Two new rules have been added to this community, and they deserve some explanation.

Inspired by this comment, I started thinking about why so many gaming spaces feel shallow or exhausting.

The problem is that they are rarely about video games themselves. Instead, they become about “being a gamer”—a label, an identity, and a consumer tribe. That identity is built on cycles of hype, outrage, loyalty to platforms, and endless talk of hardware or marketing. It flattens games into consumable products, and the people into market demographics.

That’s not the kind of community I want to build. I’m here because I see games as art, and I want to share that perspective with others who think the same way. If someone views games mainly as a lifestyle accessory, or if their whole identity is wrapped up in consumption, then this space will feel alien to them—and that’s intentional.

Which is why the first new rule is simple: “This is not a gamer identity space.” It sets the boundary clearly. We don’t need the baggage of gamer identity here. This community isn’t a loyalty badge, it’s a place for deeper thought.

The second new rule grows directly out of the first: “Talk about games as art.” If games are art—and they are—then the most interesting conversations we can have are about design, aesthetics, mechanics, and meaning.

What is this game trying to say? What choices did the creators make, and why? How does its structure, its tone, or its style affect the way we experience it? These are the kinds of questions that lift discussion beyond consumption and into critique, interpretation, and appreciation.

I added this rule because I’ve seen firsthand what happens when you try to talk about games in this way elsewhere. In another gaming community (which doesn’t need to be named), I made the mistake of approaching the medium with positivity and seriousness—treating it as art worth celebrating.

The reaction was hostility. People saw appreciation as “shilling,” and thoughtful discussion as a threat to their outrage-driven culture. That told me all I needed to know: rather than fight to carve out space in communities built on negativity, it’s better to establish one that starts with positivity and respect for the medium itself.

So that’s the point of these two new rules. They’re not just lines in a list—they’re the foundation for what kind of community this will be. A place where games are treated as works of art, not consumer trophies. A place where we discuss choices, meaning, and design, not just hardware wars or outrage cycles.

This is a place where positivity is not only welcome but expected.

I've had the misfortune of spending time in Renton because that was where Fry's (Electronics) was. Not exactly a bastion of fun and frivolity, and this is in the '90s.

Four people – including three teenagers – are accused of a hate crime in Washington state after being arrested in connection with an alleged attack on a transgender woman that left the victim hospitalized, according to authorities.

The Renton police department said the four suspects in the case first argued with the 39-year-old woman on Monday evening – then beat her after she saw them again later. Investigators say they hurled homophobic slurs at the victim, who was attacked on a street near a transit center in Renton and suffered serious injuries.

“They chased her, knocked her to the ground, and repeatedly assaulted her,” police said in their statement.

Police documents obtained by ABC elaborate, recounting how the woman told officers she first encountered the group while telling them to stop “harassing” people at a local transit center. That drew the group’s attention, and they began “charging towards her”, the police documents alleged.

Surprising absolutely no one, our education system is shit.

The average reading and math scores of American high school seniors fell to their lowest levels in two decades in 2024, according to new national data released last week.

The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992, when the test was first administered, and that math scores fell to their lowest levels since 2005, when the math assessment began.

The test, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the US Department of Education, assessed roughly 19,300 12th-graders in math, 24,300 in reading and 23,000 eighth-graders in science between January and March of last year.

The report found that 35% of seniors “performed at or above” the NAEP’s “proficient” level in reading, and 22% were at or above that level in math.

It also stated that 45% of 12th graders scored below the NAEP’s “basic” level in math, marking a five percentage-point increase from 2019. In reading, 32% of students scored below the basic level, which was a two-point increase from 2019.

One-third of seniors met the standard for proficiency in reading and one-fifth in math, give or take a couple of percentage points, bringing me to dust off some cruft and quote George W. Bush:

"Is our children learning?"

An approach (Tom Torr's books):

"What I am now" is inscribed in the neurons and chemistry of the brain, and the state and function of the organs and their behavior. Engaging with this means facing the reality of the body; cognition and the "Self" are considered parts of this body. Cognition cannot drive evolution into conflict and still maintain the equilibrium of "what I am now"; for equilibrium, it is necessary that the movements of cognition be compatible with the findings that the body's possibilities and limitations determine for it. Otherwise, that incompatibility will spread to awareness, approach, perception, the "Self," and consequently, to "what I am now."

Cognition cannot be independent of the body, and for equilibrium, it is forced to submit to its frameworks. If it does not submit, it cannot make the brain's cognitive system accompany it in a way that vitalizes its movement, and the world of cognition, in turn, becomes dual. Only observation, experience, and trial and error—that is, rationality—can guide this duality toward integration.

Perhaps if we consider rationality to be the deference of the "Self" to its own totality and moving in harmony with this totality, then the lack of rationality could be seen as a misuse of the notion of free will, an overstepping of the "Self," and its domination over its own totality; as if instead of the voice of the "Self" being a representative of my totality, it becomes a sound detached from the totality, produced almost solely in the mouth.

In this interpretation, it is not unknown why and how belief plays a cancerous role in creating a gap between "self" and the totality and is castrating. Around this cancerous tissue, which, compared to the functional biases of cerebral cognition, is the equivalent of putting itself to sleep or into hypothermia, the path of observation, experience, and trial and error becomes narrow and rugged. Cognition, and subsequently awareness, evolutionary intelligence, and approach, lose their fluidity, rationality dims, and the brain's perceptual efficiency declines. Of course, the degree of this rationality and its absence is itself part of "what I am now."

The 30-year mortgage rate shot up the day after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates.

Hours after the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate on Wednesday by 25 basis points, mortgage rates ticked up 9 basis points.

...

The Fed announced Wednesday that it would trim its key policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point, bringing it to the range of 4% to 4.25%. Around the time of the announcement, Mortgage News Daily, a website that posts daily updates on rates, crashed - possibly the result of people flocking to the site to see how mortgage rates reacted. The company told MarketWatch it was looking into why the site was down that afternoon.

Mortgage News Daily later reported that the 30-year rate went up by 9 basis points (0.09%) to 6.22% on Wednesday. On Thursday, it reported that the 30-year rate had gone up by 15 more basis points, to 6.37%.

In contrast, a report by Freddie Mac measuring weekly averages for the 30-year rate found that mortgage rates fell to the lowest level in 12 months on Thursday. That's because Freddie Mac's report gathered information prior to and after the Fed's decision was announced. The weekly report doesn't survey lenders, but is based on actual mortgage applications to lenders across the country that are sent to Freddie Mac.

...
Mortgage rates aren't tied to the Fed's interest-rate moves. Instead, they typically fall in advance of a Fed rate cut, as MarketWatch has reported, because bond investors are trying to anticipate where the central bank will go. Mortgage rates are priced off the 10-year Treasury note BX:TMUBMUSD10Y by adding a spread.

Hence, the 10-year Treasury yield is a better gauge of how mortgage rates will move - and the 10-year yield was trending higher Thursday.

Mortgage rates have decoupled from the Fed's benchmark / targets, basically, because fiscal policy and the overall economic outlook are so bad that traditional monetary policy is no longer effective.

This is generally what economists would call 'a bad sign'.

Myself, I would go so far as 'a very bad sign.'

My condolences to anyone who confused their local new/used home salesperson with a qualified economist, if they told you, and you believed, something like 'Fed rate cuts will lower mortgage rates!"

In another topic (#Smithereen 0.11 is out!), grishka@mastodon.social says this:

> I have this convention where I return IDs for remote objects (obviously, how else would you authenticate them if not by fetching from the origin servers) but complete objects that are local, to save resources. IIRC I saw Mastodon do it for replies so just copied this behavior

It was in response to a discussion about conversation contexts — a resolvable collection of items that represents a conversation, thread, reply tree, etc.

Most implementors return a collection of object IDs, some return a collection of activities.

What about a mix of object IDs and full objects? That's interesting — it's the first I've heard of it.

My gut reaction is that it's messy... mixing types: strings for some items in the collection and complete objects for others.

... but I think at the end of the day, there are three things we need to acknowledge:

1. Most implementors end up converting ids to complete objects anyway by fetching from the remote resource (unless it is not needed)
2. Sending additional bytes over the wire is fairly inconsequential (unless I suppose you're sending many Mbits...)
3. Including the entire object saves on additional calls if the receiving party does not already know about the object.
4. You can trust the objects owned by the server you're requesting data from. (this is fe34)

I wonder if an amendment to f228 is needed silverpill@mitra.social to capture this use-case?