houseplant

only if you aren't keen to share them with your friends.

if you watch an obscure show or movie or read a rare book, most people will be eager to share it with their friends, and their friends will be eager to learn about it. It's not the preferences or experiences that make you lonely, it's whether you trust your friends enough to share them.

truly, nothing is more fun than finding a cool movie and then showing your pals, who then also love it. That's the best!

well, it didn't say their descriptions were WRONG, just different. The insinuation is that highly social people were informed by what their peers think and say, so their descriptions will likely mirror other socially connected people. The lonely people would just have to come up with it on their own.

I know there's a tendency to dismiss groupthink as negative and wrong and bad, and for huge amounts of people that's true, but for small social groups it's often a sign that you've all become familiar with each other, experienced the same things and are just similar in general, and in terms of selecting for safety, these are all markers of who you will likely feel safest with.

there's a hypothesis that singing and instrument usage like drums came about as a way for a community to show cohesiveness and immediately find out who strangers are. By the time you've learned their songs you're not a stranger anymore, but if you can't sing or talk like they do, you're very likely a stranger to be wary of. Makes a lot of societal evolutionary sense.

we gotta stop chasing the whole "line go up" ideology. I know that's all capitalism is and how it exists, but we need to be okay with just simply doing well for the sake of doing well. You don't need to instantly go berzerk with investors and stocks and shit. unfettered growth will never truly pay off.

haha you built kpopping.com?? I'm not into kpop, but I have loads of friends who are, so this is super impressive!!

I had a great conversation about this the other day with a bunch of strangers- we all shared the exact same early 00's internet experience and were all reminiscing about those halcyon days

The internet has completely consolidated itself into a few websites now, and that's the entirety of people's experience using the internet now. They go to, at most like 5 or so separate sites regularly if that many and that's it. As well, social media is made to feel ephemeral so you must check it every 10 minutes or you'll have lost loads of context or information and be out of the loop- forget about doing it only once a day. Since Twitter, tumblr, instagram etc have closed their APIs, there's no chance at accessing updates through an external reader, and you're forced to scroll and scroll to get anything, most of which now isn't even who you follow but rather just what they assume you might like or what is garnering the most rage engagement at the time.

back in the old days, "surfing" was a huge part of your internet usage: after you checked up on your forum threads and usenet keywords- which was easy to do since you were able to simply read up and then you were caught up for the day- you could check out affiliate links or webrings for new sites to enjoy. Surfing around was lots of fun and you found a bunch of new stuff all the time that way, and almost all of it was made by hand by one or a few people.

I enjoyed Live Journal, where if you were a fan of whatever early 00s TV series or movie, there'd be a community made there for you to go and instantly fold in with a bunch of other fans. No need for pretense or establishing context, they'd all watched the show as well, and you wouldn't have to tone down references or discussion for laymen who stumbled across it like you do for most social media today. You can't have an in-depth conversation about something you enjoy on social media, and if you try, you're in a crowded room yelling over other people walking by, everyone can hear and see, and you're forced to act like you're being observed by thousands of passers-by instead of having a conversation in a room.

the vibe is so different. Everyone I know who used the internet back then remembers it fondly, and kids today who never did think it's a much better idea. What do we have to do to just... go back?

I used Rothko as an example of a famous and in my opinion highly underrated artist that those who "hate art" love to use an example of "bad art" because "anyone could just do that". Of course his pieces are breathtaking and once you're aware of the process of how they're created it changes them forever for you.

art is subjective, you need to really think about it, and reflect on it, to engage with it and enjoy it at its greatest depths. For some, this exercise is part of the joy of art. It's like discovering new things, every time. Discovering and considering things in subjective art is almost addictive, and it's very fulfilling.

but that's a lot of mental energy. Intellectual laziness would prefer things be black and white, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and then once things are sorted into one of those binaries, lean back and stop thinking about it because it's now sorted. Once everyone's decided that the Rothko paintings are just big blocks of a single colour, they're easy to make and boring to look at, then there's no further thought needed.

I feel like generative AI art is kindof a culmination of this: the idea of artists and creative people deserving to live and be supported simply by the things they contribute to society in the form of art and humanities, because it isn't hard labour or a trade, is laughable to the point of genuine hostile animosity. It's hard to even describe it until you've experienced it. Seeing people get angry at artists or writers or creators and thinking them being paid for the art they create is unfair: they produce it like a cow makes milk, so why the hell should they be paid for what they'd be making anyway? And if an artist labours to create their art it's more valuable and "better" than someone who piles candy in a corner and writes a story about it resembling how their gay partner was slowly diminished by AIDS. Anyone can do that!

I wish I knew how better to instill appreciation of art and artists in people. Seeing AI generated picture enthusiasts laugh and jeer openly at the artists whose pieces comprised its dataset in the first place as useless and that they're going to starve now has left a bitter taste in my mouth.

a lot of capitalism is just gambling, and being able to rig the casino so you keep winning doesn't somehow make you a smarter gambler, it doesn't make gambling less wrong, it doesn't make you more deserving because you figured it out. The entire thing is a wash. The people in control of making laws shouldn't be exploiting those laws. What's the point of laws at all, then?

the phenomenon of "red sprites", massive discharges of electricity upwards into the ionosphere that counter every single lightning strike, are only now being observed and photographed.

these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to see photos of it.

maybe he just has big fingers.

what I've noticed is that many arguments have little to do with you, the "opponent", or the topic argued about or even which of you is right.

it's more about the arguer re-enforcing their beliefs of being correct, and therefore morally righteous and powerful, to themselves. If you can argue your point successfully or at least cause your opponent to secede or give up and ragequit or block you, you won, because it isn't about correctness but power to remove or eliminate their influence from the argument, and if taken to the farthest conclusion, society at large.

you begin noticing that all these conversations are about power over the opponent and if they could humiliate them enough- either with numbers by ratioing them with chatgpt bot replies or reddit downvotes or whatever- they will be silenced and you can pretend it was your power that did it.

It reminds me of catcalling on the street. The guy catcalling a girl knows very well they won't turn her on, she isn't going to be receptive, she isn't going to fuck him. She might just shoot him an angry look. But it doesn't matter because that wasn't the goal, the goal was to get a temporary sexual power trip- you just made that girl think about you against her will!! you were powerful enough to occupy her mind for that moment. You win!

you also see it in the sort of cultish thinking of all kinds of ideological things like wild flat earthers or MRAs or pickup artists or pizzagaters or whatever stupid shit. It's never about the thing they say they're all about, they don't really care about the earth being flat, or men's rights, or manipulating girls, or child abuse- they care about feeling like heroes to themselves and their peers- culturally righteous and powerful.

instead, don't do it because it's disrespectful to people. A lot of people weren't made aware- or didn't have the option- to object to that TOS change. Saying "well, THOSE guys do it! why can't I!" isn't a mature stance. Don't take their images because it's the right thing to do

enshittification is the cute fun name for the concept of becoming a nigh-monopoly by buying out your competition with private equity and destroying it, and then- because the free market has effectively been destroyed- resting on your laurels for the forseeable future because there's no longer any pressure to improve or fix your product.

you can basically let your product become garbage because any free market pressure, you know, the kind that capitalism purports to thrive on but actually seeks out to destroy, is gone. Why bother improving if there's nowhere else for your consumers to go?

We're so used to using substandard products, getting substandard service, using things that are old, busted, falling apart, inappropriate for the job we're using them for, and so on... I love seeing westerners go to other countries and go "whoa! they're living in the year 3000!"

in all kindness, you're such an incredibly niche example of actual usage of this, that only proves it should've been opt-in instead of opt-out. I don't need to know what my tabs were 3 months ago. I don't need to treasure my precious history of browsing amazon for vacuum cleaners.

they themselves said why: Disney is responsible for cancelling, burying, and destroying the records of a lot of shows that fans seem to really love. TAG, the largest animation union, has been raising awareness of extremely unfair treatment of the creative side of Disney and other companies for a while now, how years of their hard creative work has been squatted on without ever seeing the light of day.

apparently, the hackers don't really seem to consult the artists they're purportedly trying to help by doing this, because none of them want to see their work leaked like this. I think these hackers just selfishly want to see the materials behind cancelled shows they were looking forward to.