Nuclear Monster

  • Seinfeld2000 in the intro to their interview with Wayne Knight:

    Look. i like to “goof around ” a lot on social media. But when youre talking to a screen & stage legend like Wayne Knight who is ENSCONSED in the seinfeld universe and emblazoned in popular cutlure, its time to get serious. im glad i did bc the result is honestly one of the best interviews in journalism history.

    This interview with the actor behind Seinfeld’s Newman character has the best ending to any celebrity interview, and is overall the best celebrity interview ever published by a website.

  • There is this draft of an essay I’ve been trying to write for a few weeks about how people don’t understand what free speech is. It isn’t something afforded to users of private websites. Private websites have choices in what they host beyond the legalities of their locality.

    When a user is banned from a private site for any reason their free speech rights haven’t been trampled because it isn’t their government doing the banning. When content is deleted from a website because a government tells them to, then their free speech rights have been violated. That’s the extent of it.

    Whenever any person, business, or project runs a website where users can submit comments or pictures or any kind of content there is a responsibility to moderate that content and remove anything that is at a minimum illegal. Most sites go the extra step of trying to encourage healthy discussion by attempting to remove trolls and other forms of harassment and objectionable content.

    In order to do that, sites have policies or rules that members must adhere to. It makes it much easier if instead of a community manager saying “this isn’t allowed” and banning a user, the site has a set of rules to point to and enforce. Good community managers want these policies and rules to be a tool of last resort. Usually the first level of escalation should be a private conversation with someone if their content isn’t completely out of line or spam.

    Here we are today in August of 2015 and Reddit has been operating with minimal policies in place for a little over a decade.

    This is a site where users choose what communities to join and read by subscribing to each subreddit community that they want to read and participate in. Subscribing and unsubscribing also changes what appears when that user visits the Reddit.com front page. Normally those communities are about interesting or fun topics like interviews with celebrities or useful subjects like cats and video games. Sometimes reddit even hosts surprisingly reasonable debates on subjects that people think are impossible to discuss like gun control, abortion, or even who the best Star Trek captain is. Reddit is what you make of it as a user.

    Reddit isn’t just some site hosted by someone who loves these things, it is a business in San Francisco with over 70 employees.

    Unfortunately Reddit is also what the people running the site make it, and for years Reddit has hosted hatespeech alongside the cute cat pictures and other interesting content. The most recent and popular subreddit community for racists was called Coontown. It was exactly what you would expect, diatribes about how terrible anyone is who isn’t white alongside terrible images and links to other racist materials. There was no reasonable discussion, just the same stupid old racism enabled by today’s most popular community site, Reddit.

    When I found out about this I couldn’t believe it. How could anyone at Reddit know about this and continue to host the racists at their cost and without feeling maybe a little strange about doing so? It’s their choice. I couldn’t personally continue working somewhere that did that, and I had removed the link to the ioquake3 reddit community from ioquake3.org.

    Today Reddit finally banned that Coontown subreddit along with a few others and updated their policies.

    I was so relieved! I could delete the draft article about how shitty reddit is, and everything would be great from here on out. I thought that I could go back to reading reddit and linking to them from my other sites. Until I read more on the thread on Reddit about why they deleted it:

    Reddit screenshot

    Just in case that text in the image isn’t readable for you, here is the reasoning behind the decision for Reddit to ban Coontown:

    We didn’t ban them for being racist. We banned them because we have to spend a disproportionate amount of time dealing with them. If we want to improve Reddit, we need more people, but CT’s existence and popularity has also made recruiting here more difficult.

    That is the comment from one of the original Reddit founders, the returning CEO, Steve Huffman.

    This is why nothing has been done for over a decade about the racists on Reddit. This is why the other objectionable sites on reddit are being placed behind a bogus click-through quarantine before you can read them. The spreadsheet finally ticked over and the cost to deal with these particular racists became greater than the continued benefit of hosting the racists. Not because the people running Reddit had any problem with racists, not because they support any kind of bogus form of free speech, they had a problem with the continued cost of doing business with the racists and shut off the thing that was losing them money.

    If the racists that come to Reddit for their community operations can find a way of doing so without costing Reddit more than Reddit earns from hosting the racists, they’ll be welcomed. Unbelievable.

  • David Braben:

    We’re beginning with airless, rocky worlds — places where a great deal of new gameplay can take place. These are planet-sized sandbox environments, with all sorts of things to discover hidden on them. You’ll find surface starports, crashed ships, mineral deposits, hidden bases and more. 

    These worlds are gigantic, and – like the open galaxy – you’ll be able to go anywhere. You’ll be able to fly over the surface in low orbit and choose your spot to land, you’ll be able to venture out in your Surface Recon Vehicle and hurtle across the surface at high speed. You’ll be able to sneak around or go in all guns blazing. The nimble SRV is tiny compared to your ship, and is virtually invisible on a long range scanner — ship-based weapons will find it very hard to hold a lock on them, but airborne and ground-based players can explore the same worlds together, so watch the skies!

    As I’ve said already, I’ve wanted to do surface landings in Elite Dangerous for quite a while now — and we have been planning how best to do it since the Kickstarter. Elite Dangerous: Horizons is the first stage and a huge step. The quality people expect is, as always, very high, and the team have done a great job hitting that benchmark. These worlds will feel real and meaningfully unique.

    […]

    Of course support will continue for Elite Dangerous even outside of Elite Dangerous: Horizons, and we’re keeping the community together. All Elite Dangerous and Elite Dangerous: Horizons players will share the same galaxy together and you’ll retain all your progress whenever you choose to join our new season of expansions.

    Elite Dangerous: Horizons will be available to pre-order on our store today, and I’m very happy to announce all existing Elite Dangerous players will receive a £10 loyalty discount off the Horizons retail price. Existing players will also unlock the exclusive Cobra Mk IV ship in Elite Dangerous: Horizons. The Cobra Mk IV will be available in the game only to players who joined us in the first year — forever. It’s our ‘thank you’ for your faith in the game, and you’ll see more of the Cobra Mk IV in Friday’s Peek Of The Week.

    With only non-inhabited worlds at first this is a more manageable chunk of game to develop as opposed to going for it all at once or in a series of modules if you’ve got maybe over 80 million in funding and somehow still can’t ship a game.

    Unfortunately, the pre-orders for Horizons are only available through the official store and not on Steam. Existing Elite: Dangerous players on Steam still get the discount ($15 in USD) through the Frontier store if you use the same log-in credentials that you used when you logged into the Elite: Dangerous launcher. There’s also a more expensive beta pre-order which at $75 seems a bit much for pre-release access. Into the insanity zone you can get every expansion that will ever be released with the “Lifetime expansion pass” at an eye-sequelching $195.

    As much as I love playing Elite, I don’t think it makes sense to pre-order an expansion, and giving a ship to those who do is strange as it violates the making your own way nature of the game.

    Perhaps my favorite part of this expansion at this point is Frontier moving the colon in Elite: Dangerous to after the Dangerous since otherwise it would be Elite: Dangerous: Horizons which would be as ridiculous as charging four hundred dollars for a piece of concept art that may or may not turn into one ship in what might be a video game some day.

  • Wilson Rothman has this review of a new printer series from Epson:

    Epson’s new move is a sly one. Rather than compete on price, the printer maker is dropping the cartridge issue entirely. When you buy an EcoTank printer–for instance, the ET-2550, which closely resembles Epson’s XP-420–you fill up its four-chambered reservoir with ink from plastic containers included with the printer. There’s a satisfying feeling of dumping all of that ink into the tubs. You then let the printer prime itself and your ink worries are over.

    This is fascinating. Everybody hates the current state of printing at home and generally at work it isn’t much better if you’re using fairly standard printers there, too. These printers are already up for pre-order. I can’t believe I’m thinking about pre-ordering a boring printer. Right now my HP printer is a piece of complete garbage, it’s so bad that I’ve named it appropriately:

    Incredible Piece of HP Shit

  • Evan Lahti has this article on how much he loves Splash Damage’s Dirty Bomb:

    At its peak, when some popular streamers and YouTubers were being paid to play it, Dirty Bomb was drawing as many as 13,000 concurrent players. I didn’t get swept up by that initial wave of attention, but I wish I had: Dirty Bomb, still in beta, is one of the best multiplayer FPSes you can play today.

    I like its rhythm. I like its map flow. I like that one of the characters has an ever-replenishing grenade launcher that I never have to reload. Here’s why I think Dirty Bomb is worth your time.

    I’m going to have to check it out.