Weekly round-up: August 10
Microsoft's surveillance tech in Gaza - multiple reads
Realized I have not posted about it here before, but there is currently a very specifically targeted boycott of Microsoft concerning the Israeli army's use of Microsoft services in their invasion of Gaza. There has been some recent coverage of how the army is using Azure cloud and AI services for surveillance.
In the ensuing war in Gaza, the cloud-based system pioneered by Sariel has been put to frequent use alongside a series of AI-driven target recommendation tools also developed on his watch and debuted by the military in a campaign that has devastated civilian life and created a profound humanitarian crisis.
You can also read the boycott information on their website here. I was reminded to make this part of my weekly round up thanks to MDS's post about it here. The boycott does not ask you to quit using Windows, which would be an extremely difficult ask; instead, it's requesting that you boycott specific games-related services like XBox Live and Microsoft gaming-branded products and services.
I understand that a lot of people have made Live completely central to their gaming habits... but I gotta say, you do not need it. You can really enjoy yourself without it. If you use Live because it's the most affordable way for you to play a large volume of games, consider that now might be a great time for you to play some ROMs of old games instead. You can get that shit on the internet archive, and emulators are easy to find, and they're not computationally demanding and will definitely run on the crappiest laptop you might have on hand. When I was in college I played sooooo many good old Gameboy games on my shitty institutional college-sourced Dell! A trip into the past for a little while can be just as invigorating as a constant drip-feed of new games. (And, like, you know a lot of those old games are actually fucking good, too.) You do not even need Minecraft!! Vintage Story is great and I play it all the time!!
Zé Ramalho - Admirável Gado Novo - Loke
I appreciated Loke's thoughts about how you might translate a song by Brazilian singer Zé Ramalho about working class deprivation and surveillance. Loke is a localization manager and translator for videogames.
This stuff reminded me a lot of the things we discussed when I studied Latin as a kid. A lot of the Latin they make you translate in school is poetry, which, like songs, have a similar need for extremely succinct, low-wordcount metaphor. One of my teachers spent a lot of energy illuminating the metaphors in the poetry we were working with - particularly some of the crazier, nearly-impossible-to-preserve metaphors conveyed with sentence structure rather than word choice. I haven't translated songs or poetry in any language since I was about 17 years old, so it was interesting to return to those memories while reading this post.
The Worm Hunters of Southern Ontario - Inori Roy
A fantastic article about the "worm picking" industry, which supplies the kind of large nightcrawlers you cannot effectively farm to bait shops for use in fishing. I used to keep composting worms (until they all died in a heat wave - perhaps a story for another blog post) and I, too, have a fondness for the worm. Wonderful creatures. They're not really supposed to be here in North America - the article gets into this - but they've been here for centuries now, and a worm-harvesting industry has grown up around them in Ontario specifically.
Thanks to v, who does a lot more interesting thematic link roundups than I do, and who included this one in a recent post about specialty craft and labor.
Dial-up internet to be discontinued - AOL.com
They're gonna stop providing dial-up AOL! In fuckin 2025!!! I do not go on Bluesky much, but I did, and this news was waiting for me there.
AOL was a very specifically North American phenomenon, but the long and short of it is that if you were alive and old enough to retain memories in the 90s somewhere within the terrible domain of America On Line, you probably saw a lot of their free trial dial-up internet CDs. They were everywhere. Famously, people would use them as coasters (though I never actually saw someone do this). They came in all sorts of styles and they came ceaselessly. It is crazy to me that the company was still providing this service until this year... I wonder how many people were using it?