ELLIOTTCABLE

screenshot of an e-mail confirming wire-transfer of a 6-figure amount of money. not pictured: my horrified face.

Almost done. Closing is tomorrow.

I am *exhausted*, and a twitchy mess.

I cannot comprehend this amount of money. But it's almost over.

Hopefully the positive "I'm a homeowner" feels eventually(?) start to replace the stress and anxiety?? This is supposed to be a good, exciting thing, right?

a photograph of my Shetland Sheepdog, Lily in the sunlight in front of a window. her head is turned over her shoulder to look at the camera, with eyes slightly squinted.

I miss her so stupid much.

4. and finally, worst of all - while there's still a relatively large subset of games that are subject to 1 ∧ 2 ∧ 3 (think e.g. MMOs with big group raids, already famously hard to schedule and/or incompatible with married/employed life) - you have the planning/progress dimension. In an MMO […]

3. worse yet, unlike other social gaming, to which the above two apply … the systemic games encourage planning, collaboration, and effectively _contiguous time_, cotemporaneous presence. they can't really 'slip into the cracks' where you have A. unexpected downtime and B. unexpected […]

2. okay, fine, that's just describing any "unproductive social interaction." a party, a coffee-date, same thing. except, further, this is _task-focused_ social interaction; so also fairly low on the "quality of social-interaction" scale - less valuable in that dimension, as well. any time you […]

1. gaming is, at least for a large chunk of people including me, in the "downtime" category. unfortunately, there seems to be large intersection between intoverts (social-is-costly) and social-systemic-gamers; so now, whatever proportion of your limited downtime goes to social-systemic-gaming […]

to dump some poorly-formatted crap that I originally wrote for Discord - it's a really interesting social problem, and has significant game-design implications:

Grok's AI chatbot now includes companions for you to 'romance'

Oh look, you can sext with Mechahitler

https://www.engadget.com/ai/groks-ai-chatbot-now-includes-companions-for-you-to-romance-133017601.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub&guccounter=1

Question for y'all #SystemicGames¹ folks who like multiplayer/#coop games:

How do you logistically manage actually having a co-op, multiplayer playthrough of a complex video-game in your life?

I've always struggled, hard, with satisfying my needs here; not only is it so hard to find people who […]

[BDSM]

@aphyr is this considered beyond/separate from subspace, or is it just another term therefor?

and, if I parse that correctly, that's electrodes on the head? the default beginner advice is "only below the belt", yes?

(zero judgement, just curiosity - my own praxis involves some very […]

@aphyr (I hope you maybe don't mind educating on your timeline, but I'll fuck right off if you want - just know I respect your "normalizing queerness and BDSM in tech" way more than your actual tech work, and I respect your tech-work a lot, so, uh, lol)

[BDSM]

@aphyr what's "trip" mean, in this context? and is that electrostim, or,,

… and the house was, oof, I deeply, hope, *not*, the worst financial decision of my life. went substantially over my range, I hope for the right reasons, but … I'm definitely house-poor now, yikes.

[death, explicit suicidal thoughts]

(the health-situation was brutal; she was begging, over and over, every time i saw her, for me to kill her, towards the end. it's so much better now that she's gone, i'm glad it's over, i'm glad she's no longer miserable.)

and honestly swap whatever your default reactions are to those two. former potentially deserves condolences and latter deserves … idk, congratulations?

I, uh, I. Own a house now.

On the same day that someone important to me passed.

It's … it's been a fucking weekend. A fucking month? Year???

Man, I had a shit week.

Tried to stretch outside my comfort zone in a big way; but failed myself really badly.

Old trauma woke up at a crucial moment, and bit me really hard; and I think the whole thing, instead of being healing, just … doubled everything down.

I’m feeling worthless in a […]

“Stop trying to make Evanston a thing”

also, because OP maybe wasn’t clear enough:

I wasn’t *banned for using emdashes*; I was banned for arguing about a queer history thing. (I disagree with the ban, but at least it’s more nuanced than “somebody used an emdash!!”)

well this did numbers

some people are missing my point. if you’re out here hating on unpaid, volunteer people who’re just trying to make a safe space, you won’t be getting sympathy from me. Subreddit moderation is analogous to software maintenance; thankless, and provides literally no life […]

@fm_volker

I think I'm so annoyed because I've gone out of my way for _years and years_ to do so — I have the macOS text-entry shortcuts memorized, and all of my daily-typing has curly-quotes, emdashes, ellipses, etc chorded in. That takes _effort_. Because I care about the result.

And now, thanks to A.I […]

a screenshot of a Reddit-messaging thread: v me_irlgbt @ • 1d Hi, mod that banned you in the first place here. What tool did you use to write your comment? v elliottcable • 1d Uh, my fingers, on my iPhone. Although I guess in 2025 we're past being able to prove that. Darkest fucking timeline. • me_irlgbt ! • 1d Are you telling me that you're the sole human that actually types em dashes and ellipsis characters? ••. • elliottcable • 1m I really shouldn't be wasting my time on this thread, but good lord you've hit one of my biggest pet peeves: that typing like an adult now gets you accused of being ingenuine on the Internet. I doubt you'll even bother to click the link, because you've already made your judgement; but feel free to IF and search for "—" or "..." on, say, one of my blog-posts from like 17 years ago: https:// web.archive.org/web/20241114074522/http:// blog.elliottcable.name/posts/community.xhtml Fucking yes, some of us absolutely have been putting effort into using proper and semantic typography for decades. No, Als didn't invent that. They were trained on our data so by definition anything they do is something that real, actual, humans, actually, do. Anyway, all of this is beside the point, because I actually did the thing you blocked me for doing, and y'all actually believe that thing is ban-worthy, so we're just wasting eachother's time - but, seriously, emdashes do not an ML model make, thuverymuch. Unbelievably rude.

I’m unreasonably fucking pissed.

An r/me_irlgbt moderator banned me, and is now accusing me of being an A.I. … … … because I use fucking emdashes and ellipses.

#typography #AI #nightmaretimeline

@axiixc yes hahaha.

a photo of a collie holding a flower in its mouth in such a way as to contort its doggie lips, looking very uncomfortable and awkward as dogs do. a tumbler-style comment underneath that image says (in very microwaved, JPEG-compressed text): “gat u a flowder”

my phone has a “memes” folder

for years, that folder has had exactly one image

this is that one image.

OH: “How many non-legally-binding weddings do you think I can have before my friends will stop coming to my weddings.”

i just want my post get boosted a lot so i can see my gotosocial “knows X other instances” grow

It'd be nice if tech companies didn't take an accelerationist approach to exacerbating and widening every problem that already existed in society, but they have.

The best defense, in some ways, is to fix the shit that's always kinda-sorta-maybe worked. In this case, yeah, it sucks that ChatGPT […]