I'm really not sure "not actively promoting people who might make slightly more profit for this apocalyptically profitable megacorp that happens to have started out as an online bookstore" is "fucking the authors". It's certainly not actively *helping* you but "doing nothing to help you" is a long way from "fucking you over".

I'm not saying Amazon's innocent here, I'm quite sure there are *many* things they are doing that actively siphon money away from authors and publishers and towards Bezos' pockets. But "they haven't decided, unprompted, to start a regular e-mail blast advertising random books to their customers based on their preferences, and included me as the first example" is way under the threshold of things I'd say qualified as "fucking you".

We all know what the difference between a game console and a general-purpose computer is but I feel like the fact that there's multiple c64 emulators available on iOS suggests that Apple doesn't have an official ruling on where the line between one and the other is. I don't think anyone would boot up Speedscript or GeoWrite in their virtual c64 to get some writing done but maybe a few people like George RR Martin might be all over Wordstar in their virtual MS-DOS machines, and that could be enough to put it over the line.

Realistically I suspect Apple's line is more like "is part of this old system owned by someone with enough lawyers to make us give a fuck that we're making money off of it" but obviously they're never gonna come out and say that publicly.

None of these jobs are going to be endangered at all by "AI". Image generators are massively automating "creating by leeching off of actual artists".

The usage you desire is perfectly served by getting a suite, or by getting two adjacent hotel rooms and opening the door between them. I have attended so many room parties at furry conventions that were held in two adjacent rooms or in a suite.

You can also do things like go out to a park and chill together.

I have been running a Mastodon instance since late 2017.

There are several design choices that Gargron (Mastodon's main developer) has made that are pretty explicitly because he wants it to be Twitter, But I Made It. Feature requests to change these choices keep appearing and keep getting denied - if you want to up the character limit past 500, or have markdown/other rich text, you will have to fork them and add it yourself, or perhaps switch to the "Glitch" fork, which is maintained by one of the leading contributors to the main project who is not Garg.

Personally I would be delighted if the Fediverse ate not just Twitter's market share, but Facebook's, and Instagram's, and Youtube's, and TikTok's, and every other site that has strip-mined public conversation for profit.

Catalina didn't offer anything that felt worth the hassle of losing a couple 32-bit things that will never be updated, and of discovering if the new separate Music app is as much of a pain in the ass about hassling me to subscribe to their streaming service as iOS Music is.

At this point I think it is pretty clear that the only thing that's gonna get me onto a new version of MacOS is buying a new computer, and that's not gonna be until like 2022 or 2023. Which feels kinda weird given that I've been on the current OS once a .1 release came out since like Tiger.

I'm still using an iPhone 6s I bought around 2016 or so. I bought an Apple case when I got it and that absorbed a few drops, when the last iPhone came out I decided to sink a whole forty bucks or so into a new case because the old one was starting to fall apart. I can't remember how much I paid for it when I got it, it was shortly after the 8 came out so it was last year's model. Plus AppleCare. Which is expired now.

No battery swelling, still works with my old wired headphones/earbuds. Still does what I need it to. I'm hoping to get at least five years out of it, maybe more; all I really do with it is maps, check email, and the usual web bullshit.

Yay for Asterix! Leave that one where the kids can get to it.

My day job is a web comic. All of my story notes live largely in Evernote. I mostly try to avoid doing lengthy sagas that need to really worry about continuity.

I believe Marvel and DC employ archivists; part of their job is to be a resource on continuity. Part of the job of a comic's editor is also to catch continuity glitches.

Millions of people bought Guitar Hero and Rock Band to enjoy a fantasy of being a rock star. I don't think anyone bought these games expecting to actually learn how to play music.

Have you learnt to become a space marine from playing Quake? Have you learnt to rule a nation by playing Civilization? Have you learnt to draw graffiti by playing Jet Set Radio? Have you learnt to be a hand-to-hand combat master playing Street Fighter?

Unless a game is explicitly designed as a teaching device, you are not likely to learn anything more than a vague caricature of the skills involved in the activity it simulates. Nobody expects to learn any activity based on a video game. But somehow, people constantly criticize Guitar Hero and Rock Band for this.

Why do you think anyone expects these games to teach them to play a real instrument?

I make comics, and I am curious where one can find the thin CMS you have made that you say beats WP for comics. I'm pretty happy with WP+CP for serving my comics after tossing in a security plugin; I also use it for my blog, and my image gallery.

I pay money to Metafilter - a mandatory $5 account creation fee, and now a buck or two every month since they added an option to do this. This goes in part to their fabulous team of moderators.

I also donate my time to helping to moderate a webcomics forum, because I want to have a nice place to talk about making those.

It's not so much that trolls are paywalled out, it's that there is a definite culture in place in these places that is anti-troll, with enough people wandering around the site with 'keep things civil' in the back of their mind. Sometimes a mod has to step in and delete a few posts that are turning into personal attacks, and politely remind everyone to please chill out and remember that there's humans on the other side of the screen. It works. I have had civil discussions with people who passionately believe the opposite of my views, and we have kept it polite, because both sides know they're in a forum that expects certain behavior, and that stepping outside of those bounds gets posts or accounts deleted.

(Neither of these places has a real names only policy, by the way; MeFi even has a modest cultural expectation of elaborate usernames that are unique to the site.)

You're only just now noticing this? I've been feeling like I've been living in a Bruce Sterling novel for the past seven years or so.

I think iTunes has all of those things you want nowadays, actually. At least for me on my Mac. It seems to kinda suck on other platforms because it has to drag a whole lot of the Quicktime infrastructure it relies on for playing music along with it, and becomes kind of big and unwieldy.

I get system notifications of playing tracks if I want 'em.

It's got plugins. I don't know how extensive they are, mostly I just have a handful of visualizers, and I think I've got a couple music format plugins somewhere in there too. (I've spent like $100 on various visualizers over the years, right now I'm really liking Aeon.)

I'm not sure what "excellent media library" or "the ability to play straight from the library" entails. I can double-click on a track in the iTunes window and it plays it, it manages all my folders and tags for me and makes it easy to dig out the actual files when I want to, I can sort in all kinds of ways.

Does Winamp do "smart playlists"? Because that's iTunes' killer feature, IMHO. It spends the vast majority of its time in a playlist of "stuff I haven't played in the last 5 weeks, or skipped in the last 10". Keeps my vast collection constantly rotating.

No, a virus would be hard-line fundamentalists, who the US elevated to power in the Middle East because they would originally be more amenable to doing our bidding in terms of who got the oil. The same virus can work in Christianity, and is pretty widespread. Or maybe the virus aggressively amoral capitalism, which has a really depressingly powerful synergy with fundamentalists. But perhaps I'm stretching the metaphor to far.

Islam, in this metaphor, might be described as another OS entirely that was implemented on top of Judaism; there's quite a few stories in the Bible that also show up in the Qur'an. Much of the Bible happens in the Middle East.