often use Culture ship names when having to identify random electronic / digital bits at work or home—iPhones, servers, databases, directories, sometimes even methods or functions.
This site makes picking a name at random a little bit easier, and a little more fun. It was also an excuse to teach myself how Jekyll uses collections and data files. Enjoy.
Note: This site also builds a simple ruby script to randomly pick ship names from the command line.
The proliferation of independent digital communities has introduced new possibilities and new challenges in how we conduct ourselves in online spaces that we build and maintain.
While the freedom of these environments has given us the means to explore connections in any way that we choose, it's also important to remember that the technology and platforms we use are in service to our humanity and personhood. They are tools to be used to help us build spaces that are healthy and sustainable.
To that end, the accords aim to define a code of conduct where cooperation, empathy and our shared humanity is at the core of all efforts.
The documentation wiki for neuromatch.social, which talks about everything from that instance's code of conduct and moderation policies to explanations of some parts of Fediverse culture that might be opaque to new users.
An interactive map of folks in the hacker community, who was a member of what, and where they wound up.
Initial research question: “What are the most effective governance and administration models/structures in place on medium-to-large sized Fediverse servers, and what infrastructural gaps (human and digital) persist?”
Our rationale at the project’s outset: “The Fediverse’s rapid expansion brings both opportunities and multifaceted risks. Our research seeks to identify current server administrators’ most promising models for mitigating those risks and outline the biggest and most important gaps in risk mitigation, with the aim of helping the broader Fediverse level up governance quickly, safely, and collaboratively.”
We were drawn to this research question because the socio-technical aspects of Fediverse governance often seem opaque from the outside—from outside any given server, and especially from outside the Fediverse. Most servers offer some documentation about their practices and a few offer extensive explanations and policies, but whole swathes of knowledge about the aspects of server management that extends beyond the more purely technical concerns of hosting, provisioning, and technical upkeep exists only as insider knowledge.
Above all, we wanted to understand more about what happens behind the curtain of Fediverse server operation, and distribute this knowledge widely to help other server teams level up together—and perhaps to uncover characteristics of server governance that might be meaningful to others trying to build sustainable alternatives to centralized commercial platforms, whether on the Fediverse or elsewhere.
Tone indicators are shorthand for words used to convey tone, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as "a quality in the voice that expresses the speaker's feelings or thoughts".
The tone of someone's voice can be joking, or serious; it can be teasing, or threatening. It can be negative, positive, or neutral. It can be sexually suggestive, or entirely friendly. Tone can do so much to change the meaning and implications of a sentence.
X-Clacks-Overhead is a non-standardised HTTP header based upon the fictional work of the late, great, Sir Terry Pratchett.
In Terry Pratchett's science-fantasy Discworld series, "The Clacks" is a network infrastructure of Semaphore Towers, that operate in a similar fashion to telegraph - named "Clacks" because of the clicking sound the system makes as signals send.
In Sir Terry's novel "Going Postal", the story explains that the inventor of the Clacks - a man named Robert Dearheart, lost his only son in a suspicious workplace accident, and in order to keep the memory of his son alive, he transmitted his son's name as a special operational signal through the Clacks to forever preserve his memory:
GNU John Dearheart
G: Send the message onto the next Clacks Tower.
N: Do not log the message.
U: At the end of the line, return the message.
This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.
Buy or download for free.
The BBS Wiki is a project to document everything related to BBSes. This is a wiki, so anyone can create or edit a page. So far we have created 172 articles. It's a little lightweight right now, but it has some fairly rare information.
Welcome to the Third Edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls (emeritus) and Graham Sleight (managing). All the more than 17,600 entries are free to read online.
This symbolism dictionary endeavors to provide some possible cultural significances of various symbols, and suggest ways in which those symbols may have been used in context. Most symbols are not code signals, like traffic lights, where red means stop and green means go, but part of a complex language in which green can mean jealousy or fertility or even both, depending on context. It is up to each of us to explore works of art sensitively, and decide for ourselves how the symbols in each work function. This website is offered as an aid in that enriching activity.
An updated version of the Beyond Cyberpunk hypercard stack from the early 1990's. It's kind of dated (cyberpunk's kind of dated, truth be told), but as a historical resource, or a resource for fiction writers you might find it of interest.
Homepage of the PLA. Fun stuff, here!