I kept thinking of Wishbone when watching the Odyssey, and I didn’t realize until the next day that the reason why is that Wishbone was the first time I’d ever heard the story. My original Odysseus was a dog.

This controversy over tesseract finally got me to do a bit more reading to understand how federation actually works and what a frontend does. Now I understand why everyone is so pissed.

The email metaphor has been the most useful to me in understanding how this works. Someone tell me if I’ve got this right. Basically, you have your lemmy account, which belongs to the instance you created it on, like how a gmail account belongs to Google. You can use whatever frontend you like to view your feed, just like you could use Outlook to view your Gmail account. Tesseract is a frontend, kinda like Outlook in the metaphor. In theory, a frontend should deliver to you everything that would appear on your lemmy instance no matter where you access it from, but now the tesseract frontend is basically making content filtering decisions about what users, topics, and instances you have access to. It would be like if your Outlook app suddenly decided “ew, you shouldn’t be using your Gmail to talk to any of those yahoo mail people, and also it’s now forbidden to use Outlook to discuss seahorses.”

So all the posts, users, and instances are still there, it’s just that the dev of your frontend decided that you shouldn’t interact with those users or discuss those topics anymore. Worse still, they surreptitiously tried to hide all of this new filtering among other features that are needed for spam and whatnot, leading people to think something was actually broken.

Do I have that right?

I remember a YouTuber I follow breaking into a raid shadow legends bit, clearly taking the piss and pretending they’d actually sponsored the video.

It took me like a full 15 seconds to realize that it was just a real sponsored segment. They were just reading it with so much sarcasm that it came across like a bit. Don’t think they ever got that sponsorship again after that.

“I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach”

- Upton Sinclair

“Fuck it, aim for the stomach!”

- canvas contributors

I always liked the wii version because it didn’t have such aggressive “balancing” and you could win by half the racetrack or more if you played well and didn’t get blue shelled. I don’t know if the newer ones are like that, but it was a welcome change at the time in my opinion.

I have always believed that video was the “shot across the bow” to get Crowder to shut the fuck up and let the divorce proceed. His wife wanted the divorce to move quickly and quietly, outside the public eye. Then Crowder got loud about it, announced it was happening on his podcast and basically said that he wasn’t going to agree to terminate the marriage.

Next thing that happened was that video getting released. One video, one argument, verbal only, but it still clearly painted him as a piece of shit. In my mind, that video was the wife’s lawyers telling Crowder’s lawyers “We have all of the home security footage. Do you really want to battle this out in public?”

Does anyone really believe that argument was the worst thing they could have released? Listen to how that man spoke to his pregnant wife and tell me you don’t think he ever got physical with her. They only ever released that one video. Crowder shut up about the divorce and that was the last of it.

Not defending this, but it did remind me of how nuts the monetization was on the original. I had a modded 360 at the time, and there used to be an old school forum style website that curated all available DLC. This game had exclusive content for GameStop, Walmart, Target, and I think a 4th and 5th retailer too. Not to mention the pre-order bonuses and other exclusives. I wanna say there were around 25 different pieces of content and to get 100% of what was available, youd’ve had to buy 5 retail copies of the same game… or have a modded 360 and an internet connection. Even unlocking the content was more of a hassle than most DLCs. You had to move your user profile to a USB stick, connect it to your PC, inject the entitlements to the exclusive costumes into your profile, then move the profile back to your console.