Yvonne MacStitch

Despite everything, I know we're not in the worst timeline, if we were we never would've gotten Armored Core 6: FIRES OF RUBICON. Like god fucking damn, but that and the messy interpersonal politic of HEAVEN WILL BE MINE, I yearn for the big robot.

Apologies, I can't stop thinking of Crossed Wires, the Hacker Webcomic Iris Jay has put out and still working on.

The difficult of writing a review post and telling you why you should read it, is that I don't want to spoil anything or throw all the good jokes into my post like what film traiters do with the best material the show has.

Iris has an absolute banger sense of humour, I'm still in awe of her hosting "That's Korps-ect!" the korps gameshow during this years DVS, where she introduced herself as "I'm Doctor Sybil Throat, and you're not, isn't that tragic." I can only aspire to be on that level of smug villain.

Vanishingly few people on Earth are as close to web archival as I am. How many people are lucky enough to call it their full-time job? And I have a small bit of depressing news: Yes, the web is getting worse.

Websites that used to be open are now requiring registration to just view content and forcing users onto proprietary apps. APIs that once encouraged creative usage of data are tougher to access and offer less access. Restrictions on crawling via robots.txt and heavier-handed tactics such as Cloudflare are making it harder to preserve crucial content. Ads are getting more intrusive and frequent.

Everything is being turned into a fine paste of hallucinated LLM slurry. The web is failing at the thing it used to be best at: Directing you to the information you seek as provided by a human who knows about the topic and has taken care to write about it accurately.

It's made it a huge challenge to archive the web, but it's also, obviously, made it a lot harder to find true community in the way that we used to. It's really tough for a distinctly human website like Cohost to thrive in a content slop world. So much money has flowed into the worst possible version of Tech, and building sustainable community-driven projects is really challenging in that environment.

I mourn the loss of Cohost and the web of the past. I don't think we're ever going to go back to what things were like before the money and reactionary rich guys ruined everything, but I'm hoping that we can continue to hold on to each other, build nice things for ourselves, and ensure they're preserved for the future.

Not in an 'Oh ho ho! We'll get you yet, my pretty! You're a furry and we'll prove it!' kind of sense. More in the sense that it's actually a lot of fun sometimes to come up with an odd creature in your mind, then give some thought to how they'd get around in a world like this. Does their tail get in the way when they sit on regular seats? Or in doors? Ow! Do they have trouble reaching things - or have to duck down all the time? The logistics of presence in a scene are a fun little mental exercise, or even something as simple as considering how someone would emote with extra bits like ears or a prominent tail. Try it some time, if you haven't. You can keep that blorbo to yourself, even! It's just for the satisfaction of exploring something unusual. :3