Hey gang, yeah I know it's been a while & we're mostly dormant but this is important.

I just got an email from our webmaster. Apparently LLM scrapers have been attacking fenspace.net with great ferocity, lots of bots hitting the site with 5 requests/sec. 

(Given that there were like 30+ "Guests" watching the subforum when I started this post, I suspect they're here too.)

As the site owner I've authorized him to set up a bot-protection system that ought to keep the content-stealing techbro plagiarism gremlins at bay. That said, there is a catch; it'll effectively switch the site over to HTTPS, and that might - might - break some image links, templates etc.

So we're going to do this thing because frankly all of those goat molesters can go catch a bus with their teeth. But if you go look at FenWiki at any point and see something broken please let me know here. I will do my best to make sure FenWiki is working correctly.

--Mal

Back in the days of yore, when Mac OS X was new and iTunes hadn't gone past a 50mb download, they added a feature called Smart Playlists, that for once in the entire history of things marketing tagged the "smart" label on was actually useful and even a major improvement - set one up and it would sift through your library each time a song started, finished, or was added, removed, or modified, and update itself to include whichever ones matched the criteria set, which pretty much amounted to being any kind of regular expression you could set up to search for in the mp3 details fields, be it a string in the title or artist/album, a number of stars in the rating, even things only tracked by the player itself like play count. You could even combine multiple criteria with logical operators if you wanted. Further, you could embed playlistts into other playlists, and it would still get the sort order right if some of them were these smart playlists.

Naturally, I set up a nested list that included smart lists sorted by star ratings a number of times equal to the number of stars (and eventually including asterisks in the title as well for more granularity) so a song with five stars and five asterisks was ten times as likely to be played than one with one star and no asterisk, thought a specific song's chances would also be modified by how many had any particular rating, of course. If I started getting tired of one and dropped the rating, it would play less often, if I heard one that hadn't played in a while and it stuck out as feeling fresh just raise the rating and it would get more time in the rotation. It worked very nicely, at least until marketing added more and more features that turned iTunes as a whole into a stuttering chunk of bloatware, and then I needed a Windon't system for programming classes and it did not have feature parity, and, and, and...

And these days I just use Rhythmbox because it's the default install on my Ubuntu live USB, and it doesn't do any of that, not even letting you manually add things to the play queue if they're already waiting in it, and any kind of play probability management has been unavailable so long I barely remember it aside from a flash of annoyance when I think of a particular song and have to manually search it out of the library to queue it up. So, I figured I'd ask if anyone knows of a player app that does something like that, hopefully with a Linux version or at least able to run in WINE? I feel like improving the soundtrack of my life might help raise my attitude, at least, and I'll take any little bit of help I can get with that to be honest.

Imgur is not working in the UK because it doesn't want to be subject to UK laws.

Is this the standard method for displaying images for these forums or is it the choice of the poster?

Is there any way to change this?

This story is available on AO3

May your Monday the 13th rise only to the "spooky fun" level

I'd like to share a little news story.  It's fairly long, but I'm just going to say that I was laughing for about ten minutes straight as I read through this story:  Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

You know how having money makes people think that they're really smart in every field?  Well, someone managed to get a recording of Peter Thiel's four-part lecture series, despite making it clear that recordings were entirely prohibited.  And this guy hates universities so much that he just spent a few hours trying to impress academics with his theories about the antichrist.

What is the antichrist?  Apparently anything to do with world government, like UNICEF or something. And also getting in the way of new technology, like luddites. Who is the antichrist?  People like Marc Andressen, Greta Thunberg, and Eliezer Yudkowsky get mentioned as candidates, fairly close together. (A different article noted: "With enemies like these, who needs friends?")  The whole thing is like SF tech scene inside baseball, but antichrist flavored.

And people kept going to see these things!  I mean, I definitely would have, this is comedy gold, especially if you're in technology.

I'm not really knocking the idea of there being antichrists, there are plenty of people who meet the definition in 1 John. It's that, like, people whom you disagree with in politics are probably not the antichrist just because you disagree with them, right?

ISBN 978-1-5387-7800-5
(also available as an ebook, but you probably want a copy that can't be remotely deleted without your permission or knowledge)

Lessons from Cats for Surviving Fascism
by Stewart "Brittlestar" Reynolds

Exactly what it says on the tin.

A quick read, but you should take your time and think about what's written in each of the two- or three-page chapters.

Your PM mailbox is full

This is a beautiful song by Allister MacGillivray. I'm thinking specifically about the SATB choral arrangement by the composer.

Quote:Small craft in a harbour that's still and serene
Give no indication what their ways have been.
They rock at their moorings all nestled in dreams,
Away from the roll of the sea.

Their stern lines are groaning a lullaby air,
A ghost in the cuddy, a gull on the spar,
But never they whisper of journeys afar,
Away from the roll of the sea.

Oh, had they the tongues for to speak,
What tales of adventure they'd weave.
But now they are anchored to sleep,
And slumber alee.

Come fair winds to wake them tomorrow, we pray;
Come harvest aplenty to them every day,
'Til guided by harbour lights they're home to stay,
Away from the roll of the sea.

Oh, had they the tongues for to speak,
What tales of adventure they'd weave.
But now they are anchored to sleep,
And slumber alee.

Come fair winds to wake them tomorrow, we pray;
Come harvest aplenty to them every day,
'Til guided by harbour lights they're home to stay,
Away from the roll of the sea.

Away from the roll of the sea.