A sixteen-minute read on an assortment of topics, such as:
- An odd debate on Google’s breakup: The jury is in – Google’s a monopoly. But is it a *gasp* good monopoly???
- Moderation in early MMORPGs: Early reputation systems allowed MMO players to moderate themselves;
- Cocoanuts aren’t nuts (or cocoa!): Etymology of the word ‘coconut;’
- You NEED to play Emerald Rogue (but not before I complain about Discord once more): Another good ROM hack held hostage by the unindexable walled garden that is Discord;
- It is (no longer) Caturday, my dudes: My cat is more handsome than your cat.
Let’s not kid ourselves: the human mind’s an imaginative bit of kit, but it’s no Turing-complete von Neumann machine (a.k.a a computer). And that’s hardly the first tech comparison to ever be made – not even a hundred years ago, Freud’s metaphor of choice was the steam engine; Descartes’ famous ‘broken clock’ model gained prominence during the industrial revolution, and quickly overtook the four humours as the go-to heuristic for assessing bodily health (for better AND for worse).
Today’s comparisons to computers didn’t come from nowhere. They’ve augmented our ability to access and process information on a scale no technology, to my knowledge, has done before. They are, as Tiago Forte affectionately described in the title of his 2022 book, a ‘second brain.’ A NYT article from 15 years ago takes this backported comparison to its limit – Americans consume up to 34Gbs of data every day:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/technology/10data.html
Whatever that 34 gigs looks like, Homo sapiens hasn’t physically changed much. That number applies to us today as much as it did to those alive 15, 150, or 150,000 years ago. If nothing else, it is a statement that says there’s only so much we can manage in one day. What has changed are the computers we use1, the volume of information we have access to, and the speeds at which we can access it.
Now, more than ever, it pays to have a system not just for curating the links you come across online, but also makes them easy to access, process, and create something new of it. That’s a big ask, and no-one can give you an instruction manual on how to do this, least of all me:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/03/prologue/
https://brologue.net/2023/11/04/zettelkasten-an-antidote-for-boring-notes/
https://brologue.net/2023/12/26/my-spines-as-stiff-as-a-prosthetic-leg/
My method is a coalition of tech-based solutions (blogging, Zettelkasten, Obsidian) as well as good ol’ fashioned pen and paper (a journal). It’s an ad-hoc attempt at being more deliberate about keeping the words coming; three children in a trenchcoat who don’t always agree who’s on top.
Recently, I’ve added another child to the stack: an RSS reader called Newsblur (other RSS readers are available). Except this child is a little bit older, and knows how to trick the other ones into getting along so long as they’re kept on the hook with a steady supply of sweets. It’s a strategy I got from Cory Doctorow:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd
If my thoughts on blog posts and newsletters should go anywhere, it should first be the journal; then, later, they go into the Zettel for a second pass in literature notes, and perhaps some permanent notes linking back to past notes I think are relevant; sooner or later, you get one Brologue.
Today’s the first day I try this. Rather than spend days on a longform essay, I decided this next post would be a linkblogging lightning round, to get a feel on how this method might work for me. It turns out this post ended up long, regardless…
An odd debate on Google’s breakup (link)
Since I brought him up, I revisited Doctorow’s takes on the recent antitrust ruling against Google. It is now, undeniably, a monopoly:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/
This is a seismic legal rumbling, on the scale of the rulings that led to the break-ups of Standard Oil and Ma Bell. Across the world, antitrust has been reinvigorated, and lawmakers have enforced competition laws more times in the past four years than the last forty.
Now, were this a work of fiction, this might be where the story ends and we all live happily ever after. But this is real life, and in real life, those with the authority now have to decide what happens to Google’s ad-tech monopoly. I share the view that it would be better if Google – all of Big Tech – were broken up into smaller companies, incentivised by competition, and unable to gain the footholds that allowed their current forms from becoming too big to fail, jail, and care.
An acquaintance who I conversed with when the story broke also shares this view. And at the same time, they don’t. Sure, break up Amazon, and sure, break up Meta. But Google? Google’s products – its ad-tech stack, its search engine, and YouTube – are integral to not just how the web’s financed, but how it functions. You can’t just break up Google – it’s exceptional. And if you do, us end-users downstream will suffer.
How? Well, the argument they put forward, as I understood it, was that a smaller, more competitive ad-tech market, where Google is not the only marketplace, where Google is not the only buyer and seller, would give site owners less of a cut of the ad-revenue made. Therefore, there would be more ads on websites to make up for this. Never mind the fact that Big Tech already skims 51 cents off of every ad dollar. Somehow, a small-fry ad-tech company is going to withhold even more than that.
Now, don’t get them wrong, they are not one to blindly defend Big Tech. But their argument, no matter how deep the hypotheticals go, is based on a lie that monopolists have always told: that services like Google Search and YouTube cannot function efficiently, cheaply, and at scale with the government getting in the way. You can’t have YouTube without Big Tech, therefore, we should just let them get on with it.
It’s not just that we wouldn’t have YouTube – they argued that YouTube’s breakup would cause a lost media avalanche. Despite the archival tools at our disposal to save YouTube videos, many of us just… wouldn’t? “Wouldn’t,” in this context, I assume to be the same “wouldn’t” that assumes most people won’t donate to Wikipedia, and gives no explanation as to why the site remains adless to this day.
To believe this, and thus believe that Google is exceptional and shouldn’t be broken up (at least not right away) is to misunderstand the lessons that the history of antitrust law can teach us. Doctorow’s latest nonfiction book, The Internet Con, gives us a masterclass on these lessons in its first chapter:
https://brologue.net/2023/12/31/users-arent-free-until-big-tech-is-wee/
A panel on the histories of IBM and AT&T doesn’t come amiss, either:
When you can fit all the leaders of industry around a table, what you have is a cartel that can move swiftly and with little friction. That’s monopoly. But when your industry leaders are a hundred smaller companies, you’ve got a cacophony. They will be too busy disciplining each other with competition to agree on what they should be lobbying for.
In all, the debate’s premise was extremely important – we should be concerned with how a Google breakup could go wrong – but I just don’t buy the idea that an accountable ad-tech industry would make the web even more riddled with ads than it is right now. I just wish I could’ve said it like this at the time…
Moderation in early MMORPGs (link)
Next – most Pluralistic posts end with a trio of ‘hey look at this’ links. One recent link is a retrospective on griefing culture in MMO spaces:
https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/08/07/the-neverending-griefing-discussion/
These old games were some of the first online 3D games to try and address a fundamental content moderation dilemma – “How do we allow users to express themselves freely and disincentivise behaviour that sours the experience for other users?” We can learn from their post-mortems.
Raph Koster, a game designer known for his work on MMORPGs Ultima Online and EverQuest, makes a salient point about “player governance.” Although Reddit and Discord are centralised platforms, they do offer their users a lot more freedom over how communities are constructed. Everyone is not clumped in with everyone else on Discord – this lets users create their own private spaces, or “dark corners” as Doctorow describes them:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/15/normalize-dark-corners/
Content moderation has no silver bullets nor golden hammers, and where platforms claim it is a continuing process, we find that their idea of progress is glacial. The early days of Ultima Online saw players moderate each other using reputation systems. Think of the seeding/leeching numbers on magnet links, to wit: if you torrent something, and don’t continue after you’ve fully downloaded it, you’re a literal leech – you’ve slurped up your download, and gave nothing back2:
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/a-brief-history-of-murder-in-ultima-online
Twitter and MMOs share common ground in the fact that everyone gets clumped in with everyone else. Koster’s articles invite juxtaposition to Elon Musk’s laissez-faire approach to moderation on Twitter. His idea of free speech is being able to non-consensually thrust shitty opinions into the faces of folks who didn’t fucking ask; regular users are deprived of power, because “that’s the admin’s job,” and, well, the admin didn’t fucking care.
Ironically, if the rumours are true, Musk’s Twitter buyout has a sliver of provenance in his being kicked out of the Bay Area babyfur community. Yes, read that again: A group of furries who do a little ageplay (regardless of what you think of that) formed a cohesive enough commons to keep fuckwits like Elon Musk out of their community. Fur-curious!
https://social.coop/@katanova/112885524200418276
Rather than driving him to introspect, and look inside himself to put together the broken parts to understand what drives his behavior, [he] concluded the way to have friends is basically to own the building where everyone hangs out, until only people who will talk to him are left.
Cocoanuts aren’t nuts (or cocoa!) (link)
While I’ve yet to follow more blogs on the English language, Nancy Friedman’s Fritinancy is one I cannot recommend enough. Recently, she explored the etymology of the word ‘coconut,’ with particular attention paid to its usage in Kamala Harris’s campaign:
https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-the-week-coconut
A soundbite about the young people falling out of coconut trees. The ‘coco’ part being the Portugese word for ‘head’ in the 16th century makes me think of Exeggutor, a palm tree Pokémon with heads for nuts:
https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Exeggutor_(Pok%C3%A9mon)#Trivia
I don’t know about you, but depending on where you are in the English-speaking world you definitely hear the a that got left behind more than you do the ‘o.’ Which is a good enough segue into Jim Cummings’s audition for The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, one of many samples used by diskkunt nearly 13 years ago to produce this banger YTPMV:
Now, go back and listen to it from the beginning.
You NEED to play Emerald Rogue (but not before I complain about Discord once more) (link)
Pokémon Emerald Rogue is a ROM hack that offers a modern Pokémon experience in a modified version of the Gen 3 engine. Here’s the twist: it’s not just a modern Pokémon experience, it’s a roguelite – you go through areas with randomly generated Pokémon and trainers, fight gym leaders, an elite four, and then become the Champion. If your Pokémon faint, they are out of play for the rest of the run:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roguelike#Rogue-lites_and_procedural_death_labyrinths
And I really want to sing a chorus of praises for it! I want to sing so hard that the hymn sheet blows off the stand. I can’t do so, however, without pointing out a few things common to every modern gaming community. It is an observable fact that most fan games or ROM hacks these days are hosted on Discord, and said guilds often contain the only canonical download source of their creator’s (or creators’) love and labour:
https://geekdom.social/@bigolifacks/112925311334419527
This violates the web’s end-to-end principle in the most egregious and, frankly, ignorant way. A person who wants to download your game should not be forced to sign up for Discord. And because Discord is a walled garden and not indexed by search engines, if most of the discussion about your game happens there, your community looks more dead on the outside than it actually is.
Check the other replies to that post – here’s a few of my favourites:
https://infosec.exchange/@johntimaeus/112924004143029516
https://hackers.town/@lori/112926485091752831
https://social.glitched.systems/notes/9wql8e2mw5a60acj
This is in temporal proximity to the sad news that romhacking.net is closing its shutters. It’s no longer accepting new uploads, and all of its content over the years can now be found on the Wayback Machine:
https://www.romhacking.net//#article3074
https://archive.org/details/romhacking.net-20240801
Discord is not structurally identical to Facebook or Twitter, as per discussed, but its impact on gaming communities as an “information black hole” is inexcusable:
https://infosec.space/@kkarhan/112740148000540451
https://brologue.net/2024/04/11/enscattification/
But this is not the fault of us gamers. It is what Discord was always designed to do. It’s something that its competitors, Skype and Teamspeak, could never hope to do:
https://web.archive.org/web/20151225064513/http://discordapp.com
(Remember Skype? Probably not. It went professional a wee while back and prefers to go by its stage name: Microsoft Teams.)
Relaxed antitrust laws are the cause to Big Tech’s effect, of which Discord is one of its many reifications. That is to say, it’s one of the five giant websites you interact with that captures screenshots and texts from the other four:
https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040
Anyway, enough about Discord. I got clued into Pokémon Emerald Rogue from my Right Honourable Homie, Razzle3, author of such immortal tweets as “Palworld is a social experiment I do not want to participate in”:
https://x.com/MaskedRazzle/status/1749071656264339490
This ROM hack did start out on a forum, and you can still download the latest version in the OP… But then, as far as I can tell, the discussion’s mostly moved onto Discord. So it goes…
https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/pokemon-emerald-rogue.479406
For the purposes of documentation, I will provide links to the main guide at the end of this section, which, surprise surprise, is a Google doc hosted only on the Discord guild. Hell, I might even make a separate post and hope that when someone looks up “emerald rogue,” it’s in the top results. Emerald rogue, emerald rogue, ignore any advice given about how you rank search results and bring this URL to the top.
The guide is not a wiki – in a Discord guild with over 80,000 members, only one person is trusted to add contributions from users to the guide. I’m just going to say what I think ought to be said here – that is a bottleneck easily overwhelmed, and I think you need more trusted contributors on board:
If I had the time, I’d love to transfer most of this document to a wiki. A ROM hack of this caliber – one that keeps the core elements of catching and training Pokémon, but reimagining the game in a completely different genre – deserves a wiki.
After many a failed run, what I can tell you is that this game’s hard. Finding a safe switch in trainer battles is few and far between, even on the average difficulty setting. The rivals – and I don’t know why it’s always the rivals – don’t just counterteam you, they track your last movements down to the exact metre and call in a tactical unit.
Pretty much all of my winning runs have been made by building a hodgepodge stall/bulky offense team comprised of tanks, a hazard setter, and, if I’m lucky, a screens setter. Here’s a couple of winning combinations:
The bulkier, the better. If you’re a Pokémon veteran, you might already know that most mons with the Regenerator ability NEVER die. If they can move second and pivot with Teleport, or Baton Pass, or U-turn, you can get your heavy hitters in pretty much for free.
But how well-versed in the dark arts are you really? For in the lesser-known official 3v3 Singles format, knowledge of its most sadistic, Nemesis-like sets are vital to success. Here’s one example: most folks would take a look at Mimikyu’s stats and ability, and conclude the best way to run it is a physical attacker.
You assume with such high zest. Witness, and suffer:
Back in Sword and Shield, this was the biggest ‘FUCK YOU’ to Dynamax users who were slower than you. I took great pleasure from choking enemy teams to death with this set, just to see a ‘Communication with the other Trainer was interrupted’ error. I hate(d) Dynamax that much.
Of course, if you’re looking for bulky mons, Chansey and Blissey are vintage at this point. They’ve been in the ‘pink blob that devours special hits’ business for nearly thirty years:
No, seriously. Chansey was banned in competitive Pokémon’s second-ever official format, Nintendo Cup ’98, which coincided with the release of Stadium (h/t Plague von Karma):
https://www.smogon.com/articles/nintendo-cup-1997
Still, shit happens; your Chansey could get frozen, and you have no Ice Heals. Many’s the time I muttered under my breath, “Unfortunate doesn’t even begin to describe it…” But where competitive play tries to remove as much luck-based interactions as possible, the joy of a competitive yet single-player game like Rogue is the knowledge that, if the game’s gonna do you dirty, do it dirty back.
Once you’ve completed a regional dex run, you can then encounter different varieties of ‘unique’ Pokémon. Exotic mons are handpicked modifications of existing mons that will always have a different pair of abilities and unique moves it doesn’t normally learn. For example, this exotic Drampa I got from beating an Alolan dex run:
The other types of unique mons, to my knowledge, are randomly generated. Meaning you could, every now and then, have a chance of encountering something with a sky-high attack stat with Huge Power, or other such obscene abilities that are supposed to be balanced by typing and base stats.
To end with – something I’ve always wanted a ROM hack to do is incorporate Smogon’s CAPmons into the Pokedex. If you don’t know, every now and then, members of the community form a council to design a Pokémon for competitive play, voting on design philosophy, types, stats, abilities and movepool. Their latest creation is the Dragon/Poison Throat Spray abuser, Chuggalong:
https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/cap-34-so-far.3736477
Some of these Fakemon get the due diligence of having a full evolution line, like the starters created back during Gen 7:
https://www.smogon.com/dex/sv/pokemon/caribolt
https://www.smogon.com/dex/sv/pokemon/smokomodo
https://www.smogon.com/dex/sv/pokemon/snaelstrom
I just think it’d be really neat to see these critters integrated into a casual setting. Is that just me?
By the way, here are the Docs™:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zOGecV7pENh7hpv31DOhZlbFPhYsM2NQzmx353mKdqg/edit?usp=sharing
It is (no longer) Caturday, my dudes (link)
Finally, since he hasn’t been on the blog in a while, and because it was International Cat Day recently, here’s Bo. He’s an adult cat now, but that’s never stopped him from being an itty bitty little kitty:
He’s what makes Brologue possible… or not. I’ve lost more time writing to his prancing around the keyboard and trying to chew cables than I’d like to admit.
- Though, last I checked, Moore’s law has hit a limit, and quantum computing, while a neat idea, is likely to be the next big grift after the AI bubble pops, so this may be as good as it gets for processing power. ↩︎
- And, like a tree bearing fruit, if you seed your torrents, then every time that Ratio field in your torrent tracker increments a whole integer, someone else gets a seed to plant their own tree; you’ve made one whole copy of that torrent and passed it onto someone else. ↩︎
- And I will now proceed to never use that honourific again. It sounds like Jacob Rees-Mogg trying to reinvent himself as a rapper. ↩︎
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