Bunch o’ Bookmarks I’ve Found in Most of 2020

Here’s a bunch of links I’ve nfound interesting up to this point. My Pocket list is gettting cluttered and I wanted to clear it up. It kept getting better but I’ve decided to stop and publish what I have.

Links Worthy of Their Own Sub-Section

Yakuza examines masculinity with care, but leaves women behind by Sam Greszes on Polygon

I’ve spent over 100 hours going through Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza Kiwami 2 and it’s such an amazing series. I’ll simp for it another time, but that doesn’t mean it’s free of problems.

In this post, Sam goes over the feminist critiques of the game which have to do with how the women in the game, as well written they are, have been written without agency, constantly needing to be saved somehow.

A bit of a shame given how well it deconstructs toxic masculinity through the protagonist Kiryu. Since they’ve tried really hard to make the story “for men, by men, to men”, the women in the series fall short of their potential.

Memers are making deepfakes, and things are getting weird

Another Yakuza related post which looks into how deepfakes are getting real popular. More recently, the deepfakes where deepfakes of men from not quitting Linus Sebastian through to Jeffery Epstein (who didn’t kill himself) sing Baka Mitai. The article mentions a recent graduate who managed to make the deepfake and share how to with a tool the company she works for makes.

As entertaining as these are (though it’s a bit yikes when Hitler and Stalin sing Video Killed The Radio Star), there’s a lot of potential for abuse, more so than there is already where it’s being weaponized against women.

Still, there’s plenty of great singing in the Yakuza series. I really should write about it soon.

The Truth is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free by Nate Robinson in Current Affairs

A great article on how lies spread much further than the truth because the honest people insist on taking money whereas liars will gladly do it for free. Some libertarian think tank can post trash but academic journals charge both to publish and to read. Goes into a broader discussion of how copyright isn’t working for the greater good but rather to make a few people rich.

Building Climate Change Into Your Early Retirement Plans by Tanja Hester on Our Next Life

I had a doomer phase wondering what the point of retirement saving is if the planet will be an inhabitable mess¹. This seems like a good assessment that climate change will have to retirement, expecting less returns and higher expenses, factoring in slack and considering the millions who’ll be displaced and starving.

Eugenia Cheng’s Answers to Grace Cunningham’s Question’s [PDF]

The other day, Twitter found Grace wondering how we know math is real. While it wasn’t a dissertation, they’re interesting questions. Sadly, for people who don’t like to be corrected, they sure seemed to dunk her for not understanding math, even though she got an A+ in the subject and there are people who’ve dedicated lots of time figuring out how maths work who understand her questions just fine.

Grace then discovered her video was viral on twitter and asked some better questions on how we understand math, and why the smart people weren’t dunking on her. One smart person, categorical mathematician Eugenia Cheng decided to answer her questions. Nerds, be like Eugenia and be willing to answer questions from curious folks once in a while.

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled by Laura Sullivan on NPR

Honestly, there are things I wish would happen to fossil fuel executives, but I won’t mention them here. Just know that just 10% of plastic is recycled and oil companies have marketed hard how recyclable it is even though they just wanna sell more plastic, which is trash (pun fully intended and acknowledged).

How to increase productivity

Actually, Jack Conte (founder of Patreon 😉) in general. While his video style annoys me, he has some very valuable lessons on creation. In the linked video, he compares publishing to finishing, and why to be known for putting out great work, you need to focus on publishing since you’ll never finish.

Other Links

• Teens Flock To New App Where Theh Just Enter Own Personal Data Into Form by The Onion—might as well skip the value proposition and give away your data outright!
• Socialism Is When The Government Does Stuff—video of a guy who really understands socialism.
• A Beginners’s Guide to Getting an Education Without Going To College by Zoé Samudzi on Vice—a good guide on how to go about deep learning without academia.
• Passion by a David Mitchell [VIDEO: 3:41]—I’m annoyed at how companies are constantly looking for “passion”. Like, can you really be passionate about extremely mundane things?
• Welcome to Fucking by NRL Sport [Video 2:12]—Fucking in Austria is great! There’s so many ways to enjoy it. I should also go to Wank in Germany or maybe someone can join me in Petting
• Wild Sourdough by NC State—I found this project through Adam Ragusa on how to capture wild yeast for bread (and why it works) [VIDEO: 14:23]. I should get to it some day.
• Law Student Sent To Ex-Gay Therapy, Puts Counselor to Shame on ImFromDriftwood[VIDEO: 7:19]—This guy owns conversion therapist through some sharp lawyer like logic. The channel itself has a lot of great stories from LGBTQ people. Check it out.
• Why you should have a blog (and write in it) by Leticia Portella—goes over why you should get a blog and write in it. It’s good for you and the programming ecosystem. Although I haven’t gotten much recognition for my writing and I haven’t added anything to the programming ecosystem yet.
• The Games That Weren’t by Frank Gasking—an upcoming book on games that have never been release from small titles to AAA games.
• Google Is Promoting Climate Change Denialism On Its Apps And Mobile Homepage—not sure why I constantly get article from Watts Up With That and other unscientific rags prominently on google. Do they agree with it?
• Naomi Wu on those digital pregnancy tests which are just strips—turns out they are far more useful than I thought since they’re easier to read compared to a strip.
• White Pages Removal – How to Remove Your Information from Spokeo Search, WhitePages, People Finder, and More (2020 Tutorial) by Quincy Larson on Free Code Camp—a guide on how to get your data out of various data brokerages.
• An Army if a Women Are Waging War in the Web’s Most Notorious Revenge Porn Site—Mel Magazine talks to The Badass Army, an NGO which is trying to take down revenge porn. I remember once giving them money and them being able to take down a forum. Unfortunatly, it’s moved and it’s really hard to take down. I tried to think of some solutions but this is a social problem, not a technical one. No wonder women say men are trash. The thing that really creeped me out is that the one woman moved and her nude listings were updated.
• Fantasy Unemployment by Dave Rupert—an RSS only post where he explores what he would do if unemployed. Ends off by worrying about ageism and the exploitation of the youth.
• World Health Organization: Bad guy or fall guy?[Video: 38:02]—in this video, potholer54² goes over the criticisms of the WHO’s handling of the pandemic by examining the US’s intent to withdraw from the WHO. Long but worth it as he goes through the evidence and concludes that they did do best with the information they had and their circumstances, but they’re bureaucracy and poor communication didn’t help. Also, the whole China/Taiwan thing is a mess.
• The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder by Sandra Upson for Wired’s Backpage—a really sad story on how Lee Holloway, co-founder of Cloudflare, developed a neurodegenerative disease and how that affected him and his relationships.
• Ghengis Khan is Cancelled—after falling off his horse 800 years ago, Ghengis Khan has finally fallen victim to cancel culture. Sure he killed lots of people and raped many more women, but the guy should have a chance to grow. People change.
• Any claim without a URl should be treated as suspicious by Terence Eden—don’t believe everything you see on the internet, especially uncited screenshots.
• Ugandan govt wants YouTubers & bloggers to pay to share their content online—some African governments have some dumb fucking ideas. Uganda already has a social media tax. I hope my countries government doesn’t follow suit.
• Exposing 8 Viral Video Tricks That Will Blow Your Mind | DEBUNKING 2020 How To Cook That Ann Reardon—In this video, Ann exposes a content farm and goes into how they work.
• Why did Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 feature a booby trap banned by the UN? by Brian Gilbert (BDG) of Polygon—in line with BDG’s random gaming videos for Polygon, he looks into why Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 had punji pits (spike pits). The most interesting thing he mentioned was how the game industry has changed from when you could do random shit for the heck of it to now where every little detail needs a long-winded rationale. Heck, the punji pit isn’t even in the Pro Skater 1+2 Remake [Affiliate Link].
• Everyone’s Getting Tired of Shitty Viral Tweets About Men—a lot of these things get real tiring and the people who make them do it in the name of “being woke” or whatever. Sure do it for some annoying dude, but tweeting about a guy who has hobbies he enjoyes is just unwarranted.
• We Live in a Post-Hypocrisy World—I’ve got lots of thoughts on the US elections, even more on how useless the opposition is, but the most annoying thing about them is covered here. Basicaly, they shoud act like an actual opposition party, realize they’re the one’s to “pass on to” as elected representatives and abandon the whole “you go low, we go high” thing that hasn’t earned them much. Like I said, I can drone on this forever, but I’ll quote Maya Angelou instead: > When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.
• I can’t believe you’re forcing me to vote for Trump, which I definitely didn’t already want to do—somehow getting a little PC causes one to change all their opinions on everything.
• Chess Change Log by Ilyx [Video]—a bill wurtz style video on the history of chess.
• Using ‘Lady,’ ‘Woman,’ and ‘Female’ to Modify NounsUsing ‘Lady,’ ‘Woman,’ and ‘Female’ to Modify Nouns—I’ve been thinking a lot about inclusive language which I understand the need for but find clumsy at times³. One such place is using “women” as a noun. I read this to try and understand what to use. If you can, drop the adjective.
• Why Beethoven Sucks at Music—clickbait, but it goes into why Beethoven is considered “good music” even though most people haven’t heard most of his work. Also looks into how the idea of “good music” and “classics” came about
• We View Nikolai’s Response as a Tacit Admission of Guilt—I saw people making fun of this truck company for marketing their “HTML5 Supercomputer”. Turns out said company is full of shit.
• Blacklight by The Markup—a tool which finds trackers on a website. You’ll find the series of posts which goes into web tracking.
• Scots Wikipedia is written by an American teenager who can’t speak scots—what can I say, but yikes.
• This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic—earlier Sweden and Japan got a lot of criticism for their rather lax approach to COVID. Turns out it’s really hard to make drastic actions there (illegal in Sweden) and they focused on limiting superspreader events. The article explores the variable behind that approach.
• Timothy Ray Brown, the First Man Cured of HIV, Dies at Age 54—RIP