Why do I bring this up? Well, we don't usually think about it, but piracy can involve things like: paying a VPN subscription, paying a Usenet provider, paying for a DVD to rip it and upload it somewhere else, paying either a VPS or media server company to host your media online, and hosting a piracy website using cloudflare. We usually don't think about this because for most people nowadays, it's as simple as going to a sketchy website and hitting play. Now there are some ways around this. I2P and some other proxies let you torrent without a VPN. There are media server apps that are completely free like Jellyfin. Plus after looking it up online, you don't neccessarily need an account to rip from streaming services, but I'm not entirely sure. However there are still possible problems that fed into consumerism. For one thing, there are ways companies keep track of which torrents are popular. There's an LLM called NetTrace used to tell how popular a torrent is. I'm sure this is used for finding which torrents they'd have an easier time suing someone over. But someone else brought up the possibility that companies use it for popularity rankings of media and adjust accordingly. My point here is while looking for the least consumerist option is nice, we live in a society of money and we shouldn't beat ourselves up for not avoiding it when possible.

For those who don't know, Auteur Theory is the idea that the director is the movie's "one true voice" or artist. Now a lot of people do this to an extent. If I see a film by a director I like, I get interested in it. But it's weird that a collaborative art form is often boiled down to just one person's brain. Even with TV, it's often seen as the show runner's "voice." That said, my 1st introduction to this theory was a Discord friend at the time sending a video complaining about it for the wrong reasons. It wasn't about how it ignores the efforts of other workers (actors, writers, etc), but how it praises films with "too much personality." You know what's the opposite of art with personality? Soulless AI slop, ads. Hell, I even thought of ads at the time. Complaining about self expression in art is like complaining that water is wet.

Has its place but doesn't live up to the hype. The plugins can be useful, especially if you're a newbie, but VSCode & even its anti-Microslop fork, VSCodium, are overrated. A lot of people speak praises of the Live Preview extensions. But you can just save the change and then open up the file in your browser and refresh when needed. It gives you the benefit of being able to test multiple browsers. Browsers also will give you a useful error message for xml files, including which line has the error. The main reason I stayed with VSCode/Codium was the Neocities plugin that lets you push updates to Neocities, but I don't need that anymore. Plus it's very resource heavy for a text editor. This was the 1st one I used that wasn't just the Neocities Editor.

Whatever Generic Text Editor Comes With Your OS or DE

This one is just okay, but it has the vibe of some oldhead coder who couldn't care less about whatever fancy IDE people are using. Plus it's common for Linux to have the default text editor come with a few features for coding, like color coding tags and tabs. I've never used Notepad++ but I'd imagine it's similar.

Kate

KDE's code editor. It's similar to VSCodium but more lightweight and with less extensions.

Nano

Kinda the same vibe as just using a generic text editor. Using the terminal can be useful for files that require sudo permissions to edit. Plus the small amount of key shortcuts makes them easier to remember even if they do that thing where they use a confusing shorthand for the Alt, Ctrl, etc keys.

Anyway, I'm excited for the new Hathaway Gundam movie. I feel like my approach to franchise is to just watch the stuff that looks interesting to me and the previous movie starring Hathaway Noa did not disappoint. That said, I feel like this franchise has gone on too long. It's been since 1979, that's like 4 decades plus 7 years. Ironic since I've gotten into One Piece, but I'm the type of person who'd rather have a good but premature ending than for like a series to never end, no matter how much I like it. In fact, this is why I was so hesistant to start One Piece. I get intimated by the idea of "catching up" with an ongoing but long series, especially since like I might take a break from the series or something and then jump back in too late.

The reason this concept interests me is that on social media (and even the rest of the web), there's this competing idea that since political deattachment and disengagement protects the status quo, it's a sign that you're unaffected by these tragedies. I don't think these ideas are mutually exclusive. But I don't think it explains marginalized people who want to disengage from politics, at least not fully. Sure, you could just argue it's because they're more privileged in some areas than others, but that also describes a lot of people who do see themselves as politically engaged and passionate. But one thing that comes up in discussions with people like that is that they see it as pointless, that there's nothing they can do. Hell, lately, I can feel myself succumb to this "psychic numbing" sometimes. So I plan to read more about the concept, however it seems kinda hard to find Robert Jay Lifton's books online. I still managed to find some, but he's not as popular as some other writers for sure which is unfortunate.

This isn't meant to shame this person. But I had a disagreement about AI with someone on Matrix. They brought up computers. While I do see the comparison in some ways (data centers, the harmful environmental effects, surveillance, etc); with computers, there feels like there's at least more of a discussion to had as to if they're worth it or not. While they've done a lot of harm, they're also useful for a lot of things. I also said LLMs were glorified text/image generators and that I didn't think of them as "great." This person responded with a video on improvements in generated meme videos, missing my point. This got me thinking.

Think of it this way, why would I trust my information from a generic text generator? Why would I use an image generator to produce an image when I like drawing and editing memes together myself? LLM-generated images have turned "I don't dream of labor" to "I don't dream of hobbies." for a lot of people and that's what makes me uncomfortable. Not an imagined threat to "meritocracy" as if that ever existed and was not just some rhetoric rich people and policticians used to justify their existence.

Vicious Delights: I know him from the Frutiger Aero Archive's Forum & IRC. He reviews anime and talks about trends in fandom culture. He often provides a unique perspective on things that's refreshing.

Rnotte.Art: They're an artist and an internet friend of mine. Talk about society, art, and finding joy in life when it seems like the world sucks.

I might add more later.

マリウス: They cover a wide range of topics from tech to travel pics to research into the formation of buracracy.

Virtual Curiosities: I found this one when looking for RSS feed reader reviews.

Hutch 3G: Flip phone enthuasist

Noahie: An existentialist but positive personal blog with a hint of religious faith

Quinn MaClay: Introspections on culture and music

I've noticed I'm more interested in radical leftist news websites, middle eastern news websites, and people's blogs for punditry and analysis than I am the breadtube channels or even the mainstream news websites in my RSS feeds. I still keep up with them to get a different perspective. But it feels like more of a chore lately because it feels more "commodified" in a sense. Hell, there's this one youtube video essayist I used to love, but lately have been disappointed in. I might unsubscribe from certain Youtube channels. It's on Freetube, so it's probably not gonna hurt their subscriber count anyway. By the way, if you want a Lebanese news website, Megaphone News, El Nashra and Ujleb are pretty good.

But I think this coincides with the treatment of reformism as "revolutionary" regardless of what side of the reform you're on. For example, in the USA, basic social democractic reforms (like government funded healthcare) get associated with socialism even more than workers owning and managing their workplaces together (you know, controlling the means of production). Even the revolutionary left ends up spending more time arguing for reforms than revolution. But at the same time, it's hard to blame people for turning towards more ethical consumerism or millequetoast reforms when literally the politicians and corporations fight so hard against it. It's hard to blame people for wanting to keep certain industries alive when big tech is trying to kill them off along with the workers in those industries when they can't pay their bills. Hell, you could argue fighting for reforms helps. But I don't think we should stop there. I'd get more into it, but quite frankly, I'm not a "revolutions" expert and most people have a simplified idea of what a revolution would entail anyway. If there's something like the Epstein files, the Panama papers, Democrats' willingness to cooperate with the Trump regime, etc. show, it's that these systems themselves breed corruption.

But if you think about it, even if you have a community centered around certain values, music, etc, the problem remains the same. Some people might fit some aspects and not others, but force themselves to fit completely regardless in an attempt to fit in. What I don't miss is the subcultures themselves but the sense of rebellion people had. Even then my experiences in mutual aid and keeping up with the news show that that hasn't been completely lost.

I think what people are complaining about is not the "inautheticity," but the even more blatant commodification of it & the lack of collective identity. As I made clear, I don't think the lack of an in-group and out-group is inherently bad. In some ways, it might even be good. But it's easy to see why people would miss it in an era where people are isolated from one another and individualism is touted in subservience to modern society rather than against it. There's a reason none of these subcultures challenged the status quo in the long run and got co-opted. They were easy to commodify to begin with. Don't rebel, listen to music about rebelling. Don't help your neighbor, complain about "posers." All that happened was the mask got taken off.

For example, I'm reading a book on a well-known science fraud scandal. I not only learnt some physics, like palladium filtering out hydrogen molecules, but also how misleading it can be to treat a charismatic expert in one field as a genius in every subject. Basically, the people behind "cold fusion" were electro-chemists but not physicists. But since they were already well liked and smart, people trusted them. I can take that and encorporate its message about "Great Man" theory into how I see systems and how I see the world at large. But even then how I interpret it is always gonna be influenced by my perspective in other areas. No one is without bias and that includes me.