Two very different protest songs I heard this year

Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals - The Iron Wall Hen Ogledd - Scales will fall

As a gamer, I love Valve. Problem is, I’m not their customer. Their customers are publishers and independent devs. Their main product is digital shelf space in the one of, if not the, most visited digital game store.

This is the lens through which any discussion of Valve’s business practices has to be viewed. None of the companies in this meme compete with Valve in this arena, except perhaps Epic Games. They are for the better part Valve’s customers, and they probably don’t like that. They might create their own stores to try to claw back some of their sales, but their core business model is not reliant on those stores.

As another commenter said, if this is a monopoly, it doesn’t seem like one created through anticompetetive behavior. You can watch Gaben on YouTube talk about how he just wanted to make a distribution platform for Half life that wasn’t clunky like Microsoft. Steam was just one of the first, imo.

(This isnt necessarily me condoning their business model though. Still feels like digital feudalism if you ask me.)

Don’t listen to people who say it’s not possible to have fun learning about this stuff. It can be. I can be boring, too, depending on your interests. Sounds like you’re worried about wading through things like Capital, Communist Manifesto, etc. Totally warranted – they were written in a different time and for a different audience. That’s not to say that there isn’t good stuff to get out of primary sources, but it’s more difficult.

I recommend listening Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life to get some context as to who he was, what movements he was a part of, the state of the world he grew up and lived in, and a breakdown of the things he believed, things he changed his mind on, etc. It gives you important context. You don’t need to slog through it or do a ton of mental work. Just listen and absorb it. If you don’t understand a section, replay it and try to do some mental work to “get it,” but if it doesn’t click, move on and keep listening. Over time, you will begin to understand.

I also recommend listening to Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. Very accessible.

Chores for sure. Throw on an audiobook while doing the dishes.

Reading is fun too because you can get a little more absorbed in the world, if you can manage to stay focused.

Watch Baraka.

Go for a walk around the neighborhood.

Wake and bake. If you have a yard, go into it. Look at it. Look at the plants. Differentiate the plants. Take a picture of one. Use your phone to identify it with Google lens or iNaturalist app or something. Find the scientific name (evidently called “binomial nomenclature”, huh). Use bonap.org to find out if it is native to your geographic area. If it is, keep watching it day to day. omg it is blooming. Look at the insects doing stuff on them. realize holy shit that’s their home. they feel peace, like i feel when i hear running water. this is an ecosystem. If it isn’t native, find out if it is invasive. If so remove it as best you can without disturbing your other plants. If it is non-native established or something else, consider keeping it depending on how dominating it is in your yard. Keep watching the natives. Identify others. Read their wikipedia page. Find out they attract monarch butterflies. Prune away the non-natives. Admire your yard. See a monarch and cry with joy. Continue into the fall. Keep taking pictures. Watch the petals turn in and shrivel a little. Witness death. Snow comes. See the stalks remain. They poke out of the quiet blanket. In other places, hard mounds of snow ice envelop. It melts to dirt. Brown yard and sticks are seemingly inert. Somehow it’s all gathering momentum. Imagine next season. Those stalks weren’t there before last summer. They’re gonna explode and even more are gonna pop up. Get excited. Hell yeah. There’s gonna be so many goddamn natives in my yard next season.

I love steam and valves hardware products, but the thing is, I’m not the primary customer in their business model. Steams product is digital shelf space in one of the most popular digital arcades, access to which they charge their real primary customers: independent game devs and publishers.

Whatever their activities are outside that, even the much appreciated proton and contribution to Linux gaming, is in the context of capturing more gamers on their platform, making their real product an irresistible choice for their real customers to release their game on, despite the steep per-purchase cut Valve takes.

That’s not an entirely…erhm…nice business model imo. It’s remarkabley like Amazon, but at least Valve didn’t put a bunch of local bookstores out of business becoming the juggernaut they are.

Honestly i felt the giddiness that DF did in that first video. It was exciting not just because it did look like a huge upgrade to realism – but because this is another pandoras box moment for genAI. Exciting in a holy shit way, not a “I can’t wait” way. Also, I believed it when they said it was just changing the lighting. Looking at the Grace model more, along with peoples comments, there has to be more than lighting going on here. and with Jensens comments, I think that seems clearer.

He really is pushing the slop angle, and, well – me too I agree with you. I’ve soured on the whole idea. I think there’s been too much backlash toward DF though.

I think you mightve recommended me Homage to Catalonia by Orwell a couple months back. Its his memoir about his time in Spain.

It was so good, thanks for that rec.

I’ve upgraded this ability to 2.5x-3x speed for some YouTubers and I feel like a god.

I just can’t watch 4 hours of analysis on Tyler Perry at 1x speed.

Plus, the whole thing is about putting your money in some place where it will passively gain value, so that when you retire you will have compounded wealth. Well – that whole system seems to be faltering in its own right. I mean, the stock market is not rational, that is pretty evident at the moment.

You’re telling me you want me to forego part of my paycheck each month in favor of a tiny piece of ownership of a cross section of companies – which I can only claim the actual liquid value without strict penalty until after I’m 67 – and the value of which is highly dependent on the irrational fears and hopes of other people? and, if not that, upon how well that cross section of corporations extract wealth from the rest of the population? that that money is almost guaranteed to grow is part of the whole issue of the requirement of capitalism to achieve infinite growth year after year – and if it does grow? – where the hell does that money come from? Less and less from transformation of materials into value, and the exchange of that value for money. Less and less from the rendering of a service and the exchange of money for that service. More and more from the enclosure of resources (perhaps including the up front, one-time transformation of materials into those resources, and continued maintenance) and the extraction of rents for use (see: the current state of computing and data storage).

There’ve got to be losers here. If my future wealth is going to be based on a bunch of economic losers having near nothing when they reach the same age, wtf is the point? what is the point if I have wealth and my neighbor has nothing.

If my own future wealth is dependent on me owning a piece of an entity that pays a worker a fraction of the value of their labor – that makes its profit purely on that distinction – I think I probably ought to avoid that whole system altogether out of simple solidarity.

Edit: this is a rant.

Edit2: Oh yeah and thats all not to mention these companies I’d be vesting in are quickly destroying the global ecosystem

Quite skeptical of solutions that don’t involve just leaving the environment be and letting natural processes play out. Like trying to keep a forest healthy by “controlled” burning/logging, clearing downed trees as if they were human trash instead of newly fallen habitats for myriad species of life, distributing nutrients into the soil at a pace that seems slow to us but perhaps necessary to who-knows-how-many species.

The idea that we can affect nature on a human-rather-than-geological timescale is true. The idea that we could bring a particular ecosystem from collapse into balance on a human timescale, with rudimentary human interventions, is full of hubris and folly. They’re intricate systems in which innumerable species have co-evolved over millions and millions of years. We all know about the butterfly effect. Many of us have read A Sound of Thunder. How about Frankenstein? Icarus? We ostensibly know the lessons. When will we finally change our actions to be in line with what we are – a small component of a global ecosystem – instead of masters over it?

I’ll go against the grain here. It’s not as much, to me, about whether homeschooling is good or bad. I think it has the potential to be really good and really bad for the kid, depending on the parents.

But people who say, “kids won’t get socialization” if they are homeschooled seem to think that tossing all our socially-unformed people into one location, with little socially-formed supervision, is automatically going to teach the former group how to socialize with others in a healthy manner. It’s not. It just creates trauma for kids all around. Child on child abuse.

Not only that, but you strip kids of agency by putting them in a building where they can’t leave, controlling their movements by a bell, assessing and grading their performance by “objective” measurements, subjecting them to authoritarian teachers – it’s all so degrading and the opposite of what id consider a healthy learning environment.

If schools had more adults integrated into student activities – all the activities – sitting at lunch, class, band, whatever, – removing the barrier of superiority, removing lettered grading system, paying more teachers more, maybe id consider it. But as the school system is in the US (or, at the very least, my locality) now, id never want to send my kid

Edit: obviously not all schools are like this. But they are in my city. Id have to move to a more affluent town to be able to trust the school system.

I’m just so tired of seeing 1984 and Brazil and Idiocracy and every other political warning and satire played out in the real world every goddamn day of my life

Ahhh…Well, in that case, I think you should quietly ask her out. I personally don’t think its wrong of you to do that. I’d keep it on the down low, of course. Who knows, maybe one of you gives the other the ick and it turns out to be nothing more than two platonic coworkers hanging out outside of work (I know, unlikely). If it does develop further romantically, at least you’re now out of the love triangle and into a secret romance…which im kinda inclined to think that is better than a perpetually unresolved love triangle. But yeah, its tough. Wishing you good luck!

How realistic is it for you to be able to talk to Jane about it all? Maybe you could get a clearer picture about her (perhaps, lack of) feelings toward John.

Feels kinda silly for him to stay at a job he hates just for someone he hasn’t been on a date with yet…sounds like could be an infatuation situation but im not sure…

definitely juicy though! sorry you’re in the middle of it

edt: phrasing. also, course its not as simple for John as “just leave the job and find another.” surely there are other factors to him staying on board

I hate silicon tips usually but these are my preference too. I have ccx brand ones though.

The output of the human animal’s “play” drive were commodified.

good luck, I also have a strange affection for that movie

Cats pretend aggression when playing with each other

Emperors new groove is the only one up there in snark for me

I do not believe that which was created through collective labor should be able to be enclosed, so that the encloser can extort others for access.

The house was not built by its owner. It was erected, decorated, and furnished by innumerable workers–in the timber yard, the brick field, and the workshop, toiling for dear life at a minimum wage.

The money spent by the owner was not the product of his own toil. It was amassed, like all other riches, by paying the workers two-thirds or only a half of what was their due.

Moreover–and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring–the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town possessing bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town well paved, lighted with gas, in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful.

A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds’ worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day–a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.

Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?

Kropotkin