I mean, how else do you propose to organize the sea of information that the internet is constantly swamped in? Individual personalities work as a pretty consistently navigable waypoint and information gatekeeper, a pretty decent filtration mechanism. Most other methods are somewhat vulnerable to corruption over time, or are less consistent, or demand higher maintenance for different tradeoffs.

I don’t necessarily think so. Following individuals (granted that you are actually doing so, and not following just an individual’s “brand”) is kind of a better way to guarantee that you’re going to get a consistent perspective. If you just followed topics, oh, here’s this perspective, this perspective, this perspective, ahhh, and it all becomes so much noise. Now you have to engage with the kind of, surface level summation of so many people’s cited sources and comments. It becomes harder to judge, potentially, harder to understand.

It’s like if you were trying to find a good video game to play.

You could search by genre, right, or, by “topic”, and that might get you some stuff that’s similar, but if you’ve ever tried to browse the steam store by just tags alone, you’ll find pretty quick how useless it is.

So, maybe you go by publisher, or, likewise, by magazine, by news site. That might be decent, for finding similar games, through a publisher, right, but it’s kind of a toss-up. If you like street fighter 6, it’s a toss up whether or not you like any of capcom’s other games. Same thing could be said of most publishers. And I don’t think you’re going to find consistent perspectives, necessarily, from kotaku, or even really useful information. It is the kind of, MO of a news company to flatten every journalists’ output into a kind of unified, easily consumable, inoffensive package, to bump up readership numbers and ensure they keep getting review copies, and ensure they keep hitting deadlines that line up with, or come a day or two before, release dates.

So, then you just go to one singular journalist. Now you can trust their perspective, now you can understand their tastes and where they line up with you and where they don’t. What they are possibly more predisposed towards reviewing. This is easier if they’re a private entity, rather than part of a larger model. Or, you could start following a single studio, or a single developer. Now you can understand what they are likely to produce in the future, as viewed through the lens of their past catalogue. Do they produce point and clicks? First person horror? Do they make games with particular subject matters that you find fascinating, or do they just have a kind of vibe that you like?

So that’s kind of why it would make sense to follow specific people, instead of just kind of, crowdsourcing your topics, and then following those collectively defined topics. One will give you the more consistent set of answers about what you’re looking for, one will give you a much broader net, and maybe will inform you more of the “cultural zeitgeist”, insofar as it exists among people who also want to make posts on those topics, to people who only want to follow those topics, and not follow the posters themselves. And I would, broadly, say the consistency is more important than “accuracy”, not that I think you’re going to get either from following topics and not people.

Yeah, but I like physical keyboards because they’re cool, and non-physical keyboards are lame. They reduce my hardware experience to a joyless, abstracted, sterile experience, where I don’t have the ability to click any buttons, turn any knobs, flip any hinges. Then, on top of that, the software experience also ends up being standardized and sterile.

It is more practically efficient, sure. But I like the inefficiency. It’s like driving a stick-shift, it’s less convenient, but the tactility and inconvenience, the physicality, makes the object more real, less confined to cyberspace. I am forced to become a more conscious driver, I can’t drink a drink while I drive, or drive one-handed. Old phones are like portable games consoles. New phones are magic mirrors that steal your soul.

There’s also probably something to be said that there’s a sort of two-way causal relationship, where the phones becoming more practical devices enables more reliance upon them, and phones becoming more practical devices is driven by a need from private interests to make these devices more reliable and frictionless. More joyless. Cars used to be a simple toy and a fool’s replacement for the horse and buggy. In many ways, I would’ve much preferred if they had remained confined to that use case, rather than evolving to take over american civic infrastructure and life.

It’s sort of like, dwarf fortress has an appeal, not just in playing the “game”, right, not just in doing the things in the game, but also in memorizing the layouts and how to interface with the horrible UI, where it makes you feel smart for understanding how to parse it, even if in reality it’s a fairly useless skill, and it’s not actually that complicated.

to kind of sum it up, I think “not all men” tends to be kind of a red flag in the same vein as “all lives matter”. Not quite as bad, and obviously it’s contextually different as “not all men” refers to feminism rather than race relations, but I think it kind of makes the point as a metaphor.

You could try these, if they’re available in your area, seems pretty similar and I always liked em.

I’ve never seen anyone bring it up, so there’s probably no chance it ever gets brought back. How come banana ice cream is so uncommon? It’s the obvious secret fourth flavor, and this one was good. Why do we live on hellworld?

I will take on every animal at once, and win.

By being elected president on a platform of bog-standard normal liberalism, FDR style, behind a remotely charismatic personality rather than a shambling horrid human corpse. I will legislate the space force to create huge satellites that catch solar energy and funnel that energy down to the surface with big microwaves. I will take this opportunity to equip the space stations with hypersonic aircraft that will drop normal supersonic personnel carriers, ensuring a global response time of only a few hours. This will probably be less monetarily intensive than putting a US military base everywhere on the planet, so I’d use those savings to expand the nuclear arsenal, and possibly deploy some of those weapons to space in secret under the guise of some commercial wi-fi satellite ventures. I will reveal this fact to everyone later on once they have all been globally deployed and nobody has any countermeasures, and then I’ll start performing a bloody hostile takeover of the planet.

Then, I will attempt to quintuple global fossil fuel output. I don’t know what we’ll use all this excess energy for, probably we’d just use it to build more horrible weapons of war, or huge impenetrable underground citadels, or whatever. I will get rid of regulation for industry, ensuring massive environmental disasters. I will even tell the CIA to do some of them probably, nord stream pipeline style, and they’ll probably do it cause they’re crazy. Maybe I’ll use the microwave power grid to blow up some of my enemies by boiling them until they explode.

At the end of my term as god emperor dictator, a disgrace and shell of my former self, I will use the nuclear football to ensure no life on the planet survives, except for maybe basic viruses, bacteria, and maybe a couple different insects. I will arise from my presidential super-bunker to face a barren world. A perfect world, free from sin. Thus concludes the 2nd Global Emu War.

If I wasn’t going to do any of that and I just had to give like the least dangerous animal I personally could take on, I’d probably say like. Maybe a stray ant. That might be too sad, though, because that’s just a lonely ant and it’s sort of too pathetic to kill it. Maybe like a really evil guy that’s about to die anyways? But that’s also too sad, because that’s just a meat-puppet automaton of life that has shambled around until it’s shut down. Maybe I could just kill like, dick cheney, or something, someone super evil. He looks too much like george costanza for me to do that though, I think.

Edit: actually I think I could take on any invasive species of animal barehanded, with a combination of my extremely tough fists that I have been spraying with dog medicine, and tai chi exercise DVD training regimen.

Can’t we just have both, and teach both? But like, in a more committed fashion than we currently do. Probably swapping out road signs and textbooks as they naturally need to be swapped out, to include both sets of measurements and the conversions between them.

I mean, the US was just a colonial state that broke ties to the british monarchy, and that shit happens all the time, so I think through that method, there’s still a pretty good chance. If you’re talking more about like, the establishment of the US as a state through the genocide of the native peoples, intentional or otherwise, I’d say, sure, yeah, that’s hopefully never gonna happen again, but general independence movements happen all the time.

Needs more limitations on investment in the stock market, more investment into co-ops and employee owned businesses, and more investment into rail infrastructure and other good civic infrastructure at the federal level. Also, change from general ranked choice voting, to the schulze method.

Also I wanna see a real move towards taco tuesday. We think it’s a meme or whatever, but like an experimental free food day, or free single meal, for at least one day a week, seems totally achievable, and like it would do some good. Maybe try to integrate some community gardening into it or something, set up some federal system for that, that would be fucking sick dude hoo lee.

Edit: If you’re getting rid of states, or like, trying to rethink them, I think I remember seeing some maps redrawn with states if they all had totally equal population, which you could do, and I’ve also seen some maps that allocate states based more on natural resources, than just having like, a lot of the western states be shitty squares and stuff. I think I saw one based on water tables, but I can’t seem to find it or remember the name of it. You’d probably wanna go in for stuff like that, if you wanted to still retain the idea of states, and give them a reason to exist but also be fair and not lame.

You know, it’s kind of interesting, because I kind of wonder, and I’m sure someone could educate me to, the differences between philosophical outlooks that drive these different ideals.

If you were like, a windows or mac purist, you’d maybe just be gunning for as much mass adoption as possible, meaning that you have as much interoperability, or, accessibility, as possible, and maybe you’re just biting the bullet in terms of like, corporate shenanigans and control. Basically you’d just be like, admitting defeat, to some extent, it’d be a compromise ideology. It’s sort of like the same ideology that pushes one big centralized set of servers for everything, compared to everyone running their own little instances. Sure, you’re getting a lack of security, lack of flexibility, and thus, potentially, the functionality of the app ends up sucking depending on what you’re doing, yadda yadda. But in return, you get mass adoption. This is kinda flip-flopped with like, Linux purism, right? And then the natural use cases and market adoption for it tends to just be the more niche uses, that demand such flexibility.

So, which is more important for free access. Actual legal freedom, which even works itself into the structure of the app itself, right, or just, straight mercenary mass adoption, under any means necessary? I dunno.

On one hand, within the current structure of the economy and political landscape, globally, it’s kind of impossible to achieve mass adoption with Linux, and I think mass adoption of it is almost kind of antithetical to the anarchism of the project itself, as is mass adoption of most anarchist political projects. It’s just kind of impossible to win in a head-to-head competition with larger corporations, or with more short-term gains focused ideologies.

I’m still just running windows 10 LTSC with MAS, and it works fine for me, so that’s obviously where my ideological line is kind of threaded, just having everybody have the best free version of windows, maybe with some sort of increased privacy modifications to cut down on telemetry and shit like that, but I kinda doubt people could actually do that without destroying the usability of the system like all of those tend to do, or else someone would’ve probably done it by now.

The problem is that I don’t know whether or not it’s gonna be worthwhile until I read the comment, and by that point, it’s already too late, because I’ve already read it.

Couple different factors there, but it mostly just comes down to some easily explainable things. A shooter without a motive isn’t a story that sells well, and it isn’t a story that people generally want to read. Your highest profile american crimes tend to be perpetrated by extreme weirdos. I think it’s probably just that this guy was kind of a sad old dude, and probably a pedo to boot, so it doesn’t really make for a nice, harrowing story. It’s just depressing, mostly.

Most readers, I think, want a kind of, narrative, or meta-narrative, around their media consumption. You can see people in this thread, trying to stamp one onto this shooting with the whole bump-stock thing, which I think is mostly just a minor aside, but for the fact that it kind of ties into a larger narrative about gun control, a larger meta-narrative, that serves political ends. Even in that, though, it’s not a very good grafting subject for those stories. The fact that it was passed by a republican president means that it can’t really serve mainstream political party end-goals, and bump stocks aren’t really a significant concern, despite how people might want to make them out to be. Basically their only tactical use case is something like this, otherwise, they’re mostly a toy. They don’t really have the same use-case for gang violence, like you might see with glock switches. So they don’t really present a highly defensible instance of gun control going wrong, and they don’t present a high-priority target in terms of gun control legislation.

It is almost impossible for most places to do reporting in a way where you are ever given the full scope, the full picture. It’s hard to report sobering data which might give you the larger picture, because it’s uncertain, up for contestation, boring, and unrelatable. It’s hard to report on everything in an indiscriminate way, if you’re just reporting everything without any bigger picture questions, then you’re liable to simply serving stories with no external context that would ground the reader, and you lead the reader to only ground themselves. If you do this enough, in combination with the A-B testing that might tell you what to actually report on, you’ll just end up becoming 24 hour nightly news, where you just report on murder and rapes and serve political agendas without any real knowledge of what you’re doing. Things have to inherently be passed through the filter of a meta-narrative in order for them to make any sense, to have any meaning at all. If you can’t really do that, if all you’re left with is meaningless violence, you will probably just see people ignore it.

yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:

Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people’s wrists, at that time.

if anything, I would think it’d be the opposite. LEDs are pretty capable of more narrow bandwidths natively, but old streetlights used to be a more pure kind of yellowy color, because they were low pressure sodium vapor lamps. Those kinds of lamps give off an incredibly narrow bandwidth of yellow light, and are pretty energy efficient. I would think, as we’ve made the transition from that to more wide-bandwidth LEDs, more insects would be attracted to the lights, and more insects would die. But I’m not quite sure one way or the other.

Yeah, maybe that’s cause we don’t have nostalgia for any of the adapted properties they keep choosing over and over. The original star wars came out in 1970-something. Maybe some older Millennials have some nostalgia for the prequels, but even most of them tend to know that it sucks pretty hard. I feel like a lot of the millennial childhood movies, the nostalgia-bait, is gonna be stuff that are bad remakes or sequels of older movies. Gen-X had predator, Millennials had alien vs. predator: requiem. Maybe early Millennials had heathers, but mostly, Millennials have mean girls, which recently got a 1-to-1 musical remake, which wasn’t that good. Last two times they’ve tried to adapt avatar, it’s been pretty bad, as well. I just don’t have supreme confidence that anyone will really understand the appeal of any of these works or realistically be able to replicate them.

I think probably a primary driver of this is that a lot of these works’ appeal is rooted in their specific aesthetic, and hollywood as of late has felt very homogenized to greenscreen soundstages where everything is set in a concrete cityscape with overcast noonday lighting, because all the non-unionized CGI patsies are subject to a bunch of crunch time pressure where they just have to churn out garbage over and over. Also not helped by the amount of this which is done overseas, and can’t actively take any co-ordinated input in the middle of production. Mergers, leading to ballooning budgets, leading to shittier, more controlled, more generic products. Same shit has been happening in gaming, too. Easier to sell a committee decision on a remake, adaptation, or sequel, too, something that’s “proven” as a property, instead of an original IP.

That’s not even really to talk on how many Zoomers probably have nostalgia for early youtube videos, and shit like that, rather than mainstream movies or franchises. They don’t need to watch a remake of like, an old markiplier video, they can just tune into him doing basically the same thing he’s done for the last 15 years if they want a shitty nostalgia hit. I don’t need a remake of homestar runner, they’re still releasing shorts that I can watch occasionally. You can watch most of the same old guys because they’re still doing the same stuff they used to do. For the most part, anyways, lots of them got cancelled for being shitbags, or have had severe mental breaks. Still, point stands that, at the lower end especially, I can just go online and watch a bunch of amateur artists destroy their craft, I don’t need the movies or TV for those niche hits anymore.

Nah, I kinda like it, keeps my mornings sufficiently spicy and grounded. I tend to be more upbeat when I get too in my shit, and so it’s mostly better if I can browse around horrible doomposts and depressing shit when I need it. Certainly, I tend to like it better than cheerful nonsense that tends to either amount to played out references, or tribalistic bashing, though, that’s not to say doomposts can’t really be in that same vein either.

In any case, you’re gonna see them because they’re more likely to survive and get attention. This is good, for bringing awareness, maybe bad for explanatory power or sustained activism, but it strictly has more survival power in the attention economy, when compared to normal posts.

I’m stupid, can you give me a like, more clear practical example of a good use of blockchain? Cause I get the sense that a good amount of this conflict, going off that flowchart, is going to be due to the evaluation of these situations as like, not needing to arise in the first place, or maybe like, a philosophical objection to the necessity of the technology, maybe. But I think a clearer example could help with this.

I’ve read through this whole thread, and I still haven’t really come to any solid conclusions on it. I’m skeptical of crypto as a kind of idiotic speculative market, but that’s also every market ever. But then, the blockchain is apparently different from crypto, even though they’re both hype-laden marketing terms that have been completely fucked up. I think doing [redacted] with crypto is still potentially cool, though I think it still has limited anonymity, from what I’ve heard, and the speculative market also fucks it up.

Is “the blockchain” just like some nerd shit that’s for internal hospital ledgers, and beyond that it’s all kind of moot garbage, or what? Someone spoonfeed me.

that’s a pretty nice bait