He / They

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • So first off, I think it’s safe to assume that the article is not about going and removing IPv4 on your company’s corporate networks for a month, so I’ve been speaking in regards to home internet service.

    NAT is not a firewall, but in normal use by the average home internet user it is a means to prevent computers outside of their network from reaching computers inside the network without ports being forwarded on the router, or the internal machine initiating the connection. If you do not have a firewall on the devices, and they are not behind a NAT gateway/router, then they are by default exposing ports. There’s no inherent guarantee that a router has a firewall configured properly, or has it enabled.

    I’ve never seen NAT in combination with IPv6 and I’ve seen plenty of deployments at our customers.

    I’m interested in how this works. In a normal IPv4 scenario for home internet users, you are assigned a single IP for your router by your ISP, and internal addressing is usually handled by router-resident DHCP automatically. In the deployments you’re seeing, are ISPs handing out /120 blocks to each router? Does that require the ISP to have access to alter your home router, or do customers configure the DHCP themselves (which seems unlikely to scale)?


  • I admittedly did not read the original Mastodon post from nixCraft about the purpose of No NAT November, but surely it’s not just about moving to IPv6? You can (and usually would) still do NATing with IPv6. You don’t want every device to be internet-exposed, but still want them to be able to access the internet (and who wants to configure internet-defensive firewall rules on all their internal home hosts)?

    There’s a reason that FD00::/7 exists.





  • Games are art, and art is valuable for how it enriches.

    Not all art is good art, and there are plenty of games that no one is trying to preserve.

    Capitalism is currently also killing off lots of non-video game art that it can’t profit off of. Tons of old shows, movies, books, and music are out of print, and being held and often lost by the IP holders.

    If we allow art to become solely a vehicle for generating profit, we are going to lose out on so much beauty, talent, culture, and history.


  • This (sandbox games that are all about “pure” gameplay, where the narrative is made by the pseudo-random events) is my bag!

    In no particular order except for #1, these are my top-10:

    1. Kenshi Post-apocalyptic alien planet sandbox that can be a colony simulator, a faction-combat game, an exploration and boss-fighting game, and so much more. This is by far and away my TOP recommendation.
    2. Rimworld Dwarf Fortress-like colony simulator set on proc-gen alien planets. Supremely mod-able.
    3. Starsector Sandbox space game with a bit of everything. You can play it in so many ways, and there are so many encounters and missions and things to do. Tons of mods.
    4. Mount and Blade: Warband A medieval-combat “simulator” where you lead a… Warband of soldiers around a faux medieval world. First-person combat with a lot of great complexity. Supports mods.
    5. Derail Valley A train-driving simulator, where you just take contracts to haul stuff between towns/stations/etc. Multiple engines to drive, and a lot of cool physics to contend with.
    6. Project Zomboid Zombie apocalypse survival simulator, with multiplayer. Lots of mods.
    7. Spore A sandbox classic, where you usher a species as it evolves from protozoa to being an interstellar species.
    8. The Sims 3 Playing house for adults (and kids). Build a house, decorate it, get a good job, have kids and pets. The unattainable Millennial fantasy.
    9. Starbound Universe exploration sandbox, with a bunch of humanoid aliens you have to ally with to defeat a big monster thing. Moddable.
    10. X4: Foundations Economic simulation sandbox set in space. Build stations, ships, influence wars between empires using economic sway… Very very slow, but fulfilling.




  • I think you are looking for a unified solution to deal with very different and very nuanced problems.

    The swastika was chosen by Hitler as a means to legitimize his movement. It’s important to remember that the average 1920s German had little formal schooling in world history. Even compared to our shitty and revisionist US curriculum, they had next to nothing. He could co-opt it and people were legitimately like, “wow, that’s crazy, I absolutely have never heard of Buddhism or Hinduism or anything. Maybe we really did used to rule all of them”. The Nazi swastika was at no point a dogwhistle, it’s a very explicit and bold statement of their false identity. It was an assertion of power and authority. If you cede the symbol to them, you are intrinsically acknowledging them as the “legitimate” owners of that symbol, which they are not. You can very easily distinguish between a swastika that is being flown as a white supremacist symbol, and one that is not. No Nazis are building Buddhist temples or weaving faux-Native American textiles just so they can have a “plausibly deniable” swastika, nor using pictures of those items to masquerade as non-Nazis with a nudge and a wink (because that would hurt their ‘pride’). They just use Nazi imagery directly.

    To attack this, you need to very actively de-legitimize its improper usage, and boost its proper usage. The message cannot be “yes, this thousands of years old symbol really is about the Nazis”, because that is the stance of the Nazis themselves. It has to be, “fuck off Nazis, that’s not your’s, and we’re going to actively weed out your bullshit”.

    On the other side are symbols like Pepe, where the purpose was never about legitimizing their ideology, but in fact to hide it and dogwhistle. The creator of Pepe is attempting valiantly to do exactly what I said above, but I think that while getting Nazis to stop using it (and everything else, air included) is great, there is no wider history or adoption that makes Pepe worth using elsewhere. It was just a cartoon frog. In this case, drawing a direct line between people who choose to represent themselves with Pepe, and with the shitty ideologies they’re using it to dogwhistle about, is actually the best counter to them, because a dogwhistle isn’t a dogwhistle if the relationship is explicit and universally understood.

    Banning Pepe outright in Steam profiles makes complete sense to me, because it sends the message that “we know what you’re using this to mean, and you’re not fooling anyone, dumbass”.

    Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).


  • I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of piece? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?

    Are you asking me to speak to this? I can’t speak to the personal motivations or viewpoints of either Native American tribes, nor of a myriad of Asian cultures. But I can say that I don’t personally believe it is either fair, appropriate, or necessary for Buddhists to stop using a symbol they’ve used for thousands of years in order to distance themselves from a group they are not in fact associated with.

    groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that

    I think you may have fallen prey to a false narrative around this. From what I’m seeing, the “whirling log” (the native american symbol that resembles the swastika) was mostly dropped due to pressure from white people over their own white guilt and the politics around Nazism, not out of some collective spontaneous show of empathy, and never actually fell out of use completely, and is now being actively reclaimed by various native americans.

    During World War II, Eskeets said the U.S. government asked the Navajo to “hold off” on using the symbol. So for an unknown amount of time, Eskeets said metalsmiths, weavers and other artists stopped incorporating it into their work. That helped create the misconception that items with a whirling log are no longer being made at all.

    It’s apparently still being actively used by the Navajo, as well, but they tend not to talk to white people about it since people can’t have a normal one.

    The sacredness of the “whirling log” makes it challenging to get some Native Americans to speak to non-Natives about the subject. That’s according to Edison Eskeets, a trader at The Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site and the oldest operating trading post on the Navajo Nation and in the United States. Several Navajo artists were contacted and either didn’t respond to requests or hung up the phone when asked to speak about the symbol’s significance.

    Eskeets said the whirling log represents humanity and life and is still used for healing in hundreds of Navajo ceremonies.

    “It kind of has everything on it,” he said. “It represents the constellation, the moon, the sun, the equinox. It’s down to the earth, the four directions, the rotation of mother earth, all of that … it’s the rotation of life.”


  • But the old meanings are all dead.

    I’m sorry, but this is completely false. The swastika is still used all across the world for its original meanings. If you’d said this about e.g. Norse symbols like the Valknut or Sonnenrad, I’d be 1000% on board with you, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve not been to anywhere that Buddhism is common if you think everyone associates the swastika with Nazism.

    There are specific versions of the swastika that Nazi Germany created that are only associated with Nazism, such as the 45-degree rotated swastika, or obviously any swastika embedded within another German military symbol, but to assert that the basic symbol itself has been co-opted is very Euro-centric.


  • Sidebar, but the nominees for this year’s TGAs are ridiculous. It’s the same ~7 games shoehorned into every category they can, and a few others sprinkled in where they can’t.

    You’d think there were only like 20 games that released this year that were good.

    Some games that released this year, but snubbed by TGA in favor of kissing up to the same games n times over:

    • Hades 2
    • V Rising
    • Satisfactory
    • Mouthwashing
    • Factorio: Space Age
    • SULFUR
    • Rise of the Golden Idol