arborelia

As a

• person joining a meeting

I would like

• Zoom to install updates and then forget the meeting link

So that

• I can be late to the meeting

The Software Heritage Archive has archived a piece of software I wrote, the Unicode-fixer ftfy. This software, which I've released several versions of under my correct name, is in use at a crap-ton of tech companies. The Software Heritage Archive recognizes that it's a relevant piece of 21st-century software history, and wants to preserve it forever.

Unfortunately, their archive that they want to preserve forever buries my correct version under 70 trivial forks by other people, like things they just made to open a pull request, which call me by my deadname.

I asked Software Heritage to fix this, first by chatting with one of their developers on Twitter, then by applying the GDPR because they are part of a French organization. Here's a very paraphrased and informal summary of how it went:

---

Me: Here's an exact list of useless forks of my code you've archived that call me by my deadname. Can you fix or remove them?

Dev: What? No. You can't just change things like that. We have to maintain the integrity of software history

Me: Integrity is calling trans developers by their names and not deadnaming them

Dev: I feel for you and I support trans rights, but we literally can't change this data

Me: Whyever not

Other dev: updates the site's Content Policy to say they can't change names because they put them all in a blockchain

Me: Excuse me, you put my deadname in a fucking blockchain?

Other dev: quietly changes the Content Policy again

Dev: We don't use blockchains, why would you think we use blockchains? It's a Merkle tree, just like GitHub history, so it can never be changed.

Me: I did change my GitHub history.

Dev: What

Me: git-filter-repo, baybee

Dev: (ghosts me)

Me: hello Data Protection Officer, here's a Right to Rectify request

(no response for a month)

Me: bonjour Data Protection Officer, here's an extremely formal Right to Rectify request in French

DPO: Can we store your deadname forever and apply a cosmetic fix to our frontend that replaces your deadname with your real name?

Me: Absolutely not

DPO: We're sorry that we're unable to meet your request

Me: it's a GDPR request and you're in France, you kinda have to

(no response for 6 months)

Me: bonjour, Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés. Here's a pile of evidence that Inria, owners of Software Heritage, refused a lawful GDPR request

Anyway, that's where we are now! fun times!

I've picked out 7 virtual pinball tables to represent 1972 in my chronological playthrough of pinball.

The stream's over now but here's the video: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1636495094

Virtual pinball physics is jank sometimes. Some of the tables were great recreations, some of them weren't, and Fireball managed to be a lot of fun despite their very creative interpretation of angular momentum.

So a randomizer is when you take an existing video game and reshuffle the items and progression in it, so it plays differently every time

A mystery randomizer is when the player isn't told what the settings are (for example, what can be reshuffled, what stays the same, and what the goal is) and has to find them out by playing

And a mystery mystery randomizer is when I don't know what mystery pool the settings come from, or whether it's some other one-off randomizer mode, or even necessarily what game it is!

I have a Mystery Mystery pool of randomized seeds that's usually A Link to the Past (z3r), possibly Earthbound (PK Scramble randomizer), and occasionally Illusion of Gaia randomizer or Super Mario World randomizer. They're all Super Nintendo games so they all look the same when you rename the ROM files after their hash.

This is a thing I stream frequently around now -- usually starting sometime around 9 pm Eastern on Sundays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Fridays, though this isn't any kind of firm schedule