⦺ irick 🐁🐈⚩ @Irick@vulpine.club

Hey: DId you know? Mittens can be hard to deal with.

But we get it. We will do our best not to take anyone needing to block or silence us personally. You do what you need for you. We will always offer mitten hugs if you decide you can deal with us again.

We can be very intense about the things we believe in, and we are proud of that, but we are also not mind readers and do not expect you to communicate the specifics of your situation to us when you are hurting or intimidated.

But we will always listen, and we will always love you.

John Conway has passed due to Covid-19.
I am changing my avatar to mark his passing and celibrate his contributions.

Hi! I'm Irick.
I'm a genderqueer mitten (any pronoun), born in 1991. I grew up in the online sphere fluidly within the #furry fandom #and hacker subcultures. I majored in #ComputerScience and really enjoy #ludology. I am a #hermetic #mage, relationship anarchist, and #pural. I love #puns, #computers, #cyberspace, the #fediverse, good stories and probably you.

@ira is my headmate :)

#Introductions

We stopped by a little 70s dinner while we are waiting for the bay to free up.

We almost made it without any issues. Tire got a chunk torn out of it on i70 just as we entered Colorado. Sitting around waiting for the repair bay to open up.

Not bad

Greetings from St Lewis. I am trying your Pizza.

In the process of fleeing Florida :3 successfully over the border!

Nope is one of the best films I have seen in recent memory. Just finished watching it in a theater, was blown away. I plan on trying to catch it again in an IMAX showing if I can.

Have I mentioned I am part of a VR focused HAM radio club? We did field day this year operating our radios inside a public Neos session (with operator safegards). It was cool.

Show me crypto that can fuck up a hoarder's day. Crypto that depreciates at a steady rate, incentivizing liquidity. Show me systems that build in wealth redistribution. Show me systems that can incorporate consumer protections. Show me the usages of this technology that don't just appeal to a lazy libertarian capitalist view of freedom.

We can respect personal liberty, show me that this can go further and become a more just system than the ones we have now. If it were not for the toxicity of the space, I would have been there building these things. But the culture that grew there came in and fucked up my home.

How are you going to stop that from happening again?

Crypto speculation has burned a community I love and is threatening one of the best bets on the future if computing. The culture that came with the 'crypto-bros' was one that so normalized taking advantage of others that really they could not understand that everyone was not fully committed to the hype train. That culture had nothing for us.

And yet, I am reminded on a constant basis that PayPal and other payment processors are no allies of ours. Enforcing puritanical values, without any real exception. As each platform we pivot to gains investors they fall right back into the same systematic discrimination. Demonizing sex work, or even just risque commissions. Going so far as to start scraping merchant sites to ensure nothing violates their ToS.

We could build something better. Cryptocurrency es might even be a worthwhile method to look into. Not this neo gold standard crap, or the funny jpegs. Those systems exist only to scam people with fono at the worst or prop up rent seeking behavior at the best.

There is something there. My challenge to anyone who thinks these systems could meaningfully answer the concerns raised by traditional finance is quite simple: how do we resist the determined in investor? (Cont)

It is interesting to be living on the edge of human computer interfaces. I very deeply believe there is going to be a paradigm shift to spacial computing. Ubiquitous computing has slowly just become the norm, there are microprocessors in everything. We are starting to network them. Then finally, we will want access to this information. Abstract realities constructed by ubiquitous sensor data. Organization within cyberspace made littéral by layers of visualization and object metaphors. First by text, then the desktop, then direct manipulation on a 2d surface. Now, 6dof direct manipulation paradigms I think will start to push more and more into the common language of computer interfaces. Phones are already shifting this way. Frustratingly limited in their capabilities but none the less probing the surface of AR. We need more hackers here. We need to shamelessly assert a personal vision of computation. Resisting the commercialization pressures that turned the web into corporate fiefdoms. It is so important to me. It feels weird to feel so invested in it, but I suppose that comes with being a dork of a true believer in our ability to build better futures with our tools.

TFW your assumptions about someone posting "I finished the boss fight!" have swung 180 and you're surprised when it's about beating the level.

Man that Alex Jones defamation case was wild wasn't it?

There has been a bit of drama in the social VR space as VRChat added Epic's easy anti-cheat to their client, effectively erasing the client modification community with one day of notice.

Metaverse has become kind of a tired word. I always thought of what we were doing in this space as a logical extension of cyberspace and the web. Because of that, I've always been weary of this exact trick. Capturing the early hobby products and sanitizing the community output for commercialization.

It is frustrating to see it. Creative and curious people being told that they are not welcome in the frontiers they helped push. I've talked a bit about NeosVR before, projects I've worked on there, etc. Before any of this went down I got a little worried about similar things going down for its creative community.

So I've done my best to really advocate for a community respecting direction. I'm pushing for eventual standardization and a fully open platform. And it's been really rewarding to see them taking steps to go in this direction. The replacement rendering engine we are working on, to remove the last vestiges of Unity from the engine, is going to be released under an MIT licence. We successfully campaigned for and got top freedom in public sessions.

There is a real dialog here, and I am proud of that.

I am sick! Yay! *flop*

I am an enby and I am aparently allowed to make that y'all's problem this week.

I am also stuck with 256KB/s internet. Blew through the full speed data cap on my phone as we negotiate getting the network fixed after a lighting strike took out an exterior power circit and the ONT.
The internet sure does feel differant at 256KB/s :3