It’s nice to have cooler temps finally here, after the start of October saw 89 degree weather. Though we are looking at 81 in a couple of days, after that it’s forecast to stay mostly below 70.
And with cooler weather and Halloween decor comes a reminder that the moderation policy on the ModWiggler forum is… not ideal, and “Joe.” is the poster child for destructive interference. Last year he drove Blukač Instruments away from the forum by threatening to ban them for being “political” — because they dared to mention that their production is somewhat hampered by their country being invaded by Russia and their city being actively attacked.
Today there’s a thread locked and an 11-year veteran of the site threatened with a ban because the post “plagiarizes Karl Marx.” It does not, it’s a reference to the “commodity fetishism” angle that Adorno wrote about and which Jonathan Sterne expanded on in reference to music technology in an essay… except the post is more coherent. People were not using the thread to argue about politics at all. It’s just that Joe. has to play his role of ham-fisted petty tyrant, on his transparently hypocritical political crusade to shut down even the barest hints of leftism. I have seen him kill off a couple of total disaster threads that obviously needed it, but I maintain that the site would be better without his hands on it.
A couple hours after he locked the thread, another moderator came along and demonstrated much better leadership by posting some very thoughtful additions to the conversation (which again, wasn’t going in any kind of political direction). If the rest of us were allowed to continue commenting on the thread, that post would have turned things to a more interesting angle and it could have been a fruitful discussion.
But, nope, use one of the words that Marx once used and the thread gets murdered. Okay, whatever.
I suppose while I’m grousing about forum moderation it’s only fair to point out that KvR does not do enough of it, letting a majority of threads fester as they inevitably are hijacked by tiresome shouting matches between a couple of crusty regulars. Any thread over a certain length has probably turned into garbage. Pretty much the only thing that gets immediately shutdown is piracy talk and really blatant racism/bigotry.
And Lines, though I really like the site overall and the results generally work to maintain a pleasant atmosphere, sometimes baffles me with decisions about how threads get merged, moved and categorized, and I still don’t understand some of the decisions about the Releases category.
I’ve got a new SSD on the way now. When I bought this computer in 2019 I picked a budget drive, a 1TB Intel 660P. SSD speed, reliability and capacity have spiraled upwards since then while prices have slid ever downward. There are sales on now but rumor has it Samsung is going to slow production to prop up their prices a bit. With game install sizes ever growing and the new WRC game (by Codemasters, makers of the Dirt Rally series) coming next month, this seemed like a good time to upgrade. So, Samsung 990 Pro, twice as big, twice as fast to read and 5x faster to write, higher reliability/durability scores, highly rated software package.
Public service message: NewEgg’s current price on the 990 Pro is the same as Amazon’s “Prime Exclusive” event price. Also, my order is shipping (free) already, within a couple of hours of ordering it. One of the discounted SSDs at Amazon wasn’t even going to be delivered until mid-November.
