Text and Hubris |

Interviews, Research, and Muckraking in “Academic” Clothing

This is as close as I get to a “sub-comment”.

Speaking as an academic whose research does occasionally involve interviewing people: not all people with academic credentials are academic. Academic researchers know that informed consent is a real thing. If they do not provide you with a release and a description of the research they are doing and how your interview will be used, they are not interested in academic research. If they are affiliated (in the US at least), they should provide an institutional review board (IRB) form and/or be approved through that IRB. I am currently unaffiliated, so I don’t have an IRB to go through. That is not a win. I consider that an even greater hurdle that requires more transparency, not less.

A flagrant misuse of interview data diminishes trust, hurts everyone involved and would probably be flagged in any peer-reviewed journal. Credentials are great, but not enough. Trust but verify. I and any researcher should more than happy to sign a document saying that if, in the course of research, we find some new cool thing that we want to use a part of your interview to highlight, we must get your explicit sign-off for that.

It’s interesting how consent seems to be an ongoing issue, here.

Using Vorta for Borg Backups on Rsync.net

Just a quick note for anyone using rsync.net and Vorta for borg backups.

Rsync.net has the borg executable installed. It can be found at /usr/local/bin/borg1.

You will need to set the remote path command line argument in the Advanced section of the new repository (see below).

This can be found online in a roundabout way, but I want it easily accessible the next time I need it!

Rebuilding a Social Life

I am coming off a rather rough week and realizing that my social circle has diminished. I knew this previously, of course, but this last week was a stark reminder. It is something that I will need to address in the coming year.

How I will address that, however, is still a significant unknown.

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A pale blue horned woman riding an elk with fairies flying around her.

Vaesen - Session 0

Find this post and more like it on The Scrivener’s Jest, my more personal site where I post creative works along with a bunch of random talk about storytelling games, my life, media, Internet culture and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Last night, I started running a new Vaesen game with my core group of players. This was a session 0 game, as none of the players have much familiarity with the Year Zero system that Free League Publishing uses for many of its games, nor the adaptation made to make the system work for the Vaesen setting.

Vaesen is a roleplaying game focused on Nordic Horror centering on 19th century Scandinavia1. The players are known as Thursday’s Children. They have all, through one trauma or another, gained the ability to see vaesen, the strange creatures of myth, legend, and terror that have always been there with us. Vaesen then, is a story of dealing with creatures and people on the fringes. The setting is one of rapid industrialization, a movement from one way of life to another and the struggles that arise as that occurs.

In short, it is a wonderful and dark analog of our current state and one that is rich for exploration and storytelling.

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Active Choice in Federation

Mastodon is an odd place when you try to imagine it as a social media platform. It isn’t a social media platform. It is a whole bunch of platforms (some of which don’t even run Mastodon). My point here is not to go in to a discussion on Mastodon vs. ActivityPub, though. My point is that people, and I think sometimes even very savvy people, still conflate Mastodon with a social media platform.
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© Geoffrey Gimse (2024) - Built using Hugo.

Opinions expressed here are my own and are not neccessarily shared by employers, friends, or colleagues. Except where noted, all photos are my own. Other images used on this site are in the Public Domain or have been purchased for use via The Noun Project."