These fucking chuds reelected a convicted vampire.
I've got some fortified (though not re-enforced) bastions protecting the enterance, but they aren't very tall and I still need to increase manpower. I currently have a squad of 8 with steel plate armor and various weapons. Goblins are about 6 days travel east, so I might have to provoke them.
Last week @context@hexbear.net broke the news (to me, anyway) about the Dwarf Fortress seige update, so I've been playing Dwarf Fortress. Spent some time messing around with the world-gen parameters, rolled about a dozen worlds, and found one I'm alright with (suitably deep). Along the way I tried a sinister embark an immediately got wiped out by nauseating muck. I also tried a volcano embark and discovered I was right on top of an active Kobold camp - which was cool, but impractical.
There was an ongoing vampire problem which cost three lives. It turned out to be the Mayor, who has now been arrested by the Captain of the Guard and thrown in a dungeon where she can enjoy the craftsdwarfship of my metalsmith's chains for eternity. She only received a 400 day sentence though (she's immortal you idiots!) and is still the Mayor, so I walled it off. Hopefully the chuds don't re-elect her.
The Fortress is up to about 85 residents with a stream of monster hunters passing through to visit the underground caverns. A few of them turn up dead now and then but my idiot Dwarves are still happily wandering to all extents of the underworld to gather cave spider webs so it must be Human stupidity. I was able to have my militia commander take a squad out to do recon in the caverns and they discovered a cave leading down to a second cavern level. After doing recon in the second level, I was able to choose a spot where I can build a "Great Hall" in-between them, spanning multiple Z layers with overlapping facilities and balconies. I'm planning it out to fit all 11 guild halls, plus a library, tavern, hospital, and dorms - but in a way these fit the architecture and aren't just extra rooms dug out when needed. Since about 30% of the caverns above are underwater, I'm trying to incorporate an underground waterfall and river as well.
No seiges yet, but I have ample steel and a small castle on the surface built from bauxite blocks.
It was the mayor omg
She didn't confess to the murders, but the crimes here put her age at over 225. No natural dwarf can live so long.
Got his ass. (Pretty sure this guy is a vampire. They're not blue anymore.)
REJECT RNAV, RETVRN to VOR/DME
Lemmy.world is part of a network of "generic" Fediverse instances commonly ending with the .world TLD (mastodon.world is another example administered by the same people). They appear to be mostly concerned with growth, essentially following the tech startup model of growth -> ??? -> profit. The admins saw the Reddit Exodus as a good opportunity to expand their small collection of platforms into Lemmy, and by the numbers they were the most successful (though dozens of other instances were launched around the same time).
In the lead-up to the Reddit Exodus, Lemmy dev Nutomic (IIRC) pitched Lemmy as an alternative on Reddit and the thread went viral. As a maturing Free Software alternative to Reddit with real-world use, and an architecture which mitigates many of the shortcomings of previous Reddit alternatives (e.g. Raddle, Voat, Tildes) it checked all of the boxes that tech-bro Redditors could possibly ask for in such a platform. It stood out to them as a viable solution for the same reasons it stood out to us five years ago. Tens of thousands of people created accounts on various instances and got to posting.
Soon after, the Red Scare began. With the number of instances being launched and the number people signing up, people began taking notice. Not just on Reddit and Lemmy, but on other corners of social media as well. In various ways, people began pointing out that the people developing the alternative to monopoly capital social media were (gasp) Communists. This snowballed from curiosity and concern from people who weren't used to seeing open communists developing free software, to a full blown social hysteria - our own little Satanic Panic. Dessalines's thoughtfully written collection of essays transformed into the necronomicon. A collection of works which could be pointed to as proof of his and the project's deceitful nature, while simultaneously being a form of forbidden knowledge which could never be quoted with any amount of context. Thousands of people, including instance administrators, developed the mindset that they had been tricked into using Lemmy, and that rather than its obvious purpose of being a censorship-resistant social media platform which is also structurally resistant to corporate acquisition and consolidation, it is actually a nefarious organ of misinformation aimed at disintegrating the foundations of Western Civilization.
A substantial part of the social media engagement strategy employed on platforms like Reddit is to make the users believe that by posting, they are engaging in an existential battle for civilization. With Liberal Democracy hanging by a thread, the smallest acts like upvoting the good ideas and downvoting the bad ideas can be all the difference it takes to tip the scales. Every day they spend in the posting trenches is a day that fascism is held at bay. Where the beleaguered city on the hill can stand one day longer against the endless hordes of tyranophillic Russians and Chinese. This attitude was carried over here by many of the Reddit converts, and places like Lemmy.world are the result.
When you get to the gas giants these things are so fucking far apart it's crazy.
About one day, as a matter of fact.
Maple bourbon cheesecake was a hit at work today (I baked a test cake to make sure this recipe wasn't inedible AI slop before poisoning my family with it).
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Not to say that decentralization solves everything, but I see all of these centralized "but we do E2EE tho" apps as deeply flawed. Especially when they require phone numbers to sign up. You are just WhatsApp without Facebook's bad reputation! Assuming they are completely above board (not intelligence ops in themselves, but subject to legal pressure), we can take their word that there are no plaintext records the government can subpoena, but as a centralized service, they construct essentially one point the government needs to watch. They can correlate when messages are going in with when messages are coming out to assemble graphs of communications networks. With subpoena power, they can trivially figure out who the individual nodes are in those graphs, who they are communicating with, what their location is (they have your phone number), and with zero-day attacks at their disposal, they can exfiltrate the plaintext from end-user devices - if the social network information doesn't provide enough insight for them to roll up troublemakers without needing to burn these.
There is an old manta among cryptographers and Free Software advocates that "there is no such thing as security through obscurity." I'm calling bullshit. While it is not a substitute for sound cryptography, the clever application of stenography goes a long way. Every day you can avoid being noticed is a day the investigation has been delayed. Every investigation which gets started late, or never starts at all, creates blind-spots to the state. Public key cryptography is a crucial tool, but there is a hyper-fixation on it while alternate methods are overlooked. Classic practices of tradecraft, like one time pads, dead drops, hiding messages inside innocuous mediums. The discipline to opt for radio silence instead of constantly dinging the "Revolution HQ" server with you E2EE messaging app as you roam from WiFi access point to WiFi access point. The pre-arrangement of signaling procedures, where an innocuous post on a mediocre blog, a classified ad with the correct words in it, or the arrangement of flower pots on a balcony can let somebody know it is time to move to phase 2, or establish a meeting in a predetermined location, or retrieve a package from a specific garbage can on the Hudson River Greenway.
These apps are actually much more secure when being used by police and state officials. In this case, they don't need to worry about investigators with subpoena power. The threat model is simplified to the cryptographic fundamentals, and the security of the devices implementing them. Foreign intelligence is still a threat, but they don't have the blanket physical access to these networks that the US security state does.