I'll start: it wasn't too long ago that one wasn't expected to pay out of one's coked up nose for programs (apps). One used to be able to buy a thing and then own the thing. Vacuum cleaners. Video games. Photoshops. Now one has to sign up for it, enter one's credit card info and fucking pay monthly for some harebrained "service."
And I blame all of you. Probably 9/10ths of you are on apple products and/or are locked into absolutely insane digital ecosystems and you all laid down and took it. All of you fucking libs. You took it, you normalized it, and fuck all of you.
And I blame all of you.
Blaming the inevitable outcome of capitalism on the common people being stupid is a very Louis CK thing to do.
I have a total of zero subscriptions and pirate everything, not because of any moral reason, but because I'm broke lol
even if i had money i'd still pirate, if i want to watch a movie i want to click a file and watch it not have to check each different subscription service and then watch it in low bitrate 1080p
I pirate movies despite having money for this exact reason, when you pay you get a garbage user experience and unskippable ads. I will do anything to avoid advertising I fucking hate it
get Bluray remuxes, they mostly have them, otherwise get the Bluray rip, it will definitely have it
on the website i use you can still get the commentaries as an additional audio track embedded in the file but if you want the bts stuff you need to download the full rip which is a pain.
I don't have good enough internet to not pirate haha, I can't stream shit here. Also, fuck corporations. If it was as easy to steal all the shit I need from corporations as it is to pirate, I would never buy again.
I occasionally buy indie games tho cuz: 1) they're indie; 2) they're often not on the pirate scene; 3) they're often on sale for like a dollar haha
The internet was better 15 years ago. The way the handful of sites that still exist compete for users' full time and attention is extremely harmful to the users' brains. We're all rats in skinner boxes waiting for that dopamine hit from the little computer in our pockets.
That's just nostalgia doing your brain a fuck. It wasn't better 15 years ago, especially because smart phones allowed millions of people of color to actually get online. I think we're way better off now, and the internet actually, y'know, loads.
Nah. 15 years ago was 2005, right before social media really took off, during the height of places like newgrounds. There were individual forums or IRC channels for any niche interest you could possibly want - things were a lot more federated. Corporations weren't viciously after every single crumb of metadata about you. Things weren't nearly as ad-driven. Now pretty much all the content on the web is on reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe tumblr. It was easy to glue together a geocities page or cobble together some spaghetti php and have your own little corner of the internet.
It's good that more people are able to get online, of course. But the quality of the internet itself has been completely rotted by capitalism.
This is what I mean by nostalgia doing your head a fuck, because Friendster and Myspace were already huge in 2005. And let me tell you, adtech was already very much keeping track of your shit and cobbling together your interests. While it's true that Facebook has made that easier, there was already a massive infrastructure in place to get your eyeballs on ads at every step of the way. Remember at this time that the internet was still being driven by AOL, although it was already past its apex at this point, and it would provide a model for content engagement that's survived through today.
Adtech of the mid-2000s was childs play compared to now. Storage was still expensive enough that it wasn't seen as worth it to collect every single scrap of data and metadata about your online activity. You didn't have people tracking your gps position at all times. Companies weren't trying to put corporate spyware in peoples' homes.
Friendster and Myspace were big then, yes, but this was before the corporate push to add social network features to everything. Pseudonyms and not linking your real life to your online life were still highly encouraged (long before this practice was thoroughly stamped out by things like required facebook omniauth).
Do you think the internet is better now?
Do you think the internet is better now?
I don't really get into that one way or the other, to be honest. I don't think the internet is necessarily better or worse because I find the question to have so many parameters to it as to render it useless. If I catch myself thinking on something in the past and saying, ah, it was BETTER then, I'll stop myself because that's a destructive pattern of idealization.
Ah right, you can't say that anything used to be better because there's zero difference between good and bad things, how could I forget. The american space program didn't used to be better when it had funding. Unions didn't used to be better before they were defanged and disbanded.
Just because something is nuanced doesn't mean it can't be "overall better" or "overall worse". The internet has gotten worse since 2005. Faster, but worse.
What's your criteria? From what I can see you miss forums, Newgrounds, and Limewire. I still got uTorrent, this space is just the new evolution of forums, and I was always on albinoblacksheep myself so I can't speak to whatever Newgrounds offered although there was a lot of shit-tier content on there too. So what's worse about it?
I miss the stuff that got squashed by big companies or DMCA or whatever, and that falls under my first bucket, but my two main problems with the internet now vs the internet 15 years ago:
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Content: The vast majority of content is consolidated on just a small handful of heavily-astroturfed platforms. There are obvious problems with a half dozen or so private companies getting to control who sees what and what is or isn't allowed. Beyond the implications about being able to spread leftist propaganda or express dissent about the owners of said platforms, There are so many content creators these days making good forward-thinking content that got their start making content on some corner of the internet that doesn't exist anymore, or at least not at the same level, and there's the question of what sort of art and ideas we're missing out on because they're trying to get their start on a platform that's actively trying to suppress them. (I'm thinking specifically about the way that tik tok deprioritizes content from people who aren't attractive and wealthy-looking, but it's easy to make a case for any of the other major platforms doing the same thing.)
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Privacy: When you visit a webpage, everything about you is recorded, your browser is fingerprinted, and a profile is built around you. Even if you don't ever interact with a service they can build a profile about you based on other people who have your phone number in their contacts, your email in their send history, etc. Thanks to smartphones, these companies have data on where you live, work, visit, when you sleep, when you're out of the house, how big your house is, where your bedroom is, etc. Right now, as far as we know, they're just using and selling that information for ad revenue, but the other implications - especially as we descend further and further into fascism - are terrifying.
I think the content part is what I was saying, that you're sort of romanticizing things. The consolidation is real, but even in 2005, when you had Geocities and Newgrounds and Myspace and Friendster, the portents were already there. It's not like my shitty websites in 2005 ever got any traction or eyes unless I made it onto Digg or Yahoo, so I'd still have to feed the machine then. It's always been really hard to get started online. Is there something you're thinking of that got eyeballs that's differentiations then than now?
As for privacy, it's not quite as dire as you've painted. I am very familiar with the adtech space and they'd KILL to see what you think they can see. They can see a great deal but they've always been able to do that. Even in 2005 we were using fingerprinting to guess who's who. Now if you got a new computer it might take us a little time to figure that out, but your IP (which was definitely naked in 2005 since VPNs were not commercialized to the level they are now) would confirm for us who you were. That was without any mobile web at all. What you're talking about is cookie swapping, but again that was already big in 2005. You could easily buy tons of info on anonymized users even then and advertise to a segment even then. All that I would say has happened in the past 15 years is they've gotten better at tying multiple devices together. But that wasn't a priority in 2005 because mobile web was a joke then.
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I yearn for the days of shitty angelfire/geo cities web sites with gifs and animated borders and frames and sliding backgrounds. Seriously.
I totally agree. The technology has gotten better, faster. But the content is shit. It's all 'you need an account for your account for your account...' and at every step they're begging you quarters
Every aspect of our existence is now transient. Home - rented, job - gig/freelance, food, entertainment, fucking toilet paper - everything is a subscription. Our atomised lives are bought, sold, and lived in weekly or monthly allotments. We have no roots, no belongings, no ownership. The means of production? We no longer even own the products.
It’s extremely post-modern, I must say.
Lol, there are subscription toilet paper services now, I was just including it in the rant
And with amazon's new smart toilet with heated seat, amazon will know both how often you poo, and how much toilet paper you use each time
I think it's because companies like Amazon push monthly subscriptions to common household products like TP. But I like your bidet interpretation better.
Bidets aren’t replacements for tp, it’s just an extra cleaning step after you’ve wiped
My popular opinion: it's depressing how men are taught their bodies are gross and undesirable in popular media, because bodies are beautiful. I think it's why so many men lapse into apathy and don't take care of themselves.
There was an episode of Seinfeld about how men's bodies are ugly while women's bodies are beautiful and it just made me really ill. I know what they were trying to do to be funny, but it was still so unfair.
Although to be fair Jerry Seinfeld probably has a gross as hell body and he SHOULD be ashamed of it and himself in general.
The number of times the gag is just, man in his underwear. But also don't sexualize it so he's wearing big boxers and he's a fat sweaty man. It's just so fucking stupid.
Height is one of the dumbest things we associate with masculinity, by far.
I’m so exhausted by the idealized male body being ridiculously huge and muscular. More power to anyone who wants to get fit, but as soon as that turns into adding mass and getting visible abs, I’m tuning out.
Yeah, the shorthand in fiction is ugly = bad, so they try to add to whatever is considered undesirable. Meanwhile it's not like the guys of CTH are exactly Abercrombie models, so it speaks to a certain insecurity.
and yet you own Iphone vuvuzela cumonunsm 500 uasndillion dead libebtards owned ebic wholesome keanu chungues 1200
Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent.
why are you placing the burden on the working class? oh no it was actually our fault for being victims of the market
Popular Opinion: 90% of advertising should be illegal. Anything that isn't "here's what we sell and here's why I think it's good" should be criminal. I'm especially referring to just about every Coke, car/truck, and pharma ad in existence. But there's a ton more that will fall under this. Humans are just too impressionable.
People love to scream about the "nanny state" until you're having to pass child labor laws
I was just thinking today about how scummy advertising that targets children is.
Popular Opinion: Car culture, as a necessity in so many parts of the world now, sucks, and if it weren't for many different things that capitalism's done to make it necessary it wouldn't be viewed as normal at all.
every sane country with the resources to do so is moving towards rail based public transport. and then you've got the US cancelling high speed rail projects. almost comical
A three-dollar-a-month VPN subscription is the cheapest of all the monthly subscription services, and can also replace them all through the glory of peer-to-peer file sharing.
hmm you must have been careful to never update your Emby app? not long after the fork that scumbag made changes to prevent interoperability
EDIT: I didn't see the mention of Roku, my bad
ah okay, what I said applied to iOS/android and I didn't read your message carefully enough sorry
That's looking like a real alternative to plex but I wouldn't forego the gigabit-connection of a seedbox (then again, ISPs are shit in my area, so that's mostly why)
It is faster in practice though. Negligible for single files, sure, but think about a whole season of TV; It'll torrent 100GB to the box in a minute or two, at which point I can immediately start streaming it to my local device, without having to complete a download to it first. If I were to torrent that season to my device directly, I'd have to wait until an entire episode has finished torrenting before starting playback.
Also I'm sharing the box with a few friends, so it ends up costing me only about five bucks a month anyway.
Plex. Get a seedbox for all your torrenting and VPN needs, put plex on it and stream from your own server, flying the black flag and spending your left-over cash on rum.
Huh! Good point, not really. Pirated games are pretty individual things, like back in the CD days.
iTunes afaik still works with pirated content haha, and it gives you that nice ‘flipping through albums’ UX. Or something like VLC that offers a ‘media library’ UI. VLC and iTunes work for both audio files and video files, and I’m sure there’s better options that I’m not thinking of. There are lots of options for music, but less that I can think of for video
Once you find a program with a good UI, it’s just about setting your torrent program’s download folder to the same location as your media player’s library. Otherwise... set your download folder to tile mode and just scroll through it? Haha
That’s a great point though, there’s nothing quite equivalent to Netflix/Spotify in terms of library presentation, or even Steam for that matter, afaik. Even if you get a UX going, there’s not gonna be a browse function with integrated trailers, synopses, and interest-based sorting. Pirating is a little hacky haha ‘browsing’ becomes more about scrolling through new torrent uploads and reading titles for ones that interest you/sound familiar
I hope to hear from someone in this thread who knows about a cool media library program!
give this a go, also research game library managers
https://playnite.link/
Also the basic skills to use Linux and other open source programs as a replacement to the proprietary and expensive ones.
i like buses more, i like sitting at the top (i don't know if americans have double deckers) and just watching everyone go about their day. on the train i don't get to see that
There's some tourist buses that are double-deckers but they're uncommon.
unpopular opinion: music streaming is a much better deal than movie streaming services (not ethically of course lol) because the only time streaming services tried to have exclusive albums or artists (Tidal), it never worked because one or even a handful of artists aren't big enough to attract people away from their preferred service. So unlike Netflix or Hulu, with Spotify and Apple Music you pay $8 a month for access to most of the music ever recorded unless its super obscure, rather than paying $10+ a month to have Netflix's shitty selection of films that change every month.
IDK how other people do it, but you can use a free account and an ad-blocker, or use a free account and download the songs.
check out a website called mobilism, they upload apps and stuff. i don't know if it works for apple phones but basically on android you connect the phone to your computer and transfer the file then install it on your phone.
I just pay for an indonesian account ($2 a month i think?) and for netflix I have usenet/torrents auto-downloading and emby streaming it; i think my total entertainment bill is like 25 dollars a month now; then I share it with all my mates.
That's true, though I like classical so I have to sign up to Idagio to escape the other service's shitty selection and trash search filter functions. (How is Google fucking play bad at search?)
And yet someone has done it, just not on the mainstream streaming apps. Classical is small and yes dominated by Andre Rieu and bad Puccini operas (Puccini sucks and I will die on this hill.) but it's still a niche with hundreds of millions of regular listeners worldwide. And they skew rich, buy and listen to a LOT of music and obsess over their FLAC codecs and their Barenreiter urtext sheet music.
As for Jazz, it can be plenty hard to search if you're not just looking for Song/Artist. Try comparing the evolution over time of a particular Jazz players performance practice of the same piece using Google. Just as hard as finding the Mozart Arrangement of Handel's Acis and Galatea by Harnoncourt.
It's amazing that Apple, a group who's petty cash draw is bigger than the GDP of a mid-sized country, and Google, who's job is literally to solve difficult search problems, and is currently trying to solve death as a side gig, couldn't be bothered to throw a few million at this as a lark.
