Wings of Saint Nazaire is “a retro space combat sim in the vein of Wing Commander and X-Wing” and the alpha version can be played right now if you have unity installed in your browser, or downloaded in Linux, Mac or Windows versions. X-Wing and Tie-Fighter were games I played a lot as a kid and a new space sim like that would be welcome indeed.
geekdom
Internet dialects
I find this guy fascinating, those dead eyes in that handsomely bland face, slightly nasal voice and the overcompensating with the hands and the bobbing and moving from side to side. It can distract somewhat from his point, which is of the well, duh, variety but argued quickly. Sort of a refresher course for internet culture.
How google screws over websites
Metafilter’s founder Matt Haughey has written an article going into greater detail about the site’s troubles with Google and its ad programmes. One thing struck me:
Over the course of 2013, a series of messages from the Adsense team hit me with varying degrees of severity. We were temporarily banned from the system due to some text questions talking about sexual health (questions from users that include terms for body parts etc., but Google interprets that as the site being “adult”) and had to greatly beef up our ad display blocking by subject matter.
This seems typical American to me, that obsession with making sure something isn’t porn. It doesn’t usually hurt actual porn sites because these use more specialised ad services, but does hurt sites like MeFi that can talk honestly about sex (among others) or worse, actual sex education sites. (These sort of shenanigans can hit actual sex workers even worse; e.g. Eden Alexander and her troubles with Wepay.
In general this sort of problem is caused because Google’s algorithms for which are a proper site and which an evil SEO farm are not good enough to actually do so with any degree of accuracy, hence long existing sites like Mefi (and, it wouldn’t surprise me, this site too) are caught in the crossfire. Google doesn’t care enough for this sort of collatoral damage to let actual humans judge, so the only thing Metafilter can do is either try and adapt to Google’s abritary rules, or find ways to lessen it dependence on Google.vMefi is now trying the latter.
My own blog is luckily only a hobby, not a business, but it does worry me how much Google is screwing around with my visibility; few enough people visit as it is…
If the internet can’t even support Metafilter…
Goddammit this is not good news:
Today I need to share some unfortunate news: because of serious financial downturn, MetaFilter will be losing three of its moderators to layoffs at the end of this month. What that means for the site and the site’s future are described below.
While MetaFilter approaches 15 years of being alive and kicking, the overall website saw steady growth for the first 13 of those years. A year and a half ago, we woke up one day to see a 40% decrease in revenue and traffic to Ask MetaFilter, likely the result of ongoing Google index updates. We scoured the web and took advice of reducing ads in the hopes traffic would improve but it never really did, staying steady for several months and then periodically decreasing by smaller amounts over time.
The long-story-short is that the site’s revenue peaked in 2012, back when we hired additional moderators and brought our total staff up to eight people. Revenue has dropped considerably over the past 18 months, down to levels we last saw in 2007, back when there were only three staffers.
Basically, Metafilter depends on Google referalls for ad revenue, Google changed their algorithms and hence MeFi and many other small websites fell off the pagerankings. The upshot is that three of the moderators have to leave their jobs and people are worried about the future of the site, myself included. On the positive side, the news has released a flood of donations to MeFi, but the worries about the long term viability remain.
It’s depressing. Metafilter came into my life at the time Sandra was dying, a welcome distraction and in it I found a community of smart, sane, amazingly friendly people; to see it in peril hits me where I live, almost literally. But more than that, Metafilter is the best of what the internet was intended to be, more than just a place to buy stuff or click like on, where the users are a community, not just the assets in some venture capitalist’s portfolio. It needs to survive.
If you don’t want to be judged by your words, shut up
Current SFWA president Steve Gould smack down its rightwing critics:
Just as SFWA doesn’t control what members and non-members say in non-SFWA spaces, it also doesn’t control what members and non-members say in response to members’ public comments, statements, essays, and blog posts. When persons say things in public that others find objectionable, it is likely they will receive criticism and objections. There is an odd misconception among some that Freedom of Speech includes freedom from the consequences of one’s speech and freedom from commentary on what one has said.
The idea that you be free to be a bigot, but that I shouldn’t be free to judge you on it is of course a cherished one amongst wingnuts, but not one we need to take seriously. Not even if it makes Glenn Reynolds cry, who I see is still up to the same old schtick I called him out on in the New York Times more than a decade ago. Being silent in the face of bigotry is a political choice.