I have long been a big fan of the Semiotic Standard developed for Alien (1979) by Ronn Cobb for "all commercial trans-stellar & heavy element transport craft" - in particular Artificial Gravity Absent is just so cheery. There should be lots of icons like that littering future settings, addressing problems we are not even considering yet.

Snip of Semiotic Standard by Ronn Cobb, recreated by Scotch and Soda

I have two particular cases in mind where there should be something like this about.
- Iconography developed by alien multi-species civilizations (Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5)
- Iconography still lying around from the distant past (Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology, Foundation)

Alien gestures

While noting that iconography assumes that one is communicating with other critters that also 'read' or similar, one would assume that if you are sharing environments closely enough that some hazards or information needs to be communicated passively, this would get worked out.

The key here is 'form' - but actually there is quite a bit of leeway - looking across our iconography, a sufficiently abstracted 'Predator' would look the same; even a very strange alien form would be renderable in most of these signs with minor modifications - it would still have 'standing' 'lying' 'floating upside-down' and 'suited-up' forms - albeit with a tail or six limbs or an octopoid form or what have you. Swap those out and all the rest of those icons remain comprehensible.

One would assume that a whole block of hazards that are not dangerous to humans would appear on such a set - perhaps warnings of 'large beings walking' for smaller creatures or a variety of dangerous atmosphere tags for things with less tolerance of pollutants or even certain atmospheric components than humans.

From the history of a far future

For 40k, there ought to be some iconography that roots in the dark age of technology that ought to be plastered all over everything - even recognising that the Imperium has its skulls-and-wings staples, there ought to be other symbols in there that have persisted alongside the quasi-magical technologies they have. Red and yellow hazard striping has been part of armour designs for as long as folk have been painting but it would be neat to have some other iconography too.

For all that the Imperium has lost lots of know-how and technology, simple icons ought to have persisted - things like 'psi hazard', various warnings for plasma, melta, las and other hazardous technologies and all the semiotic standard above for voidships. Maybe some kind of 'beware the Men of Iron' or the like.

I would think that Necromunda terrain and Genestealer Cult gear would have lots of these plastered all over the day-to-day objects they use and fight through.

A counter argument could be heiroglyphics - where the meaning of symbols became lost for a chunk of time until dedicated study restored it to understanding. This could well be a valid argument, but I posit a setting where enough time-lost spaceships, isolated colonies and long-lived organisations stuck around that such symbols have survived, even if only a fraction of them.

What use to you, a DM?

Maybe not a lot, maybe what I am probing at here is that in your far future setting there could be icons and indicators that have become common across species or persist through time such that the ancient site you break into is comprehensible.

I feel there is an exercise here of going, much like Ronn Cobb did, "what hazards do folk face in this environment, what needs to be warned against" and coming up with symbols for those. If you could create such a set, imagine sharing a map with your players where all the hazards and traps are fully explained in the iconography, the challenge is for them to figure out the translation and then map their path based on that.

= = = Joesky tax = = =

d6 Icons of a Future Yet To Pass
1. Arm intersected and shifted by an arc - "Danger, Reactive Energy Shields"
2. Triangular 'face' with spiral eyes - "Caution, free-will subverting entities"
3. Black human figure with light blue line around head in front of red/white spiral - "Wear psy-barrier equipment"
4. Human figure with right side dissolving into pixels - "No shielding beyond this point"
5. Human figure with head split diagonally, across split is squared skull - "Beware humaniform mechanoids"
6. Diagonal split vertical lines and dots (1/0 cascade) with triangles/circles/squares - "Data corruption / memetic contamination"

Bo Gritz is dead. One of the largely forgotten figures of the late 20th century, Gritz played a critical role in the development of the paranoid, conspiracy theory driven reality of today’s world. He is not worth remembering outside of this, as he was a self-promoting clown show of lies and propaganda, but he had an outsized role on late twentieth century American culture as it turned toward creating myths about why the nation lost in Vietnam and seeing big government and liberals as conspiracies to attack our liberties, all of which helped lead to figures such as Donald Trump rising in the Republican Party and to the presidency.

Born in 1939 in Enid, Oklahoma, Gritz was a tough kid with a tough childhood. His father was killed in World War II and his maternal grandparents raised him. He was a troubled kid and got expelled from school. The family did have some money though and he was sent to Fork Union Military Academy in Virginia to straighten him out with some military discipline.

Immediately upon graduating from high school, in 1957, Gritz enlisted in the Army. Although he was an enlisted man, people saw possibility in him and he attended Officer Candidate School. By 1963, he was a captain and was promoted to major in 1967. This put him in line to go to Vietnam. He was involved in some intense fighting in the Vietnam War. He commanded a detachment made up of a mix of American, South Vietnamese, and Cambodian soldiers that were basically mercenaries for whatever America needed. This meant special missions that included investigating shot down airplanes and recovering their black boxes if possible.

For all of this, Gritz was promoted to lieutenant colonel and became an important Army insider. He commanded special forces in Latin America from 1975 to 1977, became Chief of Congressional Relations for the Defense Security Agency, and worked in the office of the Secretary of Defense. But in 1979, he retired from the military. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t still involved. It means he was doing covert work that was easier to do outside the military structure, such as going to Afghanistan to train the mujahedeen.

As this went on, he became obsessed with the idea that the Vietnamese communists were holding any number of American prisoners of war. In fact, this is a good moment to consider the POW/MIA craze of the 1980s. It was so difficult for a lot of Americans to understand why we had lost the war in Vietnam. They were not prepared to say that the entire operation was badly considered from the beginning, that being a wannabe colonialist power attempting to intervene in a post-colonial civil war had a lot of potential to go very badly. So it had to be someone else who had cost the U.S. the war. It was the government unwilling to do what it took to win the war. Or maybe it was the anti-war hippies and their protests. Or maybe it was the unpatriotic media. But whatever it was, it was someone else’s fault, someone who had sacrificed a generation of young American men. Of course, the government had indeed sacrificed a generation of young American men, but saying the war was just a bad idea and all these people died for a stupid cause wasn’t something people were willing to say.

These ideas began manifesting themselves in some fascinating cultural ways. First, there was the idea that soldiers were spat upon as they returned home. This is both absurd and, today, is conventional wisdom. When I ask my students about this—students who often know very little about American history before they get to my class—they have almost all heard it. The problem is that there is zero evidence that it ever happened. None. Not a single documented case, as the scholar Jerry Lembcke explored in detail. And let’s be clear, despite the narrative that the media cost the nation the war, in fact, the media was extremely anti-protestor, especially early in the war. Had this happened, the media would have been all over it. But they weren’t. It doesn’t even get mentioned in any American media publication or other cultural product until the early 1980s. Then this became a core idea of Rambo and the narrative got set in stone. Moreover, this is nonsense because the antiwar movement was inherently pro-soldier. The vast majority of antiwar protestors didn’t care about Vietnam or communism one way or the other. They just didn’t want to go fight the war and they wanted to bring the soldiers home.

This was the kind of thing that led people like Gritz into resentment and crazy conspiracy theories. Part of this, also mainstreamed by Rambo and other early Vietnam reflections in the movies, is that the government abandoned unknown but large numbers of prisoners of war in Vietnam. In fact, Gritz may have been the inspiration for the Rambo character. Again, these myths about POWs was just flat out untrue. The Vietnamese government had a whole lot bigger fish to fry than to still hold American prisoners of war after the war was won. It had to build a society, overthrow the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and fight a war with China, all before 1980. But Gritz became a huge promoter of this idea. This became a mantra of late twentieth century American conservatism. Even today, you see POW/MIA flags up in all sorts of public places—even though there have not been any but a few American POWs in a half-century, despite our wars in the Middle East. But good luck saying we should take those silly conspiracy theory flags down! They are now part of American identity. This is, at least in part, Bo Gritz’s contribution to American life. Great.

Specifically, Gritz fundraised to take trips to southeast Asia to get the boys home. He got other right-wing loons such as Ross Perot and Clint Eastwood to fund these trips. At first, the Defense Department was at least slightly interested in making sure no one was over there, but the government soon realized Gritz was an unhinged lunatic. In fact, the only thing that came of it was that, while in Laos, one of his anti-communist Laotian guerillas he worked with was killed and one of the Americans in his search party, was kidnapped for ransom! If anything, Gritz created prisoners of war!

Moreover, Gritz was breaking all sorts of laws. He had to turn himself in to the police in Thailand for his operations out of that country into Laos for smuggling military equipment. Moreover, one of his comrades was later convicted for smuggling explosives around these operations; though Gritz was not prosecuted, there is no way he didn’t know about this and encouraged it. But although he faced up to 30 years in prison in Thailand and although the Vietnamese definitely wanted him imprisoned, Grtiz never served a day.

Now, Gritz was a massive self-promoter along the way. He was an extremely highly decorated officer. He just loved his own personal history of covert operations and he saw the world as needing more men like him. So he kept it up. He went to Burma in 1986 because he still believed there were POWs and also believed the huge Burmese opium baron Khun Sa knew where they were. So even though Sa was an international criminal, Gritz went over and interviewed him. He got Sa to get on video and make claims that leading Americans, including Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, were involved in his opium smuggling operations.

This all led Gritz into ever more wild conspiracy theories. He was smart enough to realize that while he was a right-winger, there were potential advocates for his ideas on the far left too and so he tried to bring conspiracy theorists of different political stripes together at various conferences, to some success. After all, when you are a conspiracy theorist, your actual politics on the issues really make no difference because they aren’t what are driving your engagement and your life.

By the early 90s, Gritz was all-in on the far-right ideas around the “one world government” under the auspices of the United Nations and represented in the U.S. by George Bush’s “New World Order” speech.Gritz became a total conspiracy theorist in domestic life too, the kind of that the Southern Poverty Law Center has followed for years.[1] He went into the deepest area of American horrors, the idea that there was a gigantic conspiracy that attacked the true Americans—the straight, conservative, war-loving, white man. In 1998, he wrote, “Do you see the sign, the scent, stain and mark of the beast on America today? … Are you willing to submit and join this seedline of Satan? … Look to those who are openly antichrist… . [W]ho in the world is promoting abortion, pornography, pedophilia, Godless laws, adultery, New Age international banking, entertainment industry and world publishing? Wherever you find perversion of God’s laws you will find the worshippers of Baal with their roots still in Babylonian mysticism.” Whew, OK then.

Naturally enough, all this led weirdo right-wing parties to nominate Gritz for their national campaigns. In 1988, something called the Populist Party nominated him for VP, but he dropped out when he discovered David Duke was the presidential candidate. He thought it was going to be the corrupt congressman from Ohio, Jim Traficant, who I guess was respectable enough compared to Duke! But this debacle didn’t stop him from becoming the party’s presidential candidate in 1992, and it was all very stupid with rants against the Federal Reserve and the New World Order. Naturally, he only got 0.1% of the vote nationally, but he cleared 2 percent in Idaho and almost 4 percent in Utah, demonstrating the power of extremism in the Rocky Mountains. Some of this is also explained by Gritz’s 1984 conversion to the Mormon faith, which has provided some of the most virulent right-wing extremism in American politics, including more recently, the Bundy family takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2016, one of the events that presaged the rise of Trump.

As he aged, Gritz moved deeper into anti-Semitism. He became a follower of Christian Identity theology, common among highly radicalized Mormons, which argues that the Israelites of the Bible are actually whites and not Jews and thus whites are the “chosen people.” That this is complete nonsense makes no difference, as it never does for racists and/or conspiracy theorists. In 2000, Gritz claimed, “Jews, feminists, sodomites and other liberal activists may install Gore over an apathetic moral majority. … Runaway abortion, anti-Christ/God and globalism are certain.”

In 1996, Gritz and his son Jim kidnapped two children in Connecticut. One of their other lunatic followers claimed her husband had engaged in “Satanic sexual abuse.” The Gritz decided to go save the boys. Of course all they did was get themselves arrested for it and there was zero evidence of this woman’s charges. Gritz later called the whole thing “the biggest mistake of my life.” Yeah, well, I can think of a few more you might want to consider!

None of this looney tunes conspiracy theories helped Gritz’s personal life. In 1998, his wife left him. He dressed up in all his military regala, took his truck from his community to the town of Kamiah and shot himself in the chest. He failed to kill himself. People noted the irony of a man who had bragged for decades on his excellent marksmanship had failed to shoot correct with the gun pressed against his own chest. Others thought it might well be a fraud, yet another publicity stunt or a way to get his wife back.

Didn’t make any difference in how he saw the world anyway. Gritz later created what he called a “constitutional covenant community” near Orofino, Idaho. This was hardly his first highly armed right-wing community. He first tried this near Kamiah, Idaho, bordering the Nez Perce reservation, in 1994, but he left it after the suicide attempt. Then he moved to Nevada to create something called the Fellowship of Eternal Warriors, merging his brand of right-wing off-Christian theology with anti-Semitism and homophobia, which had really risen in the right-wing crazy world by the early 90s, with attempts in Oregon and Colorado to create state law against gay people.

Despite all of this, Gritz was the guy people called when other crazy right-wingers were in trouble. He spent a week in the forests of North Carolina trying to get the abortion clinic and Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph to surrender. But his most prominent moment was when he became the intermediary between the government and his fellow right-wing extremist Randy Weaver when the FBI descended upon the latter’s compound at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. This whole thing was a disaster for the government. Weaver shot and killed a federal marshal, the FBI killed his wife and son. To his credit, I guess, Gritz got Weaver to surrender to end the blood bath. And in fact, Weaver only ended up serving 18 months in prison and that for the original charge that brought the FBI to his compound, not for killing the officer. I guess in this country, you can get away with killing the cops if you are a white right-winger. Other Gritz attempts to intervene in favor of far-right causes went less well. He tried to intervene in the next big standoff between the government and a right-wing extremist group, the so-called Freedmen, on their Jordan, Montana compound. Amazingly, Gritz thought the Freemen were too crazy for him and he bailed. And to be clear, this was a man who tried to invade the Florida hospital where doctors finally pulled the plug on Terry Schiavo in 2005.

But there was one thing that really mattered more than anything else—The Big Grift. He would sell anything to his fellow extremists. He had a deal called SPIKE — Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events. This was a 12 part video series that was supposed to prep you for the war to come. But the war to come, I mean who wouldn’t make money on that? He charged people an arm and a leg for these videos. And that really says it all, doesn’t it. Right wing revolution for profit!

Well, that’s Bo Gritz for you. This very bad, no good, terrible man is dead and so, in a sense, is an era of American history we have not really dealt with. Once we pull down the pointless POW/MIA flags, we will have moved beyond Gritz’s insanity. Until then? Bo Gritz remains with us in spirit.

---

[1] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/bo-gritz

The post Bo Gritz appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Senator Ron Wyden says that when a secret interpretation of Section 702 is eventually declassified, the American public “will be stunned” to learn what the NSA has been doing. If you’ve followed Wyden’s career, you know this is not a man prone to hyperbole — and you know his track record on these warnings is perfect.

Just last month, we wrote about the Wyden Siren — the pattern where Senator Ron Wyden sends a cryptic public signal that something terrible is happening behind the classification curtain, can’t say what it is, and then is eventually proven right. Every single time. The catalyst then was a two-sentence letter to CIA Director Ratcliffe expressing “deep concerns about CIA activities.”

Well, the siren is going off once again. This time, Wyden took to the Senate floor to deliver a lengthy speech, ostensibly about the since approved (with support of many Democrats) nomination of Joshua Rudd to lead the NSA. Wyden was protesting that nomination, but in the context of Rudd being unwilling to agree to basic constitutional limitations on NSA surveillance. But that’s just a jumping off point ahead of Section 702’s upcoming reauthorization deadline. Buried in the speech is a passage that should set off every alarm bell:

There’s another example of secret law related to Section 702, one that directly affects the privacy rights of Americans. For years, I have asked various administrations to declassify this matter. Thus far they have all refused, although I am still waiting for a response from DNI Gabbard. I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized. In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.

You can see the full video here if you want.

Here’s a sitting member of the Senate Intelligence Committee — someone with access to the classified details — is telling his colleagues and the public that there is a secret interpretation of Section 702 that “directly affects the privacy rights of Americans,” that he’s been asking multiple administrations to declassify it, that they’ve all refused, and that when it finally comes out, people will be stunned.

If you’ve followed Wyden for any amount of time, this all sounds very familiar. In 2011, Wyden warned that the government had secretly reinterpreted the PATRIOT Act to mean something entirely different from what Congress and the public understood. He couldn’t say what. Nobody believed it could be that bad. Then the Snowden revelations showed the NSA was engaged in bulk collection of essentially every American’s phone metadata. In 2017, he caught the Director of National Intelligence answering a different question than the one Wyden asked about Section 702 surveillance. The pattern repeats. The siren sounds. Years pass. And then, eventually, we find out it was worse than we imagined.

Now here he is, doing the exact same thing with Section 702 yet again, now that it’s up for renewal. Congress is weeks away from a reauthorization vote, and Wyden is explicitly telling his colleagues (not for the first time) they are preparing to vote on a law whose actual meaning is being kept secret from them as well as from the American public:

The past fifteen years have shown that, unless the Congress can have an open debate about surveillance authorities, the laws that are passed cannot be assumed to have the support of the American people. And that is fundamentally undemocratic. And, right now, the government is relying on secret law with regard to Section 702 of FISA. I’ve already mentioned the provision that was stuck into the last reauthorization bill, that could allow the government to force all sorts of people to spy on their fellow citizens. I have explained the details of how the Biden Administration chose to interpret it, and how the Trump Administration will interpret it, are a big secret. Americans have the right to be confused and angry that this is how the government and Congress choose to do business.

That’s a United States senator who has a long history of calling out secret interpretations that lead to surveillance of Americans — standing on the Senate floor and warning, once again, that there’s a secret interpretation of Section 702 authorities. One that almost certainly means mass surveillance.

And Wyden knows exactly how this plays out. He’s been through the reauthorization cycle enough times to know the playbook the intelligence community runs every time 702 is up for renewal:

I’ve been doing this a long time, so I know how this always goes. Opponents of reforming Section 702 don’t want a real debate where Members can decide for themselves which reform amendments to support. So what always happens is that a lousy reauthorization bill magically shows up a few days before the authorization expires and Members are told that there’s no time to do anything other than pass that bill and that if they vote for any amendments, the program will die and terrible things will happen and it will be all their fault.

Don’t buy into that.

He’s right. Every time reauthorization is on the table, no real debate happens, and then just before the authorization is about to run out, some loyal soldier of the surveillance brigade in Congress will scream “national security” at the top of their lungs, insist there’s no time to debate this or people will die, and then promises that we need to just re-authorize for a few more years, at which point we’ll be able to hold a debate on the surveillance.

A debate that never arrives.

But even setting aside the secret interpretation Wyden can’t discuss, his speech highlights something almost as damning: just how spectacularly the supposed “reforms” from the last reauthorization have failed. Remember, one of the big “concessions” to get the last reauthorization across the finish line was a requirement that “sensitive searches” — targeting elected officials, political candidates, journalists, and the like — would need the approval of the FBI’s Deputy Director.

This was in response to some GOP elected officials being on the receiving end of investigations during the Biden era, freaking out that the NSA appeared to be doing the very things plenty of civil society and privacy advocates had been telling them about for over a decade while they just yelled “national security” back at us.

So how are those small “reforms” working out? Here’s Wyden:

The so-called big reform was to require the approval of the Deputy FBI Director for these sensitive searches.

Until two months ago, the Deputy FBI Director was Dan Bongino. As most of my colleagues know, Mr. Bongino is a longtime conspiracy theorist who has frequently called for specious investigations of his political opponents. This is the man whom the President and the U.S. Senate put in charge of these incredibly sensitive searches. And Bongino’s replacement as Deputy Director, Andrew Bailey, is a highly partisan election denier who recently directed a raid on a Georgia election office in an effort to justify Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories. I don’t know about my colleagues, but this so-called reform makes me feel worse, not better.

So the grand reform that was supposed to provide meaningful oversight of the FBI’s most sensitive surveillance activities ended up placing that authority in the hands of a conspiracy theorist, followed by a partisan election denier. And just to make the whole thing even more farcical, Wyden notes that the FBI has refused to even keep a basic record of these searches:

But it’s even worse than it looks. The FBI has refused to even keep track of all of the sensitive searches the Deputy Director has considered. The Inspector General urged the FBI to just put this information into a simple spreadsheet and they refused to do it. That is how much the FBI does not want oversight.

They won’t maintain a spreadsheet. The Inspector General asked them to track their use of a sensitive surveillance power using what amounts to a basic Excel file, and the FBI said no. That’s the state of “reform” for Section 702 after the last re-auth.

Wyden has also been sounding the alarm about the expansion of who can be forced to spy on behalf of the government, thanks to a provision jammed into the last reauthorization that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider” to cover essentially anyone with access to communications equipment. As Wyden explained:

Two years ago, during the last reauthorization debacle, something really bad happened. Over in the House, existing surveillance law was changed so that the government could force anyone with “access” to communications to secretly collect those communications for the government. As I pointed out at the time, that could mean anyone installing or repairing a cable box, or anyone responsible for a wifi router. It was a jaw-dropping expansion of authorities that could end up forcing countless ordinary Americans to secretly help the government spy on their fellow citizens.

The Biden administration apparently promised to use this authority narrowly. But, of course, the Trump administration has made no such promise. As we say with every expansion of executive authority, just imagine how the worst possible president from the opposing party would use it. And now we don’t have to wonder any more.

Wyden correctly points out that secret promises from a prior administration are worth exactly nothing:

But here’s the other thing – whatever secret promise the Biden Administration made about using these vast, unchecked authorities with restraint, the current administration clearly isn’t going to feel bound by that promise. So whatever the previous administration intended to accomplish with that provision, there is absolutely nothing preventing the current administration from conscripting those cable repair and tech support men and women to secretly spy on Americans.

So to tally this up: Congress is about to vote on reauthorizing Section 702 with a secret legal interpretation that Wyden says will stun the public when it’s eventually revealed, with “reforms” that placed surveillance approval authority in the hands of conspiracy theorists who won’t even keep a spreadsheet, with a massively expanded definition of who can be forced to help the government spy, with secret promises about restraint that the current administration has no intention of honoring, and with a nominee to lead the NSA who won’t commit to following the Constitution.

The Wyden Siren is blaring. And if history is any guide — and it has been, without exception — whatever is behind the classification curtain is worse than what we can see from the outside.

$BLEEBZORX chart

Most of the world's software infrastructure is, or is based upon, open source. The developers and supporters of some of it, for example the Linux kernel, and the major compilers, are paid by technology companies because they are critical to their business. Other, less visible but similarly critical parts are supported by lone volunteers. Apart from the unfairness, this can lead to serious vulnerabilities. Back in 2018 I wrote about one such vulnerability, the event-stream hack, in Securing The Software Supply Chain

The attackers targeted a widely-used, fairly old package that was still being maintained by the original author, a volunteer. They offered to take over what had become a burdensome task, and the offer was accepted. Now, despite the fact that the attacker was just an e-mail address, they were the official maintainer of the package and could authorize changes.

The change they authorized included code to steal cryptocurrencies.

In 2020 I wrote a detailed post about this problem entitled Supporting Open Source Software. Recently the topic re-surfaced on an e-mail alias I read. But what triggered the post below the fold was that this coincided with yet another fascinating piece from Matt Levine and his laugh-out-loud follow-up the next day.

In Supporting Open Source Software I discussed Cameron Neylon's 2017 paper on a related problem, Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson can Teach us:

Neylon starts by identifying the three possible models for the sustainability of scholarly infrastructures:

Infrastructures for data, such as repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards are public goods. This means that finding sustainable economic models to support them is a challenge. This is due to free-loading, where someone who does not contribute to the support of the infrastructure nonetheless gains the benefit of it. The work of Mancur Olson (1965) suggests there are only three ways to address this for large groups: compulsion (often as some form of taxation) to support the infrastructure; the provision of non-collective (club) goods to those who contribute; or mechanisms that change the effective number of participants in the negotiation.

In other words, the choices for sustainability are "taxation, byproduct, oligopoly".

"Taxation" in this context means some mechanism for compelling some or all users to pay. I summarized these choices thus:

• Taxation conflicts with the "free as in beer, free as in speech" ethos of open source.
• Byproduct is, in effect, the "Red Hat" model of free software with paid support. Red Hat, the second place contributor to the Linux kernel and worth $34B when acquired by IBM last year. Others using this model may not have been quite as successful, but many have managed to survive (the LOCKSS program runs this way) and some to flourish (e.g. Canonical).
• Oligopoly is what happens in practice. Take, for example, the Linux Foundation, which is:
  

  supported by members such as AT&T, Cisco, Fujitsu, Google, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, Oracle, Orange S.A., Qualcomm, Samsung, Tencent, and VMware, as well as developers from around the world

  It is pretty clear the the corporate members, and especially the big contributors like Intel, have more influence than the "developers from around the world".

On the e-mail list my friend Chuck McManis argued for taxation, writing:

Rather than "free" software, you need "community" software. The users of that software are taxed proportionately to their use and the taxes are used to fund maintenance. Using a progressive tax like income tax you can adjust the cost burden from 'free' for people who are not creating value with it, they are just using it. To 'high' for people whose entire enterprise wouldn't exist if they didn't have access to it. That means and enforceable requirement to pay, and an IP protection structure that prevents theft by simple translation.

It is unfortunate that many technologically oriented people are not thinking more deeply about macro economics as solutions to this problem where "open source" used to be "roads" or "sewers" or "electricity wires" or "ship harbors" were things used by everyone but needed to be paid for and maintained.

Source

My response was that Chuck's examples taught both positive and negative lessons:

The thing that we know from long experience with the mechanisms for funding physical infrastructure like these examples is that over time they work less and less well. One only has to drive on California roads to know this is true. It is why most of the bridges in the US and elsewhere are life-expired (see Fern Hollow Bridge).

Thanks to inflation and feature creep the cost of maintenance increases faster than politics can increase the funding for it.

But the very next day Matt Levine's "Money Stuff" Bloomberg column Memecoin Venture Capital described a funding mechanism that Mancur Olson hadn't considered:

You launch a project, and it has a name, The Bleebzorx Network or whatever, and it has some business plan, and if the plan works it will make money. And then you go out to investors and you say “buy some Bleebzorx Tokens if you believe in my project,” and the investors are like “oh you are a smart founder and your project sounds good, we are interested, what do we get if we buy Bleebzorx Tokens,” and you say “well you get Bleebzorx Tokens.” And the investors, if they come from traditional financial backgrounds, say “no we know we get that, but like, what economic rights do these tokens have? What is their connection to the underlying project?” And you say “oh, nothing, they are just tokens. They just have the same name as the project.” And they say “well will you share your profits from the project with the token holders,” and you say “lol absolutely not.” And they say “well then why would we pay for these tokens? Even if the project succeeds beyond our wildest expectations, why would that make the tokens worth money?” And you say: “It just will. People will be like ‘oh, the Bleebzorx Project is good, we’d better buy some Bleebzorx Tokens.’ So they’ll buy tokens and the price will go up. They won’t overthink it, so neither should you. Just buy the tokens and you’ll make money.” Loosely speaking, these tokens are called “meme tokens,” or “memecoins”: They have some memetic association with your project, but no economic rights.

The context for Levin's discoveryof this innovative funding mechanism was that:

On Jan. 1, Steve Yegge, a famous software developer and writer, announced a project called Gas Town, which you might approximately describe as “an IDE for vibe-coding.” People seem to like it. Yegge did not raise a bunch of money to build Gas Town; he built it himself, apparently for fun. His plans to monetize it were, as far as I can tell, quite vague, in that optimistic open-source-y “if you build something cool the money will work itself out” sort of way. (“I’ve already started to get strange offers, from people sniffing around early rumors of Gas Town, to pay me to sit at home and be myself,” he wrote, though also: “I shared Gas Town with Anthropic in November.” If you build something cool in artificial intelligence these days, the money really does work itself out.)

The way it did " work itself out" was fascinating. Yegge got a LinkedIn messagea:

The LinkedIn message said that someone had set up a token “for” Gas Town on a crypto platform named, delightfully, Bags. The way Bags works is that anyone can set up a memecoin, and then maybe people will trade it, and if they trade it the platform will collect fees, and whoever sets up the memecoin can collect those trading fees, or direct them to whomever she wants to get them. So someone set up a Gas Town token — “$GAS” — on Bags, and directed the fees to Yegge. Millions of dollars’ worth of $GAS traded, for some reason, generating tens of thousands of dollars of fees waiting for Yegge.

Yegge is a good writer and his account in BAGS and the Creator Economy is worth reading in full.

The next day Levine returned to the story:

In describing this mechanism of financing through memecoins, I made a joke about “The Bleebzorx Network,” so of course someone launched that on Bags. The royalties (i.e. trading fees), apparently, are directed to my X account. I don’t know what that means, exactly; I assume that it means that I can collect the royalties and no one else can. I have not collected the royalties, I do not know how to collect the royalties, and I would not collect the royalties even if I could. (As of noon today they were about $9,500.)

I think "OK, that's a good joke". But then I read on for the full ridiculous situation:

1. I have no involvement in this and do not endorse it. I suppose I should have anticipated that something like this would happen, but I honestly didn’t.
2. While I do not give investing advice, this is obviously dumb and I personally would not, and will not, buy any $BLEEBZORX. In fact, I will go so far as to say that, if you do buy it, you will definitely lose 100% of the money that you put into $BLEEBZORX, and also your self-respect and the respect of your loved ones. “Ooh I bought Bleebzorx tokens,” listen to yourself.
3. I am not going to collect the royalties that are supposedly accruing in my name.
4. That said, I do understand that memecoins run on attention and that, by writing about this, I might increase its price and volume and thus the royalties. (“Allow me to get richer just by telling you about it,” Yegge wrote.) I also recognize that many of the people who emailed me to tell me about it probably own $BLEEBZORX coins and were hoping that I would write about it so the price would go up. I am writing about it for journalistic and amusement purposes, not to pump it, but I recognize that in doing so I might be pumping it.
5. I am trying not to! I really truly do not want you to go around trading $BLEEBZORX for speculation or to generate royalties for me, for a variety of reasons, including (1) I will not collect the royalties so you’re not doing me any favors, (2) the thing above about people ruining their lives by being associated with memecoins and (3) I like to think that this column is a classy establishment and I would be very embarrassed if my readers were going around falling for dumb memecoin pumps.
6. Because memecoins thrive on attention, I am not going to write about this again. I will pay no more attention to $BLEEBZORX, so you should not buy it to bet on my continued attention.

Levine understands that there is a darker side to this:

But, for another thing, Yegge eventually posted about it. Not — apparently — because he had anything to do with its creation, or because it has anything to do with Gas Town. But because someone sent him a LinkedIn message about it, and the LinkedIn message promised him money, and the money was there. So he posted about it, knowing that doing so would drive attention to $GAS, which would drive more trading of $GAS, which would make him more money. “Allow me to get richer just by telling you about it,” he wrote, correctly. (As of about noon today it had generated more than $290,000 of earnings for him.) That’s how memecoins work! You own them, you tell people about them, you get richer.

So Yegge got $290K richer by pumping $GAS. But Levine asks the real question:

Why did someone do this? Why did someone create $GAS, and why did they (or someone else) message Yegge about it? Why did the creator allocate 99% of the trading fees to Yegge, rather than keeping them for herself? Presumably the creator gave Yegge the trading fees to (1) make it seem more legitimately connected to Gas Town and (2) entice Yegge to post about it. And presumably the creator kept, not the royalties, but a lot of $GAS coins for herself. You set up the coin, you distribute some, you keep a lot yourself, you generate some royalties, you send it to Yegge, you get him to post, the coin goes up and you sell at a profit. The price of $GAS spiked from less than $0.01 to more than $0.04 when Yegge posted about it, peaking at a market value of about $40 million. (Then it collapsed again and now it’s back below $0.001, which is the normal fate of a memecoin.)

Yegge and the promoters of $GAS got richer through a classic cryptocurrency rug pull. David Gerard is all over this in Steve Yegge’s Gas Town: Vibe coding goes crypto scam. He starts with the background:

Steve Yegge is a renowned software developer. He’s done this for thirty-odd years. Senior engineer at Amazon then Google, blogger on the art of programming. Yegge was highly regarded.

Then he got his first hit of vibe code.

In March 2025, Yegge ran some old game code of his full of bugs and sections saying “TO DO” through an AI coding bot — and it fixed some of them! Steve was one-shotted.

The decline was sudden and incurable. He even cowrote a book with Gene Kim called Vibe Coding. Well, I say “wrote” — they used a chatbot for “draft generation and draft ranking”. They vibed the book text.

Yegge and Kim also worked on the DORA report on vibe coding. That’s the one that took people’s self-reported feelings about AI coding and put the vibes on graphs. Complete with error bars. Vibe statistics.

In the book intro, Yegge straight-up says:

It’s like playing a slot machine with infinite payout but also infinite loss potential.

… I’m completely addicted to this new way of coding, and I’m having the time of my life.

Generative AI is all about generating an addiction, as I've been pointing out for many months. And addictions cause irresponsible behavior:

Gas Town is a vibe coder orchestration tool. You get a whole bunch of Claude instances and you just set them to work on your verbal specification. Yegge’s described it as “Kubernetes for agents.” I’d say Kubernetes for sorcerer’s apprentices.

Gas Town is a machine for spending hundreds of dollars a day on Claude Code. All the money you’ve got? Gas Town wants it:

Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from.

Yegge’s an extremely experienced professional engineer. So he put care into Gas Town, right?

I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause.

Of course, as Gerard points out, the code is probably riddled with vulerabilites that someone who does read the code can exploit. But the irresponsibility is also financial:

Crypto bros have been pulling this scam for years. They say “please publicise our thing about you.” Then the scammer runs away with everyone’s money.

Developers consistently tell these scoundrels: “get outa here.” But not Steve Yegge, ’cos his brain is completely vibed: [Medium]

Woah, what am I, some sorta dumbass? Well yeah, actually. So I went for it.

… When I see a community of earnest young weird-word-using investors cheering Gas Town on, well, I hope they all get filthy rich.

… I’m not endorsing buying crypto, though I am very happy that people are doing it.

I bet you are.

Source

This is the whole history of the scam:

The GAS token was released 13 January at 1pm UTC. Yegge posted about it on 15 January at 2:45am UTC.

By the morning of 16 January, the price peaked at 4 cents a GAS coin! Then the scammer started dumping the tokens and taking money from the suckers. By 7am on 19 January, the GAS token had been fully pumped and dumped.

A couple of hours before the final dump, Yegge posted to his blog: [Medium]

Gas Town itself needs my full attention … So I had to step back from the community.

That and all the money’s gone. Vibe finance.

This is the attention economy in action, so memecoins are a mechanism for funding open source projects if and only if:

• You are a high-profile member of the community.
• And you are comfortable living on money from degenerate gamblers.
• And either you are happy to run pump-and-dump scams or, apparently like Yegge, are happy to front for them in return for a fraction of the take.

The bottom line is that the suckers who fell for the $GAS scam likely lost some $3M, around 90% of which ended up with the scammers and around 10% with Yegge. That's not a very efficient way to fund open source projects.

Recently I had the unique experience of running two session zeros in the same week. Preparing, running, and building campaigns off of these two session zeros helped me refine my own checklist for lazy campaign building which I offer to you today. The checklist below includes links to longer articles on related topics.

Initial Campaign Planning

Before you begin in earnest, consider your system, world, and theme and get your players on board.

• Choose an RPG system.
• Choose a campaign setting.
• Conduct informal conversations with players about your choices to get buy in. See Get Players to Play Other RPGs.

Pre-Session Zero Campaign Prep

Prepare for your session zero.

• Come up with your campaign's hook.
• Come up with your campaign's truths.
• Think up any worldbuilding questions you want to bring to your players like starting location details, gods, factions, and other unique things. Focus these questions on the things you actually want answers to.
• Develop your campaign one-pager.

Run Your Session Zero

Spend a session talking to your players about the campaign you're all going to enjoy.

• Go over the campaign one-pager.
• Discuss the bonds that tie characters to the theme of the campaign and to each other.
• Optionally, have players choose a starting faction.
• Optionally, have players answer worldbuilding questions.
• Go over Lines and Veils.
• Go over "Pause for a Minute".
• Have players build characters together.
• Run a short adventure if you have the time.

After Your Session Zero

Your session zero is complete, now it's time to build off of it and get to the next adventure you're going to run.

• Embrace spiral campaign development.
• Flesh out the starting location with details important to the characters – what locations do they need to set them off on adventures and to recover from them afterwards?
• Prepare three quests players can choose from for the characters next adventure.
• Use the eight steps to build future adventures and prepare for your next session.

Develop the World

At this point you hopefully have enough to start putting adventures in front of the characters and running games. Now you can step back and flesh out the larger world around the characters, continuing to focus on the characters and spiraling outwards.

• Develop three villains with their own goals and quests.
• Develop additional factions: one or two good, shady, and bad. Tie them to villains as needed.
• Develop or use an existing practical pantheon – gods and religions the characters worship, discover, or face off against.
• Develop a practical history – elements the characters can discover as they explore.
• Build a faction list you can roll on to flavor monuments, items, NPCs, locations, or encounters.
• Use the magic system and economy of your system of choice. Keep it simple. You can always add more advanced things later if you want.

Prep and run your next game!

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

• Location Moves, Simplest Quest Model, Your Own Prep Framework
• Dragonbane, Daggerheart, Tales of the Valiant Games
• Nighthunters by Tales of the Valiant
• Savage Arctic For Shadowdark by Jeff Stevens
• Dungeons Inc by Merry Mushman
• Halls of Arden Vul Bundle of Holding
• Index Card RPG GM's Guide and Player's Guide
• Dungeon Masterpiece on Four Indie RPGs
• Crows Playtest with James Introcaso

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

• Antagonistic Relationships with Warlock Patrons
• Roles for Players to Help Run the Game
• Missing Players with Current Connections
• Ninth Step for Larger World Ideas

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

• Location Moves
• The Simplest Quest Model
• Your Own Prep Framework
• Tales of the Valiant Night Hunters Kickstarter
• Savage Arctic by Jeff Stevens Kickstarter
• Dungeon Inc Kickstarter
• Halls of Arden Vul Bundle of Holding
• New ICRPG Books
• ICRPG Video
• Dungeon Masterpiece on Four Indie RPGs

Last week I also posted a YouTube video on The Twin Dragons – Dragon Empire Prep Session 52.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

• Be wary of Groundhog Day adventures where characters repeat a time loop. They can get repetitive and frustrating.
• Don’t discount simple adventure structures. An NPC wants the characters to do something at a location.
• Seed two or three future quests while the characters finish their current one.
• Ask players regularly what they’re enjoying about the game and what they want to see more of.
• Write down notable characters’ abilities so you can offer situations where they can showcase them.
• Add relics — flavorful items with a single use of a powerful spell — to your treasure rewards.
• Keep things simple.

Related Articles

• The Simplest Quest Model
• Running Session Zeros
• Prep Three Quests

Get More from Sly Flourish

• Articles
• Newsletter
• Bookstore
• Patreon
• Podcast
• YouTube

Buy Sly Flourish's Books

• City of Arches
• Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master
• Lazy DM's Companion
• Lazy DM's Workbook
• Forge of Foes
• Fantastic Lairs
• Ruins of the Grendleroot
• Fantastic Adventures
• Fantastic Locations

Have a question or want to contact me? Check out Sly Flourish's Frequently Asked Questions.

I don’t know what depression feels like for other people, but I can tell I’m headed down into the muck when my internal monologue turns against me. It’s got a handful of phrases that it repeats over and over when things start to go bad, and one favorite is “Nothing you do matters.”

I’ve been getting that one a lot lately. I know, rationally, that it’s not true. A lot of what I do matters, to my family and my friends and myself. But, you know how it is: this is my mental illness; there are many like it, but this one is mine.

Why this particular phrase at this particular time stings so much is because it’s not entirely untrue, specifically with regard to my profession. I’m a computer programmer, see, and there has been a lot going on.

AI.

Sigh.

They rhyme for a reason.

I’m not talking about the the razor-sharp edge, where people eagerly bleed, running AI-based agents that free them from the burden of responding to e-mails from their friends. (Or people who were formerly their friends, given they don’t rate an actual response.)

And I’m not talking about the churning, smoking, shambling software production stacks inspired by dystopian hellscapes. (The Mayor of Gas Town is literally named “The People Eater.” Little too on the nose there, pal.)

And I’m not talking about the grand philosophical debates from our deepest thinkers and our best minds, if computers have risen to sentience, to consciousness. (Spoiler: No. Don’t be stupid. Jesus.)

And I’m not even talking about the moral, ethical, social, environmental, or economic impact of AI, because nobody else is either. Boooring.

What I am talking about is being replaced, about becoming expendable, about machines gaining the ability to adequately perform a very specific function that was previously the exclusive domain of skull meat.

What I’m talking about is that nothing I do matters. That nothing I can do matters.

In just the past few months, what was wild-eyed science fiction is now workaday reality. I’ve been dubious about the prospects of LLMs creating code (and lots and lots of other things) for as long as they’ve existed, but it’s hard to argue with the latest wave and their abilities from a purely practical, purely capitalistic, purely ship-something-anything perspective — the perspective that pays the bills. I’ve seen self-professed non-technical people bring functioning code into being, and that bests a significant number of actual humans I’ve worked with.

The legend has John Henry — the very best in the world — winning his battle against a machine, only to lose the war by, y’know, dying. And I sure as hell ain’t no John Henry. How many steel-drivin’ men take one look at their new opponent and just walk away? How many are making the right decision by doing so?

There are a thousand factors at play here (most of which are still in motion) but for plenty of small-scale, snap-together projects, something like Anthropic’s Claude Code or OpenAI’s Codex will be good enough, for economically-viable values of both “good” and “enough.” They’ll either burp up scripts that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise, or do (some of) the work of (some) junior or mid-level coders (somewhat) faster and cheaper. But the direction things are headed seems pretty clear.

Is the code any good? I don’t know. Who cares? Nobody looks at it anyway. AI produces a result, and results are what matter, and if you’re waiting for quality to factor significantly into that equation, I’ve got some bad news about the last 40 years of professional software development for you.

There are plenty of people I know — they’re not all professional programmers, but most are; people I respect and admire and envy — who have enthusiastically embraced this particular steam engine. Paul Ford wrote a wonderful essay about both his qualms and his excitement — Qualms: 4, Excitement: 6, final — and if what was being replaced wasn’t the basis for my definition of self, I might feel the same. I can ignore moral, ethical, social, environmental, and economic externalities just as well as the next guy.

But I am a programmer. Just like I’m a father and a husband and a son and a friend. It’s not something I do, it’s something that is fundamental to the core of my being. Like overly dramatic phrasing.

I got into computers because solving puzzles was fun, and building worlds was fun, and making things — the process of making things — was fun, down at the granular level. It was nice to have something at the end, but the act of creation was the exciting part. I suspect that predilection will begin to disappear (in commercial environments, at the very least), now that the people who do it — who want who do it — can be replaced. The journey actually was the reward for some subset of weird little freaks, but you can now skip all that crap and just jump to the end and get on with it.

People will argue that speaking English to LLMs is just another level of abstraction away from the physics of how the machine actually works. And while that’s technically true — the worst kind of true — it also misses the point. Industrialization fundamentally changes things, by quantum degrees. A Ding Dong from a factory is not the same thing as a gâteau au chocolat et crème chantilly from a baker which is not the same thing as cramming chunks of chocolate and scoops of whipped cream directly into your mouth while standing in front of the fridge at 2:00am. The level of care, of personalization, of intimacy — both given and taken — changes its nature. Digging a trench is a very different thing that telling someone to dig a trench. Assembling a clock is a very different thing than asking Siri for the time.

I was lucky enough to have a trench-digging enthusiasm when it was economically advantageous to do so. I managed to pretty much exactly hit the window when deep-nerd brain chemistry could produce a viable, even lucrative, career. I am fortunate to be able to lean into an early senescence and walk (or be pushed) away, as what I want to do and what the world wants me to do diverge.

It still makes me sad, though, that what I’ve spent 45 years of my life toiling at will likely end up as a footnote, the providence of folksy artisans and historical reenactors. I didn’t leave a dent in the universe so much as splatted against it. The world no longer has a need for what I somewhat sardonically call my art. We are all product managers now, pleading with obtuse underlings to go back and try again and to get it right this time. I remain a father and husband and son and friend, but the need for what I can do — the need for what programmers can do — is shrinking, and my conception of myself and my usefulness along with it.

There will be more software than ever, as its production is automated; we are entering the industrial age of the digital age. But less of this code will be elegant, or considerate, or graceful. Less of it will be created by removing what isn’t David, and less of it will be driven by a human understanding of human needs.

That was something I did that mattered. I’ll miss it.