Month: April 2013

StumbleUpon holding a grudge?

This is my attempt to get my old StumbleUpon account reactivated.

Here was the content of my message sent to: http://help.stumbleupon.com/customer/portal/emails/new (Which required a bit of Googling.)

Just seeing if you still hold a grudge. 🙂

I was the victim of a fairly organized smear campaign. The likes of which at the time had not become well known.

As with Digg and other social media, groups of people, thanks to economy of scale, have the ability to game any system of which they are cooperatively a part.

For a fairly recent example of this problem check out this skeptic blog. Groups within groups gain a kind of meta-power.

http://richardreed84.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/rebecca-watson-and-other-illustrate-a-problem-among-skeptic-feminists/

I would like my account unlocked. At least temporarily so I can archive my old writings and reestablish contact with some old readers. (You could also simply send me relevant database files as a compromise.)

I hope you’ll take into consideration the fact that I could easily just make another account rather than even attempt to communicate with you. That alone should show my honorability.

Either way thanks for your time.

P.S.

When I left I had over 700 followers, and as of now I have over 1500 on Google plus and a blog with over 10,000 visitors a month. I would be a valuable (re?)addition to your community. If you don’t want my participation, fine, your loss. This is an open request and your response either way will be published: http://underlore.com/stumbleupon-holding-a-grudge/

First response: Automated. Email.

Type your response ABOVE THIS LINE to reply
Re: Other : StumbleUpon Account Request
StumbleUpon | APR 25, 2013 | 12:08PM UTC
Hello,

Thanks for contacting us.

We have received your request and are working on responding to you as soon as possible. If you have any additional information to add to this case, please reply to this email.

Thanks in advance for your patience and support.
This message was sent to (email) in reference to Case # (#)

Second response: Personal. Barry Conway. (Again) See also: http://underlore.com/innomen-now-banned-from-stumble-moves-to-reddit/ and http://underlore.com/stumble-sticky-blues/

On 4/25/2013 8:17 AM, StumbleUpon Support wrote:
Brandon M. Sergent
Subject: Other : StumbleUpon Account Request

APR 25, 2013  |  12:17PM UTC
Barry Conway replied:

We have nothing further to add to our previous emails on this matter.

The restriction on your account will remain in place for reasons that have been fully communicated to you, and we would remind you, again, that Please be reminded that our Terms of Service allow for only one account per member, and that you should not create further accounts on our service. Should you do so, they too will be suspended.

Please be advised that you DO NOT have our permission to make public this private communication.

Regards.

Barry
StumbleUpon Community Advocate

My reply was as follows:

Wow. Barry?

Are you SU’s only support person or am I your personal pet project? I don’t know which would be more sad.

Clearly this is still personal for you and that’s fine. The only reason I tried was because your system occasionally spams me still. (Which is how I know you still have my writing, now so hopelessly out of date I don’t actually care.) As I said, your community’s loss.

So in answer to my post’s question it’s not so much SU holding a grudge clearly as it is you personally holding one.

“We have nothing further to add to our previous emails on this matter.”

Is that the royal we? It’s clear to anyone who has read into the context of this, noting your response times if nothing else, that this is clearly personal. You banned me at 4am, and now you’re responding within minutes at 8am. So you can quit trying to pitch the hypothetical audience on the notion that this is official to any degree beyond your abuse of power and the typical fiefdom attitude all people on the Internet in a position to moderate are in danger of acquiring.

“Should you do so, they too will be suspended.”

That you couldn’t catch me or permanently stop me is my point. Welcome to the Internet. For all you know I have a dozen sock puppet accounts already registered with relayed, borrowed, or throw-away emails etc. Good luck proving I do or don’t. I’m official saying I don’t for reasons of ethics but then again that’s exactly what I would say even if I did.

“Please be advised that you DO NOT have our permission to make public this private communication.”

Your permission is irrelevant. For one, the state I live in is a one party state. It’s perfectly legal for me to make public any communication of which I am a part. For two, you’ve already locked my account and made it clear that nothing I say or do short of hiring a lawyer to re-acquire my content, (which you do not own actually) will change that.

Perhaps we could negotiate if you were willing, but clearly you aren’t. Making this exchange public serves my purposes, which includes shining light on your obviously shady behavior and increasing readership on my blog.

Feel free to sue me if you’re miffed enough about it. The publicity for me and my writing efforts such an action would garner would be of incalculable value. I can see it now on Slash dot and Digg and Wired. “Social media giant bullies amateur blogger into silence.”

Our future exchanges will be made public as I see fit. The link I provided is live, and will shortly include this email.

“Guilty men murmur. The innocent shout to the rafters.” ~Jim Williams, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, Film)

Good talking with you again Barry 🙂

Well that was fast. Oh well, worth a shot. 🙂

RTS=PRS

My beef in this context as with virtually all the other “realistic” rts games is the inflexibility. Snipers are a great example. In real life the reason you can’t make an army of snipers is not because some things are immune to snipers at the tactical level but because making them is expensive and takes a long time.

From an organizational strategic perspective you get more bang for your buck just throwing rifles at a mob and then throwing that mob at a problem. (Infantry.)

In RTS terms this sucks because how it manifests tactically are units which appear magically immune to bullets.

In “Company of Heroes” Sniper versus motorcycles/jeeps are an excellent example. I’ll routinely see a jeep park, aim it’s machine gun at a building full of snipers and actually win (handily) because the game has hard coded jeeps and bikes to be virtually immune to sniper fire. (Paper vs rock.) Which is silly because in real life a sniper would decapitate the driver regardless of what “kind” of solider they are.

The problem is that real war isn’t economically balanced or remotely fair. In real war you don’t have to manage an economy or “grow” new troops because that’s the outside culture’s job. As a commander you are more or less handed resources and given an objective.

So in RTS games the PRS and ECON101 phenomenon are really when you get down to it just tricks to keep the game from boiling down to who can build snipers fastest, which would in turn boil down to input speed. (Korean RTS camps?)

The only way to really make that feel like anything other than a contrivance is to change the context such that arbitrary rules don’t seem completely stupid. And in RTS terms the best way to do that is the whole “magic tech” thing you can do in future or fantasy based rts games. (Warhammer/Supreme Commander)

In those contexts the “jeep” would be immune to the “snipers” because the “snipers” have anti-flesh zap rifles and the “jeeps” have “anti-zap” armor/shields or some such, so you arrive at the same PRS effect but it doesn’t feel completely stupid when you’re on the wrong end of it. You simply realize you’re paying the price of over specializing.

Also to make the game “fair” they create a situation where there is no simple winning strategy. The actual winning stratgey if it’s not boiled down to a case of “turtle vs rush” is a complex and fairly rigid build order, which is yet another RTS genre problem.

Basically this is why I don’t really play games generally much anymore beyond games that allow for meta, like diablo, which is not so much that I’m playing the game, as it is being useful to other humans in a fictional context. Second life is a setting purpose built for this I suspect, but because its purpose-built for meta, in a sense it stops being meta because everyone knows why everyone’s there and as a result the whole feel and “game” actually changes, creating a new meta-meta-game. (Make real money, or whatever other real life objectives were already there for the player.)

Bottomline: To correct the sniper/PRS problem, I’d have to hack the game or write a mod but in so doing I’d devalue my winning, and arrive at a different kind of fail/boredom point. Meaning make it so snipers can virtually kill anything just like irl, but get as bored with that as I got with emperor battle for dune once you can start making Fremen. Each had two types, anti vehicle and anti personnel.

_”Strange game… The only winning move is not to play.”_ ~WOPR/Joshua, Wargames

Thought ramble.

(Perspective disclaimer.)

Anyway… The human body is a space suit for the brain. A way for the brain to link to the world yes, but primarily a way to survive in said world.

There are three ways to expand your sphere of influence in this context. To adapt the environment to yourself, find an environment already suitable and travel there, or adapt yourself the environment. Everything that has meaning about a person is in the brain. I am firm on that point. I am not my arms or legs or liver, but I most definitely am my memories, my feelings, and my experience. The only reason my body is remotely me is because what is really me extends into those things. My nerves.

Ok so we can look at a person and we are so used to looking at people that we come to think that this is what people, which are brains as I just explained, look like. But what if another kind of brain evolved? What if other brains took different options? What would a brain in a suitable setting look like? What would a brain adapted for life on land look like? The answers are terrifying because these models of life aren’t fantastical or alien they are ubiquitous and completely disregarded at best or shamelessly exterminated or consumed by us.

Indeed I’m having the worry that intelligent feeling life on this planet might be more common than unfeeling life if you simply expand  your scale a bit. I am not the first to have this idea. It’s in fiction everywhere. But this is the first time I thought about it from a purely anatomical perspective. If you hardened my neurons against the elements and made them more physically flexible, or maybe even blended them with muscle tissue so they could individually contract, what would that look like? A blob? A large moving mold? A jellyfish? And aspen grove? I’m looking around at my world from the brain’s perspective and I’m realize that half of what I see could be brains that have found various ways to dispense with their body.

What if the skull has cut us off? I don’t like where this is going.

As I’ve realized before the only thing special about us in this context materially is the ability to exit our biosphere completely. But what if that’s only because our condition leaves us totally blind to a far superior method of escape? What if the answer to the Fermi paradox is that radio is completely crappy as a communications tool, and that space ships or physical travel is an equally crappy travel mechanism? What if they are watching us for resurgence? Would you bother talking to an anthill? What if the thickness of the skull prevents reception? What if that’s why ancient cultures cut holes in their skulls and did other gruesome things to their heads? What if that is the real purpose of a crown? What if that is the source of power and divine right? What if that is how warriors came to be rulers again and again not because of the fighting but because of the head injury?

I’m tempted to not share these things since each would be a story idea maybe and I’m not supposed to share and I’m so powerfully broke. But whatever, I love writing and I love talking and fate has kept me alive so far. Failure to gain is not the same as loss. Maybe someone will help me.

NBC hates Paul Stamets

So NBC has a new show Hannibal and in the second episode we have a mushroom psycho that buries people alive named “Eldon Stammets.”

I find this upsetting given there is a respected, if not visionary Paul E. Stamets, Mycologist. http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html

Cool show and all but this pissed me off.

I’d say Paul deserves an apology and a fat check/percentage of every rerun.