Oh wow you made a main channel video on this. It’s nice. 
yeahhhh your forum theme kindly camouflages how much of my post is direct quotes. It’s more obvious in the editor.
They’re markdown quotes, so they are aligned further back than the rest of the text. The GenX guy is @harrym from the comments of this article https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/opinion/internet-aging-gen-z.html
I like that cover art, the article itself is so-so.
inb4 paywall. https://archive.ph/olKkN. I’m not sure if you saw it, I also posted on the discord an archive link for that Washington post discord leaks article you asked for (it’s this one https://archive.ph/L0P5H)
I recommend magnolia1234’s “Bypass Paywalls Clean” extension (I’m not sure if this breaks the forum’s rules about piracy, but I’m sure NYT will be fine).
I’ll blame my weird mental gymnastics for this one. Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of “internet culture” in real life, and got used to that real fast. (Seeing serpentZA quoted as a source on TV, my brother’s kid had a Poppy’s Playtime chew toy, they’re selling skibiddy… somethings at newspaper stands). It was a bit of a wake-up call seeing someone “internet famous” be so small next to a “real” famous guy. I’ll take the L.
First time I see that word. 1 sec… “[…]eutopia refers to a society that is actually achievable and sustainable.” There’s the argument that those websites that offered everything for free with no monetization were never sustainable beyond low-interest VC, but that’s the “I just saw a WAN show clip about the time of Facebook’s IPO.” talking, all this stuff goes wayyy over my head. I’m glad I’m not the only one that noticed that nice balance. I got home internet in 2014, I still have some catching up to do with the flash era.
y’know, I do have a big book o’politics that uses about as many links as I do.
Then again, I also own Ready Player One, so maybe I just have crappy books. I’ll check out those you linked… eventually.
forums in 2024
I am grateful for the forum. I find great value in youtube comments, but lately over half my comments get erased the second I hit send. So I’ll be sticking with forums out of necessity if nothing else. I can only properly keep up with 2-3 Discord servers at a time, I don’t really have room for two theoretically infinite universes in my house. (I am particularly salty about the Dota-AllStars forums getting taken down for “back-ups and maintenance” only to be replaced with an ad for League of Legends. The back-up was accessible on the web for a while in 2018, but that seems to be gone again.)
AI
I don’t have much more to say on AI, didn’t keep up much with the news. I edited the post after a while to change the chapter name to “artists getting replaced”. I just wanted to point out Stray Souls as an example of a “commercial product”, an asset flip with Ai generated assets. And the older example of big corpos getting prosecuted for being copy-cats, in France. I obviously have no right to complain with this tapestry of quotes for my reply, lol.
I don’t read either, I use Firefox’s integrated speed-reader/text-to-speech F9 thing for the sake of avoiding eye-strain. It works with forums too, sometimes. Every big block of text seems a lot smaller with the ~6 minutes at the top. There’s also this thing I like https://intelligent-speaker.com/ , it even works with arbitrary text files, but it’s a bit of a chore digging up the audio files from deep inside the browser config files. (pro tip, quick reinstall for more free time)
I find it fascinating how tech finds its uses with unexpected audiences. Like, intuition tells us young people should love e-books, because “they’re gonna eat tech”, but in reality it’s older folks that really want that convenience of getting all of the books from their couch, even if overpriced. (Also, fonts as big as you want). And young people go for paperbacks because they’re cheaper and they enjoy going out for any reason, and going to a place to meet other people with similar interests is important to them. If only people took a second to think about technology stuff instead of, well…
Yeast Yarn Yurp
City hall wanted a digital signature. I’ve spent too much time learning about digital signage and certificates, because their instructions specified them. After further questioning, they just wanted the documents printed out, signed with a pen, and a photo of the little collage sent via WhatsApp.
University wanted classes via Zoom. After 6 months of doing no courses, they made us take exams on the classes we didn’t get. They called the police to shut down a petition website complaining about this mess. Eventually classes were moved to Skype because zoom is terrible.
One teacher actually tried to use forums, it made sense to have the projects from previous years accessible in a convenient way, but the whole thing was just too old and broken. The teacher was too old too. I’m not being ageist, he was going deaf and constantly getting triggered at random things.
Another teacher used Powerpoints and books with intentional errors to spot out people working from the learning materials. His classes didn’t explain anything, he was just going over the book page by page to list out the mistakes. He had to make sure you’re not using tech to learn.
No high-school journalism or A/V clubs. I think I’ve heard about a HAM radio club in college…
I can’t stress enough how hard creativity is beaten out of people around these parts. It might be cliche to blame school for this, but look: For literature, school wants us to learn commentaries by heart. No one wants to read what you have to say about the boring book about people killing each other over land, you’re not even supposed to read it. Quote the intro of the commentary literally, then the rest of the thing too. (iirc for my finals I wrote a character analysis from the perspective of the land itself. Since I didn’t know how the book ended, I couldn’t tackle any specific character. Scored 85%!)
ending, ending… On the topic of lack of endings and recycled words, here’s someone else talking about a game about endings and escaping big media:
For what it’s worth, it seems to me that young people treat the internet like millennials treat cars. “Yeah grandpa, I’m sure for you waiting a year for your order of a Dacia 1300 was a great experience that opened up the world and gave you access to tons of new experiences. But those gas guzzlers are too expensive and are ruining my world at the moment, so I’ll just take the trams k thx bye”.
(and uhh, thanks for the pick-me-up. it took 3 days to put together that first reply and that made my dad angry, he smashed the tv because logic.)