#+TITLE: Since My Phost Destroyed Escapist Corporation #+AUTHOR: screwtape This is a phloggersgarage 100daystooffload but tilde.club is down??? * Context Some months ago, my fascination with the edgy, rude, disgusting author and entrepreneur of video game parody comic, Penny Arcade veered into one Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. I haven't gone back and read the phost (you're welcome to link me to it if you find it) but the gist was that Yahtzee was a financial asset paid by one speculator to do Penny-Arcade but as Youtube video shorts ("while sailing around on the financial speculator's boat made of money"). Because of and hence after my phost, the corporate candy wrapper around Yahtzee fired the manager-handler they had hired to maintain possession of Their Brand. And I am not very inclined to talk about what happened but I have a sort of Cassandran duty to tell the truth again. * Yahtzee quit rather than stay with then-owner Gamurz rather than their presumable offer of a modest promotion and them bringing in a new handler for him. Yahtzee is a YouTube hit celebrity and was the sole cash cow, hence the corporate decision to clear the other plates. Obviously Yahtzee's contract was meaningless, and he could quit and move from being middle class to upper class. BUT INSTEAD * Yahtzee founded a company together with his handler, and seven other people because friendship is magic. This is kinda nice, but 1. In all writing and appearances since, Yahtzee's sick-to-his-stomach demeanor is because he knows just as well as everyone else that *all* the money for their new million-dollar-per-annum shared corporate Patreon was a gift from him to the other founders 2. Including his handler, a suit with everything that entails. Honestly, watch the interview of the two of them where the suit is saying their instant success was because his employees (er, cofounders) understand that they are making monetisable financial assets as creators owned by their newly incorporating company and are explicitly not exercising a passion for games as art. and not, oh, because one celebrity joined them out of friendship. Yahtzee has both sacrificed eight ninths of his transition to upper class - good on him and in thanks consigned himself to being a financial asset Brand Property at a second, and honestly equivalent company to all of his previous hot-potato playing owners. - this is just as bad the bone thrown to him is that his new owning company will also become one of the game publishers he is famous for parodying, based on monetising Yahtzee's labour-of-love simfarm-like game baby. * (Ir)relevance to my next show For a long time now, I've been planning a second weekly show. I wasn't going to write about it here, but the above happened, and someone emailed me reminding me to "work on the new show" this weekend. It would be remisce of me not to learn from aforesaid duffle and lay out some opposing principles. ** New show topics *** Apotheosis through merging physical humanity into each's MOO roleplaying characters. *** Veilid Internetworking through The Gibson et al's distributed hash table social media public key object store *** China Reaching out and including old and new friends in the Chinese speaking world *** Recovering our relationship with the earth as cyborgs, finding an Ixian remediation and preservation of our natural world. ** Constructing digital reality I will start a liberapay for this project for the specific purpose of liberapaying cyborgs to additively extend and author our MOO world. Liberapay is a non-profit sponsorship basically defined by its oppositional world view to Corporate Patreon, for long-term, low-amount community funding (integrated with STRIPE I think, ugh, real economies). While I basically expect there to be very not very much money, that will fuel an increasing number of people in self-ownedly developing and placing their skill and original authorship into our emerging shared digital comMOOnity, in a way that creates a natural and beautiful substrate for more and varied new people to discover, inhabit and live in, explroe and author. In particular, I am interested in the world being compatible with the wonderful people I have met and would like to meet in places including China, around South America, everywhere and all continents whom I would often miss out on closely associating with because of physical and language distances on earth. Hopefully we will find other people filled with love, art, and curiousity, who may be atypical of common office work computing and without the venture capitalism of the businesses described earlier in this article. ** Where are we? At the beginning. Everyone can watch the project unfold and come to participate when and how they are ready. It will be possible to accelerate into the new world via the liberapay, which can be expected to liberapay more sweat from people's brows. I have a pentient for moving glacially: It's hard to stop a glacier. ** Where to next? *** Veilid Actually, last month I lost my drive with my bits and bobs of a partial veilid social media implementation in common lisp. I will chase it back out of my head with a broom as I have time. I hadn't done ironclad cryptography yet, and it's a topic of the lispy gopher show this week. All I'm interested in for our purposes is the freeform social media component of veilid, which I intend as the substrate for a distributed MOO world. I've talked to quite a few people about the allowability of veilid as such within the Chinese national firewall. ipfs.io is blocked, for example. However the commentary I got was that it would likely only be addressed when it gains popularity, and I am optimistic that there is an arguement that a limited but compatible configuration of veilid could be permissable. https is used ubiquitously, probably with ed25519 which has some cryptographic similarities. **** MOO This is currently a hard point for me. Putting a MOO app inside veilid's mechanics sounds to me like all of a novel MOO server, client and lambdaMOO language implementation. In particular it has to be new because the paradigm is to be distributed across veilid, rather than a single server maintaining a single database. Which is a paradigm change from how MOOs canonically are. *** World building The concept is for a flesh-and-blood human to merge with and into an idealised roleplaying cyberspace character associated with a veilid social-media style public key. To become free from those banal moments in offline space where we have to pretend computer science doesn't exist to get along: And to get away from those moments forgetting that the earth exists and needs us while in cyberspace. The object oriented reality of a MOO is in many respects more tangible and accessible to us than a purely physical alarm clock is. We are fortunate to know many great writers, artists, role-players, readers and other hackers various. One hopes many people will quickly help author a new world. (Could the cyber-world be inside of the cosmic.voyage ?). I think it's important that the world be in some sense an aspirational role-playing world, since it is my intent to merge into my player character in that setting. So a rich science-fantasy description of cyber-reality is compatible with the idea of Neuromancer's Matrix shared consensual illusion humans use in internetworking together and with machines.