> Rather than driving him to introspect, and look inside himself to put together the broken parts to understand what drives his behavior, [he] concluded the way to have friends is basically to own the building where everyone hangs out, until only people who will talk to him are left.
- https://social.coop/@katanova/112885524200418276

While I’ve yet to follow more blogs on the English language, Nancy Friedman's @Fritinancy is one I cannot recommend enough. Recently, she explored the #etymology of the word ‘coconut,’ with particular attention paid to its usage in Kamala Harris’s campaign:

https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-the-week-coconut

Just a soundbite about the young people falling out of coconut trees. The ‘coco’ part being the Portugese word for ‘head’ in the 16th century makes me think of Exeggutor, a palm tree Pokémon with heads for nuts:

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Exeggutor_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Trivia

I don’t know about you, but depending on where you are in the English-speaking world you definitely hear the a that got left behind more than you do the ‘o.’ Which is a good enough segue into Jim Cummings’s audition for The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, one of many samples used by diskkunt nearly 13 years ago to produce this banger YTPMV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVli0334lD0&t=195s

Now, go back and listen to it from the beginning.

Pokémon #EmeraldRogue is a ROM hack that offers a modern Pokémon experience in a modified version of the Gen 3 engine. Here’s the twist: it’s not just a modern #pokemon experience, it’s a roguelite – you go through areas with randomly generated Pokémon and trainers, fight gym leaders, an elite four, and then become the Champion. If your Pokémon faint, they are out of play for the rest of the run:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Rogue-lites_and_procedural_death_labyrinths

This violates the web’s end-to-end principle in the most egregious and, frankly, ignorant way. A person who wants to download your game should not be forced to sign up for #Discord. And because Discord is a #WalledGarden and not indexed by search engines, if most of the discussion about your game happens there, your community looks more dead on the outside than it actually is.

Check the other replies to that post – here’s a few of my favourites:

https://infosec.exchange/@johntimaeus/112924004143029516

https://hackers.town/@lori/112926485091752831

https://social.glitched.systems/notes/9wql8e2mw5a60acj

This is in temporal proximity to the sad news that romhacking.net is closing its shutters. It’s no longer accepting new uploads, and all of its content over the years can now be found on the Wayback Machine:

https://www.romhacking.net//#article3074

https://archive.org/details/romhacking.net-20240801

#Discord is not structurally identical to #Facebook or #Twitter, as per discussed, but its impact on gaming communities as an #InformationBlackHole is inexcusable (h/t @kkarhan):

https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/112740148000540451

https://brologue.net/2024/04/11/enscattification/

But this is not the fault of us gamers. It is what #Discord was always designed to do. It’s something that its competitors, #Skype and #Teamspeak, could never hope to do:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151225064513/http://discordapp.com

(Remember Skype? Probably not. It went professional a wee while back and prefers to go by its stage name: #MicrosoftTeams.)

Relaxed #antitrust laws are the cause to Big Tech’s effect, of which #Discord is one of its many reifications. That is to say, it’s one of the five giant websites you interact with that captures screenshots and texts from the other four:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040