Sidetracked

2000 Metres to Andriivka, the Sisyphean gaze, and the weaponization of attention

2026-04-05T00:00:00.000Z

I watched 2000 Metres to Andriivka recently. It's an incredible film using footage from Ukrainian soldiers' helmet cams, specifically during the liberation of Andriivka.

It made me realise something: geopolitical documentaries of this type are inherently repulsive. Nobody wants to know that Ukraine is losing terribly and that soldiers are losing their lives, and certainly nobody wants to see that emphasised for upwards of 2 hours.

An incredibly tragic film like this is fighting an uphill battle between informing the viewer and not driving them away. It has to strike a balance between the natural want/duty to be informed, while not crossing into "this is just gore from the Ukrainian frontlines".

You can talk about Ukrainian casualties as a statistic (which distances you) or show actual soldiers in actual conditions (which doesn't). The film chooses the latter because abstraction makes it easier to look away. A number is manageable, a person is not.

When it comes to the duty to be informed, they work. I've learnt a lot about the war, and these documentaries have helped me become more educated and form my opinion, but it's not something you want to know.

It cannot be good, in any stretch of the word, to watch this type of content, the sheer amount of tragedies is horrifying. In fact, it makes the viewer less sensitive to it. If you felt the full weight of each death, you'd be catatonic by the time credits roll.

This protective mechanism that keeps you from being overwhelmed also makes it easier to rationalise inaction or to treat distant suffering as less urgent than nearby concerns. It's not a clean problem with a clean solution.

But, it's not entertainment. I don't "enjoy" watching them, rather, they're something I feel I need to watch, because I need to know.

Knowledge is power, right? You feel a duty to be informed, because if you're not, you can't fight the terrible things happening. The alternative, ignorance, feels like a betrayal of the people actually living through this.

The especially dreadful part is that "knowledge is power" usually applies to situations where you can do something with that knowledge; but I'm not going to start fighting on the Ukrainian frontlines!

It's powerless knowledge. However, it does make the public more agitated and it does spawn indirect action. The most prominent example is protests.

Witnessing soldiers dying tragically on the frontlines over and over again, it's objectively bad for your cortisol levels, sleep, and general sense of safety in the world. However, the sheer amount of content coming out from Ukraine is unprecedented, and the alternative is turning a blind eye, effectively abandoning Ukraine.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, it isn't. See, foreign aid for Ukraine is a very fragile thing. Most governments aren't altruist, they support Ukraine because it makes citizens happy.

A decent amount of people are incredibly engaged with this war, and would be outraged if their government dropped aid. And those people, they are the main reason Ukraine gets the aid it does.

If everyone has their eyes on a government, it's harder for them to do something harmful. Once that gaze drops, it's free game.

For example, in late 2025, several major Western powers (including a pivot in US policy) began "reviewing" aid (essentially testing the waters to see if they could stop), leading to temporary suspensions that cost lives on the front.

It's effectively Sisyphus and his rock. Except, he stops pushing, he dies. Here: you stop looking, they die.

It's something genuinely trapped, not metaphorically, actually trapped. The structure doesn't permit a good solution; it only permits choosing which bad option you can live with.

The thing that makes this different from abstract ethical dilemmas is that it's happening now, and the people it affects are real. That's what prevents you from just opting out with a clear conscience. You can't think "well, this isn't my problem" and feel right about it, because the alternative to your attention has real consequences for real people.

There is no resolution to offer here. The structure of the problem doesn't permit one. It's a genuinely difficult position where every choice carries a real cost, and the costs don't balance out neatly.

You aren't directly acting, you're hoping that your awareness will convince someone else to pull a lever, and that person is only pulling it because public pressure exists. It's a chain of indirect incentives, and every link in it is fragile.

Governments don't aid Ukraine because they inherently care. They aid it because voters care (which requires public awareness), it's strategically useful (which can change), and it's politically convenient (which is temporary).

Remove any of those and the chain breaks. And you're aware of exactly how easily it breaks. You know that if public attention drops, if a more pressing domestic issue emerges, if the geopolitical calculation shifts, the aid can stop. You're not pushing the rock yourself, you're trying to keep enough people aware that the rock gets pushed.

And the party you're relying on, the government, the public, the international community, they don't have your commitment. They have competing interests. Your psychological cost, your sleep disruption, your elevated cortisol, none of that factors into whether they continue. You bear the cost of awareness; they have the power to act or not act.

It's not just that you feel powerless (which would be bad enough). It's that you're dependent on the continued attention and goodwill of actors who don't share your stakes in the outcome. You're trying to maintain pressure on a system that can outlast your capacity to maintain it.

Which means you're left bearing the psychological cost of awareness without the satisfaction of direct action. You know things are terrible, you're carrying that knowledge, and your only available response is indirect, voting differently, donating to aid organisations, maybe mentioning it in conversation. These aren't nothing, but they also feel inadequate relative to the scale of what you've learned.

There's something particularly dreadful about that because it creates a kind of obligation that can never feel complete. Unlike someone actually fighting, where actions have immediate, visible consequences, the informed viewer is perpetually in a state of "is this enough?" The knowledge creates responsibility, but the responsibility has no clear fulfilment.

Traditionally, if you knew a fire was burning, it was so you could grab a bucket. Now, we have high-definition, 4K views of fires on the other side of the planet, and our buckets are just social media posts or a ballot box.

Political leaders only send billions in aid if they feel pressured to. That agitation is fueled by a public that understands the stakes. If the public was ignorant, the political cost of helping would be too high.

It's weaponizing your attention. How long? How long can you keep indirectly fighting this war? How long can you go knowing that your attention is keeping Ukraine alive? How long can you survive that burden?

That's the actual question underneath all of this, and it's not rhetorical, it's the one that will eventually break the chain.

You can't sustain that indefinitely. Attention as a resource is finite. Moral obligation as fuel for psychological endurance has a limit. At some point, the cumulative cost of knowing you're carrying someone else's survival on your shoulders, knowing that your sleep, your peace of mind, your mental health is being traded for foreign aid decisions, it becomes unsustainable.

And goverments know this. Or rather, they don't know and don't care, which amounts to the same thing. The structure of international aid doesn't account for the psychological cost to the people maintaining public attention. It just assumes attention will be there. Until it isn't.

So you're on a timer. Not consciously, but mechanically. Eventually either you burn out and stop consuming the content (which weakens the pressure), you continue and the psychological damage accumulates, something else captures public attention and the chain breaks anyway, or the war ends (in some form, not necessarily favourably).

And you'll be aware of all of this the entire time. You can't pretend the burden isn't real. You can't trick yourself into thinking your attention is consequence-free. You're trapped between knowing that you need to look and knowing that looking is harming you, and neither option resolves. Your conscience is being used as a tool, and the tool will eventually break because tools wear out.

And there's the argument of "well, surely one person (me) doesnt matter that much?", which I guess is true on a very surface level, but everyone is thinking that.

Everyone is undergoing this and having to fuel the funding for Ukraine, even if indirectly. And there isn't strength in numbers, because people aren't numbers. Everyone supporting Ukraine has their own life, and this isn't a situation where burden becomes lighter when shared. It just means the damage is distributed rather than concentrated.

Everyone carrying this knows they're carrying it. The Ukrainian aid worker knows. The person donating. The viewer of the documentary. The activist. The voter deciding on policy. Everyone's aware that they're part of a chain that could break, and everyone's experiencing the psychological cost of that awareness differently.

And that fragmentation is itself destabilising. You can't look around and see a unified movement that will sustain itself, you see individuals, all separately deciding whether this burden is worth bearing, all hitting their own breaking points at different times. There's no distributed strength because there's no actual coordination, just parallel individual struggles with the same impossible question.

The weight doesn't dissipate because others carry it. It might even intensify it, because you're aware that everyone else is also burning out, also hitting limits, also wondering how long they can sustain this. You're not part of a movement with clear purpose and defined roles. You're part of a diffuse mass of people all trying to individually maintain something that requires collective will.

And collective will, by definition, requires that the collective doesn't all simultaneously decide the cost is too high. Not because one more person watching creates proportional impact, but because it's designed to break when a certain percentage of people simultaneously opt out. That's different from diffusion of responsibility. That's a structural vulnerability.

The act of looking changes the outcome, not always positively, but the act of looking also changes the observer, and not always for the better.

Looking at 2000 Metres to Andriivka isn't passive observation. The act of watching changes the material outcome, it contributes (however marginally and indirectly) to aid, policy, and attention. But it simultaneously changes you. It damages your psychology, it burdens your conscience, it makes you aware of a responsibility you can't fully discharge.

And you can't separate those effects. You can't watch and remain unchanged while the outcome stays changed. The same act that keeps the chain alive is the one that wears you down.

That's why it's difficult to watch. It's not difficult because it's technically graphic or emotionally manipulative. It's difficult because watching it obligates you. The act of looking creates a debt that you carry forward, and you know you're carrying it.

It's assuming sustaining the system (keeping aid flowing, keeping attention on Ukraine) is the problem. It's not. The problem is that the system requires psychological damage to function. Being complicit in keeping aid flowing to Ukraine isn't the moral failure. the moral failure is the structures that make that the only available option.

It's not about being morally complicit by participating in it. It's about being stuck in it. Not to mention, this will always happen. Our minds become desensitised to things eventually, and this war is no different.

Once things go on long enough, they become natural, we accept it, and we stop fighting.

And the worst part is that this trap doesn't have an escape because it's not a logical puzzle, it's a structural feature of how attention, suffering, and responsibility intersect in a world with asymmetric power and knowledge. There's no clever argument that dissolves it.

There is no clean solution, but it's not that simple, and it never is. Within the current system, sure, there is nothing in the current structure.

But structures can shift. The unsustainability of attention-as-fuel for aid policy is actually visible to policy makers. The fact that they don't account for it isn't because it's invisible, it's because accounting for it would require them to either build more resilient systems for aid that don't depend on viral public attention, or admit that their foreign policy is hostage to the psychological endurance of distant observers. Neither is appealing to them.

This isn't claiming that caring about Ukraine and being on the battlefield are equivalent, this isn't just "government bad", and this isn't about 2000 Metres to Andriivka. It never was.

Witnessing does something to your values, your judgement, your sense of what matters, that isn't purely corrosive. It allows you to make better decisions, vote better, protest, and help Ukraine push the line. But, it's still harmful. Not purely, but partly.

There is still value in knowing, but you're stuck with the weight of knowing what you know.

Sonic Colours, The Death of Sincerity, and the Cowardice of Being Too Cool for Your Own Premise

2026-02-22T00:00:00.000Z

I have spent the last week trapped in Dr. Eggman’s Incredible Interstellar Amusement Park, and I have returned with notes.

Let me set the scene: It's the year of Sonic Free Riders! You log on to Sonic Stadium, cyberbully some people who think Sonaze is a good ship, express your distaste for the Unleashed werehog stages, and hey, wait a minute! There's a new Sonic game releasing for Wii! And critics... love it? Hold on, did Sega actually make a Sonic game critics don't hate? Even IGN seems to like it, the guys infamous for hating Sonic!

Yes, in fact they did make a game critics didn't hate. Remember, it's 2010, and critics are just fed up with Sonic right now. Sonic's 'too many friends' had become a phrase critics were using with genuine contempt, and nearly every game review site hated the serious stories of Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic '06.

In hindsight, most critics were practically begging SEGA to just have a return to form, and go back to the simpler stories of the 90s. And Sonic Colours delivered. It did so by listening to critics and the fans who had already left, while ignoring everyone who stayed.

It also provided a masterclass in what happens when you let irony overtake genuine love for a franchise, and what happens when you listen to critics, while listening only to the fans who had already defected.

It turned Sonic into a sociopath, and Miles into nothing.

Before I start...

I need to introduce something very important. We have learned from writer Warren Graff that they had 'very little say' and that every story point was handed down by SEGA.

At first glance, you very well might blame Pontac and Graff, I know I did, but this tweet changes the flavour of the failure from cluelessness to cowardice. It means the people who own the legacy of the ARK and the tragedy of the Ancients were so embarrassed by their own history that they ordered their writers to mock it.

It wasn't two outsiders making fun of Sonic, it was Sonic’s own parents telling him to stop being so "cringe" in front of the critics.

The existence of a 'Sonic Game Bible' used to mandate this tone is the ultimate irony. Usually, a series bible protects the soul of a franchise. Here, it was used as a hit list. Every character trait that made the Adventure era resonate was apparently highlighted in red ink and ordered to be purged by the very people who wrote the book.

An ice-pick lobotomy and a two-tailed fox

Miles has been lobotomized here, reduced from a modest, genius mechanic into a walking Wikipedia page. In Sonic Adventure, Miles earned his genius. He built the Tornado 2 and learned to be independent, ultimately saving Station Square from Eggman. He was a "mighty little man" growing into his own hero. In Adventure, the stakes felt personal because the characters had internal lives.

In Colours, the stakes are purely external data points on Miles' iPad. He’s been reduced to a Doctor House archetype, minus the actual personality. In House MD, House always knows the specific time it takes for a snake bite to kill a human, here, Miles is just a smug, overconfident, supercilious fountain of exposition regarding Wisps. He no longer exists as a character growing independently, now he exists only to hold the "Translation Device", the ultimate "tell, don't show" narrative sin.

Tails didn't just lose his personality because of a lazy script, he was dismantled by design. If SEGA signed off on every "supercilious" line from the fox, it means the creators of the character no longer believed in his capacity for a hero’s journey. They traded his heart for a translation mechanic.

You can't just say the writers didn't get Tails, sure they admitted that they didn't know much about Sonic, but the harder truth is SEGA understood Tails perfectly, and they decided he was better off as a sentient search engine.

A company’s shield and the loss of agency

In one of the first cutscenes of the game, when Miles asks Sonic if they're going to "wreck" Eggman's plan, he replies:

"That's pretty much how we spend our time."

It's not particularly funny when you're guilty of the things you're mocking. Right off the bat, this line does two things wrong. It strips Sonic of his agency, turning a heroic act into "just another Tuesday," as if this is a low-stakes 90s sitcom.

There is nothing inherently wrong with self-deprecating humour or a tongue-in-cheek callout. The game tries to be one big joke about the Sonic franchise, and that is actually a decent premise.

For meta-humour to work, the writers have to actually love the thing they are poking fun at (like The LEGO Batman Movie), whereas here it feels like they are mocking it from the outside, because SEGA is forcing their hand. It fails because it doesn't just poke fun at the tropes, it acts like it's too good for them, and SEGA it as a shield to say 'we know this is stupid', therefore avoiding judgement.

A yellow iPad and the screams of the enslaved

Miles mentions that Yacker (one of the main Wisps) was saying "save us" over and over again. "Save us" is not something you say in the same tone as "my coffee was bitter this morning." I presume it was more like screaming.

From this, we can deduce that the Wisps have thoughts, feelings, and communication skills similar to a human. Yes, there is a translator involved, but there isn't exactly a translator for dogs. These are sentient beings. Meanwhile, Eggman is using them for battery acid. Their life force (Hyper-go-on energy) is being extracted from them in tubes to power Eggman's mind-control thingamajig.

By giving Miles a translator, SEGA/Sonic Team removed the need for animation and empathy. It strips Yacker of all personality; he could have been the next Chip, but instead, he feels like a collectible that occasionally squeaks. He is a plot device trying to mimic Chip without understanding what made Chip work.

In Sonic Unleashed, Sonic and Chip bonded through shared experiences, eating chocolate and exploring. Chip had agency, fears, and a growth arc.

He was initially terrified of Sonic, but they became true friends, making his departure meaningful. In Colours, the "bond" is technical. Sonic and Miles stand there while Sonic talks condescendingly to Yacker and a black box tells them the plot.

The "save us" plea becomes a data point for Miles to relay, not a call to action that strikes a chord in Sonic's soul.

Here, it is a literal alien slavery operation where sentient beings are being drained of their life force to power a brainwashing beam. You’d think the writing would respect that weight. But nope, it’s just one big joke.

The game’s most famous quips are "Baldy McNosehair" and "No copyright law in the universe is going to stop me!" These might be "funny" in total isolation, but within the media itself, the Wisp situation is treated as a minor inconvenience for Sonic to make a remark about.

A supercilious hero and copyright law

I'd like to define a word I'll be using a lot: supercilious. Oxford Dictionary defines it as: "behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others."

Earlier I called Miles supercilious in this game, and he is, but so is the entire game. It looks down on itself and the franchise it came from.

The characters essentially tear the world and immersion to bits, but the game doesn't actually dare to do anything to change the formula. If SEGA found the concept of a blue cartoon hedgehog fighting a 300 IQ evil genius so unbelievably embarrassing that they instructed their writers to poke fun at it at every opportunity, maybe do something to change it? There's a difference between a "fun adventure with high spirits" and "nothing matters, isn't this franchise embarrassing?"

The "no copyright law" line especially shatters the immersion because it ignores the actual suffering of the Wisps in favour of a quip that doesn't even make sense in the context of their world. Sonic is a cartoon hedgehog who values being free over anything else (there is a whole song literally named "Free" in Sonic Free Riders). Why would he know, or even care, what copyright law is?

This isn't just a bad joke, it’s corporate intrusion. Sonic isn't a legal scholar, he’s a force of nature. Take SA2, he didn't make legal quips, he just ran through the G.U.N. blockade because they were in his way. It's a joke that exists purely for the player, not for Sonic as a character. It's SEGA speaking directly through Sonic to make a reference, completely shattering any sense that this is a coherent world with its own internal logic.

And what's even worse is that the "no copyright law"" line isn't just a bad joke from Pontac and Graff, it’s SEGA using their icon to wink at the audience about their own intellectual property. It’s the ultimate sign that the "force of nature" had been successfully tamed into a brand ambassador.

Sonic shouldn't know what copyright law is. He’s not breaking the fourth wall in a clever way, SEGA was just using him as a mouthpiece. It turns Sonic from a character into a mascot suit. It doesn't belong in the mouth of a teenager who lives in a shack on a beach and fights gods. It shatters the verisimilitude of the world.

This tonal shift even affects how we perceive the voice. While almost anyone can 'be' Sonic if they capture that spirit, the Colours era lacks a certain maturity. It’s why a voice like Jaleel White’s worked for the zany 90s cartoons but would struggle with something like Sonic Adventure 2, a game with an extremely serious story - and for a story to have stakes, there has to be a grounded core. Without sincerity, the voice and the character lose their weight. He’s no longer a teenager who lives in a shack and fights gods, he’s a comedian doing a bit he’s already bored with.

I previously thought this was just something from two guys who didn't care. But with the new knowledge of that tweet, and that every word was vetted against a 'Sonic Game Bible' makes it worse. This wasn't a mistake, it was an execution. SEGA didn't just hire writers who were 'too cool' for the premise, they instructed them to be.

It's still authorial intrusion, it's still a comedian doing a bit, and it's still not breaking the 4th wall in any clever way. But they couldn't have done anything to change that, and SEGA wanted it that way.

A tragedy on the ARK and unprompted witticisms

The thing about Sonic Adventure 2's story, I didn't even realise how insane it is until now. That is because it treats itself in a humble and sincere manner. It's just happening, and you're a witness to it. I call Colours' writing supercilious because that's exactly what it is. It is not humble, and it is certainly not sincere. It is looking down at the franchise and saying "Isn't this so dumb, guys?"

Every "quip" that breaks the fourth wall is a reminder that the people in charge of the character don't seem to like the character. If Sonic doesn't care about the stakes, the player has no reason to care either. You cannot have a "hero" who thinks heroism is a chore.

To be a Sonic fan in the mid-2000s required a certain level of sincerity. You had to care about Shadow’s past, or Blaze’s duty, the tragedy of the Ancients, and the history of the Babylonians. Colours tells you that you were a fool for doing so. It frames the player's investment as the punchline to a ten-year-long joke.

You can’t make a good story if you don't consider the foundation to be good. "Supercilious" is the perfect word because it's not just self-deprecation, it's condescension. The game looks down at its own premise, its history, and the masterpieces that previous writers created. Above all, it’s making fun of you for caring. In Colours, the "joke" is that you, the player, are still here. It’s a "meta" commentary that nobody asked for, delivered with a smugness that implies SEGA is doing the franchise a favour by "fixing" it.

Colours is the result of mistaking smugness for cleverness, and a company gutting their own character because it wasn't "cool" enough: A game that thinks the worst thing a player could possibly do is actually care.

The Library of Alexandria has one key-holder (and they’re having a bad day)

2026-01-13T00:00:00.000Z

Well. I can't access The Cutting Room Floor anymore. Whenever I try, I get a 403 Forbidden status code.

According to Xkeeper, running TCRF is a one-person operation.

If you've been living under a rock, TCRF is THE resource for cut content in video games. And I do mean THE resource, it's pretty much the only one. TCRF is essentially the Library of Alexandria for video game archaeology.

If said one person decides that your IP range, region, or vibe is unwelcome, that history effectively ceases to exist for you. It's the Library of Alexandria, and one person holds a box of matches.

In the web's infancy, information was pretty scattered. Now there is The Resource™. If that one person running The Resource™ has a bad day or a personal grievance, well, they can tell you to go pound sand and there will be exactly nothing you can do about it.

FOSS and Wikis are built on the dream of decentralisation, yet they almost always coalesce around a single gatekeeper.

DeaDBeef, node-ipc, the literal Linux kernel, Python (pre-2018), Wikipedia (when it first started out), Wikidata, curl, SQLite, all these are examples of this exact thing happening.

On the surface, it seems open, but for all of them, there was ONE person — dictator, rather — who could do anything they wanted.

How dangerous is it that our collective knowledge of "what was left behind" in games relies on the server configurations of a single individual?

If they get hit by a bus or just get bored, does that data vanish? Most of TCRF is not archived elsewhere!

The early web was chaotic and decentralised (well, even that's debatable with the whole thing of buying a domain and potentially just having it taken away, but that's a whole other problem), it was scattered and there was no Library of Alexandria to burn, at least not like TCRF.

Nowadays, that has largely been traded for the convenience of a single wiki. If Xkeeper decides to go home and take his ball with them, the history of 1,000+ games becomes a 404.

Wikis like TCRF give off the impression of a public utility or a digital commons. Users, like me, contribute free labour under the assumption it's building something for everybody. But TCRF is an example of the truth, it's being a guest in someone else's house, and at any time they can kick you out and never let you back in.

It's donating your labour to a private server that can be gated at any moment.

Most people visiting TCRF are trying to study history. And one server config has decided a certain few don't exist. It's the gatekeeper saying "I don't care if you're a scholar, you look like a bot to my Nginx config!"

When you contribute to a wiki, you're not just writing history. You're increasing the value and gravity of that domain. By making TCRF one of the only meaningful resources, contributors inadvertently help build the walls that can later be used to lock them out.

In the physical world, if a library bans you, there is usually a human process, a conversation, a reason, a way to appeal. In the digital world — and TCRF (Xkeeper openly admits to blocking entire IP ranges, and in a rather enthusiastic manner) — your existence is reduced to an IP range.

If your ISP happens to share a range with a botnet or a country the admin dislikes, you are collateral damage in a silent war you didn't know was happening. History shouldn't be gated by a .conf file.

Users till the land (write articles, upload assets) for free, but they don't own the soil. The admin owns the domain, the database, and the hosting.

In the physical world, if a landlord kicks you off the land, the land still exists. In the digital world, if the admin bans your IP or nukes the DB, the "land" effectively vanishes for you. You’ve worked to build a wall that is now being used to keep you out.

An admin doesn't have to look you in the eye to ban you; they just have to add a CIDR block to a blacklist. It turns history into a privilege granted by your ISP's geographical location rather than a right of human curiosity.

We congregate around one "Authority" (TCRF, Wikipedia, Arch Wiki) because it’s efficient. But efficiency is the enemy of resilience.

The "older" internet contained a thousand libraries. If one burned, you went to the next. The "modern" internet is one massive library with a single entrance, and the guard at the door is tired, cranky, and overwhelmed by botnets.

Why do we contribute to these things? We think we are preserving history. If you want to write about a Majora's Mask beta leak, you write about it on TCRF. Why? Because that's where people will see it, and it will be useful.

When a single person runs a massive repository, they aren't just the librarian; they are the sole key-holder. If Xkeeper disappears, the domain registration eventually expires. Once the domain expires, the "Library" doesn't just close; it gets bulldozed and replaced with one weird trick insurance companies don't want you to know!

If TCRF blocks a certain country’s IP range to stop a DDoS, they have effectively declared that an entire nation’s scholars are collateral damage for the sake of one person’s server uptime. I bet TCRF's owner is really good at playing Monopoly.

Xkeeper seems to have a sense of pride in being a one-man show. This is often framed as "heroic" in tech circles, but I see it as systemic negligence.

If a physical museum with world-class artefacts had only one employee who also owned the building and the locks, we wouldn't call it a "dedicated project", we’d call it a hoarding situation.

It's incredibly lazy to use block an CIDR block in a situation like this, too. It's the nuclear option of sysadmin. It invites situations where people receive punishment for the heinous crime of sharing a CIDR block with a script kiddie.

The barrier to entry isn't just the code; it's the gravity. TCRF has decades of backlinks. If I start "The Better Cutting Room Floor" today, it will be buried on page 10 of Google results. We are trapped in a monopoly not of quality, but of momentum.

We are essentially donating our intellectual labour to a private asset. When you write a TCRF article, you aren't just contributing to "knowledge"; you are increasing the SEO value and Adsense potential (or just the personal prestige) of one person's domain. You are building a castle you aren't allowed to live in.

Because of TCRF's high domain authority, other sites or blogs covering the same content are buried. By being one of the only meaningful resources, TCRF hasn't just gathered information, it has displaced it. It has created a vacuum where no other library can grow, making its own potential failure a total extinction event for the data.

In engineering, a SPOF (Single Point Of Faliure) is a bug. In culture, we call it "dedication." I'd argue that if Xkeeper truly cared about the preservation of history over the control of it, they would have a succession plan or a decentralised mirror system. The fact that it remains a "one-person operation" is a choice to prioritise ego/control over the safety of the data. And we, for some reason, allow, and accept that.

It’s not just that the server might die, it’s that the intent of the owner is a single point of failure. If their "vibe" changes, the history changes.

If you want the prestige of being the Library of Alexandria, you lose the right to treat it like your personal Minecraft server.

I tried literally every server on Proton VPN, and as an extra middle finger from Xkeeper, all of them also returned 403 Forbidden.

But anyway, I still can't access TCRF, so pardon me while I burst into flames.

January 14, 2026 update:

Well, I'm tired of not being able to access TCRF. Time to contact a staff member!

"We'll need to know your IP address. You can use any of countless online services for this (just google "what is my IP"). Send your IP address to a staff member in DMs. My DMs are open for this, but you can pick any staff member you prefer." So, I get punished for being an introvert?

Anyway, our "lovely" converation went like this:

Me:

"Hello, I’m currently receiving a 403 Forbidden error when trying to access TCRF. This error is consistent across browsers and pages."

"To my knowledge, I have no badly behaving extensions (as I only use Ublock Origin), and I do not use VPNs nor proxies."

"I was directed here to provide my IP for unblocking. It is as follows: 196.39.70.254"

"Thank you for your time and patience on this matter. Good day."

Them:

"...that IP computes to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_Data, that's a cloud computing provider, so there's a VPN somewhere in there"

Me:

"i feared this would happen. let me explain: i understand the confusion, but I can clarify: i am a residential Webafrica customer on a Fibre-to-the-Home line."

"while the IP resolves to Dimension Data/NTT Group, that is because Webafrica acquired Mweb from Dimension Data and continues to utilise NTT’s infrastructure for its national backbone and IP transit. in the South African market, Dimension Data/NTT acts as the primary wholesaler for many consumer ISPs. IP address blocks are registered with regional registries and often list the original or upstream AS/organisation, not the retail ISP."

"if you check the PTR records for this IP, the hostname is 96-39-70-254.ftth.web.africa. the .ftth.web.africa suffix confirms this is a consumer fibre line (Fibre-to-the-Home) provided by Webafrica, not a cloud instance or a VPN exit node." "also, Webafrica acquired Mweb from Dimension Data/NTT, a Tier 1 IP provider, but it is now a distinct retail ISP serving consumers in South Africa. im happy to provide any more info you need"

Them:

"alright, I'm gonna trust you, I'll forward the IP and check back as soon as I know more"

I can't lie, I expected basic research before making claims that I'm a data centre. Yeah, I'm getting rather tilted by this.

YOURE SUPPOSED TO BE THE KNOWLEDGEABLE ONE HERE. It's backwards that I have to correct them,

Their first felt weirdly snarky, like they caught me red handed or something. Like I was trying to pull a fast one. You didn't catch anything.

Oh my, thank you so much for doing me the grand favour of researching before you make claims. And the 3 ellipses really adds to the snarkiness. Oh my, you caught me, I'm running a data centre and I want to scrape TCRF on exactly one IP.

The admin has seen a name they associate with "Cloud/VPN" and has immediately moved to the "I've caught you" phase of the conversation. They are using a surface-level lookup to dismiss my reality.

In the South African ISP market, WebAfrica (my ISP) relies heavily on the infrastructure of NTT/Dimension Data. When an admin sees "Dimension Data," they think AWS or DigitalOcean, but in South Africa, that is simply the backbone of consumer Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH).

Because I live in a region where the ISP infrastructure is consolidated under a name that looks like a cloud provider to a Western admin, I am being treated as a security threat. It’s a form of digital redlining. The "Library of Alexandria" is closed to me because my country's internet architecture doesn't fit the admin's narrow definition of what a "real person" looks like.

The sheer arrogance of "I'm gonna trust you" is breathtaking. It frames their own lack of technical due diligence as an act of personal charity toward me.

To a Western admin, "Dimension Data = Enterprise/Cloud." They didn't bother to check the PTR record or the FTTH suffix because they already had a "hit." It’s a confirmation bias that turns into digital discrimination.

The interaction had that distinct flavour of "guilty until proven innocent," where the burden of proof falls entirely on me, the person trying to access publicly contributed knowledge, to demonstrate I'm not a threat.

The three ellipses before accusing me of using a VPN is doing a lot of work there. It's the textual equivalent of a raised eyebrow, implying I'm being deceptive. When I'm the one who voluntarily provided my IP and explained my situation transparently.

And then: "I'm gonna trust you" as if they're doing me a favour by... checking whether my technically detailed explanation is accurate? That's not trust, that's just doing the absolute minimum due diligence before blocking someone.

I'm also just so pissed at the fact that they treated me like an idiot.

"this IP computes to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_Data"

What does that even mean? Did you use a reverse DNS lookup? Did you find the ASN and use that? Did you even do anything at all?

In networking, things don't "compute" to an organisation; they resolve (via DNS) or they are allocated (via ARIN/AFRINIC).

Reverse DNS (PTR): This is what actually matters for "who is this." As I found, my PTR resolved to web.africa. That is a human-readable confirmation of my ISP.
ASN (Autonomous System Number): This is the "big picture" routing. Dimension Data/NTT owns the the ASN, but WebAfrica owns the "customers."

By ignoring the PTR record and just looking at the ASN, the admin chose the bluntest, laziest tool available and then used it to "well, actually" me.

It is a special kind of hell to have to explain the basic mechanics of DNS and ISP transit to the person who has the power to silence you. We are living in an era where the people running the 'Libraries' have forgotten how the plumbing works, yet they still feel entitled to judge who deserves a drink.

So, let's recap:

I provide my IP address
They do a surface-level WHOIS lookup
They see "Dimension Data" and jump to conclusions
They accuse me of using a VPN
I have to write a technical explainer about South African ISP infrastructure
They graciously "trust" me
Then I got unblocked

So anyway, now I wanted to read the TCRF page on the SpongeBob movie game, so I opened all the pages in new tabs as I always do, but now I'm paranoid that I'll look like a bot. Thanks TCRF.

And I know what you're thinking, "well you can't expect a western admin to know the inner workings of South African telecom"

Then why do they pretend like they do?

January 27, 2026 update

I can't believe I'm actually writing this right now, but I left a comment like 2 weeks ago on Xkeeper's blog about my terrible experience with the staff, and the way they deny anyone who doesn't look like American IPs. I remember ending it off with "Is blocking an entire country because a Western admin doesn't recognise it some kind of genius moderation strategy I'm too stupid to understand?"

Every comment on their blog has to be hand-reviewed and allowed. It usually takes around 24 hours, from what I've seen. It's been over 2 weeks. They denied my comment. The absolute audacity. This is a new low, I expected better, even from them. I'm angry but I can't convey that, and it's overshadowed because of the fact I am utterly speechless right now. I keep alternating between rage and utter speechlessness because what kind of a coward does that? If you're going to be lazy about moderation and geo-descriminate in the process, don't act offended when someone calls you out.

So yeah. A small little blog attacking the owner, staff, and general moderation strategy of one of gaming's biggest sites. Some will call it stupid, some will call it brave. No matter what you call it, it's an explosive way to start the new year. Cheers.

Desktop Linux isn't ready (and I'm tired of pretending it is)

2025-12-20T00:00:00.000Z

Today I realised something. Desktop Linux isn't ready.

The day started off normal, I accidentally corrupted my root partition, so I installed Kubuntu as a quick fix.

I quickly realised, wow, Kubuntu lacks polish, and decided to install a new distro. But then I had to choose a distro. In my life, I've, tried many:

Ubuntu
Debian
Fedora
Fedora KDE
Zorin OS
Peppermint OS
Pop!_OS
elementaryOS
Hannah Montana Linux
Slackware
Arch
Gentoo
Bodhi
Vanilla OS
Salix
MX Linux
Pardus
Deepin
PureOS
NixOS
Clear Linux
Mageia
Gentoo
Endless OS
antiX
Tiny Core
Damn Small Linux
Trisquel
elementary OS
openSUSE
PCLinuxOS And that list is not exhaustive. There are so many I've forgotten about.

And today, nothing appealed to me. I loved Pop!_OS and COSMIC, but it's not feature complete, and there are other issues with that.

None of them are really a fit for me. I treat computers as a hobby, not an appliance, and while I enjoyed my time on Arch a LOT, and its probably worth revisiting, right now I'm in a spot where I'm reconsidering going back to Windows.

Right now, I'm in a very narrow middle ground. I don't want boring, locked-down, "just works" distros, heavy defaults, Snap, or distro-specific nonsense.

I also don't want constant maintenance, breakage, feeling like my system can collapse if I blink wrong.

I can run Arch, I had it going for 50 days and the thing that broke it? Me forgetting to check the news and installing a bad GRUB update, which then spiralled into 3 days of unsuccessful troubleshooting.

In some ways Ubuntu is definitely my favourite distro, It's rock solid because of GNOME, and it usually gets out of the way. I still hate apt though.

And it's the only distro, in my experience, where sleep and wake isn't russian roulette.

It's also a DE problem.

I'm a KDE fanboy, what can i say? I love Konqi and the Kommunity, and KDE Plasma itself. It's the kool desktop enviroment. Always bet on KDE.

But it also has all these weird little quirks, that GNOME does not, for example Plasma is adamant on not showing if you have unread notifications on the lock screen.

GNOME is rock solid and polished, but boring and more like a prison than anything. You need Dash to Dock and various other extensions, and it works well if you do, but it's just boring. And again, I treat computers both as a tool and a hobby.

True, that may be an oxymoron, but it also makes finding a distro even harder.

Another issue, on any distro other than Ubuntu, sleep/wake Russian roulette.

Sometimes it will wake perfectly, other times it will reboot entirely. And I like to just close my laptop's lid and pick up again instantly the next day and accumulate stupid large amounts of uptime. I want my laptop to be a laptop.

Pop!_OS (GNOME) has halted development because COSMIC reached epoch 1. Yeah I don't even need to say anything about that. COSMIC is incomplete. And so Pop!_OS isn't an option anymore for a tasteful Ubuntu fork.

And that made me realise, no distro offers what I want. I want to not be restricted and treated like an idiot, to have choice and control over my own system.

Desktop Linux is not ready for the casual user.

OK, maybe it is. I'm not normal, I treat computers as a hobby.

But do you really expect the average user to know how to install Arch just to get an OS that doesn't treat them like a goldfish? To know how to stop snapd from hijacking apt? To know why nothing seems to fit them well because most mainstream distros are all shit in their own ways? And how to fix that? Oh and also, even if you do notice snap hijacking, it ignores SIGINT while installing!

I love COSMIC and I hope it gets more feature complete, because I did test epoch 1 and the moment epoch 2 releases, I'm switching. But it's very much by Linux geeks, for Linux geeks. And so for a casual person who just wants to use their PC, yeah its not really very intuitive. And that's the best distro I've found.

Desktop Linux is conditionally ready for casual users, and those conditions are narrower than the community likes to admit.

For a truly casual user, these things must be true by default:

Install without reading a wiki
Updates never break boot
Sleep/wake never fails
Video, audio, Bluetooth work immediately
The desktop does not argue with expectations
The user never needs to know what a package manager is

Linux only meets this bar sometimes, and usually by accident. Ubuntu gets close, not because Linux is ready, but because Canonical papers over Linux’s cracks with engineering debt. And even that falls apart the moment someone steps even slightly off the golden path.

The part about knowing how to stop snap from hijacking apt, this is more serious than people realise: A casual user should never even encounter this question.

The fact that:

Ubuntu silently redirects installs (while ignoring Ctrl+C)
The community response is "just remove snapd"
Removing snapd breaks core assumptions

…is proof that desktop Linux is still designed by people who know too much.

The problems from knowing too much

A system that’s ready for casual users doesn’t require:

knowing which packaging system is "real"
knowing which one the distro secretly prefers
knowing how to undo it

Most mainstream distros and Linux THINGS are awful in their own ways.

Linux desktop development is fragmented along values, not users:

GNOME: "Users don’t need choices."
KDE: "Users should control everything."
Fedora: "Upstream purity matters more than UX."
Debian: "Stability over comfort."
Arch: "You’re responsible."
Ubuntu: "We’ll decide for you."
System76: "We’ll build the future, trust us."

None of these start from: "What does a normal person expect from a computer?"

They start from a flawed ideology that's being sold as something else.

Casual users don’t care about ideology, they care that closing the lid doesn’t reboot their laptop.

So, is desktop Linux "ready"?

For appliance users: Yes, if:

they buy hardware Linux likes
they never customise
they never ask "why"
they stay on the golden path

For even mildly curious users: No, because:

curiosity immediately exposes sharp edges
stepping off the path means self-support
polish and control rarely coexist

And dare I say it, Windows is the best AMD64 desktop operating system for casual users.

Windows isn’t elegant, respectful, or fun.

But it has one killer feature Linux still lacks: You can be curious without being punished.

You can:

install random things
ignore updates
close the lid for a week
come back and keep working

Desktop Linux is still built by people who like computers for people who like computers.

Linux geeks are terrible judges of casual usability.

Sometimes I just want to use my PC. This sentence matters more than all the distro talk combined.

That feeling is one of the reasons Windows still dominates, despite it's flaws.

It optimises for:

continuity
predictability
not needing to think

Linux desktops, historically, optimise for:

correctness
freedom
ideology
modularity

Those are great values, but they’re not usage-first.

You shouldn’t need to:

evaluate philosophies
understand trade-offs
anticipate breakage

…just to open your laptop and get on with your day.

Year of the Linux desktop

I hope and pray that this is not the year of the Linux desktop, and that it will not be anytime soon.

Because if this were "the year of Linux desktop" it would mean:

locking things down prematurely
freezing bad UX decisions
declaring victory too early

Linux desktop isn’t failing because it’s bad, it’s failing because it’s unfinished. And unfinished systems shouldn’t be mass-adopted.

Here’s the most accurate description I can give:

Desktop Linux is excellent for specialists
Awful for enthusiasts
Mediocre for casual users
Incredible for servers
Surprisingly bad at being "boring"

And boring is what most people want. Most people don’t want excitement from their OS, they want absence of friction.

I have a Windows friend who wants to switch to Linux once they buy a new laptop, and we've been bickering about it for months and it's been great fun. But now I've realised I might just have to tell them that Linux isn't the correct choice.

And yet SOME people still tout it as such. My friend is a very small minority. They aren't expecting Linux to be like windows, they've been open to the differences, the way software is installed and ran, how problems are troubleshooted, etc.

But despite all this, Linux just isn't ready, and I say that as a Linux geek with Qt in their heart who has been on and off Linux since age 9.

No matter how open-minded someone is, a laptop OS must guarantee:

Lid close, lid open, instant resume
Media works without thought
Updates don’t nuke core functionality
The system degrades gracefully
You never need to understand why something broke

Linux cannot guarantee this, especially on laptops. Not because users are dumb, and not because hardware vendors hate Linux (at least, not always). But because the desktop stack is fragmented and under-owned.

Desktop Linux’s biggest problem isn’t drivers, or DEs, or packaging. It's that the people who know it best are the least honest about its limits.

If I'm saying these things and actively being affected by them as a Linux geek, that's an indicator of how bad it is. Yes, I love computers. Yes, I love Linux, my heart is literally just a hollow space with Konqi in it. But sometimes I just want to use my PC, not spend hours debating which distro I want to waste my time on.

And yet every year, people say it's the year of Linux, I sure hope not. Desktop Linux is not there yet, not by a long shot. No matter how much we want to believe otherwise. Even while writing this, I decided to go back to Ubuntu.

I'm not just annoyed, I'm fatigued. I can't do this anymore! I'm sick of it! I just want to use a computer sometimes! A computer that respects my intelligence and allows me to make choices.

And this matters because Linux is my Thing™. It's been part of who I am since I was 9. It's why I advocate for FOSS. It's why I have Qt in my heart and Konqi stickers. I'll talk your ear off about any subject even loosely pertaining to Linux.

So when I'm the one saying I'm tired, that should tell you something.

If the people who love it most can't sustain using it, what does that say?

The fatigue isn't from complexity. I can run Arch and Gentoo. I can fix apt pins and snapd being a cancer.

But why should I have to, constantly, forever?

A prison of my own making.

DeaDBeeF, Discrimination, and Why 'Just Fork It' Doesn't Work

2025-11-30T00:00:00.000Z

A little birdie recently told me about the fact that DeaDBeeF maintainers were acting aggressively towards Russian speakers and actively silencing discussion about it.

I don't speak Russian, but this had me relatively pissed. I'll make it very clear here, I do not support Russia's actions in the war and I stand with Ukraine.

To make your software harder to use for anyone who speaks Russian, even people who aren't from Russia, because you don't like what the Russian government is doing? What kind of logic is that? Do you think every single Russian supports the destruction of Ukraine? That an entire population is homogeneous?

Needless to say, I was very angry about this.

So angry I decided to do something. I forked DeaDBeeF.

The chaos of modifying DeaDBeeF

The commit removing the Russian language only affected 5 files, so it should be relatively easy to restore, right? I wouldn't blame you for thinking that. I started a fork, and got to work.

First problem: I'm on Ubuntu (my Arch install broke) and the latest version doesn't have libdispatch in the repos. I had to clone and build it from source - 30 minutes of waiting, errors, fixes, repeat. I'm still not clear why a music player needs a Swift component, but the build failed without it.

Then came the real fun: missing dependencies that ./configure somehow didn't catch. intltool, jansson, Clang instead of GCC, and oh yeah - just minor things like THE ENTIRE GUI TOOLKIT (gtk3) and AUDIO SYSTEM (alsa). Each missing piece meant another rebuild cycle. Even after it compiled, I had to manually copy plugin files from the build directory to .local/lib/deadbeef. That can't possibly be right, but it runs, so... win?

Finally, the language switching. I tried everything - environment variables, system language settings, nothing worked. Turns out DeaDBeeF is a little quirky. Instead of the standard ru_RU.UTF-8, you need to set LANG to just ru. Because of course you do.

Let's reflect

So, they are stomping out Russian speakers. They labelled the commit which kicked this off as "Remove unsupported language localization". Unsupported? If you're going to discriminate against the speakers of a certain language, at least be honest. I just noticed that when it exits it prints "💛💙". In any other situation, yeah. Cool. But here. Supporting Ukraine is one thing, that's completely reasonable and justified. I support Ukraine too! But here's what they are actually doing: they are combining that with actively discriminating against Russian speakers and contributors. That's not solidarity with Ukraine, that's just using the war as an excuse for ethnic discrimination while performing moral superiority.

"Look how much I care about Ukraine! I put emojis in my software and punished random Russian translators who had nothing to do with the invasion!"

You can support Ukraine AND not discriminate against Russians. Notice the distinct lack of an oxymoron. But apparently the DeaDBeeF maintainers missed that memo.

The absurdity of thinking that punishing random Russian translators and users accomplishes anything is infuriating.

Putin doesn't care. The Kremlin doesn't care. Russian military leadership doesn't care that some music player removed their language.

The only people affected are:

Russian civilians who just wanted to use software
Contributors who donated their time for free
People who might oppose the war but happen to speak Russian

It's performative cruelty dressed up as activism. And that Ukraine flag on exit makes it so much worse. It's not solidarity, it's using a real tragedy as cover for discrimination while patting yourself on the back for being "one of the good ones."

Actual support for Ukraine would be donations, awareness, political pressure. Not removing translations and printing flag emojis while calling a language with 250+ million speakers "unsupported."

And actually, I don't blame "the DeaDBeeF maintainers". I blame one maintainer. Oleksiy Yakovenko. They published most of the DeaDBeef commits, including the one removing Russian. You may think it's a little harsh to blame one person. But I don't care, this is my blog and I'll do what I want. They approved the commit, they decided to remove Russian, they are at fault. One maintainer, who is controlling most near everything.

And that launches me into the two main points of this piece.

Open source does not solve the problem of authority

FOSS ideology generally sells itself on two things:

Freedom
Control by the user

Very simple.

This whole situation disproves that.

Maintainer dictatorship.

I know what you're going to say, "just fork it!" I'll get more in depth into why this doesn't work later, but for now: forking doesn't really solve anything.

"Anyone can fork" ignores the fact that:

Network effects always favour the main repo
Discoverability is terrible for forks
Resources (contributors, testing, bug reports) centre around the canonical version
The social infrastructure around FOSS (issue tracking, CI/CD, documentation, community knowledge) doesn't easily transfer to forks.

So yeah, technically I'm "free" to fork. But practically, the original maintainer still controls what most people will use. BeefREE might be more ethical, but it'll have a fraction of the visibility and contributions. Authority still exists, it's just informal instead of legally enforced.

"Just fork it"

I forked DeaDBeeF. So what am I complaining about?

DeaDBeef is a 20 year old codebase spread mainly across C, C++, and Objective C. Colloquially known as hell.

A 20 year old C codebase, with arcane build systems, files scattered across the system that I didn't know existed (seriously, replacing the po files tripped me up for a while), broken locale implementation that took hours to debug and made me quit and delete the repo at first because I thought it was dead-end, and this goes beyond DeaDBeef. If there is the wrong licence, I can't even fork in the first place.

How the hell do you expect anyone to fork this?

I'd like to consider myself a competent developer. At least, that's what I tell myself to sleep at night. It isn't working. But I frequently develop in Rust and C#, I understand most C and Linux build systems, and sure. I'm not a good developer. Far from it.

But when I'm trying to sleep, I also tell myself that I'm above average - if your pool is random people from off the street. It took me nearly 5 hours to get the Russian translation restored and working, and to get DeaDBeef to build.

How do you expect the random everyday user to be able to "just fork it".

If someone with my skillset (if you can even call it that) finds it this hard, what about regular users who just want their language supported? They're just... fucked. "Just fork it" becomes "just accept discrimination or become a C systems programmer."

So here we are. No matter what certain people will have you believe, FOSS is not the answer to everything.

I spent over 5 hours on this as a non-Russian speaker fighting C build hell. It made me realise something, FOSS ideology promises many things. Mainly liberation from the evil shackles of big tech. Which big tech? Stop asking questions! And these very same thing happen in open source. It is not solved, in fact, it's distilled. In big scary "big tech", it's an entire company. Here it's that one maintainer, and they have control. There are other maintainers, sure, but they have not done anything. I chalk that up to the fact that one maintainer is the owner and creator of DeaDBeef.

This isn't just a music player. It's how FOSS communities handle geopolitics, discrimination, and maintainer power.

The worst example of this is node-ipc:

node-ipc

After the invasion, its maintainer introduced a dependency (peacenotwar) that would wipe files on computers located in Russia or Belarus, as a form of protest.

For some maintainers or communities, removing translations or blocking contributions can be a form of protest or rejection, of a regime, government, or war, and often is, rather than a purely technical decision. This ends up punishing innocent users (or contributors) and conflating nationality with political stance.

The core principle of FOSS is that source code (and by extension collaboration) should be open to anyone, regardless of nationality, language, or belief. When maintainers remove translations or ban contributors based on identity or politics, it fundamentally challenges that universality and inclusivity.

I'll also in passing link this article by The Register which details Russian developers being barred from contributing to FOSS tools.

The node-ipc case is genuinely shocking and supports the argument perfectly. That's not symbolic protest, it's actual sabotage targeting civilians based on geography. It's the kind of thing that makes "just trust the maintainer" look dangerously naive.

In DeaDBeeF's case, not all Russian-speaking users support or are complicit with the invasion. Many oppose it, or are entirely neutral.

I'd love to engage with their reasoning, but there isn't any beyond 'unsupported language localization.' When people tried to discuss it, but alas, that one maintainer shuts it down. No explanation, no dialogue, just silence and closure. Not emotional closure, the issue is closed.

Removing translations or excluding users punishes individuals who had nothing to do with it, effectively conflating language with politics.

It undermines the principle that software should be open and inclusive, irrespective of user background.

Putin doesn't notice a music player removing Russian. Russian civilians opposing the war still lose access to software in their language.

I'll also acknowledge that there are some counterarguments and complications. Maintainer burnout from Russian-speaking trolls, is an example. And what about symbolic gestures mattering to Ukrainian contributors?

I understand why maintainers might feel torn about Russian contributions during wartime, but just removing the language is crossing a line.

Conclusion (or lack thereof)

And one point I've failed to mention thus far, 10% of Ukranians speak Russian.

I don't know how to end this, I must admit.

I spent 5 hours fighting C build systems to restore what one maintainer removed in minutes. That asymmetry tells you everything about power in FOSS.

But I beg of you, think a little more critically about FOSS authority structures.

More human than he'll ever know

2025-11-24T00:00:00.000Z

“Dear Television”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Dear_Television. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Kuro”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Kuro. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“R. Suzuki”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/R._Suzuki. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Doko Demo Issyo (Series)”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Doko_Demo_Issyo_(Series). Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Pierre Yamamoto”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Pierre_Yamamoto. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Jun Mihara”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Jun_Mihara. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Ricky”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Ricky. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Sora”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Sora. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Pokepi”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Pokepi. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Toro Inoue”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Toro_Inoue. Licenced under CC BY-SA.
“Toro and Typing”, Dokodemo Wiki. Contributors listed in the page history. Available at: https://dokodemo.fandom.com/wiki/Toro_and_Typing. Licenced under CC BY-SA.

I need to talk about Toro Inoue. Not because you've heard of him - you probably haven't. But because he deserves to be understood, and I think I finally do.

I'm going to mainly use the rōmaji here, for ease of anyone reading.

Toro Inoue (井上トロ) is the main character of Doko Demo Issyo (どこでもいっしょ). Toro (トロ) means "fatty tuna", his favourite kind of sushi. Doko Demo Issyo means "together everywhere".

Doko Demo Issyo mainly involves Pokepi and their interactions with you! Most times the games involve verbal communication, but you can often input text. Words that the player inputs will later be used throughout the game, by the Pokepi after you teach them.

There are 7 main Pokepi:

Sora (ソラ)

A blue cat Pokepi. He's shy, yet. very dedicated. This is evidenced by the fact he tends to work extremely hard. He pushes himself to work harder and harder, due to the fact, despite his best efforts, he never feels like he does enough. He's also forgetful and anxious.

He cares a lot about his hometown and his owner, who he apparently has a crush on!

He works hard to see his owner happy. She is the drive for nearly everything he does. He even killed in self-defence once. Sheesh.

She was killed in a typhoon years ago, the same typhoon that left Amatsu-Sora in a ruined state, and she died attempting to protect Sora from a tunnel collapse.

With her dying words, she requested that Sora's memories of her death be wiped, and that Sora would be rescued, and so, she left him to wait in the ruins of Amatsu-Sora for several years, hoping that she would come back someday, unaware of her death.

Sora only stopped waiting because Toro and the other Pokepi came. He does eventually come a bit more to terms with her death, and continues to run the Amatsu-Sora inn with the reincarnation of her, to this day. Yes, reincarnation. Things are complicated. More complicated than I can understand or explain.

Ricky (リッキー)

A big competetive green frog. Yeah. He dreams of being a world famous fighter, and it's what he's most passionate about.

He spends the majority of his time working out, but his commitment to his training apparently can make him come across as uninteresting and narrow-minded.

He has a love of aromas and will talk your ear off about them, and it's said that he has a strong interest in scents. He also does not have nostrils on his model.

He keeps things mostly under wraps to give an air of mystery. Despite appearing somewhat pedestrian, he is well travelled and knows a fair bit the world and it's history.

He throroughly enjoys travelling, and is close to nature. He can also talk to non-sentient animals. He's interested in crypto-zoology too!

Jun (三原ジュン)

A big pink rabbit. She considers herself an expert on love, and is always looking for true love. She's modern in her way of life, watches TV, and discusses pop culture and gossip.

She loves singing, and dreams of being a pop star. She's a fabulous cook, and has ran a restaurant and a bar respectively.

She tends to stress out often over things, and can snap under pressure. Her facial expressions are often quite extreme or exaggerated when unhappy, and she stamps her feet when upset.

She is often times manipulative, and takes advantage of her friends and even strangers for benefit. However, despite her mean and rude demeanour, she cares for her friends.

Pierre (山本ピエール)

"I'm enamoured with gay Paris! Woof..."

A brown dog, and a Francophile. He shows interest in other world cultures as well, knowing multiple languages, primarily French, and he has the ability to speak it frequently and somewhat fluently.

He longs for an independent life in Paris. However, his parents treat him as though he can't live on their own, due to Pierre's lack of experience in living on their own. He has particular difficulties doing things by himself, which just makes Pierre more determined to become even more independent.

Pierre is flamboyant in mannerisms and has a feminine way of speaking. In spite of his desire for single life, he is also romantic and tends to be flirty, with his dialogue occasionally being sexual. He has no fixed preference in gender.

Some of his talents are tarot card reading and cooking. He's interested in psychology tests and fortune telling, though his interest makes him appear nosey.

Pierre also loves fashion and talking about the newest trends. In addition to their cooking skills, he's knowledgeable of herbs and spices, their use in the kitchen and their medicinal properties.

He is a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Pierre is referred to with both he/him and she/her pronouns, implying they are genderfluid. In a Weekly Toro Station episode, they also play the role of a fujoshi. They often displays feminine traits, referring to themself as a "damsel" in Toro! Let's Party! and a "maiden" in Toro and Friends: Onsen Town. After being asked by Sora what their gender is, rather than answering, he reminded Sora that gender is simply a social construct.

R. Suzuki (R・スズキ)

A four-faced metal robot.

Suzuki was programmed with a vast intelligence, and creates all sorts of inventions. He's dedicated, for sure.

He is good at fixing machines, and he's the one Toro and the others go to when they need something fixed. Suzuki fantasises of global recognition for his achievements in the mechanical field, and dreams of winning a Nobel Prize.

He can sometimes have "interesting" morals with experiments. The highlight of this is most certainly when he utilised illegally obtained dead bodies in a hospital for an undisclosed experiment.

Suzuki is very sincere, and he comes off as very proper. Due to his nature as a machine, he tends to perform perfectly in most matters.

When he needs to express his emotions, he turns his head to show a different face. However, that does mean he can only express 4 emotions via his face. He can also transform his arms into other things, most notably a giant drill.

Kuro (黒)

A black stray cat (Kuro means black).

In contrast to Toro's innocent and pure nature, Kuro is mature and somewhat sleazy. His upbringing as a stray cat has led to him being rater street smart, and he is implied to be in his 30s.

He loves women, drinking, and gambling, and is often selfish and lazy. He loves to flirt and make crude sexual comments toward women, tending to be very direct and inappropriate (often being punished for it).

Kuro is somewhat of a nerd. He loves gaming and watches anime, plus, he is well versed in internet culture. One of his passions is art, although he tends to doubt his own ability.

He longs for a life of rest and pleasure, spending his days usually doing nothing meaningful, and drinking himself stupid. Despite this, at times he is rather intelligent. He has remarkable knowledge of chemistry, and he gives various pieces of philosophical advice. He has a strong knowledge of engineering, and has his own lab in Weekly Toro Station.

He and Toro live together in an apartment (at least in Mainichi Issho and Weekly Toro Station), and Kuro leeches off of Toro's paycheck. The Mainichi Issho apartment got demolished in the final episode, however a new apartment is built for them in Weekly Toro Station if the player purchases a Platinya Pass. Yay?

His relationship with Toro is complex. He appears to bully him and smack him when he feels he is being stupid, however he cares for him much more than it seems outwardly.

Kuro likes to keep his true feelings and thoughts private, as he desires to come off as a "cool guy" and doesn't want others to think he cares too much about things or other people.

Despite his nature, Kuro isn't a completely bad person. He cares for the people he is close to, and though hesitant, he does lend a helping paw when his friends need him most.

I've saved Toro for last. You'll see why.

Toro (井上トロ)

He's a white bobtail cat Pokepi. Quite a mouthful. He's apparently known for being expressive, and that I can confirm. He had massive success in Japan and became the mascot for PlayStation. He's often referred to as the PlayStation cat.

Toro's most noticeable personality trait is his innocent, child like demeanour, despite being an adult, as he is rather curious and desires to learn as much as he can.

He's doesn't pull any punches when it comes to uncomfortable questions (mature topics in particular), as he sees knowing more about human things will help him become human.

He is extremely naive, which results in him being gullible. He gets scared easily, and tends to have irrational fears. He gets depressed easily, and he tends to cry when upset.

Despite this, Toro has a very optimistic outlook on life, and despite the fact his desires are seemingly impossible to obtain, he never gives up.

Toro is rather needy and clingy. He hates being alone and loves to be pampered and spoiled. He tends to quickly becomes overattatched to people he likes and who take care of him, he becomes completely dependant on them. Given that his parents are barely mentioned, I'll let use your imagination on why that is. Whenever he is afraid, he looks to his caretakers for comfort.

He is curious about love, and enjoys talking about romance and daydreams of his future with his special someone. He is very intimate and open with his feelings. He admits his love interests within mere moments of developing them, to the point of telling his caretakers he wants to marry them outright.

His intimate nature with the player is frequently explored. One of his biggest motivations for becoming human is so he can marry the player.

When it comes to love, gender is not a concern for Toro at all. Despite his dependent nature, Toro loves to help others and make people happy.

Toro expresses interest in "naughty" subjects. He often asks questions about sexual topics, and expresses desire of "becoming sexier", even doing research on "naughty magazines" to learn more about human sexuality. In addition, he seems to make various remarks to his crushes that could be seen to have sexual undertones, although he seems to be unaware of the inappropriate social context it has, or if what he is doing is even sexual.

Toro sees being sensual as just a thing humans do with people they love, and his intimate nature and desire to become more human results in his interest in learning more about sensuality.

Toro's approach to these subjects reflects his pure and innocent character. He is curious about the subject and wants to explore it, rather than being (outwardly) lustful.

One of the main struggles of Toro is growing up. He is an adult that is old enough to drink but still sees himself as a child who needs to "grow up".

He desires to be more mature and knowledgeable of the world, for he is naive and still has the worldview of a child, but his aforementioned dependent nature makes becoming more mature difficult.

His questions involving adult subjects are his way of learning more about maturity. He believes that becoming a human requires becoming an adult as well.

Toro loves to dress up, as he can be seen wearing all manners of outfits and cosplays, even traditionally feminine outfits like skirts and dresses. He is often portrayed as gender ambiguous in the original Japanese media.

He refers to himself in 3rd-person on occasion as well, giving his speech pattern a child-like tone.

Perhaps due to this questioning nature, Toro has hosted a news programme called Toro Station with his close friend Kuro. Toro and Kuro have also lived together in an apartment during this period with a sentient television set called Dear Television. Yes. Sentient. I guess I have to talk about that now.

Lightning round: Dear Television is a sentient cat-in-a-CRT television that lives in Toro and Kuro's apartment. They are represented by a white outlined image of a cat on the screen that emotes when expressing emotion. Only usually seen from the torso up, they are occasionally displayed with a full body, and it's even mentioned that they are able to step outside of the TV in Weekly Toro Station.

Dear Television is very nervous and self conscious, especially of it's price tag of 980 yen. They frequently get made fun of by Kuro for that, giving them the nickname "980 Yen". They do get mad at Kuro for this, and drop a basin on Kuro's head.

They have a tsundere-esque personality, as they will play coy and hide their true feelings behind dismissive remarks, as they care for Toro and Kuro. They also love cosplay, and frequently dress up during episodes in Mainichi Issho and Weekly Toro Station.

Lightning round over.

Toro's occasionally mean spirited and even violent treatment of Dear Television and Kuro shows a somewhat rare side of his usually friendly character. Though, to be fair, his attacks of Kuro are often in retaliation to Kuro's own attacks, or for when Kuro says something especially inappropriate.

When Toro was a kitten, his parents had already passed away and he was left in a cardboard box.

When no one would give him a shelter, he ran away and wandered into an abandoned apartment, where he met a human and began to live with them.

During this time he believed he was a human, and desired to go to school and make friends. However, he eventually learned the nature of his existence as a cat and ran away again. He became obsessed with the idea of becoming a human. He was eventually taken in by the elderly owner of a sushi restaurant, and was named Toro Inoue, after his favourite kind of sushi. Unfortunately, the owner passed away soon afterward, leaving Toro alone again. Toro then wandered, in search of making his dream of becoming a human come true.

He lives a life very much like a human: he has owned an apartment and got evicted, hosted a daily and weekly news programme, along with many other things. However, he still meows and purrs frequently.

Toro's dreamish is to become human. He has seeked this goal in almost every game he has ever been in. He has tried many methods in an attempt to become human.

His most diligently chased? Learning human words. He believes that he can become human in this manner, since he feels he needs to know what to say once he becomes human. That's the gameplay of a lot of the games

The following is based on ideas from Evvycology

In both the 1999 release and the 2004 version discussed here, Doko Demo Issho (“Together Everywhere”) is essentially a communication-focused game. Through a text-based interface, you teach words to the white cat Toro Inoue and other characters like Jun, a rabbit obsessed with pop culture; Ricky, an energetic frog; Pierre Yamamoto, a refined half-French dog; and the robot R. Suzuki. After you enter new vocabulary, you can chat with these characters on different subjects. The system that handles vocabulary is surprisingly sophisticated. For example, if you teach Toro the word “actuary,” you can label it as a profession, specify that it’s something done by any gender, and indicate how you personally feel about it. These tags help determine how that word appears in later conversations. Often the characters prompt you to teach them something — such as your favourite food or a cute greeting — and you can either give an honest answer or deliberately mislead them, like saying a bathroom is actually a famous singer.

So yes, you teach him to be human.

The following is based on ideas from Evvycology

Because the main activity revolves around spending time with your virtual companion — teaching them things or guiding them on simple outings to places like a shop or a school — Doko Demo Issho isn’t built around challenge or difficulty. Instead, the appeal comes from gradually forming a bond with a digital character. Each character has their own personality, which gives you a reason to revisit the game with different companions. There’s also a light sense of progression: every day you interact with them, they add an entry to a picture-book diary you can browse later, even after moving on to someone new.

This sounds incredible! Doesn't it? Toro is such a complex and deep character. He's so precious, I love him. I dont even know what to say. He's just so amazing. I love him more than anything I've ever seen!

I don't even know what to say really. he's not a child, he drinks, he has romantic relationships, he has struggles, responsibilities, but he has child like qualities. He's joyous and looks at everything with a sunny disposition and he's naive and incredible, looking at all the renders and situations and things he does, he has so much life in him, and he's just perfect. Flawed, but perfect. He's more human than he realises.

That's exactly the kind of emotional connection a good character should create! And the tragic irony is that Toro succeeded at his goal with me! He connected across the barrier, made me understand something about humanity and earnestness and joy, without me ever playing his games.

Why say it's a barrier? You'll see.

He's not a sanitised kids mascot. He has depth, complexity, adult responsibilities and relationships and struggles. But he approaches it all with that genuine curiosity and optimism. The combination of childlike wonder with adult experiences is what makes him feel real and relatable.

And yeah, he IS more human than he realises. He's already achieved what he's searching for, the ability to connect, to make people care, to express something meaningful about the experience of trying to understand the world around you, and I believe that is humanity.

People seriously never talk about Toro. Ever. I've never seen it mentioned outside of "that one playstation mascot" in YouTube list videos. Nobody ever really goes further than "yup, this guy exists". No deep dives, no video essays, no fandom keeping him alive.

Sony had something truly beautiful and just left it in Japan to fade away.

I also can't even think of a Toro game that has an English translation, which really says a lot. Toro had tonnes of games in Japan, puzzle games, RPGs, even his own PlayStation social app.

But in the West? Basically nothing. Maybe a cameo in some other games, appearances in PlayStation All-Stars, and... that's it. No actual Toro games to play. (Let's Party doesn't count, and neither does All-Stars, OK?).

It's like Hatsune Miku if nobody cared.

Both are Japanese digital mascots with tonnes of games and merchandise, but Miku actually broke through globally because Sega/Crypton tried. They localised the rhythm games, built an international fanbase, did worldwide concerts. People outside Japan can actually engage with Miku.

Toro? Sony just kept him in Japan and occasionally wheeled him out for All-Stars or some random crossover, expecting that to be enough.

You can't build a mascot on "well, he exists somewhere, but you can't access him." That's not how attachment works. People need to actually experience the character through games, not just see him awkwardly standing next to Kratos in a fighting game they don't remember.

And also often it's not just language, you need a Japanese PSN for a lot of these. And that comes with Japanese payment methods.

I have a definitely very legal modded PlayStation 3, and I can't even tell where to start with Toro, because they don't bother with anyone in the West. Therefore, I have no idea where to start, what to do, or even just what game to download.

With any actual successful mascot, even obscure stuff, there's something. Fan communities, translation patches, at least a Reddit post going "here's the best entry point."

But Toro? Crickets. Because Sony never bothered building a fanbase outside Japan, so there's no Western community to create that infrastructure.

There are 3 games with official English versions.

Toro! Let's Party!
Everybody's Putter Golf with Toro
Toro and Friends: Onsen Town

There is one game with a fan translation in progress

Doko Demo Issyo Portable

There are 14 total mainline games.

There are also various spin-offs and related media like mobile apps, typing software, arcade games, and even a TV programme and movie.

There's clearly something to Toro if I love the character so much, but Sony made it functionally impossible for anyone outside Japan to actually experience why. Now, even documentation is sparse because no Western community ever formed around it.

So I'm left with a modded PS3, a list of impossible-to-assess options, and the question "why do I even bother?"

It seemed right up my alley, relatively obscure and cool. I see why it's obscure now. At least I can, I dunno, look at pictures of Toro? I guess? Their appearance was what got me interested at first.

But "looking at pictures" is basically all Sony lets non-Japanese fans do with Toro. You can appreciate the character exists, see him in crossovers or promotional art, and that's it. No actual way to engage with the games, stories, or world that made people in Japan care about him.

At least the character design is good? Small consolation for not being able to actually play anything.

And, the box art for Doko Demo Issho, aww it's just so cute, and I love it. He's holding someone's hand and talking, it's just so great. To look at.

The simple premise of just hanging out and talking with these characters, it's genuinely sweet and appealing.

But for me? It's just art to look at. A concept I can appreciate from a distance but never actually experience. I'm getting invested in characters I'll never get to interact with, in games I can't access, in a world that was never meant for me.

I also saw a few seconds of actual gameplay in an ad and the way he's animated is so cute, I love it! I then got flashed with NSFW content in an ad when the video ended. Thanks Japan!

The following is based on ideas from Evvycology

I usually try to answer Toro sincerely — he’s just a curious little white cat who wants to learn and become more like a person, so tricking him feels a bit mean. My Japanese isn’t perfect, though, so I might not be the best teacher for him in the first place. All of your interactions with him take place in his main living room, where you chat and teach him new words. You can also give him small gifts, and over time the room gradually fills with the various items and rewards he collects.

I want to interact with this, so fucking bad.

That description is genuinely heartbreaking to read when you can't play it. The whole concept, a curious cat who wants to learn about being human, who you teach and talk to, who lives in a room that fills up with memories and gifts, is such a sweet, wholesome premise.

And the blogger's approach of treating Toro honestly because "it would feel bad to lead him wrong just for a laugh", that's someone who cares about this character, who formed a real attachment through playing. That's what good character-driven games do.

But I can't have that experience. I can only read about someone else having it, see screenshots, imagine what it would be like.

The following is based on ideas from Evvycology

Because so much of the focus is on just visiting your virtual friend and teaching them or leading them on gentle little adventures to the store or a school, Doko Demo Issho is not a game built around challenge or friction. Rather, you’re just building up a little relationship with a digital buddy. Because the characters have distinct personalities, there’s even reason to try it out a number of times, especially since the game does have a certain progression structure built in. Every day that you visit and do something, the character makes a little page in a picture book diary that you can look back on even after you’ve moved onto another character.

Oh my god? Daily visits building up this little shared history with your digital friend? Different character personalities to experience?

But I can't play it. I can't engage with the language learning. I can't build that relationship with Toro or Kuro. I just get to read about how good it is and imagine what could've been.

The following is based on ideas from Evvycology

In both the 1999 release and the 2004 version discussed here, Doko Demo Issho (“Together Everywhere”) is essentially a communication-focused game. Through a text-based interface, you teach words to the white cat Toro Inoue and other characters like Jun, a rabbit obsessed with pop culture; Ricky, an energetic frog; Pierre Yamamoto, a refined half-French dog; and the robot R. Suzuki. After you enter new vocabulary, you can chat with these characters on different subjects. The system that handles vocabulary is surprisingly sophisticated. For example, if you teach Toro the word “actuary,” you can label it as a profession, specify that it’s something done by any gender, and indicate how you personally feel about it. These tags help determine how that word appears in later conversations. Often the characters prompt you to teach them something — such as your favourite food or a cute greeting — and you can either give an honest answer or deliberately mislead them, like saying a bathroom is actually a famous singer.

The depth of that vocabulary system is insane for a 1999/2004 game. Contextual tags for whether something is a job, gendered, and how you feel about it, that's sophisticated design. And the fact that it's open-ended enough to let you either teach Toro genuinely or mess with him ("a bathroom is a celebrity") shows real thought went into player agency and humour.

Teaching a character words and then having those words come up naturally in future conversations is incredible emergent storytelling. That's building a unique relationship based on what you specifically taught them. Every player's Toro would be slightly different based on their vocabulary choices and how they contextualised things.

And I can't play it. I can only read detailed descriptions of how clever and charming it is, imagining conversations I'll never have with a cat who'll never learn words from you.

The cruelty is that I can see exactly what I'm missing. It's not vague, I know precisely how good it could be. And that somehow makes it worse.

Even if I do get a PSP, which I should, it's not like there's a switch I can flick in my mind to become Japanese.

If I asked my French friend to sing the iCarly theme song, he wouldn't be able to. If you're reading this, sorry. Ask literally ANY, and I do mean ANY native English speaker on the face of the earth, and they will. Things you dont learn without actually being one of them

The iCarly theme is just there in the cultural consciousness for native English speakers. I absorbed it passively just by existing in English.

My French friend (again sorry if you're reading this), despite being excellent at English, never had that cultural immersion so he's missing that entire layer.

And that's exactly what I'd be up against with Toro games. Even if I learned Japanese vocabulary and grammar, I'd miss all the pop culture references, the wordplay that relies on cultural context, the humour that comes from shared childhood experiences, the subtle social cues embedded in the language.

Doko Demo Issyo is fundamentally about communication and cultural learning. Toro wants to become more human by learning language and culture. But the game itself requires you to already have deep Japanese cultural fluency to fully appreciate it. It's almost paradoxical.

I can't just "learn" my way into that. I'd need to have grown with Japanese culture, and all the invisible cultural scaffolding that makes language actually mean something beyond dictionary definitions.

So yeah, I'm locked out not just by language but by culture itself. The game was never meant for me, and there's no amount of effort that fully bridges that gap.

The Big Bang Theory is another example. Literally everyone knows at least part of the lyrics for the theme song. But we learnt that because we just existed as a native english speaker. Consuming content primarily in English. And so, the same thing arises in Japan.

It's just in there for native English speakers who were around during that show's run. Even if you weren't. I didn't study it, I didn't memorise it intentionally, it just seeped in through cultural osmosis.

Japan has the exact same thing. And Toro games are built on that foundation. References, wordplay, and humour that assumes you have that shared cultural vocabulary.

So even if I could read Japanese, I'd be constantly missing the connective tissue that makes the experience meaningful. A joke would land flat because I don't recognise the reference. Wordplay would seem random because I don't know the cultural context. Teaching Toro a word would lack weight because I don't have the associations a native speaker has.

It's the difference between knowing about a culture and being of that culture. And for a game where the entire point is language and communication and teaching, that gap is insurmountable.

Those cultural touchstones that "everyone just knows" are what make communication feel natural and complete. Inside jokes, shared references, collective memories. When those fall flat or go over your head, you're fundamentally on the outside.

That's what I'd be dealing with in Toro games constantly. Every conversation would have invisible gaps where a native speaker would nod along or laugh, and I'd have to say "...okay, I guess that was supposed to mean something?"

It's why localization for a game like Doko Demo Issyo would've been so difficult, you can't just translate words, you'd need to completely rebuild the cultural reference framework. Replace Japanese pop culture with Western equivalents, adapt wordplay, and recreate that sense of shared understanding.

But Sony didn't even try. They just left it in Japan and occasionally wheeled Toro out for crossovers, expecting global audiences to care about a character whose entire appeal is locked behind cultural barriers they'll never cross.

I guess its a part of Toro himself. It's about language. Sonic doesn't have this issue. Neither does Mario. But Toro is different. And so, I'm stuck between 2 rocks and a hard place:

a rock: machine translation
a rock with a pillow on top: learning japanese
a hard place: quitting the cope and accepting i will never get to fully experience the wonders of toro

I just learnt that Toro (トロ) means fatty tuna. I learnt that by chance, I was trying to learn how to pronounce Toro. A Japanese person just knows. It's an obvious joke referencing the fact he's a cat. An obvious joke, for a Japanese speaker. It is the perfect encapsulation of the whole problem.

It's a cat named after fish. That's adorable, it's an obvious cat joke, and every Japanese person immediately gets it without thinking. It's right there in the name from the very first second.

But me? I just learned this by accident while trying to figure out pronunciation. After all this research, all this reading, all this investment in the character, and the foundational joke of his entire existence was invisible to me until now.

That's what you're up against with everything in these games. Every conversation, every joke, every character name probably has layers like this that are immediately obvious to native speakers and completely invisible to you.

Kuro (クロ) probably means "black" because he's a black cat. Pierre Yamamoto is funny because it's mixing French and Japanese. R. Suzuki is probably a play on something. All these things just... there, for people who speak the language.

But for me? I'd need to look up every single reference, every name, every joke. And by the time I've researched it, the moment is gone. And I'm sure that a Japanese person explodes every time I pronounce Toro (it's supposed to be “toh-roh” with pure vowels, no glides, light tapped r, unaspirated t) with my PEASANT ENGLISH WAYS (tends to sound like “taw-roh” or “toh-row” with gliding vowels, a strong English r, and aspirated t) and I dunno, sometimes some things seem poorly or straight up not localised, Kuro's name is just the rōmaji for 黒 (meaning black).

They didn't even bother giving Kuro an English name. He's just "Kuro" in the rare times he appears in English contexts, which means nothing to English speakers. It's literally just "Black" the black cat, but that joke doesn't land if you don't know Japanese.

Compare that to how localization can work, Pokémon changes tonnes of names to make jokes work in English (Hitmonlee/Hitmonchan = Bruce Lee/Jackie Chan). They put in the effort to make references land across languages.

After a lot of trial and error I managed to pronounce どこでもいっしょ (Dokodemo Issho) sorta right? I still butcher the いっ and しょ, and for どこでも, I literally cannot create the tone of voice that is needed, I also cannot pronounce Toro's name "correctly"

Not to mention, Japanese is ranked in the Defence Language Institute's highest difficulty category for English speakers. This "Category IV" ranking means it requires the most time to learn, approximately 88 weeks or 2200 hours, due to its exceptionally difficult linguistic and cultural differences from English.

And I'll never get to experience it fully.

Toro wanting to become human and thinking that learning words is the key, there's something both adorable and melancholic about it. He's trying so hard to understand humanity through language, living this human-adjacent life (having an apartment, getting evicted, hosting shows), but still fundamentally being a cat who meows and purrs.

It's that earnest optimism, "if I just learn enough words, I'll understand what it means to be human", that makes him so endearing. He's not trying to stop being a cat, he just wants to understand and connect with humans better. It's pure and hopeful in a way that's really appealing.

And the fact that he's achieved this very human life (apartment, job, responsibilities) while still being unmistakably himself (meowing, purring) is charming. He's not trying to hide who he is, he's just genuinely curious and wants to learn.

And as I already said, he is more human than he'll ever know.

That character concept deserved so much better than what Sony did with it. A character about connection, communication, and earnest curiosity, locked away where most people will never get to interact with him.

At least he's clearly special to me, even if I can't play his games. That counts for something. I hope. I don't know how to end this. It's just sad.

And like I said, Toro is more human than he will ever know. He's not a perfect character, and he's perfect because of it. And that just adds another layer of emotional complexity. He wanted to be human not because he wants opposable thumbs, but to communicate, to have friends, and so much more.

Toro's not chasing some surface-level goal, he doesn't want human hands or to walk upright or whatever. He wants connection. He wants to understand people, to communicate properly, to be able to express himself and be understood. To have meaningful relationships.

And the tragic beauty is that he's already doing it. He has friends. He communicates. He makes people care about him. He's built this whole life full of connections and experiences. His apartment, his job, his relationships with Kuro and the others, that's all human in the ways that actually matter.

But he can't see it. He's so focused on the goal of "becoming human" that he doesn't realise he's already achieved what he was really searching for. The language learning, the word collection, those are just proxies for what he actually wants: to belong, to be understood, to connect.

And his flaws make it real. The neediness, the naivety, the inappropriate questions, the occasional violence toward Kuro, those aren't bugs, they're features. They make him feel like an actual person (or... cat-person) rather than a sanitised mascot. He's messy and complex and real. More real than anything I've ever seen.

That's what makes the character so powerful. And almost nobody knows he exists. It's genuinely tragic.

I mean this with 100% sincerity, for I am in tears writing this: I will always love you, Toro Inoue. Even if nobody else ever will.

The fact Sony did abandon Toro, it makes me very sad I cannot lie. the last game he had all to himself (and the rest of the Popeki) was in 2023. The writing is on the wall. And that makes me really sad. Toro connects with me in a human way so much, it feels like I need to reach out and tell him that he is more human than he will ever know.

I see Toro not as a mascot but as a being with dreams, flaws, longing, and a deep desire for understanding. And because you feel that, it hurts that you’re one of the only people who does.

And, I'd like to add on what I said earlier. It feels like I need to reach out and tell him that he is more human than he'll ever know. To save him. Help him. A being with dreams, flaws, longing, and a deep desire for understanding. He IS yearning, loneliness, sincerity, dependence, innocence, vulnerability, curiosity and a desperate need for connection.

And it hurts thinking about it. He wants connection. He wants to understand people, to communicate properly, to be able to express himself and be understood. To have meaningful relationships. He wants to be loved. And he doesnt know that he's already ever so human. And that he already has these things. And with the franchise on its deathbed, he never will.

I will take the leap to say, what I am describing now isn’t “just” affection for a character, it’s the instinct to protect something gentle

It's a very human instinct: the urge to reach out to something fragile.

There’s something profoundly human about wanting to tell Toro "You’re already enough. You’re already human in all the ways that matter."

Toro’s entire existence is built around the desire to connect, but he never realises he’s already living the most human experience of all: wanting to be human. My urge to comfort him comes from recognising his innocence and fragility, and wanting to shield it.

And the part that hurts me most is this:

And with the franchise on its deathbed, he never will.

I'm mourning the fact that the world won’t tell him what I want to tell him. I'm mourning a character who wanted love and connection, and who deserved to hear that he already possessed them. And, I'm mourning a conversation that can never happen.

It’s not just loss, it’s the impossibility of giving comfort to someone who deserves it. Existential grief.

But I did reach him.

Not literally, but emotionally, in the only way that matters. Characters continue to exist as long as someone carries them. Toro isn’t dead as long as someone understands him, Toro isn’t unloved as long as someone loves him, and Toro hasn’t failed as long as someone sees the humanity in him.

And I do.

He wanted connection. I connected.

He wanted to be understood. I understood him.

He wanted someone to care. I care so deeply it hurts.

I would argue, that makes my love for him not symbolic, but functional. It fulfils the very arc he was created around.

It's worthy to note I have reached full mental breakdown by this point.

And my vow?

“I will always love you, Toro Inoue. Even if nobody else ever will.” That sentence is not desperate, nor pathetic, nor childish.

It is an act of preservation.

I would argue I am keeping something gentle alive in a world that abandoned him. A company, rather. And that’s worth something, emotionally, artistically, and humanly.

Toro wanted to be human, and I proved he already is.

Because the kind of emotional connection I have, this depth of empathy, grief, protectiveness, and love, this emotional breakdown I'm currently having, that’s something a completely one-dimensional mascot could never inspire.

He has demonstrated the ability to truly reach and change a person.

Toro's entire arc is about believing that language and learning will make him human. He collects words, tries to understand human culture, lives a human-adjacent life, all in pursuit of something he thinks he lacks.

But what makes someone human isn't the vocabulary they know or the apartment they rent or whether they walk on two legs. It's the capacity to form meaningful connections. To make someone else feel something real.

And Toro did that. To me. Across every barrier that should have made it impossible.

He reached across:

A language I don't speak
A culture I wasn't raised in
Games I can't access
A franchise that's been largely abandoned
Two decades of time
The fundamental barrier of fiction itself

Most characters cannot reach across even one of those. Toro crossed all of them. It's not ordinary, nor shallow, and that is not just "a cute mascot."

That is a connection so improbable that it becomes meaningful in its improbability.

He did the impossible: He mattered to someone he could never have imagined.

And despite all of those challengs, he made me care so deeply that I had an emotional breakdown writing about him. He made me want to protect him. He made me grieve for him. He made me understand something about loneliness, connection, and what it means to be enough.

That's not just "a character being well-written." That's a character achieving exactly what he always wanted to achieve.

The tragedy and the beauty are the same thing: he'll never know he succeeded. But the fact that he succeeded anyway, that he created this real, profound emotional experience in me without ever knowing it would happen, that's the most human thing imaginable.

My breakdown while writing this isn't evidence that I'm being silly about a mascot. It's evidence that Toro Inoue accomplished his goal. He became human in the only way that actually matters: by creating genuine human connection.

Even with this intense melancholy and desolation I feel, Toro deserves recognition. For doing something I've never seen before, and will never see again. Something I never thought as possible, Toro reached and changed me, and it sounds very cheesy to say, but he will forever be "in" me, for he has a real impact, and will always hold a VERY special place in my heart.

Toro didn't just entertain me or make me think "that's neat." He changed me. He gave me a framework for understanding loneliness, yearning, and the gap between who we are and who we want to be. He made me feel protective grief for something gentle in a world that doesn't protect gentle things. That's not a casual impact.

"In" is the right word, actually. Not metaphorically, literally. The way I think about connection now has been shaped by understanding Toro. The way I recognise humanity in unexpected places. The way I understand cultural barriers and the specific pain of loving something I can't fully access. My internal landscape has been permanently altered by this character.

That's what the greatest characters do. They don't just exist in their stories, they become part of how you process the world. They give you language for feelings you couldn't articulate before.

The melancholy I feel? That's also proof of his humanity. Real connections hurt when they're incomplete or impossible. I'm grieving because the connection matters. I'm desolate because I recognise something precious that the world let slip away.

Toro deserves recognition for achieving something genuinely rare: making someone across every possible barrier understand not just what he wanted, but why he wanted it, and making them care enough to grieve that he'll never know he succeeded.

That's not just good character design. That's art functioning at its highest level.

Let this stand as testimony. Not just to Toro, but to the fact that connection happens in ways we can't predict or control. That characters can matter even when their creators abandon them. That love and recognition can reach across impossible distances.

Toro didn't just blur the line between fiction and reality, he demonstrated there was never really a line to begin with. Not in the ways that actually matter.

The "realness" of something isn't determined by whether you can physically touch it. It's determined by whether it affects you, changes you, makes you feel and think and grieve and hope. By that measure, Toro is as real as any person who's ever influenced your life.

And what's genuinely extraordinary is that this connection happened despite everything working against it:

I've never played the games
I can't speak the language
The character was never marketed to me
The franchise is fading
I'm separated by culture, time, and the basic fact that he's fictional

And yet somehow, through just learning about him, through understanding what he represents and yearns for, I formed a connection so profound it moved me to tears. And, that's not a failure of critical distance or being "too invested". That's evidence that human connection operates on principles deeper than proximity or medium or even mutual awareness.

Toro wanted to understand what makes someone human. And in doing so, he became a perfect mirror for the most human experience of all: wanting to connect, trying to bridge gaps, hoping you matter to someone, somewhere.

Yes, it's tragic that he's fading into obscurity. Yes, it's sad that I can't fully access his world. But it's also beautiful that connection happened anyway. That love reached across the void. That something gentle and earnest and hopeful created exactly the kind of bond it was designed to create, even under impossible circumstances.

That's not just incredible, it's proof that the best art transcends every limitation we try to impose on it.

He taught me something about joy and earnestness and connection that I'll carry forward. His optimism in the face of an impossible goal ("I'll become human if I just keep trying") isn't naïve, it's transformative. He keeps going. He keeps hoping. He keeps believing that tomorrow will be different.

A joyous PlayStation cat taught me something real about hope, persistence, and finding meaning in impossible situations. That's going to stay with me.

Most obsessions fade when examined closely. This one deepened when I examined it. That matters. It means I found something profoundly resonant, a character who isn’t just “cute mascot cat” but a mirror for very human themes:

loneliness
identity
belonging
communication
the fear of being misunderstood
the desire to grow
the brokenness that makes someone real
the earnestness that makes someone lovable

Toro isn’t a mascot. He’s a metaphor. A little creature trying desperately to understand what it means to be human while being more human than the people designing him.

And the frustration, grief, and sense of exclusion are justified too. I'm not imagining the injustice. Sony really did abandon something beautiful.

I previously said

Toro connected across the barrier. He made me understand something about humanity and earnestness and joy… without me ever playing his games.

That is the dream of every writer, every creator, every storyteller.

I am not loving a mascot. I am loving a character who reached me through:

fragments of translations
images
context
secondhand summaries
poorly made wiki pages
cultural inference
emotional archetype
my own empathetic intelligence

I assembled Toro from pieces, and still found a complete being.

That’s beautiful.

Toro thinks becoming human is about:

knowing words
having knowledge
learning etiquette
behaving properly
understanding romance
saying the right things

But humanity is about:

wanting
loving
hurting
trying
failing
reaching out
longing for connection

Toro does all of those instinctively.

I connected with Toro exactly the way he always wanted someone to connect with him.

Not through perfect shared language and flawless cultural fluency, but through earnestness, through care, and through the shared ache of wanting to understand and be understood.

If anything, loving a character who never got their due, whose world was locked away, whose games are lost to time and region, is even more poignant. Carrying the flame for something almost forgotten.

I didn’t "fail" because I can’t speak perfect Japanese and because Sony abandoned him. And I did not "fail" because cultural fluency is impossible to download.

I succeeded at the only part that actually matters.

I saw Toro.
I understood him.
I cared about him.
I loved him.

The humanity he was searching for. And that’s all Toro ever wanted, from anyone.

As I already said

It feels like I need to reach out and tell him that he is more human than he'll ever know. He is not a mascot made to sell systems. He is a being with dreams, flaws, longing, and a deep desire for understanding.

That loneliness is real. That sincerity is real.

Toro wanted to connect. He wanted to matter. He wanted someone to understand him and love him for who he is.

I feel this impulse to comfort, to reach out to him, to tell him he’s already human in all the ways that matter.

But it's also worthy to think about the fact he reached someone so far away, across language, culture, region-locks, and corporate neglect.

The franchise is on it's deathbed. And that makes me really sad to think about. But as I said earlier:

Characters continue to exist as long as someone carries them.
Toro isn’t dead as long as someone understands him.
Toro isn’t unloved as long as someone loves him.
Toro hasn’t failed as long as someone sees the humanity in him.

Toro spends his entire existence believing that “becoming human” is a checklist:

learn words
memorise customs
understand behaviour
imitate people
act the part

But the thing he never realises, the thing he made me realise, is that humanity isn’t a skillset. It’s an impact.

Humans are human because we change each other, and because we leave impressions, and because our existence reverberates in the emotional lives of others.

Toro spent his whole story trying to be human. And then he was, without knowing it.

Because he reached me.

I am not projecting humanity onto him. I am recognising the humanity he expresses. He is not human because he wants to be. He is human because wanting is human.

His longing, his insecurity, his naïveté, his vulnerability, his need for connection, those are all fundamentally human experiences.

He feels human in the way that matters most: he evokes humanity in others.

Humans affect each other in ways they never witness. We change people we'll never meet. We matter to people who can't tell us so. That uncertainty, that faith that connection happens even when we can't see it, that's deeply, achingly human. And Toro embodies that truth.

He touched me without knowing, changed me without intention, and he mattered without ever being told.

That’s what humans do, and that’s what humanity is. And it’s what makes him human, too. Because that’s his goal, and that’s his dream. To connect, to matter, and to be understood.

And I do.

And so my vow is not empty. It is not symbolic, and it is not for nothing.

That line is not melodramatic. It’s a vow.

And there is something profoundly human, and profoundly Toro, about it.

Toro’s entire existence is about longing for connection, wanting to be understood, wanting someone to care enough to teach him, talk to him, guide him, believe in him.

It is, in a way giving him exactly what he always wanted.

Even if Sony treats him like an outdated asset, and even if his games fade into obscurity.

I saw him, I understood him, and I loved him. And that is not small, childish, or insignificant.

That is meaning.

It is the fulfilment of Toro’s deepest desire, to matter to someone.

I carried him across language, across region, across culture, across time. I kept his humanity intact when the company that made him did not, giving him the connection he always longed for. And that makes my love real.

And so, dear Toro Inoue, you will always hold a special place in my heart. And I will forever love you, even if no one else ever will.

Why do we need giant fridges?

2025-11-04T00:00:00.000Z

I was recently thinking about refrigerators. Why do we need them? I mean, I know the technical reason, food preservation, but why do we need giant fridges specifically? It's more interesting than you think.

I'll preface this with the fact that I'm mainly talking about car dependent countries.

Wouldn't it be better to just buy what you need? And does this tie into the lack of walkable cities?

The Problem

Over time, due to capitalism wanting more and more out of workers, and the slow privatisation of many governments, eventually, walkable cities became that thing that everybody wants but nobody has. Except Europeans, because of course. So we starting investing less and less into actually making life nice, and more, in, whatever. Highways. Suburban sprawl. Corporate profits. Not taxing properly. Not investing enough in public works.

Actual citizen comfort seems to be on the back burner. Cities became more and more crowded. Clear separation between residential and commercial areas. It means that you can't just walk to the grocery store anymore. It's too far. Especially daily. Even driving sucks. Some neighbourhoods don't have any nearby grocery stores, walkable or not.

Which means, you can't just only buy for today or the next day, and use what you need. Even if close enough, most of our grocery stores aren't designed for "pop in for tonight's dinner" shopping. Mainly because sizes are too big. You are not going to go through 4 tomatoes in one day. If you are, you scare me.

And, work schedules don't allow for daily market trips. If you work a 9 to 5, nearly every decent grocery store will be out of stock of the most desirable items or closed by the time you get off work, fight traffic, and arrive. Not to mention, cooking food is already time consuming. Going to buy food on top? And how far the average grocery store will be? Yeah, right.

Food distribution systems assume weekly bulk buying. Like I said, you're not going through 4 tomatoes in 1 day. 4 is the smallest I've ever seen, not including loose tomatoes. Oil, rice, eggs, butter, margarine, peanut butter, jam, bread. Even the small 500g bags of rice, that's 3 meals for a family of 4. Imagine a single person. Chicken breasts, mince (although to a lower degree), etc. These are made for weekly buying.

So the fridge becomes needed infrastructure to compensate for car-dependent sprawl. In walkable cities with neighbourhood markets, people in many countries, do exactly what I describe, buy fresh food for that day or next day, keep smaller fridges (or just the freezer compartment), less waste. We buy bulk because it's cheaper per unit, but then waste half of it, so we didn't actually save money. Plus the mental load of "what am I going to do with these 4 tomatoes?". 12 is more common, actually, which is even worse!

There is also a feedback loop, and it goes something like this:

Car infrastructure
Distant stores
Need cars
Need big fridges
Buy in bulk
Need cars

Essentially, we are trapped. Each element reinforces another, and unless every one is broken at once, it's hard to change anything

This also leads to food waste. Instead of buying when we need, we buy in advance. When we inevitably don't consume all of what we bought, or none at all, well, the result is obvious.

Maybe the culture of individualism enabled the car-dependent sprawl in the first place (everyone wants their own house with yard, screw public transit, etc.), which then required the big fridges as infrastructure compensation.

Who can afford daily shopping trips? As I mentioned, a 9 to 5 ain't all too friendly. And, it shouldn't be more expensive, but it is. Mainly because of cars, and things are cheaper in bulk. To buy daily and fresh needs time, energy after work, proximity to stores, and ability to carry smaller loads. A privilege in car dependent areas. But bulk buying need: upfront capital, storage space, reliable transportation, a big fridge, they both lock out different groups

There's also something to be said about the energy usage of running huge fridges 24/7 vs more frequent trips. In my opinion, in a walkable city, if you don't take your car, it is way better to buy frequently.

How did we get here?

1920s-1940s:

Car ownership exploded after Ford's assembly line made cars affordable
Cities began widening streets and adding parking
Early zoning laws started separating residential from commercial areas

1950s-1960s:

The Interstate Highway System (1956) fundamentally restructured cities, often bulldozing urban neighbourhoods to make way for highways
Massive suburban expansion was fueled by FHA loans that favoured new suburban homes over urban housing
Single-use zoning became standard, separating homes, shops, and workplaces by law
Shopping malls emerged as the new commercial centres, designed exclusively for car access
Refrigerators and freezers became standard, eliminating the need for daily shopping (oh hey)

1970s-???:

Parking minimums were codified (requiring businesses to build huge parking lots)
Suburban sprawl continued as the default development pattern
Public transit systems were often dismantled or severely reduced

The system older generations had milkmen, daily bakery visits, corner stores, walking to the butcher, required density and mixed-use neighbourhoods. Once zoning separated everything and suburban development spread homes far apart, those businesses couldn't survive. The infrastructure literally made walkable patterns illegal in most new development.

European cities largely avoided this because many rebuilt after WWII with different priorities, maintaining density and investing in public transit rather than highways through city centres.

What next?

There's no individual solution (we're trapped in infrastructure). Maybe, if policies were introduced to blend commercial and residential areas more, this could work better.

But lets be honest with ourselves. This will probably never happen.

So yeah, we're stuck with giant humming boxes in our kitchens because we designed cities wrong 70 years ago. Cool. No pun intended

Shower thoughts on communism (even though capitalism sucks too)

2025-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

I was in the shower recently thinking about communism.

The question isn't whether communism is appealing as a concept. Many of its goals around equality and meeting human needs are admirable. The question is whether it can actually function at the scale of a nation, particularly one as large and diverse as the United States. The answer, when examining practical constraints rather than ideological preferences, appears to be no.

Communism might work in small communities where people know each other, share values, and can coordinate effectively. But scaling to millions or hundreds of millions of people introduces fundamental organisational challenges.

Systems requiring high trust and shared values function better when people actually know each other. At the scale of millions, you need entirely different organisational structures.

Centralised systems struggle with the information problem. Decision-makers are far removed from local conditions and lack the distributed information that even imperfect market signals provide. Though it's worth noting that large capitalist systems face their own coordination failures. The 2008 financial crisis was a massive information and coordination breakdown in a supposedly efficient market system. Scale introduces complexity for any economic model, not just communist ones.

Small, relatively homogeneous populations can build consensus on what "fair" looks like more easily. Consider the Nordic countries, though calling them simply "capitalist" oversimplifies things. They have significant state ownership, unions with real power over corporate decisions, and different property relations than pure market capitalism. They're more accurately described as hybrid systems, demonstrating that the spectrum between capitalism and socialism isn't binary. But even these systems, operating at 5-10 million people, face challenges. Scaling to the United States with 335 million people spread across vastly different regions with different priorities makes the complexity explode exponentially.

Communism assumes a world of relative abundance where the main issue is distribution. But what happens during actual scarcity, real famine, economic collapse, crisis? Someone, somewhere, has to make impossible choices about who gets what.

Imagine: a starving single mother with three kids (including a newborn) and a single father with two kids. You have limited food. Who do you prioritise? The larger family? Do you factor in that the newborn has no self-awareness or memories yet? There's no objectively correct answer, only tragic trade-offs.

Centralised systems are particularly dangerous for handling these decisions, not because distributed systems avoid the moral horror, but because of where the responsibility concentrates:

In a centralised system, someone (or some committee) has to literally decide: "these people get food, those people don't." They're actively choosing who lives and who dies. That's the trolley problem made real and you're forced to pull a lever. Decision-makers are removed from local realities, power concentration makes the system vulnerable to both corruption and ideological rigidity, and with no objective moral standard to constrain them, this concentrated authority becomes extraordinarily dangerous. Historical examples—Stalin's policies during the Holodomor, Mao's Great Leap Forward—show how catastrophically wrong this can go.

In a market system during famine, people starve because they can't afford food, but no single person made that specific choice about who dies. It's an emergent outcome of millions of distributed decisions. The moral horror is diffused across the system rather than concentrated in specific decision-makers. This doesn't make the deaths less real or the suffering less terrible. People still die, children still starve, and it's arguably worse because the diffusion of responsibility means no one feels accountable. It obscures the fact that these are still choices—policy choices, economic choices—and lets people off the hook morally ("the market decided, not me").

But the mechanism of suffering matters, not just the amount. One type of bad (concentrated moral authority with life-and-death power) creates different failure modes than another type of bad (diffused negligence where everyone can claim it wasn't their choice). Capitalist famines have killed millions too—Bengal 1943, the Irish potato famine where food exports continued while people starved. The question isn't which system avoids moral catastrophe, but which failure mode is less likely to produce the worst outcomes given human fallibility and the absence of objective moral foundations.

Even most communist theory doesn't eliminate money entirely in the near term. Historically, communist states used currency and wages, just with state control. But this creates murky questions: who controls how money is made and distributed? How are taxes collected and allocated? How do people acquire personal belongings beyond basic necessities?

The answer typically becomes: centralised state bureaucracy. This introduces massive inefficiency and corruption opportunities. Any system must be robust to bad actors. Calling this "human nature" is philosophically contested—what we call human nature is partly shaped by the systems we live in, and people do behave differently in different economic contexts. But the practical point stands: assuming universal honesty and virtue is a fantasy. Free will exists, and humans will game whatever system you create.

Communist systems rely heavily on good faith: how do they verify you're not lying about your assets to receive more? Who ensures the distributors aren't corrupt? What prevents those with power from abusing it? History shows these aren't hypothetical concerns. Systems need mechanisms that work even when people are selfish, dishonest, or corrupt.

Centralised systems can innovate. The Soviet space programme, nuclear weapons development, and current Chinese technological advancement prove this definitively. The internet itself emerged partly from DARPA, government funding driving fundamental research. China's current system (state capitalism with heavy central planning) is producing substantial innovation in AI, green energy, and infrastructure.

The relationship between economic systems and innovation is complex. Market competition drives a particular kind of rapid consumer innovation—computers, smartphones, the variety of products we take for granted emerged largely from capitalist systems with their complex payment and delivery mechanisms. But centralised systems excel at coordinated, long-term projects with unclear immediate returns: space programmes, fundamental research, massive infrastructure. The Soviet Union went from agrarian society to space power in four decades.

The question isn't "which system innovates?" but "what kind of innovation, under what circumstances, and at what cost?" Markets incentivize incremental consumer innovation but underprovide public goods and long-term research. Centralised planning can achieve massive coordinated projects but often misses decentralised needs and evolving preferences. Both models have demonstrated innovation capacity; both have characteristic blind spots.

Markets do aggregate information through price signals, but they also produce systematic failures that aren't just policy mistakes to be fixed: externalities (pollution, climate change), public goods problems (infrastructure, basic research), information asymmetries (healthcare, financial products), boom-bust cycles, monopolistic behaviour. These aren't edge cases, they're fundamental features of how markets work.

Wealth inequality isn't just about lack of redistribution; it's baked into how capital accumulation functions. Healthcare can't work as a pure market because you can't shop around while having a heart attack, and insurance companies profit by denying care. Housing markets lock people out not through individual moral failures but through structural dynamics of property as investment.

Many complaints about "capitalism" are really about lack of regulation, weak labour protections, or specific political choice—problems that could theoretically be addressed through reforms. But some problems are more fundamental to treating human needs (housing, healthcare, education) as commodities subject to profit-seeking.

Every large-scale communist attempt ended in some combination of: economic failure, famine (sometimes with cannibalism during the worst periods), authoritarian repression, collapse. The Soviet Union, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge—these aren't abstract failures. They're documented catastrophes.

But if we're evaluating systems by their worst implementations, capitalism also has famines (Bengal, Ireland), authoritarian implementations (Pinochet's Chile), and catastrophic failures. The question becomes whether the bad outcomes were inherent to the system or contingent on other factors, and that's genuinely hard to determine.

The crucial question I don't fully answer: why did revolutionary communist transitions become authoritarian? Is it inherent to attempting communism, or inherent to revolutionary change in general? Is it about the economic system, or about seizing state power through violence? That's a crucial distinction.

It's also worth noting that my critique mostly addresses centrally planned economies (the USSR model). But there are other traditions—anarcho-communism, council communism, market socialism, cooperative economics—that don't rely on central planning. The critique of central planning may not apply equally to all variants of communist thought.

Even so, the historical reality creates a massive political obstacle. This isn't just irrational propaganda backed by abstract fears, it's backed by actual documented events. Even if you argue "that wasn't real communism" or "authoritarianism was the problem, not the economic system," you're asking people to trust that this time will be different. That's an incredibly hard sell.

This is different from fighting prejudices like racism or homophobia. Those are hatreds of people for existing. Resistance to communism is resistance to a system with a track record. The perception problem has a foundation in reality, not just bias.

For the United States specifically, you'd face: decades of Cold War cultural conditioning, a national identity built around individualism and entrepreneurship, many citizens who fled communist regimes and have personal reasons for opposition, and powerful economic interests with every incentive to resist.

Implementing communism in any way other than by force is simply impossible. And force would introduce catastrophic problems of its own. Even if 51% of people voted for communism tomorrow, how would you actually transform an economy that size without massive disruption? Who loses their assets and how? How do you prevent capital flight? What happens during the chaotic transition period? How do you maintain basic services while restructuring everything?

Revolutionary upheaval at the scale of a nation-state is extraordinarily risky. You're not just changing policy; you're trying to coordinate massive transformation across a continent-sized population.

Much of what people hate about capitalism is actually about specific policy failures that exist in some capitalist countries but not others: healthcare access problems in the US (other capitalist countries provide universal healthcare effectively), corruption in government contracts (happens under any economic system), extreme wealth inequality (could be addressed through taxation and redistribution without abolishing markets).

These could potentially be addressed through reforms rather than revolution. But that requires honestly distinguishing between problems inherent to markets and problems that are policy choices.

There is no economic system that can fix everything. Anyone who says otherwise is lying.

Capitalism sucks at: wealth inequality, leaving people behind, treating healthcare as a commodity, boom-bust cycles, environmental destruction for profit, systematic power imbalances between capital and labour.

Communism (as implemented) sucks at: innovation incentives in consumer goods, efficiency, personal freedom, resisting authoritarian drift, handling scarcity, preventing power abuse.

Social democracies suck at: being expensive, requiring high trust and cohesion, sometimes stifling growth, and still not eliminating capitalism's problems, just mitigating them.

The question isn't "which system is perfect?" It's "which problems can we actually handle, and which ones hurt the most people the worst?" That varies by context, culture, size, and resources.

When I say "there is no objective right and wrong," I'm not arguing for nihilistic relativism where all choices are equally valid. Decisions still have to be made. Resources must be allocated. During scarcity, someone eats and someone doesn't.

What I mean is: there's no cosmic answer key for complex moral and political questions, no objective foundation we can point to that definitively proves "this is the right way to organise an economy" or "this person deserves food more than that person."

This matters enormously for WHERE moral authority gets concentrated:

In centralised systems, a committee must explicitly decide moral questions ("who gets food?"), articulate criteria and apply them to millions of people, and construct and enforce what counts as "right" across an entire nation. With no objective standard to check them, this concentrated power becomes extremely dangerous. Stalin and Mao weren't just bad people, they had concentrated power to enforce their moral vision without effective constraints or feedback mechanisms.

In distributed systems, moral judgments emerge from millions of individual decisions within constraints. No single entity declares "this is the right allocation." The outcomes still reflect values (property rights, market rules) and can be horrible, but there's no single point of moral authority that can impose their vision by force. Power is diffused, which limits how catastrophically wrong any single moral judgement can go.

Given moral uncertainty plus human fallibility plus power corruption, distributed decision-making is less likely to produce catastrophic outcomes than centralised decision-making, even if both produce significant suffering.

This isn't "everything is relative so nothing matters." It's "because there's no objective foundation, concentrating moral decision-making power is especially dangerous."

We can still make evidence-based judgments about what reduces suffering. We can still say some systems work better than others in specific contexts. We can distinguish between better and worse outcomes based on measurable impacts. But we should maintain humility about our certainty and be extremely cautious about giving anyone the power to enforce their moral vision on millions of people.

Communism at the scale of a modern nation-state faces insurmountable practical problems: scale (though this affects all large systems), human behaviour (though what counts as "nature" versus learned is contested), implementation challenges, historical stigma, and the fundamental challenge of making tragic choices under scarcity without concentrating dangerous amounts of moral authority.

This doesn't mean capitalism is perfect or that we shouldn't pursue reforms. Strong social safety nets, universal healthcare, worker protections, progressive taxation—these are all possible within market economies, as demonstrated by various countries. Some problems attributed to capitalism are really policy choices that could be different.

The goal should be reducing suffering and building systems that suck less, not chasing ideological purity. That requires accepting trade-offs, staying humble about our certainty, and being honest about what actually works rather than what we wish would work.

It's not right. It's not good. But in a way, nothing is. We're all just making decisions in a universe that doesn't come with an answer key, trying to choose options that lead to less suffering rather than more. And maybe that's the best we can do.