Thank you for welcoming me. I am just checking out what Friendica is and seeing if it is and how it works. I support of a small opensource convention and we are exploring using Friendica to replace out Facebook presence.
I have not looked at hubzilla yet, thank you for mentioning it. I have been aware of the Fediverse for a few year, but I am only just now really starting to dig into everything that is here. Our big needs are a space were or community can interact with each and where they can get updates on events and news.
The week of December 23, FEWSNet, an independently run famine reporting service funded by the United States government, updated its projections for impending famine in northern Gaza. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel publicly criticized the population figures used, and the update promptly disappeared from public view, apparently upon instructions from U.S. government officials. This recent censorship battle over whether to call starvation in Gaza a famine is compromising United States credibility on issues where the U.S. has led the world for decades. A half-century ago, the U.S. helped forge a global consensus on norms to guide how the world responds to food crises, including that food not be used as a weapon. Now, U.S. officials are censoring independent reporting of starvation in Gaza resulting from Israel withholding food supplies from northern Gaza. 1974 was a crucial year for forging this new consensus. The year started out badly. In one of the low points in the otherwise proud history of U.S. humanitarian assistance, the U.S. Government indeed used food as a weapon, retaliating against the young government of Bangladesh by stopping food aid shipments in the midst of that country’s worst food crisis since independence. As many as 1.5 million people may have starved to death in that famine. US food aid stopped because of a dispute over Bangladesh’s trade relations with Cuba. This followed on the Nixon/Kissinger policy during that country’s war of independence, three years earlier, of ignoring the terrible civilian human rights abuses and death toll inflicted by the military forces of a U.S. ally. Pakistan was a strong U.S. ally, its president a friend of President Nixon, and Pakistan was in the middle of secretly negotiating the China opening that took place a few months later. U.S. policy was willing to pay the price of a terrible humanitarian disaster inflicted by Pakistan’s army on Bangladesh’s civilian population by a close ally in order for President Nixon to achieve his foreign policy triumph on China. That earlier Bangladesh disaster was a precursor to the U.S. withholding food aid during the 1974 famine. But the U.S. was not alone in 1974 in pursuing shameful policies that abetted famine. Emperor Haile Salassie’s failure to address or even recognize a famine in Ethiopia led to a Communist takeover there. But at the end of 1974, the nations of the world represented at the UN’s World Food Conference established a new set of norms, institutions, and aspirations to guide global food security. And three years later, despite then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s contention at the 1974 conference that food was a powerful weapon in the U.S. arsenal, the U.S. along with the rest of the world outlawed the use of food as a weapon in protocols to the Geneva Conventions. This norm was recently reinforced by unanimous Security Council resolution (2018), U.S. Senate resolution (2022) and a joint UN communique led by the U.S. (2023). A decade after that World Food Conference, when Ethiopia faced another famine, these norms were honored by one of America’s staunchest anti-Communist Presidents. President Ronald Reagan, deciding that starving people in Ethiopia would get U.S. food aid in spite of their Communist government, declared that “a hungry child knows no politics.” That Ethiopian famine was part of a broader African food emergency in the mid-1980s, which led the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to start the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). FEWS started as, and remains, an independent analytical and early warning service for the global food and humanitarian community under a series of USAID contract and grant agreements. As a former USAID employee, I frequently relied on FEWS estimates and information during my 38-year career and had close FEWS colleagues over much of that time as well. I know – even in environments of great uncertainty and inadequate data – how carefully and impartially FEWS analysts weigh the information they have access to in making their most informed judgments. Since its adoption by the UN in 2004, the Integrated Food Security Phase System (IPC) famine scale has been the standard for early warning, and that’s the system used by FEWS in their most recent Gaza update. A FEWS declaration of famine also requires validation by an independent group of global food security experts called a Famine Review Committee. FEWS analysts are careful in using this system and making their assessments because that’s their job, but also because they know that – whenever and wherever they declare conditions approaching famine – powerful people and institutions will attack their analysis, as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew and USAID have just done.
The Biden Administration has done more damage to the international norms of humanitarian law and food security than any other U.S. government in recent history.
Aeterna Noctis is a cool game. Sometimes flawed execution but many neat ideas and the combat feels really good once you have it figured out. Also it's huge. Finished hard mode 109% in 69 hours. Nice.
Trying out this new fangled thing after facebook is trying really hard to X itself out.. Here's a photo from a fancy sunset from a Trader Joe's parking lot, and an uprooted tree!
Hmm... no way to explicitly add alt text to images other than writing in more description I guess? And the "preview" while editing plain text does not look like the final post.
Satellite images show the extent of devastation from multiple wildfires burning in Los Angeles County after one day. The fires have killed at least five people and destroyed thousands of structures.
Finishing out 2024 with my third and final game of the year, I published I want to get off MR BONES WILD RIDE today on itch! It’s PWYW and I’ve submitted it to a couple of game jams that inspired me.
I have backed 631 crowdfunding projects over the past 13 years (in all categories, but primarily tabletop games). Of these, 45 of them have not fulfilled in a timely manner, for a total of approximately $980 in unfulfilled projects. Of these, a couple I have marked as "still hopeful," meaning the creator hasn't updated in a bit, but they have some goodwill from the community (but tide might be turning).
The ones I have marked as "not going to happen" or similar (one is literally marked "shitpost") are down to 22 projects, with only two being >$80, for a total loss of $591 (I might have just misplaced one $30 project, though.) Most of the dice-only projects I've backed have failed-- the exceptions being the FATE dice from Evil Hat, and the Wild Earth cyberpunk dice (which are currently sitting on my desk, about 12" from my keyboard). I also backed the Pixels dice, but that hasn't fulfilled yet, and I am waiting patiently. I backed for Fudge dice from them, so I know it will be a long while, yet (the Fudge dice are last to be fulfilled; they had the fewest orders for them.)
I will absolutely not be tallying the total I've spent on crowdfunded projects, because I really do not want to know.
I back a LOT of projects by POC as my way of supporting them (I'd have to do an analysis of all my projects to figure out what percentage, but it's pretty high, considering I'm a white lady). Of my projects that I've given up on, only the one I probably misplaced is from a POC.
Several of the "not going to happen" projects are from disabled creators. This isn't surprising; disabled folks operate on a thinner margin of energy and resources than non-disabled folks, and it's very easy for even one small health issue to derail a project. A good thing for "the industry" to discuss and maybe try to tackle might be how to build a support network for disabled creators (and not just of other disabled creators) to help them get their project over the finish line-- and then how to get those creators to actually ask for that help.
On the platforms: My favorite for crowdfunding is still Kickstarter. It's easy to get updates and to go back and see the updates later. There's a lot of transparency, there. Backerkit is second place, largely because the funding side and the fulfillment sides aren't integrated-- there is no link on the campaign pledge page to the survey/fulfillment page. I have more successfully fulfilled pledges on Backerkit, but it came in late to the crowdfunding platform game, so it learned a lot of lessons from Kickstarter's success.
My favorite for fulfillment is Backerkit. It's easy to understand for me, and it does a decent job of being transparent about communication. I am not a big fan of the fact that, once a project is "closed," you can no longer access anything-- I think they removed that feature, but I still have old projects that closed and the digital files are no longer available.
My least favorite is IndieGoGo. Project closed and you want to know what you pledged at? Go find it in your email, because you can't find it on the project page. Because of this, I just don't back anything on IGG that I really want to receive-- if I back, it's a supporting level for a few bucks.
As a creator, I use Kickstarter almost exclusively because I like the experience as a backer, and it's been good for me, although I think it's a bit saturated, and I really hate what the former head of the gaming category did to it. I haven't tried out Backerkit yet, though I might for a future project.
I'm running a ttrpg by text-only in Discord (Fabula Ultima, if you're wondering). Not play-by-post, but live chat. Gotta say, I kind of love this format. It doesn't require a whole lot of effort on my part-- no voice or video. It's slower, but everyone in it signed on for that. When I need to look up a rule, I have the time to do so without feeling like I'm making people wait. And I don't feel pressure between sessions to check in and keep up to date on a garrulous group of RPers.
With everything going on I have been moving all my social media to the fediverse and getting away from the billionaires.
Married, father of 2 boys and papaw to 3 granddaughters. Over worked Facility Manager. Love Camping, metal detection, coin collecting, love to cook, bbq and making pizza in my homemade wood fire pizza oven.
Newsteinleo
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Wilmar Igl, PhD
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