Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

Responding to an ill-informed rant about SMS (the mobile phone message service), I highlighted parallels to the ranter's proposal, and it got me wondering: Why do some proprietary services so easily replace open protocols, while others don't?

The rant was ultimately demanding that we give up using SMS, instead using WhatsApp, a proprietary messaging services owned by Facebook. This is a clearly horrible idea, and suggested some parallels.

We should give up using RSS for podcasts, instead let's use Spotify. (NO!)

We should give up using HTTPS, instead let's use a new protocol owned by Facebook or Google to visit web pages. (NO!)

We should give up using email, instead let's use a proprietary messaging app. (NO!)

We should give up using IRC, instead let's use Slack. (Most of us already have!)

Spotify's effort to own podcasting is falling flat, fortunately. Attempts to build a Facebook-only subnet seem to have petered out as well. Replacements for email have come and gone (remember Google Wave? or Google Buzz?). But it seems like it took nothing at all for IRC to be tossed aside in favor of something new, *anything* new! If it weren't Slack, it would be HipChat, or Discord, or something else.

There's a lesson to be learned here, and were I a paid pundit, I'd declare what it is with confidence, and return to the theme repeatedly over the next few months to emphasize just how right I was.

But I'm not a paid pundit, and I don't know what the answer is. I'm not sure there is a single answer.

At its peak, IRC wasn't as widely used as the others, or not as widely used by non-technical "normies" at least. RSS feeds for podcasts seemed like they could be as technically fiddly as IRC in the very early days, but people like @davew made sure that the experience was smooth and simple, and so it stands up more than 20 years later.

There have been extensions to HTTPS, like QUIC, but so far they've always been handled as extensions and implemented as open standards. Google's biggest push toward centralizing the web was AMP, and enough people cared enough about that to push back until Google promised to stop emphasizing it in 2021.

Sometimes the most open technology wins, despite efforts by companies to extend or replace it. Sometimes it's tossed aside so quickly people forget we once used something like Slack without paying anybody anything.

I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm on four Slack servers, 18 Discord servers, and only three IRC servers, so I guess I'm part of the problem.

#blog #nerdery

I may have done this a time or two.

It's pretty amazing to watch Hasbro completely destroy their TTRPG bread and butter by attempting to revoke the existing Open Gaming License v1.0.

I think I get how such a thing happens! The head of the Wizards of the Coast division has states that she thinks the Dungeons and Dragons brand is under-monetized, and that's probably true. For the mindshare DnD occupies in a world dominated by _Stranger Things_, DnD should probably be bringing in much more money than it is. But this ain't the way, chief. There is so much history here, and Hasbro seems intent on grasping ever more tightly to everything they can, which is causing it all to slip through their metaphorical fingers.

The biggest trigger seems to be a clause that, as written, makes any and all third-party content the property of Hasbro. If you create content under the new license, they can take your content and sub-license it to someone else without any compensation to you. Which is obviously completely unacceptable! But I can see how it ended up that way!

Lawyers are paid to think of worst-case scenarios, and one of those is undoubtedly that Hasbro spend time developing a new title, and upon publishing it, some indie publishers speaks up and says hey, that sword you've got in your new title, I developed that sword! And maybe nobody from Hasbro has ever even heard of the indie publisher, but they've got the receipts to show they published months before Hasbro did, and so Hasbro ends up defending themselves in court and possibly losing, and it's a mess. So they say, quite reasonably: look, if you develop a thing, and we develop a thing, and they happen to be similar, that's just life, okay? And being lawyers, they can't just leave it like that, so they spell it out in great detail: if you develop a thing, and they develop a similar thing, that's okay, because they have a perpetual license to do so. And in fact, if they're working with a third party, you can't sneakily sue *them* either, because they can sub-license as needed. And I'm reasonably sure that was the entire point of that clause, that it was intended to be defensive only.

But the law isn't entirely based solely on intent, and the letter of the license is atrocious. Maybe the person in charge today would only use it defensively, but it was written to be very offensive.

And revoking the previous license? I suspect they're just assuming nobody is going to want to fight them in court. They're Hasbro! They've got lawyers for days! But you don't have to be a lawyer to know you shouldn't be able to declare a license null and void because you feel like it. If there wasn't a termination clause in the license, that's it.

So Hasbro, in an attempt to better monetize the D&D brand, has made the D&D brand toxic for all third-arty developers and many dungeon masters.

It's not like there aren't other systems out there! Some of them are themselves relying on the Open Gaming License 1.0, but they soon won't be. Some of them are completely different and unrelated systems already.

Not many people are going to be want to create anything new for a company that tries to change the rules after the cards have already been dealt. It's a scrambled metaphor, but it's a julienned situation.

Me, I'll stick with horror and panic with Mothership. You could definitely run Mothership in a dungeon.

#blog #ttrpg #hasbro #OneDND #OpenDND #MothershipRPG

More than 33 years ago, Jeff Beck (RIP) shouted that "NOTHING IS BEING DONE" about the environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQvnzW_HV4I

Not enough is being done now, but I hope he saw that we are making some progress.

I bought this CD as a teenager, and listened to it on repeat. Today, after hearing of his death, I'm doing the same, but via Apple Music streaming.

#JeffBeck #MusicVideo

Sometimes I think about how much trouble I have fully re-contextualizing the past. For example, I know now that Reagan was a bad person who said and did bad things, but he was also the first political figure I ever looked up to. As a result, even though I can list for you (in person, never online) many, many, many bad things about him, it's still hard for me to think of him as bad. Rather, my *initial* response when I hear his name is positive, then replaced by a more negative and reality-based assessment based on what I know and understand today.

This makes me wonder: assuming I live long enough and continue to be open to re-evaluating things in the future, who today am I going to have the same trouble with? I'm not sure I have positive feelings about any political figure today as much as I did about Reagan. Maybe Obama.

I think my previous re-evaluations have made me less likely to support anyone quite as ardently today. I'm in awe of Pelosi's effectiveness as a politician while still being very aware of her eerie effectiveness as an investor, the latter of which would seem to require unethical dealings. The caveats are there currently, rather than being layered on later.

In fact, having seen so many people brought low by additional information, I think I'm less surprised when new information is released about people I like now. I mean, I guess the Channel 5 is (allegedly) a serial harasser of women. Okay. I learned some crazy stuff about Bill Cosby some years back, hearing similar things about people now just doesn't hit the same way.

Having learned to see the racism and sexism clearly present in the world today, it can't shock me to find that heroic figures are guilty of perpetuating racism and sexism.

Maybe this is why I couldn't get very excited about Bernie Sanders.

Maybe this is what it's like to be old.

#personal #politics #blog

Today I saw yet another example of someone online stating that such-and-such means that "we have copletely [sic] abandoned NLK's [sic] values in favor of something disingenuously called "anti-racism" (It should be called reverse-racism)."

This stuff is exhausting! How about an analogy:

I have a dream in which we are all marathon winners. We are done running. We have medals and confetti and cake. It's a joyous time, and whether we finished the race in four hours or fourteen hours doesn't matter, because we have all finished it. That's my dream!

Right now, though, right now some of us are moving at a good pace, while others aren't even moving in the right direction. Some of us are incapable of moving on our own. Others are being held back. Helping those who are struggling most right now makes sense, right?

You wouldn't interrupt a marathon to object that encouraging the slowest runner isn't fair, since the dream is for everybody to have a medal and cake.

Sick days are for naps and #GenshinImpact but mostly naps.