If your project is beholden to the billionaire class, it will either eventually serve fascism or be killed. The material interests of the fascists and the billionaire class are aligned. The capital class *cannot* save us from the fascists; at the end of the day, they are *at best* two sides of the same coin, if not entirely identical.
i think i might not release the BASIC zine as a zine after all, or at least not at first. i will make a website and some videos first.
it will be the "how it is made" genre of media
🐹 Dan, you know coin-ops, I run a small business and would like some coin-ops in there, how does that happen?
🦝 That depends on the sort of coin-op.
PINBALL
🐑 The whitest man you've ever seen hands you a business card. After mulling it over you call the number and a pinball machine shows up. It develops a fault within three days. Within two weeks you have eight machines and weekly tournaments, during which your bar is full to capacity but nobody buys any beer. Two of these machines work at any given time.
FRUIT MACHINE / GAMBLING
🐻 A large stranger turns up with a large cabinet. He places it somewhere inconvenient, plugs it in, points at the plug, says "See that? Touch that, you're fucking dead," and leaves. You mind your own business.
JAPANESE RHYTHM GAMES
🐿 These are delivered by a trans woman you met on Discord. She brings five friends to help. Setup takes longer than planned and you want to close and go home. They offer to finish the job and lock up. In the morning they're still updating firmware. Their pizza boxes attract mice. You have to remind them periodically that they're not allowed to sleep here.
ARCADE / VIDEO, GOLDEN AGE
🐨 A man in his fifties asks if you want a Pac-Man. You say sure. Next week there's a Pac-Man, all good. The week after, it glitches out, and he puts in a 60-in-1 emulation board as a temporary measure while he fixes the Pac-Man board. The 60-in-1 brings in way more money. You feel you have to persuade him not to fix the legit board. This discussion becomes far more heated than the situation warrants.
ARCADE / VIDEO, 90's
🐍 These are delivered by a green-haired guy you met on Discord. There's no firmware to update but he still brings five friends and wants to sleep there. The Japanese rhythm games lady is his ex but they're on friendly terms.
CRANE / CLAW PRIZE GAMES
🐐 These are delivered by a big hard-faced woman with places to be, but not so quickly she doesn't pause for a cigarette before unloading the truck. She explains the scam and you would prefer if she hadn't; you feel robbed of your innocence and complicit in something seedy. You ask her to set the payout as high as possible, to soothe your conscience. As she pours cuddly toys from a big black bin bag she tells you people have more fun if it doesn't win as often, but if you really wanted, she could set it to give a toy every time and you would both still make money. She smiles as she says this, and calls you "Honey." You feel dirty.
GUMBALL / BULK VENDING
Scenario 1: 🦊 a man in his fifties with a moustache and Willy Wonka energy talks you into a single gumball machine and then two months later you're selling Pokemon cards.
Scenario 2: 🐺 a man in his seventies arrives with a small girl in a brown vest. He says 🐺 Go on honey, ask. She mumbles something about how her 🐇 troupe's raising money and can we please put one of these on the counter please. He says 🐺 good job honey. He has a kind and careworn face. Thirty years ago he told a man "Touch that, you're fucking dead."
reddit reminded me of my VGA-card-with-bad-ram from 2017ish.
I hate dealing with Ijvalid drire specibicapikn problems
@notptr it is kafkaesque. it is as if they have the same, very clear idea of what is normal/acceptable
@notptr in retrospect, and on a more positive note, i am really glad i found the fedi. it set me free a little, knowing i was not alone.
@notptr i have given up being bothered trying to assist others, someone even told me they did not want my help, as if i am annoying
@vidak I get it. Where I live there isn't a scene that I know of that is into FOSS and such. It is apple, or microsoft.
Every time I mention something about Microsoft did, my friends are like we get it notptr you hate Microsoft.
I also made a guy angry on bluebook social that the link of chatgpt and encouraging people to use it was a waste of water and electricity.
I also tried to get local people to use fedi and that failed. Everything is entrenched with bluebook social.
@aziz sorry to hear it, this topic affects me very deeply and is probably the biggest struggle of my life
i have given up trying to seek out others in person in my city anymore as it usually always goes badly
people are always telling me to stop what i want to be doing and do what they themselves are doing
At Repair Cafe last weekend, I tackled a couple laptop for a student. One looked like a lower-end model (assuming the circuit board was reused across models), but she considered it "good for gaming".
It had half the amount of RAM, integrated graphics in its CPU, no external GPU, can't comment on the harddisk since it was removed, the CPU was hidden behind heatsink, & circuit-boards dated 2019.
Leaves me wondering: If *that* was good for gaming, how much do we really need the higher-end models?
pretty much no-one i know understands anything i find interesting--computers, philosophy...
it ranges from polite indifference, to ignoring when i raise the topic, to outright mocking.
i think it is a function of australia's toxic anti-intellectualism, we call it 'tall poppy syndrome'. which is meant to be a label that criticises it, but quite a few aussies i have met are enthusiastic about cutting down every tall poppy they see.
it is very frustrating having to do everything by yourself, knowing no-one else will join in. it has been like this since ny first memories.
australia is probably one of the most conformist white colonial nations i know. difference is treated with hostility. it is not the laid hack hippie surfer country AT ALL
As tech enshittifies, as climate worsens, as fascists dismantle the government, the gaslighting & greenwashing will be intense.
They'll appropriate anti-tech/antifa/green terms just like they steal data & water & natural resources.
Know your values.
Keep building a better world.
#noAI #ClimateChange #antifascist
Oh! Can’t keep up on your #LispMachine releases? Well! System 301.1 is out now! And it ain’t even a bug fix… now you can count or clean your dirty .. pages. #LispM https://tumbleweed.nu/r/sys/info/f2ac23283ebeaea9
with respect to computers, it is very obvious to me that this is the bad timeline
hard to continue believing in leibniz and his 'best of all worlds' hypothesis now, really
looking across another domain--agriculture--i would say computing now exemplifies a "monoculture"