sadly another extremely popular example of this myth-making). Then there's the idea that humans and nature are separable, the idea that the colonizers are trustworthy stewards of the land they stole, etc. When you set these things up to be true in your fictional world, you're helping acclimate readers to the idea that they're true in the real world, and that's bad.
I don't think that Matrin necessarily did this with malice: she's probably just reflecting back the myths she was taught. Special order tasked with sacred duty now almost extinct? Great way to give a character a tragic backstory and some powerful motivations, right? Etc.
TL;DR: I wish Martin had been as conscious of and clever in undermining colonialist myths as she was in dealing with standard fantasy racism.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-10-20 00:42:02
DOJ Admits List of Noncitizen Voters Is Faulty as It Begins Arrests
Eleven people with lawful permanent resident status were arrested in California Monday for alleged voter fraud.
Hours later, First Assistant Attorney for California Bill Essayli admitted that they may not have even voted.
The arrests were announced in a Department of Justice press release, which lauded the capture of California residents as part of
“Operation Protect the Vote”
—an effort to purg…
