Apparently the latest controversial morsel on the FFVII remake is:

We wanted Tifa to have abs, so she has an athletic body type. The ethics department at Square Enix also told us that we had to tighten her chest as not to get unnatural during all the intense action. From there we got the black underwear and fitted tank top.

Ethics department. Out of all possible occupations for ethicists, someone out there has managed to make one involve critiquing 3D rendered breasts.

Apparently I stand to be blacklisted. I wrote a piece for Quillette once, before it became famous, that was actually a qualified defence of the concept of cultural appropriation.

I would later learn this act of authorship makes me a member of the Intellectual Dark Web, which of course I find highly amusing.

I found a Usenet post from 2004 about a bug in Thief: Deadly Shadows. A player, trying to open a chest, instead got engulfed by it and ended up inside.

Who was this taffer who found himself swallowed up by a chest...?

It was Terry Pratchett.

The Sarr-Savoy report to Emmanuel Macron on heritage restitution has an English translation, and I have read it. It’s very... French. That is, it reflects the stereotype of the continental intellectual whose writing can never merely be about a subject when it can bear witness to it, and whose language teems with temporalities and specificities and capitalisations. The historical and legal survey sections tone it down somewhat and appear solid, but the highfalutin moral/political exhortation that’s meant to hold it together seems itself to have expropriated its terminology into alien contexts. A sample of what President Macron will learn if he actually reads this: ‘Objects are the mediators of correspondences, of metamorphoses, and passages within an ecosystem characterized by fluidity and circularity. Within a reticular universe, objects become the operators of a relational and plastic identity...’ (p. 35)

Further brief impressions:

• It honestly reads more like a manifesto than like a report. A weighing up of arguments and points of view this really is not; when views to which the authors are unsympathetic are acknowledged at all, they tend to be psychologised: e.g. ‘no one dared to have the courage to face the situation directly’ (p. 18) and we need ‘an analytical reading of the various postures [sic!] polarizing the debates around restitutions’ (p. 28).
• Relatedly, a lot of research has clearly gone into this, and yet, given the topic, it’s remarkable to what extent the scholarship of heritage ethics as I know it isn’t represented here. It isn’t for want of a willingness to draw on Anglophone sources. It’s just not there. The closest thing comes in the context of a sort of progress narrative of the spread of pro-restitution views (p. 24).
• However, the authors do critically respond to existing pro-restitution arguments: some people who might have been cheerleaders for this report aren’t going to like p. 39. ‘Their return to their communities of origin does not have as its aim to substitute one form of physical and semantic imprisonment by another, that would this time be justified by the idea of the “rightful property owner”.’ ‘The argument according to which the act of restitution implies that cultural heritage objects only retain their legitimate life within their originary geocultural environments—and equating this with the idea that the cultural objects must therefore remain at their originary home, is not acceptable.’
• That’s because they want to push a ‘new relational ethics’ instead. Why no, they don’t do much to set this grand aim within the context of moral philosophy at large. No prizes for guessing why I have the knives out for this one.

If your eye got caught by the waves of Mastodon-is-like-Twitter-but-much-nicer articles, you may find these notes marginally useful. I’m going to assume you’ve got as far as knowing Mastodon is not the whole network, but a microblogging platform integrated into the wider and older ‘Fediverse’. If that’s confusing already, see here for a primer (and maybe here but ignore the implication that Mastodon Social is a GNU Social instance).

If you're looking for microblogging then your choice is largely between Mastodon and Pleroma instances (although Misskey is looking interesting and GNU Social/PostActiv haven’t gone anywhere), but there are other bits of Fedi as well: recent and work-in-progress additions include Peertube for federated video and Pixelfed for image posting. (Right now Pixelfed has partial federation support but following and anything else involving account inboxes won’t work, and Peertube following has complications arising from the way it replicated YouTube’s user/channel distinction.)

If you’re possessed of the perverse sort of mind that that intrigues instead of putting off, then you’ll be looking to choose an instance to join (unless you intend to host your own, in which case you are indeed on your own). There are various instance lists, such as fediverse.network and those at distsn.org, but the main thing to grasp is that this is rather like having a large extended network of friends and colleagues, some of whom aren’t on speaking terms with each other.

In a sense, this is a feature: it’s not that Fedi has any fewer nasty people (for anyone’s definition of nasty) than any unfederated social network, but that the federated aspect lets people sort themselves into local instances that suit their attitudes and interests, including the level of blocking: you can join anything from a free speech instance to an instance that administratively blocks free speech instances so its users never see posts from them. However, if you don’t want to make more than one Fediverse account (and many people do make multiple accounts to suit the local interests of multiple instances), and you want an unrestricted view of the Fediverse, then you can end up specifically looking for an instance that’s lightly moderated (so it won’t be blocked on sight by restrictive instances) but with a no-admin-level-block policy. (You can block/mute both individuals and instances on your own account.)

In particular, mastodon.social, the big flagship Mastodon instance, has a reputation for blocking large chunks of the Fediverse without telling anyone it’s done so. Edit: this has now changed after, er, events took place. (I’m not sure whether this covers all admin-level blocks or whether individuals may also have been blocked/muted.)

Also, if you’re academically inclined and considering a sign-up on scholar.social, check the blocklist/mutelist (it silences unmoderated instances, but at least has a public list of those it’s silenced) and also read this, this and this: the admin’s conception of academic freedom is, er, not uncontroversial.

While we’re on the jolly subject of blocklists, there are a couple that are passed around among some admins of more block-happy instances, and, well, I’m not going to tell you what side to take here.

When you look at the public front page of an instance, you may find yourself viewing the ‘federated timeline’/‘the whole known network’, which contains every post the instance knows about via subscription or relay. However, when you’re deciding which instance to join you’ll usually want to check the local timeline instead: if necessary you can get an instance’s most recent posts from here. (Remotely viewing local timelines is a semi-solved problem: the Mastalab app very recently added remote instance subscriptions of this sort.)

(Some instances have ‘followbots’ that follow as many people as possible in order to give the fullest possible view of the Fediverse. Which is why, if I want to do a hashtag search, instead of bothering with the limited view of the local instance I may go to https://mastodon.host/tags/tag-goes-here in order to take advantage of its followbot. There’s also a tag explorer tool here, and if you can follow a Japanese UI there’s a Fediverse search tool here. Let’s say federation has its complications. Mastodon’s search features are also deliberately restricted, the reasoning apparently being that they’d be used for harassment if they were more useful.)

If you want to interact with a post you've found via the open Web but your instance doesn’t know about it yet, you can try putting its URL into the search box in the Mastodon UI, or the Mastodon-style front-end available in Pleroma (if there’s no login option to use the latter, try adding /web to the end of the hostname). Mastodon can generally find other Mastodon posts unless a server’s configured in a way it dislikes. Pleroma has a set-up where a remote URL with /objects/ in it redirects to a local one with /notice/ in it, and the latter doesn’t always seem to return results in Mastodon. Friendica URLs don’t work in Mastodon search and I don’t know of any work-around.

Misc. Mastodon vs. Pleroma stuff: Mastodon has a character limit of 500 unless an instance changes it, Pleroma has 5000; Mastodon’s post privacy settings may not be available to set in Pleroma’s native front-end unless the admin has turned them on (though none of them provides real security: it’s more like whispering when in a crowded room); the native Pleroma front-end has no favourites list or ability to search for anything but usernames, but the Mastodon-style front-end can be used instead; if Pleroma won’t load older posts, or displays sensitivity banners when they’ve been set on images even though you turned them off, switch timelines and then switch back; I’ve had random problems following accounts from a Pleroma instance and never receiving posts from them, but I don’t yet know whether it’s instance-specific; and Mastodon is useless for heavy users trying to follow what happened overnight, because ‘I figured nobody is likely to scroll back 400 items’.

Culture-wise, according to legend Mastodon is a fluffy cloud heaven of sweetness and light, while GNU Social and Pleroma instances compete to have the shiniest jackboots. Having viewed the federated timeline the night McCain died, I can confirm that Mastodon has plenty of horrible people who will be openly vile when they feel they have political/social licence to. There is some truth in the ‘social network without Nazis’ thing, but...

Basically, the nature of federation means generalisations about culture are seldom very useful once they get wider then the culture of specific instances, but Mastodon by design tries to foster niceness and that often does, indeed, foster enforced niceness. The Content Warning feature (actually a repurposed subject line in the federation protocol) has developed into a complicated and somewhat arcane cultural phenomenon of its own, with readers expected to be able to parse a line like ‘mh (-)’ to know what they’re being warned about (‘mental health, negative’). Basically... You know the kind of people who get sociopolitical religion and then want to ‘educate’ everyone else? Soi-disant marginalised people with elbows as sharp as their victim complexes? People who not only earnestly practise niceness but have set up a working group to determine niceness protocols? They tend to gravitate towards Mastodon. But then there are also people who really are somehow marginalised or just have a puppyish keenness, so, you know...

Oh, and one of the largest Pleroma/GNU Social sites really is overseen by someone who’s either a vocal racist or a gigantic edgelord.

Politically, it’s your usual social media drivel for the most part: loads of people banging on about late stage capitalism in a manner suggestive of late stage adolescence. There are a few people who are doing more serious thinking from a Leftist angle, but then again I just saw someone abandon an account on the social.coop instance, describing it as a bureaucratic hell... It’s a similar case for the Right: worthwhile conversations can be had, but some searching is usually involved.

So yes... You have been warned, and all that. In the event that curiosity burns yet within your heart (there must be some if you read this far, even if it’s maybe of a morbid sort), let me leave you with a few introductory following recommendations: @tokyocameraclub@mstdn.tokyocameraclub.com (that entire instance has some great photographers, transcending all language barriers), @signalstation@raggedfeathers.com (a strangely beguiling sort of dark fiction) and @netkitty@cybre.space (everyone loves the kitten).