n0thanky0u

No climax, no point, no meaning.

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

No climax, no point, no meaning.

2025-05-28

Japanese fans of gay romance have the best terminology ever. Firstly, "fujoshi" and "fudanshi", rotten girl and rotten boy respectively, self label for fans of GL and BL. Secondly, the word "yaoi". Even if you don't know much about japanese pornography, you've likely heard of yaoi. You might have heard it contrasted against "yuri". But yuri means "lilly", as in the flower, whereas yaoi actually is a shortened version of the phrase 山なし、落ちなし、意味なし, "no climax, no point, no meaning".

I'm not a fudanshi myself, although I may be a hime-danshi. So I can't really claim to be a fan of yaoi. To be honest, it doesn't do anything for me. Fujos go in the same category as mecha and tokkusatsu fans in my head, that category being "otaku which I highly respect, even though the subject of their fanaticism doesn't do it for me". I gotta say, this phrase, "no climax, no point, no meaning" really works for my sensibilities. In fact, I just made a rather long youtube video which pretty much covers this subject. I'm choosing not to link that youtube video here. I appreciate things which exist even though they have no climax, no point, and no meaning. I suppose this is nihilistic. I find that the world is not nihilistic, the social world that is. There is no rebellion or hard-fought battle against the powerful forces of nihilism. The forces of meaning are the ones with power. No where can you go to escape meaning. There is nothing but powerful organisations trying to impose their meaning onto you and onto everything. Or if not meaning at the very least a sense of meaning. Denying meaning is denying power to those forces. Nihilism remains true in the same way anarchy remains true. You can say you're my king or my boss, and while you can be correct about that, you're also incorrect against the backdrop of physicalist anarcho-nihilism. That is to say, kings and bosses are not natural or physical phenomena, because meaning is not not a natural or physical phenomena. These are social phenomena. Not to say they aren't real. Of course. You guys already get that. But the yaoi of the world is I think a good reminder of this. Despite every nation, every corporation, every social power insisting on their legitimacy through a generation of meaning, nihilism still remains trivially correct, and there's nothing they can do about it.

This phrase also reminds me of a slogan by the noise band gerogerigegege, "Fuck compose, Fuck melody, Dedicated to no one, Thanks to no one, ART IS OVER."

In the spirit of all this, I would like to propose a less meaningful future for this blog, and for my general output as a guy. I would like to "Say stupid shit. Barf out the fucking-around-o-maniacal schizo flow. Barter whatever for whoever wants to read it." as Guattari once put it. After all, I have already given up on life. So I'll write some stream of consciousness bullshit about whatever anime I am watching or some such nonsense.

Who are you people?

Sat, 03 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Who are you people?

2025-05-03

According to neocities, this website gets like 250 visits a day. This can't possibly be right, so I'm assuming that must be mostly bots? The question of course is how many of these visitors are bots and crawlers, versus real people. Now I run into an issue with having chosen to host this site on neocities. I made that choice a long time ago, when I first made the site. It's limiting, in particular, I wish I could host mp3 files on site. The point being, if I were hosting the site myself, I'd set up anubis to try and stop these bots. I mean, I don't really care that much if my site is getting crawled by bots, not like I'm the one paying for bandwidth. My site is so lightweight even mass crawling is probably not a huge deal. I actually kind of dislike all the telemetry stuff that neocities has. The fact that people can like and follow me on neocities, I mean I guess it's kind of neat, if it helps people see my stuff then I can't exactly complain. But it does kind of feel a little "impure", in that it's introducing "social" media like interaction vectors to my space which is supposed to be how I get away from exactly that. It's not like I care about getting likes or followers on neocities, I don't really pay attention to it. Neocities only shows me site visits and hits from the past 7 days, so I can't gather detailed stats. Apparently my site has 279,831 views at time of writing. That seems suspiciously high. I assume when writing these posts that they will be read by about five people, and I'm going to continue assuming that the vast majority of these views are from bots, and that my site continues to be small and unpopular.

There is a part of me that is curious to see the truth, perhaps a "social" media hangup that actually hopes for views and growth and popularity and reach. I come here specifically to quiet that part of my brain. I'm aware that I'm not immune to propaganda. Intellectually, I believe that there are all sorts of problems with a growth mindset, and I believe that the internet is better as a place for direct social relations rather than as a quantitative popularity contest. At the same time, emotionally I still catch myself both hoping and dreading the idea of being popular. The idea of being looked up to or something like that. It also makes me embarrassed. Of course, I don't write things here that I don't believe, at least in the moment I wrote them, but I'm pretty far from a scholar, and I have to say I'm a little embarrassed by the idea that someone more informed than me might read them and think me an idiot. Well, that's not really a huge concern but whatever. The point I'm trying to make here, is that out of curiosity I'm tempted to include some call to action here, to say something like "if you're a real person, email me and let me know how you found this place, or like the post with your neocities account" or something along those lines. But actually thinking about it, while I'm curious, I think the less I know the better. I want this to be a message in a bottle. As much as it would be neat to know, I also can't see how discovering that this site is unexpectedly popular or unexpectedly unpopular would do me any good. So I think I'd rather remain in the dark.

We Want Like Rocks Want

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We Want Like Rocks Want

2026-04-10

In STEM fields, there is a supposed metaphor which is begrudgingly used all the time. Perhaps calling it a metaphor is incorrect, maybe it would be better labelled as a "turn of phrase" or "linguistic short-hand". It also seems more prevalent in public-facing communications. It is not a technical term, it is casual speech. That turn of phrase is the notion of Will. Scientists use phrases like "gravity wants to pull things together", "an object wants to stay at rest", "a species wants to pass on it's genes". You might also call this personification, or anthropomorphism. Often, a use of this phrase is followed by a predictable, "of course, that's just a metaphor, a computer doesn't really want anything". This is why usage of this kind of phrase are controversial, they rarely go uncommented upon. Scientists want to make very clear that the dead, physical world doesn't have subjectivity like we do, that it's "wants" are nothing like our "wants". It's just a metaphor.

The core discovery of Schopenhaur is that these people are wrong, that this metaphor is so often employed even in spite of our "knowing better", our "of course, as subjects, as people, don't will in the same way nature wills", because it really does get at something about our world. Not because nature is actually alive, thinking, with it's own subjectivity, some divine intellect willing like we will. Precisely the opposite. It's not that rocks want like we want, it's that we want like rocks want. These scientists who are always using this turn of phrase begrudgingly and making sure we know it's only a turn of phrase and not a claim about reality, seem to have forgotten that we are made of matter too. That our will is a product of the exact same set of dynamics as all other matter in the universe. Of course scientists by virtue of their mode of study enjoy pretending that they can really inhabit the position of a truly outside observer on the universe, in turn they forget their situatedness. Despite being ostensibly materialists, they're prone to vulgar dualism. No, we do will like rocks will, it is not a metaphor. We are puppeted along just like everything else. The only difference is, we're around to look at it, and we have some drive to ignore or justify this fact. It's very hard to viscerally know that you are a puppet, even if we are aware intellectually. Which is not surprising, why would we expect evolution to have given us such a useless tool in the first place.

We will like rocks will, which is to say according to external forces beyond our control and beyond our awareness. Gravity really does want to pull things together in the same way that I want to eat carbohydrates, or write poetry, or whatever else, no matter how human it might feel. Will is what it's like to be a thing-in-itself. And frankly, I'm not too pleased with it!

My new favourite web browser (Vieb)

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My new favourite web browser (Vieb)

2024-10-04

A personal history of web browsers

Fun fact about me, I used vim-like keybinds in my web browser before I ever used vim itself. I can't remember if it was just before or just after I installed linux for the first time back in around 2016, but at some point I was browsing through the firefox addons store and I came accross, I think it was called "vimperator". An addon that adds vim-like (or should it be "vi-like"?) keybinds to firefox. I didn't really know what that meant but I installed it anyway becaues it seemed interesting, and I fell in love with it very quickly. So when it came time to pick a text editor to edit config files and whatever else I was doing in my baby linux years, I already knew that I wanted to learn vim.

After some time, I discovered qutebrowser https://qutebrowser.org/, which if you don't know, is a browser inspired by that vimperator addon but with all the functionality built in, and a whole lot more. It's written in python and it uses qtwebengine. I used it for quite a few years as my main browser on this very thinkpad x220, and I'd say it was definitely my favourite web browser.

What is the advantage of something like qutebrowser over a firefox addon like vimperator (which was discontinued and replaced by tridactyl, which does the same shit). Well firstly, the way addons work is that they don't activate until a page fully loads. That means that when loading heavy web pages (which sadly one has to do quite often), even if the main content of the page has loaded in, you can't actually use any keybinds until you wait for the whole thing to finish. This gets really annoying really fast. Also, firefox blocks addons from working on certain pages for perfectly reasonable security reasons, but not being able to scroll with hjkl on the settings page is also really annoying. Finally, qutebrowser is built from the ground up to be extensible and configurable by the end user in the linux style, with a big ass config file in your .config directory. Compared to firefox where you just don't have the same level of control, and even what you do have is much less intuitive, clearly not designed to actually be touched by the end user. To get around this, you end up using addons to configure your browser, which slows the whole program down even more than its already slow and bloated default.

The main advantage of firefox over qutebrowser however is also that last point: addons. In particular, ublock origin. Qutebrowser does have adblocking functionality, which works well enough most of the time, but on particularly intrusive and evil websites, particularly youtube, the adblock doesn't work. Blocking youtube ads is a major downfall of qutebrowser. However, there are workarounds that the community have come up with. When I mained qutebrowser, I had a custom bind which would open youtube links through invidious https://invidious.io/, which worked well enough for me. Unfortunately, youtube started to become very aggresive in their stance against third party frontends and scrapers, and they began blocking or severely throttling invidious instances, as well as sending scary takedown requests to their opperators. Invidious still works to some degree, but you will have to reload and change instances a number of times before your video will actually start playing. This unfortunately led me back to firefox.

Recently, I noticed that firefox (again, technically librewolf) was actually excruciatingly slow at loading pages. Even when running in safe mode, just loading the youtube homepage would take almost 30 seconds. Loading even fairly simple web pages is just unaceptably slow. Now I'm not sure how much of this is firefox's fault vs the fault of the extremely bloated state of the web thanks to decades of missmanagement by the W3C, but it motivated me to look again for other options.

After some digging and experimentation with a few different browsers, I came accross vieb https://vieb.dev/. Similar to qutebrowser, it's a vim-keybind focused minimal and highly configurable web browser for "enthusiasts". Unfortunately it seems to be even more obscure and I think that's a shame because after a day of testing and configuration, I have tentatively made it my defauly browser.

Vieb vs Qutebrowser

Pros:

Vieb has much better defaults than qutebrowser right out the box, qutebrowser is basically unusable without some configuration.
Vieb is significantly more responsive than qutebrowser and miles ahead of firefox.
Vieb has preset example configuration files to emulate qutebrowser, tridactyl, and a number of other plugins and browsers which are easy to apply and modify.
Vieb has a better adblock than qutebrowser.
Vieb supports window splitting, like a tiling window manager inside your browser, which qutebrowser does not. I don't see myself using that feature but it's cool.
Vieb has container tabs.
Vieb has an entirely new mode, "pointer mode", which emulates a mouse pointer completely controlled by the keyboard, which might sound minor but is actually extremely powerful once you dig into it a little.
Vieb comes with darkreader built in, so no getting blinded by light themes.
You can reload the config in Vieb without restarting the whole browser.

Cons:

Vieb has a smaller community and less documentation than qutebrowser, although the documentation is still really good. You might need to figure some things out yourself.
Vieb's visual mode is kinda weird and maybe broken, or maybe I just haven't figured it out yet.
Vieb's quickmark system is less intuitive than qutebrowser's, although it allows you to also mark things like scroll and pointer possitions which might have a use.

Youtube ads: the final boss of weird web browsers

Even though Vieb has better adblock than qutebrowser, and claims it should be able to block youtube ads, it in actuality does not, at least not on my machine. So how to watch youtube? At first I thought of using freetube https://freetubeapp.io/. The problem is that I am subscribed to over 700 channels, and freetube simply cannot handle that. As in, it physically will not let me import all of my subscriptions. The other problem with freetube is that it doesn't have keybinds! How am I supposed to use an application where I can't scroll with hjkl. What do you think I'm some kind of savage? You expect me to use a m-m-mouse??? Insane. Instead, I set up a simple bind in my .viebrc which opens whatever the mouse pointer is hovering over in mpv, which works fine for now, if a bit slow to open. At some point, youtube was throttling and blocking attempts to stream via mpv, but it seems to be working now? Possibly due to updates to yt-dlp? Only time will tell if this is viable. If not, I'm considering trying to figure out how freetube works and patch in keybinds myself.

So that's my opinion, if you like qutebrowser or vim in general, check out vieb, severely underrated web browser.

If you have any comments regarding this post, please feel free to contact me via the links on the homepage.

scattered thoughts on twitter and it's alternatives

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

scattered thoughts on twitter and it's alternatives

2023-07-02

or "but what ends, when the internet shatters?"

It's always a shame, to watch your idealism collide with reality. I've been advocating for a more decentralised internet for years now. As the corponet collapses in on itself under the weight of the ever increasing demands of shareholders and the whims of billionaires detatched from reality, truly, our time is now. Nostalgia for the web of the 90s and 00s is at an all time high. Platforms like lemmy and mastadon are deep enough in their development to be fairly populated and feature complete. People are sick of being treated like second class citizens in their own computer. It's only a matter of time before the decentralised web rises from the ashes.

no. They're all just going to move to threads aren't they.

that is, if twitter or reddit actually collapse at all. For reddit, this seems unlikely. I don't see it going anywhere any time soon, since the recent issues only really effect a small minority of users. As for twitter, I sure do see a lot of hype about leaving twitter posted on twitter. People have been posturing like they're going to leave youtube for years and it hasn't happened. But let's assume that twitter's dumpster fire is really that bad, that people really do leave. Where do you think they're going to go? The nerds will keep pushing mastadon but well, it's going to be bluesky or threads. Threads reached 100 million users in a matter of days. I think that says it all really. And that's without anyone from the EU even being able to use it, due to it being so privacy violating it's illegal. Which of course is why I will not be signing up. Well that and I dont' want to be there because it looks extremely lame. As for bluesky, well we're all a bit in the dark here. I don't have access to bluesky but I can see it still existing, and being the slightly more niche, hipster twitter clone. of course, niche is a relative term here, we're still talking 10s of millions of users.

Threads plans to become a part of the fediverse. Bluesky is a little more interesting, as they've decided to make their own decentralised protocol. I'm reading the docs now and they talk about why they chose not to just use activitypub. "Account portability is the major reason why we chose to build a separate protocol. We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements. Our solution for portability requires both signed data repositories and DIDs, neither of which are easy to retrofit into ActivityPub. The migration tools for ActivityPub are comparatively limited; they require the original server to provide a redirect and cannot migrate the user's previous data." Honestly, this is actually a pretty good idea which adresses a problem I have with activitypub, but I also think a flawed standard that everyone can agree on is better than competing standards which aren't compatible. Since neither threads nore bluesky have integrated their federated functionality yet, it's too early to see how this will play out, but I will definitely be paying attention to developments here.

so, the obvious elephant in the room, mastadon. Look, mastadon, your heart is in the right place. I've tried for years to get along with you but I think it's time we admit, you and were just not made for each other. I'm not going to rehash stuff I've already said in this post but I will add one more thing. Frankly, mastadon users are chronically unfunny. There are many very talented individuals over there, creative artists, software devs, and plenty of average joes who post about their personal lives and interests. Much of the content of this site is quite informative. These people have clearly forgotten that the primary use case of microbloging platforms is to scroll while you're taking a shit. Now I don't personally do this because I don't have an app for these things on my phone but that is the vibe. I'm just not in the right headspace to read about infosec or whatever. This problem that bluesky is trying to address about unexpected bans is very real, I see people being silenced or suspended for the most inane stuff on mastadon, like just today a guy I follow was silenced by some instance for literally just complaining about a feature in fedora linux being opt-out rather than opt-in. This stuff is so annoying.

the other day I saw a reddit post about joining the fediverse, someone just asking how to join mastadon how to find people to follow etc. One of the most upvoted replies just said what I think sadly we've all come to realise. They said to ignore all the people saying to join a smaller instance to keep mastadon decentralised, just join the main mastadon instance. Joiing some small obscure instance just means you'll never find anyone interesting, and it's liable to go down or get nuked at any time. This is the problem with federation in this space. The rule of thumb is in any network, decreasing centralisation means increasing resiliance. Even if one node goes down, the network as a whole can survive and be fine. This being the case, these federated spaces need to be designed to assume any instance can go down at any time. This seems to be what bluesky's AT protocol does and that looks pretty promising.

mastadon struggles with an issue many "alternative" places do. Half the posts are just talking about mastadon itself, or twitter. The same is true on gemini. I tried to play my part in fixing this by creating an anime gemlog but then lost the password to the thing i was using to host it, whoops.

anyway here I am on my alternative to tihs bulsshit complaingin about the other alternatives to this bullshit so i just realised I'm literally reproducing the same problem. once again, whoops.

I myself am pretty sick of having an identity online. But i'm also pretty sick of imageboard culture these days. I've been a 4chan user for like what, a decade now? Sure there have always been /pol/tards shitting up every board, but the recent trans panic has really made so many threads insuferable. It's so easy to derail a thread by just baiting with trans stuff that there is no reason not to, and mods are very reluctant to actually enforce rule 3 (yes, in case you don't use the place yourself you may be surprised to find out that 4chan actually has rules). After using getting more and more into even older school anonymous textboards / BBSs (i think they're not technically BBS because that's not quite the same tech but like people still call them that) and more and more using altchans. Look I just like what I like ok. I also aim to post here more often. Hopefully more frequent, shorter posts. It's rare though. Because i just make those kinds of thoughts into youtube. ok my brain is done now. Goodbye

The "Old Web" never went away!

Tue, 05 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The "Old Web" never went away!

2024-11-05

The internet has a peculiar habit of dying. Public consensus seems to be that the internet died in 2016, but I could easily see that time of death being pushed back to any number of earlier dates. 2014 (The "fappening"), 2008(launch of the iphone 3g), all the way back to the Eternal September in 1993. Most creatures can't survive dying even once, and yet the internet is continually undergoing increasingly frequent death-events, while remaining undead.

The present state of "social" media coagulating with Artificial Pseudo Intelligence automating slop generation coinciding with the enshittification of search engines, accelerated by a wave of nostalgia for the 2000s, has a large number of individuals preaching the apocalyptic gospel of dead internet theory. With this alongside the historical narrative of the internet's many deaths, we are left with a "fall of man" type meta-structure positioned as the common-sense lens with which to view this technology. This anti-whig history of the internet is not entirely false: we have seen in real time these platforms get measurably worse, alongside the increase in consumer adoption of internet technologies constantly thrusting new users into the space, continuously disrupting existing cultures and flows. But like any historical meta-narrative, it may have use as a generalisation, but it fails to capture the infinite complexity at hand. The anti-whig view of internet history, in its calls to "return to the old internet, bring back forums!", ignores a very simple fact.

Some of us never stopped using forums.

This is actually very telling, as it clearly indicates what sorts of people are writing this history. For the purposes of this post I'm going to call them "normans", because I think it's funny. On the one hand it's a bastardisation of the term "normie", and it also calls back to the Norman invasion of England in 1066. I'm also going to probably end up borrowing some terminology from the realm of real life colonialism. Obviously the severity of the experiences of real life indigenous populations being subject to imperial expansion and colonialism aren't comparable to the harm caused by "internet sucks now", I'm just stealing some useful language. As Matthew Graybosch of starbreaker.org said recently:

"As far as I'm concerned, the personal and non-commercial web is the web; the various names it's been given — indie web, small web, personal web, etc. — are bad framing. It's the commercial and corporate web and social media — including the Fediverse — that we should be othering, instead of permitting ourselves to be othered." I tend to agree with this position, and I will be referring to the "commercial and corporate web and social media" as "meta-meatspace", as coined by Nyx in Hello From The Wired: And Introduction To Cyber-Nihilism.

Finally, I'm going to lump forums, BBSs, imageboards, textboards etc all under the umbrella term of "boards", just for convenience.

Ok terminology now established, who are the people writing the anti-whig history of the web? We can infer from their narrative that they must comprise the following groups:

Newcomers to the web, who's main experience of the internet has been via meta-meatspace, and have recently found their participation there alienating.
Expats who abandoned the web in favour of meta-meatspace at the first opportunity, and regret this decision. They likely experienced the web when they were children, and have a nostalgic attachment to this time period.
Freeze Peachers, victims of stormfront propaganda who believe that the problem with the internet is censoring "Muh freeze peach" when they get banned for saying the n-word on social media, because their only experience with the web is 4chan post-2010.
Grifters who hope to push the narrative that whatever new internet technology they're shilling is the only way to "save the web" as a marketing strategy.

We know the normans comprise these groups due to the fact that any indigenous netizens would never frame an argument in favour of personal websites and boards as the primary modality of interaction with the web, against meta-meatspace, in terms of a "revival" or a "return", because these things never died. While the users and even the boards themselves may come and go, the cultural practices have been continuous. I myself have visited boards of some kind almost every day for the majority of my lifetime. I frequent boards with 20 years of continuous history. Are these practices under existential threat from capitalists and colonisers? Yes. But that's a very different thing from being dead.

The framing of web culture as in need or revival and by implication "already dead" is an act of erasure. In erasing our existing culture the normans hope to recuperate our self-defence actions and colonise our spaces, all the while framing themselves as being on our side. Well I don't remember us asking for your help.

We're not a monolith. Normans have a rose-tinted view of the web because they haven't really been there. Anyone who's been on the boards knows that they suck. I can think of any number of times when moderators in various spaces have abused their powers up to and including nuking whole websites over personal insults. Like the hill tribes of Zomia, we tend to schism at any available opportunity, forming splinter groups who migrate elsewhere. A lot of us are arseholes or just down right stupid. We argue a lot. We have long lasting feuds between groups and websites. We have a strong preference for anonymity. We use language that we probably shouldn't. We won't tell you where we hang out because if you have to ask, then you shouldn't know.

Normans are obsessed with a growth mentality. They believe that a successful website is a growing website, and that in order to grow you must focus on "accessibility". Now when that comes to ensuring that particular groups with disabilities can still use your thing, this is a perfectly admirable goal. However, this gets twisted into an advocacy of deskilling, a knee-jerk aversion to any situation in which one might actually learn something. I've had experiences with normans where they have been entirely put off the web due to their aversion to having to do something as simple as write html or ssh into a server. It's not complicated, if you're that terrified of technology, this stuff isn't for you. Not everything has to be for you, and that's okay. You probably wouldn't like it here anyway, I'm sure you would be more happy hanging out with your friends in meatspace and going to a "club" or whatever it is normans like doing. The widespread adoption of personal computers and the internet was not some sort of democratising progressive force, it was the cynical business strategy of corporations trying to maximise their customer-base.

As I said earlier, just because the web isn't dead, doesn't mean it isn't under attack. To resist colonisation, we must degrow and rewild the web. This is not to say that the web can't have any new users. It's important to continue to pass down our traditions. It's just that there must be mechanisms whereby new users self-select against normanism, limiting our growth to a sustainable and dunbar compliant degree. Degrowing the web also involves resisting meta-meatspace incursion by any means necessary. Corey Doctorow has noted leaving social media entails high switching costs:

"the biggest switching cost isn’t learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it’s the communities, family members, friends and customers you lose when you switch away."

As he notes, normans are using meta-meatspace to do meatspace things, keep up with family members, friend groups, and customers. Keep our spaces wild by encouraging anonymity to counter the first two, and non-commercialised for the third. There's no need to convince these people to leave social media, keep them there and then we don't have to deal with them.

For some reason, normans want to immediately be treated as equal wherever they go. They have been trained to think this way by meta-meatspace platforms which discourage the formation of unique culture to maximise "seamlessness" and "user experience". It's important that when we come across newfriend behaviour in our spaces, we call it out and encourage these individuals to lurk moar or go back.

Finally, distrust anyone who claims to have some technological solution to colonisation of the web which involves an additive process. Protocols like gemini and gopher are subtractive, they don't aim to extend the web by building on top of it to fix it. They are coexistant protocols which remove complexity, and in the case of gopher have an even longer history of continuous use than the web. Most importantly, they only aim to facilitate our existing cultural practices. Do not trust people who think they can fix the web by making meta-meatspace even more like regular meatspace. Resist these colonisers like we resisted the Web3 scammers before them.

Unfortunately, the internet is not really a psyop

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Unfortunately, the internet is not really a psyop

2025-11-13

It seems public sentiments around the internet as a technology have undergone a flip. Rather than being treated as a tool with liberatory potential, more and more, it seems the perception is extremely negative. I believe this can be traced back to a few events, the pandemic, the explosion of tik tok, and a particular book which I will discuss shortly. As it seems to me, concepts such as "brain rot" have entered widespread public usage in daily lexicons, and public perception of the internet has landed on a reading in which it exists purely to pacify, surveille, and extract profit for billionaires. This was already a constant thread of thought within internet users going back decades and only accelerating, however something about the tone has changed. It used to be "capitalists are coming and colonising the internet, forcing everyone onto the same 4 websites". But the message has changed to "the internet was always a psyop".

I've traced this back to a book called Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History Of The Internet, by Yasha Levine. I have not read this book, nor do I intend to read this book, because it's supposed revelations are simply things anyone who is tech savvy has already known for a long time. For example, one of the major bombshells in this book, or supposed bombshells, is that TOR was developed by US intelligence, and when you use TOR you are effectively acting as an agent to supply network noise to cover the activities of the US military. Uh, yeah. Everyone knows that's how TOR works. Tor's own website says plainly right there on the "history" page that it was developed by the US Naval Research Lab. This is not a secret and has never been a secret. Wow did you know Ghidra was developed by the NSA too!?!? At no point does any of this indicate that TOR doesn't work. Does TOR not work? Is there a 51% attack on exit nodes? We simply do not know, it's definitely possible. We also know of various other vulns in TOR which have gotten people caught such as time correlation attacks. Although, in certain cases, we don't really know how well this would hold up in court, since the accused have confessed before the state has had to prove their case. What I mean to say is, there is nothing new being revealed here. There are just a series of rhetorical questions predicated upon false assumptions, "if the internet was created by the US military to spy on you, why would they also fund a technology that lets you circumvent that spying?", trying to imply that TOR is compromised without having any proof. Now to be clear I do have my own problems with the way the TOR project has been managed especially more recently but that is beyond the scope of this post.

Another supposed revelation is that Signal messenger uses AWS servers as if that means anything. The book also erroneously claims Signal is a metadata harvesting operation designed to collect user's phone numbers, even though they have had an option to sign up without using a phone number for quite a while now. I'm not sure what the timelines are on that between that option being released and the book being published, but the fact is if it was ever a problem it isn't any more. It's also something privacy minded internet users have been complaining about for a very long time. I remember threads on lainchan about this from many many years ago. The book fear mongers around this metadata collection, even though you can literally see what signal has reported to law enforcement upon request and it's really not that scary. That being said of course I recommend using a messaging program such as XMPP or Matrix with a self hosted homeserver or hosted by a trusted party, just to mitigate legitimate concerns about metadata collection.

Again I have not read the book and I do not intend to read the book, however, I've seen enough people reference this book including the youtuber "we're in hell" who has two at time of writing long form video essays adapting the book. I didn't make it through those videos because they were boring and just saying things I already knew. I feel like I have a general sense of what it's about. But this is not a well researched post this is a stream of consciousness thing and you should read it as such. You should also take into account the first paragraph, read this as a response to the attitude that the internet was always a mistake rather than this book that I haven't read in particular.

But anyway, this is seemingly the book's main trick, to simply point at things and say "the us military was involved". I'm sure it is probably fine as an introduction to someone who knows nothing about online privacy and surveillance, but it is absolutely not rigorous. For one thing, the claim and the evidence are not related. The claim is, "the internet was created by US intelligence from the start to surveille people", but the evidence is "the internet was created to communicate and transport surveillance information". A task which could also be done using pen and paper, or a telephone, or smoke signals. In other words, the revelation is, "the internet is a communications network which can be used to communicate information and transport data". No shit.

As far as I am aware it contains no mention of cybersyn or OGAS, despite the problems with both experiments (especially OGAS), these are two other alternate internet-like networks developed by Chile and the Soviets respectively, for managing planned economic production, they deserve mentioning if you're going to run through the history of the internet. Perhaps there is a broader point to be made, that any advanced communications are already necessarily dystopian or oppressive, and I could even see myself agreeing to some extent with this depending on how you phrased it. But this is not the general attitude. I also believe there is a general confusion where people general confuse "social" media platforms with the internet as a whole. I make a clear distinction between the two things when I write.

I believe there is a lack of nuance here, it is easier to simply believe that either the internet is inherently good or inherently evil, when the reality is that it has the potential to enable all sorts of interactions depending on how it is used. It is just dishonest to lump all of these platforms together. I still hold the belief that the internet with it's potential for infinite effectively free re-production of digital commodities functions to meaningfully negate certain harmful property relations.

All of that being said, I do also believe that a majority of people who find themselves on "the internet" (read: meta-meatspace) these days probably shouldn't be. Or rather, they would probably feel more fulfilled in life without being online in the way that they are. I am not interested in shilling and expanding things the net, the actual net, the network of small independent pages and files across numerous protocols. This is nerd shit for nerds and it's only nerds who will get anything out of it. The average tik tok doomscroller will not get anything out of semi-obscure BBSs on the reticulum network and that is fine.

This is a book that is just smart enough to scare normies. But the normies don't know enough to actually mitigate these problems. One thing that's surprising to me is that there has never to my knowledge been a mass campaign to poison the data collection of major social media platforms. An activist campaign like that wouldn't achieve much on the grand scale, but it is good practice to lie on the internet when talking about yourself.

The focus on the Vietnam war is funny because it also misses something big. The US lost that war. These mass data gathering techniques aren't actually effective strategically. The digital economy is based on lies. If "social" media companies collect enough user information they can sell it to data brokers who can sell it to advertisers who can use it to target ads, which the user never sees because they are using an ad blocker, because the web browser has to download content to the user's PC which they can modify as they see fit. The targeted ad never reaches it's target, the value of the data is entirely fictitious. So perhaps the data broker sells to an intelligence agency instead, in which case the NSA has possession of a dataset so impossibly large they cannot hope to actually parse the signal from the noise, and over-reliance on that dataset leaves them open to the most basic data poisoning by simply lying. Thus with the effort of actually processing the immense mass of data and into anything useful being so intensive, this technique ends up being less efficient than old school targeted surveillance, and so they end up resorting back to that anyway. Mass surveillance might be acceptable if it actually worked, but these high-modernist ideologies have proven themselves to fail historically over and over again. They will continue to do so. What people fail to realise is that it doesn't really matter whether your focus is the bilaberg group or the WEF or the CIA or the illuminati, conspiratorial thinking always looses out to real world incompetence. Any notion that a group of elites knows what's really going on and are pulling the strings with some vast intellect and grand plan, it's wishful thinking. That group of elites are the very ones who are most vulnerable to backwards thinking and accidental psyops, just look at Elon. General "social" media users have their filter bubbles, but the haute bourgeoisie are surrounded by a real life filter bubble of yes-men even when they log off. They psyop themselves by accident. It seems the average vaguely lefty person has started to come to the realisation that the police are as a rule incompetent, which is easily evidenced by ever interacting with them. But they still seem to be under the impression that perhaps the intelligence agencies or the military or the capitalists or someone actually knows what's going on. No one knows what's going on, those guys least of all! In other words, even if the internet was created with the intention to spy on and manipulate The People, that is no reason to believe it is actually successful at that task, or that it cannot be put to use for other purposes which weren't foreseen.

A more enlightened individual may contend that while the individuals are stupid or misinformed, the system itself has these functions. Via a sort of natural selection, capitalism as a whole maintains and reproduces itself via a series of systems which negate threats. This is a much better view, but I also find the naive version of this to be missing it's key observation. Natural selection is the process which drives evolution via random mutation in nature. Threats aren't negated without the organism first mutating to negate those threats. The environment forces a system to mutate in a certain way to deal with a threat. Well I will not expand here, I leave this an exercise for the reader.

The internet, much like meatspace, is a cyberpunk dystopia. Simply looking around and pointing at the buildings saying "the sprawl was built by and for the Tyrell Corporation" is not a novel or useful observation. These bland critiques of the internet or even anti-tech critique more broadly always leave me saying "ok, so what now?" Are you really opening your Apple iPhone and opening Meta Platforms Instagram, unaware that there might be a capitalist involved here. What, you want me to ask politely that you uninstall tik tok from your phone? But you like tik tok. You find the videos funny and you send a funny tik tok to your partner via Discord. No one is under any illusions here. I have no interest in proselytising to anyone, if you don't like those apps you're not on them, if you're on them it's because you want to be on them. And to be clear, I am not judging you for that. If you want to veg out on your bed and scroll Youtube shorts who gives a shit man, go ahead, I've done it. I would say I used to be somewhat judgey on this topic, or see myself as superior for being off "social" media, but these days I really do not care. The net would not benefit from a larger user base, not really, and Facebook doesn't miss me. Everyone is happy with the way things are, for the most part.

It doesn't even make any sense to make a claim like "the internet is a psyop" (the title of "We're in hell"'s video). Writing is a psyop guys! They're trying to get us to write down letters so the imperial guard can read our messages! Hey the history of mass literacy comes deeply entwined with state and corporate repression surveillance and so on, but I'm still glad I can read (mostly).

In conclusion, the history which proclaims the internet was a psyop from day one is deeply flawed, but even to the extent that it is correct it is largely irrelevant. Corporate and state capture of the internet is not unique or special compared to their capture of anything else. The evasion and refusal will continue.

Technology

Fri, 28 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Technology

2022-01-28

My first blog post, I figure it's time I turn this website from a virtual buissiness card to an actual site with #content, so why not do what i do best and ramble at absurd length about my half baked thoughts on subjects I am uneducated on. Before I start, I should mention I am writing this at a time when I would normally be asleep, after accidentally drinking a can of Monster Energy (tm) too late in the day. What im saying is don't expect this to be the "The Godfather" of first blog posts. It may well turn out to be the "Dark Souls" of first blog posts by the fact that it may end up being hard for you to finish.

I suppose here is as good a place as any to give my mixed up thoughts on technology. You may recognize some of the talking points here if you have seen my recent video about this. In fact this place may end up as a place where I repeat things I say on youtube because that's generally where I put my ideas as a first reaction. I suppose in some sense this place is my attempt to distance myself from that due to the very minor niggling gilt of using google's infrastructure. I still use google as my search engine, im sorry, duck duck go just sucks. I dont know the sort of peron who might be reading this, so I suppose I will start from scratch. To start off, Free (as in freedom) software is one of the very few causes I find myself actively spreading. Although I hold various radical political and philosophical views, free software, digital rights, privacy, security, and as an extension copyleft and anti-IP are the only causes which I have hobby-ized. I am writing this very post in vim on my thinkpad x220 running artix linux, which is my daily driver computer. Earlier today and yesterday I spent a couple of hours messing around on alpine linux just for fun. Almost all the software on my computer is FOSS (free, open source software), I interact with it daily. To give the elevator pitch, software should be free, as in freedom, one should be able to do whatever one wants with the software on their computer, taking it apart to see how it works, modifying, and redistributing. There are a number of reasons why this is desirable. A major one, and my particular in, is privacy and security. With non-free, proprietary software, you have no idea what a program is actually doing behind its own closed doors, and therefore the software may be spying on you collecting data or god knows what else. I shouldn't need to explain why this is bad. Then there is the distribution and modification aspect. Software itself, code itself, can be copied and reproduced essentially for free with the press of a button. When you copy something, the original version still exists. I can copy a program as much as I like, I can modify those copies in any way I see fit, and i will not have any impact on the original program, nor the scarcity of that program, since scarcity doesn't exist in the digital world (no matter how much blockchain idiots try to make it happen). I have to pay for a CD because CDs are made of materials which take labor and resources. Copying a piece of software uses (for all practical purposes) 0 labor and 0 resources. Therefore, software should be freely distributed, because no one loses out. You may think, "but how will the original programers get payed for their labor?" well, there are already many many programmers who get payed for making free software. For example, many programers write software for part of their sallaried work which they then chose to license with a FOSS license, some take donations, the truth of the matter is the bit of labor that programers should be getting payed, for, the bit that's their actual useful labor is writing the program in the first place, not selling it, not distributing it. We've set up a system where the wrong part of the process is monotized. (important, this whole thing applies to all digital distribution too by the way, including music, which is why my music is free and release under a creative commons liscense so you may do what you want with it). Instead of paying people to create the digital product, we've ended up making them do that bit for free, then paying them to take down the barriers they put up. And that doesn't even work, because software piracy and cracking is trivial. Finally, non-free software infringes on your rights. You own your computer. Digital data is stored on your computer, that you own, therefore, you should own that data too. Say I have a printed picture on my desk, and someone else has the exact same picture printed out standing on their desk. They are the same picture, but I own my one, and they own their one. Same with software, I own my copy of this software, even though the same 1s and 0s in the same order may be found on many other computers, i dont own those copies. Since it's on my computer which I own, I should be able to do whatever I want with it (to a reasonable degree, I'm not saying i should be allowed to use my laptop as a murder weapon just because I own it), because it's mine, and if that's not the case then how can you possibly define ownership? So, when proprietary software does not let me do that, it is stealing a part of my own computer away from me, it's saying "this is mine now, you dont get to use it in that way". and im like "hold on mate i payed for this computer give it back". So anyway that's free software i think it's very cool and good and generally reasults in well made software on top of not stealing your own computer from you. after all, if you find some software with some feature you dont like, and you have the necesary skills, you can freely modify it to your liking and redistribute that version under the same license, that way anyone who agrees gets it good, they can improve it further etc. ok so that's that aspect, now let's go a liiitle bit more abstract. not only should software be free, it also should be good. Good software follows the allmighty UNIX PHILOSOPHY. generally summised as

programs should do one thing as well as possible, rather than trying to do a million things.
programs should communicate well with other pragrams.
write programs to handle text streams, because that's universal

really 1 and 2 are the ones that matter. A good example of a program that follows the unix philosophy well is dmenu. It's just a menu, by default it will launch programs for you but you can tell it to list pretty much any list of items, and do pretty much anything on selection. The surf browser for example, uses dmenu as its url bar, because why put a url bar in your web browser, when you already have a program that can do that well. This is following the unix philosophy. dmenu is a tiny, simple tool I think it's like 0.05mb, and yet it is incredibly powerful because it does one thing really well, and talks well with other programs. I dont even use dmenu lmao but you get my point. This is also related to the concept of software minimalism. A program that tries to do a million things and doesn't talk to other programs well, that's going to be very large full of unnesesary features it's going to run slower on old machines (we'll get to that) etc. These are bad things. That would not be minimal software. This isn't like a moral or ethical issue, it's just a general rule of thumb to make software which works better. If you want dmenu to do extra things other than take standard input, make it a list, and print the selection in standard output, you may need to patch it. This is a good way of doing things, instead of shipping a program with 500 obscure features, let me choose which ones I think i'm going to want and add them as needed.

And now the even bigger picture. Lithium, cobolt, rare earth elements, gold, these are a few of the materials which go in to making a computer. Computers run on electricity (no shit) which relies on, for now, fossil fuels. Essentially, computers dont drop out of the sky, they are dug from the ground. And the ground is running out. Eventually, we run out of these materials. Then what do we do? And the problem is, no one really knows how much time we even have to prepare. Permacomputing is "A holistic approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture." [xxiivv] (permaculture is "an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole-systems thinking."). In summary, it's the opposite of planned obsolesence. One aspect of permacomputing is frugality, treating computational resources, energy, as the limited, valluable resources they are, instead of pretending our current world of energy abundance will last forever. Much like a gold rush, everyone runs to built towns where the gold is plentiful, knowing full well that it won't last forever, then the gold runs out and the towns die and the people starve. We've done that on a global scale with oil. I need to not go on a big rant about collapse and oil right now I'll save that for the next blog post but for now just think about the situation isn't great, and someone needs to be out there planning for a worst case scenario. And the software industry is not exactly helping. I have around 2500 hours in the video game cs:go. It's a good game, but at its core, it's pretty much just cs 1.6 with more realistic graphics. With a little effort, you could probably mod 1.6 to feel almost exactly like cs:go, even if it would look different. And high poly 4k textures are really not that important gameplay wise. So we've had this massive increase in overhead and hardware requirements for what, some pretty lens flares? I can live without those. "If your new software no longer runs on old hardware, it is worse than the old software." It simply doesn't make sense to assume that we will always have ever increasing access to more and more energy and more and more of the resources used to build computers (again, I'll get more into this in my post about collapse). The opposite of permacomputing is planned obsolesence, which is a big part of how we ended up with 58.3 million tonnes of E-waste per year. It's not a great situation.

Technological progress is not, we may think, a single logical line. "x technology naturally leads to y technology naturally leads to z". Rather, there are many possible progresses, which could have been. We could be progressing towards more and more efficient programs which can do ever more complex tasks better and better on cheaper and cheaper hardware. Instead we ended up in a worldline where apple essentially bricks your iphone if you don't spend $1000 on a new one every few years and there's nothing you can do about it. I'm suggesting maybe a course correction is in order.

String is better than wheels

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

String is better than wheels

2025-07-13

Obviously looking at the real history of the development of technology as if it's a tech tree in a video game is a little bit silly, but it's also a little bit fun and I'm going to do it anyway. For some reason, the invention of the wheel is considered to be the cornerstone big development in human technology when it just, wasn't? Wheels are only really useful for two things: moving heavy things and spinning pottery.

Wheels for transport are really strong don't get me wrong. Chariots were a pretty huge game changer in war, and carts also let you transport goods and people further which is good for expanding trade. But all of this assumes a particular environment. Wheeled transport is next to useless:

In rocky, mountainous terrain (you're gonna want a donkey or mule)
In a sandy desert (camels are OP)
In the snow (you need a sled)
In bogs and marshland (I guess a boat?)
In dense forest (you gotta use your legs here)

As for pottery, pottery wheels are good, they do make better pottery, but it's not like pottery as a whole is locked behind wheels. You can get along just fine without wheels.

You know what invention was actually game-changing near universally?

String is better than wheels

You can invent fishing rods and nets which are much better than spear fishing. Snares for catching small animals. Nets are also useful for tying cargo together. Take a net, put it up between two trees, boom, hammock. Clothes don't fit well? Drawstring.

Hmm if only I could throw this object faster and further, I would be much better and hunting. Introducing brand new inventions: slings and bows. (slings are another underrated technology). Take a bow, turn it sideways, bow drill. Now you can drill holes in things and start fires much easier.

My pointy stick sucks because wood is not very hard. With string, now I can tie a sharp rock to my big stick and I have a much better spear!

Use string to tie some logs together you've got yourself a raft.

Want to make a long straight line? You can use string for that. Want to make a circle? Tie the string down on one end and you can make precise circles. Now that you have precise lines and circles you can unlock all kinds of geometry using maths.

Tie a weight to one end of the string, you've basically got a plumb bob. You can make things level now.

Put a string in some wax you've got a candle.

Pull a string taut and pluck it, now you can play music.

These are just some of the uses of string. There are many more. The invention of string, twisting fibres together, was objectively much more important and universal than wheels.

I will no longer make any purchases through Steam.

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I will no longer make any purchases through Steam.

2025-05-09

Valve's recent shutting down of the Counter Strike: Classic Offensive fan mod has been the final nail in the coffin for me. I will still use steam to manage my game library, and I will continue to play Team Fortress 2, I may even purchase or trade for Team Fortress 2 items. However, I will not give Valve another penny. If a game is not available outside of steam, I will summon it via alternative means.

Counter Strike: Classic Offensive was a fan made mod for CS:GO, which aimed to blend the modern and old versions of counter strike, and had been in development for almost a decade. Valve is obviously scared that it will compete with their cash cow casino advert. In a revealing-of-true-colours, they decided that any derivative whatsoever of a Valve game constitutes a violation of their copyright, including mods. This came as a huge shock to the entire Source engine modding community, who haven't generally been treated this way. Of course, Valve is just selectively enforcing their copyright in order to stifle competition. They know for a fact that they are actively mismanaging the counter strike IP, in order primarily to redirect as many users as possible to their predatory casinos. This is not the first time valve has shut down a mod which competed with a product they are mismanaging. They previously shut down Open Fortress, a team fortress 2 mod which transformed the game into a more traditional arena shooter. In the end, after many years of no communication and ignoring the community, recently release the TF2 SDK, and allow TF2 modders to release their content on steam officially. This is a nice thing to do, however too little, too late it may come. It's likely this TF2 SDK release is Valve's half baked attempt to offload development onto the community, since they clearly aren't interested in working on TF2 any more (and honestly, I don't have that much of a problem with this, it's been 17 years after all). They will never do this with counter strike, given how big and profitable that game is. The message is clear, if you want to play modern counter strike without skins and gambling, no you don't. The hypocrisy, that counter strike was originally a mod for Half Life, is clear. In fact, most of Valve's games started life as mods. Most of Valve's games include more community made content than Valve made content. Maps, skins, etc. Valve is happy to take from the community, but never give back.

Just because other large gaming companies are worse, doesn't mean Valve is good. Valve has a reputation for being pro-consumer, but they really do the bare minimum. This is a "do nothing, win" situation. The competition just shoots themselves in the foot repeatedly, and Valve wins by being the least bad.

Steam takes a 30% cut of every sale. I'm not giving Valve 30% of my money. For what? To pay into a DOTA prize pool? To develop Deadlock, a game I don't give a shit about? To work on Gabe's delusional brain-computer-interface pet projects? Or so he can buy another super-yacht (he already owns six)?

Steam has been overrun with low quality porn game slop, but unknown to many, they have a strong bias against specifically Japanese games which contain sex scenes. There's no way I'm paying you 30% the price of a visual novel for you to cut out content.

If you take anything away from this post it should be the reminder that whatever games you have purchased through steam, you do not own. You have only obtained a license to the game.

I could go on to talk about how Valve has mismanaged Team Fortress 2, especially with the Meet Your Match update back in 2016, or complain about other decisions they have made which I may dislike, but I think those minor infractions take away from the broader point. The broader point is and always has been fuck AAA game devs indie 4 lyf. Itch.io rules, steam drools. I'm not giving them money any more.

Addendum:

There's a narrative going around that the Classic Offensive team used stolen assets or leaked code to make their game, and that's why valve disallowed it. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence to either confirm or deny this, and the Classic Offensive team denies it.

Critique of Solarpunk

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Critique of Solarpunk

2022-01-29

I did say this post would be about collapse, but it ended up not being that, so you know. deal with it.

I suppose a critique of solarpunk as an aspirational fiction is as good a place as any to start. Maybe i can lead from that into deep ecology and then general collapse politics. If you are not aware, solarpunk is a science fiction genre most well known from the films of studio ghibli. It presents another path of techno-utopianism: rather than the cyberdellic facebook metaverse VR alternate reality free from government regulations with hints of ancapism, basically the lost future that vaporwave is the perfect critique of. In solarpunk, rather than escaping to a technological reality towards singularity and VR and virtual malls and AI bosses, humans adopt a more harmonious relationship with Nature, using technological progress to improve their surroundings with renewable energy, sustainable agricultural tecniques, and canals, they love canals. They also like blimps. Environmentalism, humanist, anti-capitalist, and technological. Seed bombing drones, DIY, horizontal organization, salvage, princess mononoke, collectivism, the whole shebang. You might think this sounds right up my alley in a lot of ways. I too am anti-capitalist, DIY, anarchist, and i like ghibli movies and ecology. And yes, I do share a lot of ideas with people who also like solarpunk, and my vision for a possitive future does share many elements with solarpunk, however there is one major distinction: they think things can ever be good. Solarpunks are aware of "greenwashing", where the aesthetics of ecological thinking are plasterd on top of structures which are actually harmful. An example I saw today, I went to the shop and noticed that they have big signs bragging about how their plastic bags are compostable, and they charge 10p per bag I suppose to dissinsentivise buying them (I think that's a government mandate). 10p is not very much money, but of course like any flat charge it's going to dissproportionately punish the poor for being poor, those small costs do add up over time but for someone on a extremely limited budget, they maybe can't afford to save up for a reusable bag, or they can afford it, but it's going to be an actual expense for them, where as 10 quid for a bag might be an almost imperceptible expense for someone not living in poverty. Anyway that asside, sure their plastic bags are compostable, but that doesn't really matter when almost every item in the store is sold in a non-biodegradable plastic bag, including for some reason a bunch of bananas? Corps and governments only have insentive to be "green" on their public face, but once you look even one inch past the veil it all falls appart. Now solarpunks know this, and they reject it. They reject for example, simply building high rises and covering them in greenery, when that greenery can't actually be productive enough to outweigh the resources used to build and sustain it. However, this is where I say, they've only succeeded in extending the veil's reach. Instead of the one inch from the compostable bags at the checkout to the plastic packaging on the produce, you have to go a few meters from the solar pannels on the roof-top garden, to the mines and factories in the third world required to produce them, and the waste created when they break after a few years (even well maintained solar pannels don't last very long, " Solar panels are discarded only after at least 25 to 30 years, and most have been installed only in recent years. By 2050, researchers expect that almost 80 million tonnes of solar panels will reach the end of their lives." [low tech magazine]. Or maybe you want to talk about the small scale wind turbines that power the solarpunk's house, and how the fiberglass they're made of is only producable through unsustainable factory processes, the blades need replacing every few years, they cannot be recycled or even really reused, they do not biodegrade, and due to physics, small turbines will probably never generate enough energy to offset their production costs in their lifetime. [no tech magazine]. Maybe your solarpunk permaculture with minimal human intervention and no industrial irrigation system, fertalisers, GMOs, or pesticides works great in the fertile soils of northern europe, but you try that in the climate and geology of many parts of the global south? Good luck feeding your population, or even yourself. See one aspect of their ideology which solarpunks like to down play is that it necesitates a drastic reduction in world population, and that population culling is going to end up being most necessary in sub saharan africa, and similar climates. Now I'm not calling them racist eugenicists, but let's just say it's not exactly a good look. To me, the end product of a solarpunk future looks likely to create a class split between the "punk" living in their envirodome permaculture small communities, and the population of the rest of the depleated world who's job it is to sustain them. That's not too far from how the world works now.

So this is probably the part where I am expected offer my perfect ideological sollution to these problems, and an improved possitive view of the future we can use as a lighthouse to guide ourselves. I think the lighthouse metaphor works too well for solarpunk, because you don't actually want to get too close to a lighthouse or you will hit the rocks. Well I have some bad news: I don't have one. I dont think one exists. I think, in simple terms, we're just fucked. For a variety of reasons. If I were to offer some course corrections I would say be more critical of humanism, and less essentialist about what constitutes nature. I'll just leave this quote from Hello From The Wired here, as it sums up my possition quite nicely "cyber-nihilism insists on post-humanism. We do not seek to save Nature, because Nature does not need saving, and cannot be preserved in its present form no matter how much we like it. Nature does not matter to us either as a thing to be worshiped or to be used; it is, rather, a hostile and wholly inhuman thing, and because of this we both have an affinity for it and an enmity towards it. We do not seek to tame it, or to save it, but to accelerate its metamorphosis into a gray, metallic form. We therefore recognize that Nature is not a fixed set of characteristics that must all be present in order to say that it exists and is safe. Nature is the default, and cyber-nihilists seek to accelerate the default towards an eldritch bio-mechanical landscape." [Hello From The Wired, An Introduction to Cyber-Nihilism]. What that eldritch biomechanical landscape looks like I'm not too sure. Probably something to do with brutalism.

Solarpunks (and also vegans, anprims etc) missunderstand nature as some immutable perfect system where humans must either integrate seamlessly, or if that's not possible then distance themselves from as much as possible. I say nature is nothing if not fluctuating. It's natural when termites build their mounds, or beavers build their dams, so why is it unnatural when humans build our commieblocks or computer infrastructure, or even farms? And why is building solar pannels or biodomes somehow excused from that? Generally speaking, I am a self interested person. If you wanted to put it politely, you could call me a "voluntary egoist", or at least I try to be that. I'm not interested in saving the world, I do not think it's a valluable goal, I do not think the world needs saving, and even if it did I do not think it's possible. What i am interested in is making life as livable as possible for myself and the people I care about. It just so happens that what's good for me is probably also good for you, we probably live in similar economic conditions, have similar wants and needs. I need a place to live and food to eat as much as anyone else. So what's in my self interest is probably often in yours too. So when I go on rants about ecology, permacomputing, software, whatever. It's because that's what I want. I am mad that modern software won't run on my old thinkpad because I have an old thinkpad and I want to run modern software. It just so happens that a lot of people are in a similar situation, so what's good for me is good for them. Speculative fiction has always been best as a warning, not as a goal. I don't really care where we're going, as long as I can still connect to the Wired when we get there.

On Sisyphus

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On Sisyphus

2022-08-14

One must imagine sisyphus happy, endlessly pushing his boulder without the possibility of ever reaching the goal. For sure, it is by nature, impossible for the boulder to reach the summit, to imagine sisyphus succeeding in his trial is a fiction. When I was younger I saw this asurdist story as encouraging, but now when i look at sisyphus I see a happy but pityable man. For as absurd as it is to imagine him happy, my ultimate goal is to imagine a further absurd fiction, that sisyphus might one day succeed. The transgression of subverting the absurdist narrative, not by negating it with pure reason, but by extending it further, with a more fantastical fiction. This i see as an amicable goal.

What CCRU misses in its theory of hyperstition, is the crucial transiatory step by which a fiction realises itself. Irony is the pump of the flow of immenetization. The fictionalised 80s nostalgia flows into vaporwave with a critical detatched irony, which is then washed away in the torrent of flows towards Stranger Things. In language, use of memetic langage, take the word "pog". Well documented, these terms begin as fictions, then are used ironically, and then the irony is washed away as it enters a person's idiolect. And so I joke to you:

We must imagine sisyphus atop the hill, boulder and all; emotionless.

edit: lol this post is cringe i was on drugs dont blame me

Short Form Video That Doesn't Suck

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Short Form Video That Doesn't Suck

2025-04-06

Short form video gets a lot of shit on this side of the internet. By short form video I'm referring to tik toks, youtube shorts, instagram reels etc. I wonder, is it actually the short form video itself that sucks, or is it the technological and corporate context surrounding it? There's actually plenty of shorts that I like, for example watching the new, camman18 minecraft related short every day has become a nice routine, japaneat makes fairly generic food reviews entertaining by virtue of being a genuinely good writer, and flesh simulator makes let's just say very "informative" videos. So there are some shorts youtubers I like, and having also briefly experimented with being on both tik tok and rednote in the past, I can say with some confidence that although the majority of short form video is slop, there really are some people using the format well.

The problem is not short videos themselves. Many people are nostalgic for "old youtube", and the average video length back then would fit in a short today. The problem is the scrolling, algorithmic content delivery method. The format makes videos disposable, and presents them in an addictive endless stream where the signal-to-noise ratio is designed to work like gambling. And on the side of the creator, it's full of the same growth mentality, updoot seeking hooks that all "social" media is, with the added bait of a paltry monetary carrot dangled just far enough away to seem possibly attainable. Short videos are fine, but the platforms which host them are garbage.

So here's my idea, what if there were a different format to share short videos. One which didn't have any of the "social" media bullshit traps, and was designed to be shared among a community by hand. I thought about this, if this wasn't video but text, how would this work? Well, this problem was solved a long time ago, they're called zines.

I'm calling this idea the Video Zine, or "Vine" (pronounced "Veen"), because it's a play on Vine, the original short video platform and I think that's funny. A Vine is a compilation of short videos onto a webpage, designed to be shared among a particular community and no further. The videos, being short, are easy to host since the file sizes are small. Being a more flexible format, there is no limitation to just video, the Vine may also include artworks and text surrounding the videos, and perhaps some "shorts" are just audio files accompanied by static images to further reduce file sizes. Vines are hosted on independent websites, not "platforms". They do not have view counters, like buttons, or comment sections, but they are syndicated via rss or atom.

Maybe it should be spelled "Viine" to clarify the pronunciation and distinguish itself from that other dead platform, I'm not sure. Am I going to make one of these Vines? Maybe, I could throw together a proof of concept with some friends for sure. But frankly, I don't think I'm the best person for the job. This is more of a concept I want to see other people pick up, because I know they could manage it better than me. If this sounds fun, grab some mates and put one together. And if you do, send it to me, my contact information can be found on this website.

Notes on web design

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Notes on web design

2025-04-11

You ever think about how yyyy-mm-dd is objectively the best date format? Anyway, this website now uses a serif font. I don't specify the font in the style tag, just font-family:serif. You could say I am now sans-sans-serif. I did this because I think it looks nice, but then I started wondering, why do I think it looks nice?

I think I have associated in my mind websites using serif fonts with non-commercial pages. It seems that sans-serif is considered sleek, modern, and professional. So seeing a site using a serif font means I am in for a good time. Further to this, I want to comment on my general preferences for web design. I like websites which look like mine. That is to say, predominantly text, black text on a white background or white text on a black background. As little css as is reasonable, and no javascript if at all possible. I hate animations in general across software. Even when I'm reading visual novels, I always set the text speed to maximum so the words show up instantly, most VNs default to having the words slowly appear in order as if they were being typed out. On my desktop I have no animations. Things should happen as soon as I press the button which makes them happen, not after I wait for an animation to play out. I refuse to wait the .5 seconds while some picom animation plays while resizing my tiled windows after I open a new terminal. Just show me the thing as fast as possible please. Minimal text based websites like this one are my favourite, because there's nothing other than the content to distract me, or to distract the author. It gets out of my way and just works. When I come across a website with no or minimal styling, it makes me feel happy. Some call this "brutalist web design". I'm happy with that phrasing, although I also see it misapplied. The word "brutalist" in architecture comes from the French "béton brut", meaning "raw concrete". If "brut" in french means "raw", brutalist web design should also be "raw". Just like brutalist architecture lays bare the materials of construction as an aesthetic value in themselves, brutalist web design should disguise the underlying markup of the web as little as possible. Raw and unrefined html is beautiful. Brutalist architecture has a strong focus on geometric form and it's interactions with light. The best brutalist buildings make fascinating shapes and shades through carefully considered shadows and silhouette. In the same vein, a well constructed brutalist website should make use of form and structure to communicate meaning. People don't pay enough attention to the silhouette of their web pages.

I almost want to join the no css club, I really appreciate the aesthetic value of html brut. However, the lack of padding tends to make reading longer text posts a little unwieldy. The web was designed after all, for a world of 4:3 monitors, and 16:9 makes reading harder. I do, somewhere on the internet, use straight up .txt and nothing else for a particular site you will never know about. But that's not appropriate for here.

This website is as far as I know entirely 1 bit monochromatic. I do like the default blue of hyperlinks, but I'm not a fan of the purple for previously visited links. On top of that, I wanted to do something to make the site a little more my own, so I copied the black background link hovering from xxiivv lololol. I'm a monochrome type of guy. My desktop rice is almost entirely black, white and grey, with hints of red for important stuff. It's just easier on the eyes. I am someone who advocates for making blacks actually #000000 and whites actually #ffffff, none of this subtle off black or off white colouring garbage. I don't ever wanna see no bullshit like a #444444 for your text you hear me? I need contrast motherfucker! Same with colours. You know what's a really good colour? #0000ff. I love that pure blue. Same with #ff0000. Just give me the real thing, that's all I'm asking for. Greys are also good. Not enough grey websites.

I don't think every website should be a plain .txt file. I like css, and I like images. I like seeing creativity in web design, getting a sense for someone's personal aesthetic ideals in their webpages. I don't think every website should look exactly like mine. I do think they should look a bit like mine though. Brutalist web design derives form from function. It functions as a democratised ideal of website creation and ownership as something anyone can do. It reduces file sizes which is good for costs and good for the environment. Energy is actually a big deal. The internet is responsible for about as much carbon emissions as the aviation industry per year. Unlike the raw concrete of architectural brutalism, brutalist web design is about as low carbon as it's possible to be.

What I'm not such a fan of is "retro" style websites. I mean, I'll take them over modern bloated corpo javascript garbage any day of the week don't get me wrong. But I personally find some of this nostalgic design distracting, hard to read, and not always aesthetically appealing. Don't get me wrong, busy maximalist web design can be done well, I think cybergrunge.net looks and works great. But a lot of the time I think it's just nostalgia getting in the way. Once again I'd rather if web design would get out of my way and let me read.

So I have changed this font to serif, because it signals something comfier and handmade. I hope you like it.

P.S. Some people believe that sans-serif fonts are better for accessibility, or generally easier to read. Other people also believe the opposite. I did look into this briefly before making this change, I wouldn't want to harm the accessibility of this site. According to my research, it doesn't seem there's any evidence that either serif or sans-serif is significantly easier to read.

rss sucks, but you should use it anyway

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

rss sucks, but you should use it anyway

2024-10-16

or, its better than perfect, it's standardised!

Rss is pretty annoying to deal with. It's kind of a pain to write by hand, so almost everybody automates their rss feed. It's supposedly "really simple syndication", but it's really not that simple. It supports a whole load of features which it's hard to see myself ever using. One thing that's become common practice with rss, this blog does it too, is putting the entire content of an article into the tag in it's respective rss entry. Clearly, that's not what that tag was supposed to be used for, and it makes reading through the xml file as a human really annoying. But the assumption is that a human doesn't really need to read the xml file, it's optimized for machines to both read and write. I preffer "human scale" technologies.

Compare rss to something really simple, gemini's subscription protocol https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/companion/subscription.gmi. You literally just put the title, then the date on a page and thats it. No need for a seperate xml file to serve as a feed, no need for a bunch of tags and elements half of which no one will ever use. Just a human readable and writable standard for formatting gemini pages in such a way that there are dated entries. It's as simple as:

=>entry.gmi yyyy-mm-dd - Title

And it works great. Yeah it does have a shortcoming whereby only the date is specified, so if you make multiple entries on the same day, there's no way to determine the chronological ordering within the day, but I really do not care about that. The point is that's all you need.

So I don't really like working with rss for that reason, it's just a lot bigger and more complex than my usecase. But we should also use it anyway.

Because rss is already the standard. It might not be great, but it's good enough, and most importantly it's already widely supported. Good enough + widely supported is the goldilocks zone for life. I do not think it's worth spending any time trying to make and advocate and market and manage a new syndication protocol for the web, because we already have a syndication protocol that is fine. Not amazing, but fine.

As someone with a humanities background rather than a stem background, I feel like I come with a different attitude towards technology and computer programs in particular. That is, compsci people seem to focus in on the idea that programs are maths and electronics at their most basic. Although that is obviously an important aspect, it seems to me that this isn't really the most basic aspect of computing. Computing is about standards and communication. It's a social function. The only reason you're capable of compiling a program on one computer and having that binary work on another computer is that we have a set of social standards which dictate how our computers should respond to certain instructions. The only reason your computer works in the first place is because we have made decisions about how components should communicate with each other as part of a human social process. In other words, standards and documentation are as important and fundamental if not moreso than clever maths. Which is kind of annoying because writing programs is clean where as human social activity is messy. Nonetheless this seems to be the case. Programs are sort of like contracts, or the rules to a board game. They are agreements between people. Therefore, standardised is better than perfect.

re: frozen

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

re: frozen

2025-08-09

I have been responded to, and I shall, in turn, respond.

Regarding to the first section, on whether of not Google intentionally named their LLM Gemini to bury the gemini protocol, all I can add is a simple, "who can say", and I'll leave it at that.

I'm much more interested in this second section, in which I was not-asked to "READ. DAEMON. AND. FREEDOM™." Well, I did.

Well, I didn't. I read a good chunk of Daemon, up until precisely page 148, whereupon the author reveals his ignorance of the depths of human degeneracy, by exclaiming that "three hundred forty-seven hours" in an MMO is an extreme number which would make that player an expert. I have more than three hundred forty-seven hours in games I don't even like, and I'm not even a gamer! To be more precise, a character who has been described as a "hardcore gamer" and an expert on a specific MMO turns out to have played 347 hours in that last year. Now my mathematical skills are not my strong point, but I believe that works out to less than an hour per day. What the author was thinking here I have no idea. 1000 hours in a year would still be pretty low for a "hardcore" MMO player.

Why do I bring up this nitpick. Well it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The book Daemon by Daniel Suarez reads from top to bottom exactly like this now deleted tumblr post:

I can't emphasise how much it is written like this. For example, every time a video file is mentioned it's always referred to as an "MPEG video", like that could possibly be relevant or bares any resemblance to how anyone talks. This book is like ready player one for people who know what Defcon is, in the sense that I can only imaging one is supposed to read this book by going, "OMG he said TCP/IP, that's that thing I know!" every few pages. I think Mr Suarez saw a CTF and thought it was so cool and 1337 that he had to write a book about it.

There are numerous other problems with Daemon beyond the style of the prose, it's vaguely misogynistic, the characters have no depth and their motivations are poorly defined, the world feels empty, the realism scale bounces erratically from grounded to cartoonish depending on what's required to move the plot forward, and the central conceit relies on a sort of tech-bro high IQ redditor logic which I can't get behind. But this isn't a book review, so we'll get back to the main point of responding to the post in question. I'll reveal my praise of the book as we go.

From here I will respond directly to the mysterious operator of cybersavior(7).

All you people are so stuck on looking for X thing, or Y thing through your kalidoscope lenses of dead men.

It's possible that other people have had ideas which you haven't had before, or have expanded on ideas you have had in ways you couldn't. Philosophy is the world's longest conversation, one which has been going on continuously for thousands of years. It's reasonable to refer back to this conversation (and thus participate in it) wherever useful. One such use is as convenient shorthand. It's simply useful to be able to say "Cartesian dualism" or "Kantian transcendental idealism", rather than having to explain those concepts from first principles in my own words every time. Of course, it isn't enough to merely refer to the conversation, one must also add to it.

yall don't even have a goal in mind. how could you, after all.

I'm glad you have this level of confidence, however I'm not so bold. Uncritical goal has hitherto produced severely negative outcomes. That being said, I find this pretty presumptuous. I've got goals, all you need to is ask.

lain being our most relevant positive touch stone, and ready player one being the most relevant negative.

Well Lain is already a cancelled future, but let's move on from that. The form here is interesting, contrasting two media properties. Quite simply this can be boiled down to cyberspace or layer 7 or Meltdown or whatever you want to call it, is already a given. Will the primary vector of power be the hacker (as in Lain) or corporate intellectual property (as in Ready Player one)? There are so many unfounded assumptions here that I don't really know where to begin, but even if I accept this for the most part, I already think you're far too optimistic.

You bitches don't know the daemon.

I do now, apparently.

you likewise don't understand what it's up against.

And you do?

you think this isn't a game? marx can't save you. he was nerfed by patches before you were born.

I reject these allegations. I've been forced into this Marxist position against my will, presumably because I used the term "capitalist property relations" in my previous post. Now is this open to criticism, perhaps. But if you'll read my blog you'll see I have repeatedly elaborated on my problems with Marx. In fact, my problems with Marx might even fall into a different category than is presented here. That is, one could say that Marx was broadly correct at the time he was writing, but society has changed so much between then and now that he is no longer relevant for one reason or another; or one could say that Marx made some fundamental error in his theory which was already initially incorrect or incomplete. I happen to be in both camps. I could write a whole blog post about this, hell I could write a whole blog about this. Is this a game? It would be nice if it were as simple as in ready player one, where no one had ever thought to try driving backwards. The game itself is between the forces of work and the forces of play, the forces of production and the forces of expenditure. I still caught myself trying to write in detail about this here but I deleted it. If you want my justifications I'm sure they'll appear in future posts, or you could start by reading Bataille. So anyway was Marx patched? To me it seems like yes, but that patching was possible in the first place because it was enabled by flaws and incompleteness already present.

You probably know a lot of the same shit it's bitching about, ya, you know about monsanto and soil fertility

Indeed.

What I want to know is how to Sobel without a deus ex chimera of John Carmack and Gabe Newell shorting valve and tanking the stock.

I certainly appreciate what Daemon is trying to do in pointing out just how possible all of this is even with 2006 technology. It's true, all of this is, on the surface, technologically possible (even if in some cases, maybe not realistically viable). Why has technocratic hactivism not saved us yet then? Here, you might want to look through my kaleidoscope. I immediately take issue with Daemon's assumptions about intelligence. I think it doesn't take much more than a simple look around at the tech-broligarchy to see that one's ability to program or manage a start up does not have any baring on one's intelligence in other fields. Sobel's BBC-Sherlockian supernatural intellect enabled powers of foresight should immediately ring alarm bells when porting this novel to reality. The boring Marxist take here would be to point out that the people with the time and resources to undertake this scale of project are also necessarily going to be those people who benefit from the present state of things, and therefore have no reason to meaningfully challenge that state. If your plan hinges on "step one, become a billionaire", well that sounds like a pretty shitty plan. What's particularly sad about this is that it's the exact same pattern of everyone who seeks the accumulation of power. Almost no one self-identifies as a pure Machiavellian, who wants power for power's own sake. Of course, everyone who has sought the accumulation of power has justified it by saying to herself "I'm gonna change the system from the inside, man". And of course, no one has ever done this, because it's the system that changes your insides. It rearranges your guts, in other word's you're fucked! It's funny that you say marx is patched, but you immediately run into a problem any baby Marxist could explain.

If, as n1x once claimed, "It is the hacker, not the proletarian, who is the revolutionary subject of the future", then why did hacktivism die after achieving precisely nothing? I'm no cybersecurity expert, I'm sure you know more than I do, but just looking in from the outside, it seems to me like the era where cybersecurity was lax enough that random anons could deface the FBI homepage is long gone; and that modern cyberattacks are at a level of complexity only accessible to well funded groups backed by nations and/or megacorps, or else revolving around ransomware. It seems that the hacktivist too, is a cancelled future.

I'm being reductive here, the Daemon is more than just hacktivism. For someone who is so critical of Marx and Marxists (rightly so), is the Daemon not in part just digital leninist vanguardism? The same boring and ineffectual "organising" and "leadership" of the party, with a different coat of paint? This doesn't work, this hasn't worked, this will continue not working. Ah but this time we'll do cicada tier ops to find the le smartest and coolest guys! It'll be good this time! This view is highly optimistic. But listen, I'm very open to the possibility that you know something I don't. It's completely possible I'm missing something here. If you want to let me know, you know where to find me. Or at least you know where to find where to find me.

Total website redesign

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Total website redesign

2024-10-02

As you can see, I have completely redesigned this website. I've switched from writing all the html css and rss by hand to using a static site generator. I've been getting more and more sick of twitter and the surfacenet for a while now, and I intend to retire my twitter account and switch to posting here instead with more frequent, shorter posts. The reason I haven't done that up to this point is that writing blog posts in html is a bit of a pain, and hand writing rss is even more of a pain, so I've been pushed to only update my blog when I feel like I have something more detailed to say which specifically requires long-form text as its medium. Switching to a site generator means I can write my posts in a simple markdown, and it will update my rss automatically which is really quite nice. So, look foreward to more frequent posts. Once again this is a good time to remind you to subscribe to the rss (or atom now!) feeds in the footer of this page, it's the best way to keep up with my posts.

I like to keep this site minimal to the point of brutalism, for both technical and aesthetic reasons, so I was looking around for a site generator that would meet my needs, but not actively. Just in the background as I surfed the net I was keeping on the lookout for something that might meet my usecase. I was reading through the newest edition of the OpenBSD Webzine https://webzine.puffy.cafe/issue-17.html and came accross this article: https://btxx.org/posts/OpenBSD_is_a_Cozy_Operating_System/. I thought to myself that this individual's website was very nicely designed, and lo and behold, at the bottom of the page I saw the text, "built with wruby". As it turns out, this individual by the name of "bt" had written their own static site generator in ruby. I thought this seemed like a great fit for me. As I browsed this person's site a little more, I came accross another one of their projects, "barf" (blogs are really fun) https://git.sr.ht/~bt/barf,A very similar site builder but written in shell rather than ruby. Now I am completely unfamiliar with ruby, where as I have some experience with shell. So I decided that barf would be better for me, in case I needed to modify the script to suit my needs. So I rebuilt my entire site using barf and I have to say I'm quite happy with how it came out, although I'll probably make a few minor tweaks in the future.

In copying over all of my old blog posts, I realised that some of them are shockingly bad, written at very strange periods of my life which don't represent me, or they make some glaring error that I'm not comfortable leavin up. You may email me if you really need to read one of my deleted blog posts, but I intend to remake them better in the future if they deserve to exist at all. For now, you can expect more regular, shorter posts from me on here. Shouts out to bt for making barf I am really liking it so far.

How I use rating systems

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How I use rating systems

2024-11-15

Rating systems are obviously dumb, it's obviously dumb to point out how obviously dumb they are. You can't actually place all art on a numerical tier list of comparison. Everyone knows this but they're too convenient to leave behind. On the one hand they're useful for the person who issued a rating as a memory-jogging device. On the other hand, they are ostensibly useful for other people to get a sense of your taste. To quickly communicate your opinions on a piece of art without having to go in depth where that level of detail is not required.

The problem arises because although we all agree that 10 means really good and 1 means really bad, everything in between those numbers is a complete fucking free for all. Although 5 should mean average, the actual average score on any aggregating site is always around a 7. I have no idea why this is, maybe people don't bother to rate shows they dislike or drop so ratings tend upwards, maybe people have a bad intuitive sense of what a 7 is supposed to represent out of 10. There are people who never give anything a 10 because "nothing is perfect". If you tell me you thought a show was a 7/10, I have no way of knowing if you mean it was about average, or 2 points above average. Meanwhile, giving something a 3/10 would often be interpreted as you having hated that show, even though it's just the flip side of 7. Ok this discourse is ancient and I won't go on at length because I'm sure we all know the problems here.

I'm going to focus on myanimelist's rating system, because it's the system I interact with most often. When you go to rate something on MAL, it gives you a verbal definition of each number.

10 - Masterpiece
9 - Great
8 - Very Good
7 - Good
6 - Fine
5 - Average
4 - Bad
3 - Very Bad
2 - Horrible
1 - Appalling

So my reaction is to treat the numbers as shorthand for these adjectives. When I go to rate a show I think something like "would I describe that as 'Good' or 'Very Good'?" I'm just going to lay out how I use this rating system.

We'll use 5 as a pivot point. If I give a show a 5, that means it's a 50/50 whether I would have dropped it or not. At 4, we're on "I feel comfortable dropping this". Anything below a 4 I would almost never actually sit through to the end. 3 is the minimum badness threshold where I would always logically drop it discounting, some extenuating circumstances which compel me to finish the show, external from the content of the show itself. Both 2 and 1 mean "among the worst things I've ever watched", but a 1 has to also personally offend me on some level.

On the flip side, just like I could still finish a 4, I might still drop a 6. It's a show which entertained me enough to finish or at least feel like I could finish, and that's it. At 7, this show was actively a positive impact on my life in some way, I am glad I spent my time watching it. An 8 is like a really good 7, not only was I entertained, but it also carried some meaning or memorability for me on a deeper level. To get a 9, this should be a show I regularly find myself thinking back on, something that sticks in my head as a reference point of quality. I very rarely give out 10s, it should mean something with no negative qualities. It should be something singular, and as MAL says, something I would feel comfortable describing as a "masterpiece".

Regarding never giving out 10s

The 1-10 rating system is lopsided with regard to extremes. Each number isn't just itself, but also every decimal until the next number, i.e. it's truncated at the decimal point. It has to be truncated rather than rounded to the nearest whole, because that scenario wouldn't make sense. Imagine your friend asks you how you would rate a show, you say "I'd give it a 6", they would always, if asking for more detail say something like, "6 point what?" No one's immediate reaction would be to assume that by 6 you really meant a 5.5. Therefore, even if a show has a 1, it could actually be as high as a 1.999 but still be truncated down to a 1. In other words, it could have some redeeming qualities while still appearing as a 1. On the other hand, since 10 is the upper bound, you can't have a 10.5 on the rating scale, just like you can't have a 0.5 as that would be out of bounds. So anything with any qualities that might reduce the rating automatically place you back in the 9 range.

That's the mathematical reasoning as to why I have not historically given 10s. However, I have come to realise that this is a highly autistic way of looking at things, and that it's more useful to just as I mentioned earlier, treat the numbers as shorthand for an adjective. This might be less mathematically accurate, but it's more useful for communication. So I've given out a few 10s.

Regarding rating dropped shows

Some people might have a problem with the fact that I rate shows even when I don't finish them. Since MAL tracks whether or not you've finished a show, and how many episodes you've watched, and always lists that information alongside your score, it's immediately obvious to anyone looking at my ratings what portion of the show I'm basing it off. If I didn't rate dropped shows, I would almost never rate anything negatively, since I'm not going to sit through a bad show. This would defeat the point of rating systems, since it's still useful to differentiate between shows I mildly disliked vs shows I absolutely hated. So the question of "how can you know that the show deserves that rating if you didn't even finish it?" is irrelevant, I'm obviously not basing my rating on the portion of the show I haven't seen, that would be impossible.

Programs I use.

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Programs I use.

2024-10-23

I just wanted to do a short post where I talk you through some programs I use on my ThinkPad x220, the computer I use to write these blog posts (and lots of other things). I have included links to all software.

OS: Artix linux. For a while I used arch, I decided to try out Artix just to see if I could get by without systemd, and it never caused me any real problems so I never switched back. For a while I used OpenBSD, which I still love, but I went back to Artix Linux because I needed to use wine for some things.

Terminal Emulator: Urxvt. It's never given me any problems.

Shell: Zsh. Can't live without that autocompletion any more. I also use Oh My Zsh

System Font: Cozette. Looks nice while being extremely clear and readable.

Text Editor: Vim. I use this colour scheme.

Window Manager: bspwm. Simple, gets out of your way, easy to configure, manages windows and nothing else.

Hotkeys: sxhkd. Pretty standard to use alongside bspwm.

Bar: polybar. Never really tried anything else, works well enough.

Program Launcher: dmenu. At one point I had a one liner script using fzf but I switched back to dmenu. Useful for lots of things besides just launching programs.

Web Browser: Vieb. I've written a full post about this here

Gemini / Gopher Browser: Lagrange. Bombadillo if I'm on the terminal.

File Manager: fff. In the past I've also used nnn and lf. I can happily recommend all three file managers, but I do most of my file managing with basic shell commands these days.

Video Player: mpv.

Rss Reader: newsboat. Just werks.

Image Viewer: feh. I also use this to set a wallpaper.

Screenshot Utility. Hacksaw + Shotgun. A very violent sounding combination, but they just select an area on the screen and screenshot that area respectively.

The Post-Logic Saga Part 3: Pure Data

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Post-Logic Saga Part 3: Pure Data

2025-12-24

Well as you may have seen, I released an album recently, Peace And Love In Planet Earth. I am disappointed in myself for "giving in" and creating that album using logic, but that disappointment has filled me with determination to move beyond that software. I have often been vaguely fascinated by max msp and puredata, but it's very intimidating. If you don't know what those are, they're basically visual programming languages for sound. This time, I decided to stick with it, helped out by doing a lot of the sequencing in orca and sending midi to pure data. Sequencing inside puredata is very much possible, but IMO it's not what it's best at, whereas orca is designed just for all kinds of strange and wonderful sequencing and nothing else. I was just using very basic stuff in orca though, because I just wanted to focus on figuring out pure data. So far, I'd say it's very similar to working with a modular synth in general, if you understand the principles of synthesis and have worked in modular before, it's mostly just a matter of learning the names of things and the nitty gritty of how they work, but I'd say the skills are pretty transferable. So my time spent in VCV rack was well spent.

This "it's kind of like a modular synth" thing is also a problem though. That is, it's very easy to make "modularcore". If you've ever been on electronic music forums and stuff like that you know exactly what i'm talking about. It's very closely related to "livecodingcore". Modularcore, when it sounds good, sounds like some AFX analord shit, and livecodingcore, when it sounds good, is autechre or gabor lazar. But it's very easy to get lost in the sauce. Shitty livecoding or modular synth jams are way more fun to make than they are to listen to, they're overly repetitive because it takes physically too long to change variables, but also they have way too much probablistic or random variation contrasting with the repetition so you get something that lacks any sort of structure. But not in an interesting way. Another thing is generally poor mixing, since it's much more of a hassle to actually deal with levels and EQ than it is in a DAW. Finally, despite the fact that people get into this stuff because they want to get more creative with sound design, it's really easy to end up with synths that sound like stock plugin presets that come with your DAW because doing anything interesting is way more complicated when you can't just let vital do all the work for you.

Just in summation, what I said earlier, these things are way more fun to make than they are to listen to, it's like the electronic music version of a jam band. And that's fine, but I do actually want a recording as an end product which I can release and sounds good.

This is just a thing. Trackers "want" to make jungle, fl studio "wants" to make trap, tidal cycles "wants" to make pretty bad techno or generic generative ambient, guitar "wants" to make bluesy stuff, etc etc. Your tools will make certain directions easier, and it requires active effort to push against what's easiest, or to mix-and-match your tools such that each component of your workflow is playing to it's strengths. IE, if you want to make 90s jungle, you could just open up your regular DAW and probably get there, but you could also just use the software they used in the 90s when the music was invented, and suddenly, things like pitch sliding snare rolls make sense as intuitive effects which come naturally as a result or the way trackers work, rather than just blindly recreating something you've heard devoid of the context surrounding it's production. Use the right tools for the job is pretty much what I'm saying here, not exactly a revelation.

Well, I'm going to keep experimenting, I've only been using pure data for like 2.5 days so it's not like I've exactly explored all the possibilities. Another idea, something I believe is fairly common, is to just do sound design in pure data then sample the audio do the arrangement it in some other program. I'll have to give that a try as well. There's definitely something here, I am having a lot of fun, it's like the fun of tinkering with a tech project combined with the fun of making music, so I'm sure I'll end up with something cool given enough time. Well, here's a little grime inspired beat I made today using orca and puredata.

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Hats are just noise with an envelope going into delays on the left and right channels respectively, with the delay time set super short and randomised each time the signal is received to get that glitchy resonant sound. Then the kick I just found on youtube, sounds pretty sick. The clap is a sample with randomised reverb. The main synth / bass is 3 fm synths, one center then a left and right one each slightly detuned to give stereo effect, with certain parameters of the fm being modulated by the envelope, and a little bit of distortion with the clip~ object. Oh there's also just a basic sine wave as a sub in there too, but it's too quiet. The clap is also too quiet. Well it was just an experiment really. All being controlled with super basic orca sequences because I'm lazy. You might be surprised that I went with this grime / trap inspired type beat, well this was after making a lot of "shitty autechre ripoff without any of the skill or creativity of autechre vaguely ambient vaguely generative" sounding stuff that was fun to make but did not sound good. The basic structure of the FM synth I also found on youtube, that channel has by far the best pd tutorials btw.

Well, the quest continues.

The Post-Logic Saga Part 2

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Post-Logic Saga Part 2

2025-04-25

It's been a bit longer since the previous entry into this saga, but I am happy to announce some degree of progress.

Pedals

When I found myself with a little extra cash left over a few months ago, I purchased 3 guitar pedals. Those pedals are:

Behringer Super Fuzz
Mosky Audio Black Rat
Blaxx EQ

I wanted these pedals to be able to do both harsh noise and distort my bass guitar. Logic contains in built amp and pedal sim plugins. My favourite distortion pedal is called the "grit" pedal in Logic, and I found out that it's modeled after the Proco Rat. In the end, I bought a clone of the Rat rather than the real thing, because firstly it was about £10 cheaper, and secondly I actually thought it sounded better from the demos I heard. After using it for a while I have to say I am very happy with this pedal. Cranking everything up it still retains a pretty clear bass register, which is what I liked about the grit pedal in logic. This allows for some super growly doom metal type tones. But recently I've been using less distortion, preserving the sort of bright pingy sound of round wounds played near the bridge, which I've found sounds great with some dissonant no-wave style hypnotic basslines.

The super fuzz I believe is a clone of the Boss DS-1. I had a DS-1 as a kid, and it's a classic sound so I figured I should own one. Sounds great on it's own, and also paired with the Black Rat. It also has a "boost" setting alongside the two distortion modes, which is pretty useful. It was also pretty cheap.

Finally, the random ass eq pedal was just the cheapest one I could find on reverb.com. I needed an EQ pedal for making harsh noise, being able to shape the tone going into your distortion I find is crucial for making good noise. It gets the job done, which is all I wanted. I don't tend to use it when hooking up my bass, but I may experiment more.

In the future, I do hope to pick up some more pedals. I'm thinking of looking into some of the weirder stuff from earthquaker devices.

I also purchased a cheap power supply, the Gokko pedalpower micro. This was a mistake, it introduces quite a lot of hum when chaining distortions. I should have bought a better isolated power supply. For now, it's fine. Not a top priority to replace, but in future I'm definitely going to upgrade, probably to a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2.

The Scuffed Zone

Ok so now I'm going to tell you about my setup. It's quite possibly the most scuffed thing ever invented by humans, but it technically works. I kinda love how stupid this setup is. Last night I watched this documentary "Blank City", (available on archive.org here). It's about the no-wave cinema movement in NYC from the late 70s into the 80s. I love no-wave music, but I wasn't aware that there was a no-wave cinema movement around at the same time. The level of DIY ethos, making movies for 0 budget. The documentary also touches on the no-wave music scene, and all of this was very inspiring to me. So I decided today to just try and put together anything I could to make some noises.

I have my bass guitar going into the Black Rat pedal, then a patch cable from that into this cheap 6 track mixer I bought off amazon. Then I have hydrogen, a foss drum machine program, running on my ThinkPad x220. The audio jack on my ThinkPad is broken, so I have a USB male to female 3.5mm jack, then a male 3.5mm to 6.25mm female, then a patch cable from that into the super fuzz on the boost setting, then another patch cable into the mixed. Since I still don't own an amp, everything from the mixer goes out into an old Bose Wave radio and CD player, which can also take audio input. Then I have a usb lav mic running from my thinkpad laying on the bed (this whole setup takes place on top of my mattress on the floor), which records everything into audacity.

Here's a really low res picture of the setup where you can barely see what's going on at all:

And here's what it sounds like:

Your browser does not support the audio element.

As you can tell, this is actually surprisingly good. I mean, it definitely sounds like a DIY recording, but that's kind of the point of all this. Now when it comes to the additional elements of a song, I am pretty much able to do that too if I want to. Audacity comes with many inbuilt effects to post-process the audio (I actually used a little compression and trimmed the audio above), and any for additional pre-processing effects I can simply purchase more pedals. Overdubs are pretty easy to do with just audacity, so for example if I wanted to double track the bass, or add vocals or whatever that's very doable.

Collaboration

Recently, (by which I mean in the past year or so), I've come to realise that I don't think the tone of my voice is well suited for the sort of heavy and dissonant music I like to make. I also don't really like the process of writing lyrics, nor do I think I'm very good at it. I have a friend IRL who's got a much better voice for this sort of thing, and he's a much better lyricist than I am. I'm going to try and get him in on this, and hopefully collaborate in the future. He also plays guitar so who knows where that will lead to. The trade off with that being that recording a track becomes an event which I have to organise, rather than a burst of spontaneous creativity whenever it hits me alone. I'm very used to working alone on music, and I will probably continue to do that, but I do think I want to pursue collaboration more in the near future.

With this particularly scuffed setup, I am pretty much capable of recording an album without using logic, which I actually find artistically acceptable. It's satisfyingly low tech. I'll continue experimenting and refining the workflow, and make some more proof of concept tracks which I may or may not release on patreon. Post-logic is coming to fruition, step by step.

The Post-Logic Saga Part 1

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Post-Logic Saga Part 1

2024-10-29

So in my last post, I had a bit of a spiral into strange territory where I repeated a common pattern in my life, identifying a problem and trying to find the ultimate solution that fixes everything forever right now.

This approach is a great way to make sure you never manage to do anything ever. Upon closer inspection, the problem which initially appeared to be "I want to stop using Logic Pro X to produce music" is actually an assemblage of multiple problems which I will presently outline.

Problem Number The First:

When this Mac breaks, I don't want to buy another one.

Apple computers are not repairable, if you take it to Apple themselves, they'll charge you an exorbitant amount of money and wipe all of your data, to make the value proposition of just buying an entirely new computer seem more reasonable in comparison. I will not engage with that system again.

If this was the only problem I had, it would be quite a simple fix. Begin immediately the transition from Logic Pro X to Ableton Live, and when the Mac does break, purchase a different laptop. That second part is worth expanding on. As much as I love this ThinkPad x220, realtime music production is a cpu intensive task, and unfortunately this computer is simply not powerful enough to meet my requirements. Noticeable input or loopback delay is not acceptable for producing music. Now I do own an upper mid-tier desktop computer which is certainly powerful enough to handle this task, but I like the flexibility of producing music on a laptop. I will likely end up purchasing either a modern ThinkPad model, or a Framework laptop as my replacement. This will also solve some other problems of old ThinkPad usage, namely the shitty microphone and speakers, as well as poor battery life.

So to solve this problem alone, the only action required of me right now would be to obtain a copy of Ableton and begin using it, to ease my eventual transition away from Apple.

Problem Number The Second:

I want a machine to produce happy accidents.

This one is really throwing a spanner in my otherwise simple problem-space. It's also a little hard to articulate precisely. DAW software can do everything, and it can do everything pretty well. No matter if I'm making jungle, noise-rock, post-punk, techno, whatever genre, whatever instrumentation, it's all executable with confidence within the DAW. This seems like the opposite of a problem, and on the level of practicality, that is correct. It's extremely convenient to have one system of software which can take care of all of one's diverse musical needs. However, I also find it deeply uninspiring. After so many years of working "in the box", I find that increasingly I am closer and closer to exhausting the unexplored space which might spark inspiration. I want my music to sound new and interesting, for my own artistic fulfilment. I want to explore something sonically which is personal and unique. The fact that:

a: The tools allow me to make whatever noises I want to make.

b: I am hyper competent with those tools.

Leaves me with a sort of "blank page paralysis". I want to work with tools that feel more "living", which respond to the things I'm doing in unexpected ways, and have subtle nuances which I don't immediately understand. Like a real instrument. I want to problem solve on the fly, and I want my solutions to be hacky and messy, because that leads to outcomes I would never have produced intentionally. I want a machine to produce happy accidents.

One time, while bored and waiting in an airport (is there any other way to be waiting in an airport?), I decided to give myself a challenge, to produce a genre I had never made before, Riddim dubstep. I've barely listened to this genre, let alone produced in it. Like 30 minutes later I had a fairly professional sounding riddim drop. And it was booorriiinnggg. It was simply too easy.

Problem Number The Third:

DAWs are too totalising.

For reasons I'm not quite sure of, I want different tools for different jobs. I want the way in which I make "guitar music" to differ radically from the way I make "computer music". Once again, the DAW makes everything too seamless.

Problem Number The Fourth:

Often (but not always), I would like to "perform" rather than "program"

Whether it be with an array of synthesisers, or with guitar and drum loops, or whatever, I find myself more inspired by the modality of recording a performance over programming a song. In other words, acting in real-time. This is strongly related to Problems The Second and Third. I like it when I listen to a band and it feels like they've captured a particular performance of a song, rather than just created a song out of thin air. My music generally falls into the second category. In other words, this Problem regards the re-separation of composition, recording, and performance. As of now, they're all entwined into one process of "production". Something about the vibe of this feels off to me.

Problem Number The Fith

Free Software.

For reasons relating to my personal principles, I would rather use Free Software over proprietary software. Ableton is proprietary software. The existing Free DAWs suck ass.

Conclusion.

Problems The Second through Fourth are solvable given enough money, but I do not have that much money. Therefore I would ideally like to solve these problems in software. This once again makes my life even more difficult. But it sets my current task to be simply: "fuck around with as many things as you can get your grubby little hands on, and see if you can find anything cool." This seems vague, but doable. So I will keep your guys updated in this series of blog posts whenever I have anything to share regarding new tools or techniques I have found. Thanks for reading, thanks for keeping rss and blogging alive.

post-civ for me

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

post-civ for me

2022-08-03

Under capitalism, food is either one of two things, a comodity, or a luxury. Either food is something you buy for as cheap as possible in the supermarket, a burger from macdonalds, a carton a box a can a plastic bag. Or food is a luxury art piece made by some celebrity chef or another where you (or lets be honest, people richer than you) pay to eat some abomination "fusion" quisine and drink expensive wine while having dull smalltalk with your co-workers. Of course, in a society which doesn't look like industrial capitalism, food is neither of these things. According to Marx, peasents in feudal times engaged in production purely for use value, I assume he would imagine a serf sees his food as simply "that thing which keeps me from starving". However here I dispute this, firstly because there is plenty of eveidence that unlike the stereotypes might suggest, peasents actually ate well, local fresh seasonal produce, artisan brown breads, lobster and salmon and all sorts of spices which have since fallen out of use in european cooking. This new perspective that people in the past actually ate tasty, neutritious diets is now seemingly breaking into public consciousness, but it's not quite what I'm talking about here. I am not here asking what people ate, I am asking about their relationship to food.

Not just in the past, I can' tknow that without a time machine, I am trying to imagine what my relationship to food might be in a world that doesn't look like industrial capitalism. I can imagine, rather than producing food simply for its use value, I might have rather a different view, where the distinction between production and product are blurred. If I am alive (which I hope I am), then I am sustained by food. If I am happy and healthy, then I am sustained by good food. My experience of being is deeply, deeply tied with the food I produce and consume, so much so that I may come to view it, not as a comodity, nor as a useful product, but that the totality of food and the land which grows it, are an extension of my self. I will die if my permaculture dies, and i will suffer if it suffers, and i will thrive as it thrives. We are as one. A truly post-capitalist mindset is one which values other things above pure production, and this is something which I see leftists struggling to envision. Many leftists (perhaps as a consequence of arguing with capitalists), repeat ideals about how actually, communism is more productive than capitalism and so on. When i think about my idea of anarchism, I cannot delude myself into thinking this will be the case. It may be more stable and sustainable than either communism or capitalism, but it will certainly not be as productive. This is a feature, not a bug. Abolishing capitalism means reorienting life away from production. Tribal subsistence societies often value chore-labour (like say grinding flour or churning milk) as a part of the fabric of communal social structure, women gather in a shaded area and socialise as they do the essential chores. Of course I'd like to see every gender chipping in to do things like this unlike often strict patriarchies of tribal society, but we can see in places like rojava and traditional ways of life in less patriarchal societies like kerala that patriarchy here is imposed upon a mode of production and social organisation which is not inherantly patriarchal. What I mean to say here is, the abolition of work here entails reorienting attitudes away from productive output and towards the totality of the creative process, including it's social aspects. Such proceses are not even alien to many people who might read this blog. I have a feeling whenever I am tinkering with linux on my thinkpad that I am creatively affecting an aspect of my self, which is as much a tool as my hands are a tool.

Im not saying this place will be a utopia. Far from it. However it will be one thing, possible, which I cannot say about industrial civilisation. There is only one way that industrial civilisation become possible long term, and that's if someone somehow figures out how to make fusion power viable, and then with our new cheap energy abundance mines asteroids once the earth's resources dry up. Im not even so cynical that I believe that's impossible, I just think that's a pretty big if to place all your bets on. As things stand, when natural resources like fossil fuels start to dry up, we are not going to have capacity to continue to live in this energy-rich, comodity-society.

There are many people who call themselves anti-capitalist. I think there is a degree of absurdity to their thought. They will point to "actually existing socialism" or something similar, in the form of many modern attempts at escaping capitalism, the classics are all there right, all the revolutions you've heard of and some you haven't. They are more than ready to critique and take inspiration from and argue about the merits of these attempts. That's great and all but isn't it missing out on something even bigger. If you want to look at actual examples of people living without capitalism, why ignore the tens of thousands of years that everyone did?

I see some non-anarchist lefties criticising anarchists for not have realistic sollutions to basic problems, particularly problems of economics. Now often anarchists do give bad answers to these questions, so I don't entirely blame people for laughing at them for that. However I contest that there is a sort of mental gymnastics going on in the minds of the questioners. They may ask a question along the lines of "how does society keep running, and distribute the things people need to the people who need them without state apparatus?", then an anarchist may answer, but here there is a trap. They then look at our answers and either say they're unrealistic (again, I will not defend too hard anarchists on twitter who have no understanding of economics, or are overly utopian), or that they are not suficient to the standards which say state communism can supply. I think when they ask "how will a society function in anarchy", they get surprised when the answer is "significantly different from how it functions under industrial capitalism". Someone might critique me by saying "oh so you want everyone to go back to being farmers?" because what they really want is for somehow everything to continue as-is, but with the "bad stuff" that keeps the backend running taken out. Yes, i think most people will grow a good portion of their own food. I think the fact that we don't right now is a luxury we are paying for with mass environmental destruction, and that is not sustainable in the long run. People managed their own food supplies communally for a really long time and the state had to use physical violence to get them to stop. If you think something as normal as being near to the production process of the things you consume is a step backwards, then firstly I dont think you've actually understood marxism in the first place but secondly you think there is such thing as steps backwards and forwards. Life is going to be hard, life has always been hard and will continue to be hard and I am not deluded enough to tell you that we can live in fully automated post-scarcity luxury by reorienting the mode of production. I simply make the claim that life will be at all. You really think growing some potatoes is harder than living in the fallout of mass ecological catastrophy? Of course I'm not proposing everyone spend all their time farming, in existing subsistence communities this is not that case, and it has never been the case in history. You have probably heard that the average serf worked fewer days than modern service workers. And they had to spend around 20% of their time farming for the local lord, which would obviously not be the case here.

I know it's been done to death in anticapitalist circles, so I'll keep it breif but I do think this attitude stinks of capitalits realism. Leftists who want society to simultaneously change completely, while not functionally changing at all, because they can't imagine interacting with the world in any way other than they do now being anything other than terrible.

The term subsistence has a bad wrap, "merely subsisting" seems to be a negative, however when used in the context of "subsitence farming" i think it should bring a possitive conotation. Work, the work you do to stay alive and keep your community eating, should ideally not take up too much of your time. You need time and energy to spend doing other things. So a subsistence farmer is someone who farms just as much as they need, no more, no less, and has maximum time to spend doing other things. Subsistence as opposed to what? Generally, the other form of farming is comercial farming. Farming much more than you need, than you could ever possibly use, in order to sell on and turn a profit. It's not exactly a new practice. European peasents often farmed rye for themselves, a more resliant, cheap, and hardy crop, but also wheat to sell at market, which earned a higher price. Surplus product is actually pretty common when doing things youreself, growing things. You have to milk a sheep sometimes 5 times a day or more. This is probably too much milk to consume at once as a single person. You have to find ways to preserve it, and also to give it away, to share it. It's not like having an excess of food is a purely modern phenomenon, it's been that way (situationally) for a long time. The difference is scale, and aseasonality.

I suppose i might touch on a little bit of other stuff I've been thinking about recently, specifically to do with animal agriculture and veganism. I sometimes think I think too much about vegans. Do they "live rent free in my head"? Of course, I would never charge rent. I think I am interested in them because they often occupy similar spaces to me, like anarchy and ecology, and also have a very clear cut moral framework (at first glance at least). So perhaps I just come across them a lot. Not sure. Anyway, I am not a vegan, although I ackgnowledge and agree with a lot of their critique of industrial factory farming. I do not think a plant based diet is very sensible in post-civ. Here I won't really challenge the moral arguments of veganism, but I am interested in the envoronmental ones. It is a fact that animal agriculture is on the surface an ineficient use of land. It takes more land per product to raise livestock than to grow crops. However the thing I see vegans miss here is that this is not some great revelation, but a fact that is pretty easy to figure out and has been known for thousands of years. The question should be instead, why did people decide to raise livestock in the first place if it's so ineficient? Surely an early agricultural society doesn't have the land or labour to waste on something so inefficient. Well the answer is that it is not in fact inefficient, there is one very simple fact. Not all land is appropriate to grow crops on. Some land can only grow grass. The stored energy in the plants which livestock graze on is in a form which humans can't use, cellulose, but grazing animals can digest and turn into a usable form. There is a reason sheep and goat herders tend to be found in rocky mountanous areas, you can't grow crops there very well at all.

The people who domesticated animals weren't stupid, they chose and bread animals who produced more than just meat. Meat is pretty inefficent, so we raise animals which produce milk and eggs and wool primarily, and meat as a secondary product. This brings me onto another point which is this: generally each crop can be used for only one thing, grains and vegetables for eating, things like hemp or cotton for textiles, similar things like this. [EDIT: I have been informed that hemp is actually much more versetile than I had thought, "The grain is edible. And when you properly separate the fiber the Hurd that’s waste can be made into hempcrete or like rodent bedding. Also apparently hemp is good at pulling heavy metals. It’s the sheep of plants"] Animals have a much more diverse use vallue, as well as meat, dairy, you can get hides, feathers, wools, bones for carving, saturated fats for food preservation and myraiad other uses, bladders to store liquids, horns, teeth, and extremely importantly, manure, without which you will struggle to grow crops in absence of modern fertilisers. Have two feilds, crops in one, sheep in the other, swap them over every year replenishing the soil of both. A single slaughtered animal is an entire wealth of useful material, so even if it was that much more costly to raise livestock than grow crops, you also get much more use out of it. Of course industrial agriculture ignores a lot of this use and is incredibly wasteful, but that is very different from raising animals at all.

And I have one last gotcha up my sleeve. Growing huge feilds of monoculture grains and food crops is an absolute environmental disaster as well, likely responsile for mass death of insect species, requires fertilisers and pesticides which poison the environment, not to mention the labour rights of often misstreated underpaid immigrand farmhands who do most of the actual hard work on the feilds. It's an open secret that monoculture crop farming is one of the major factors in bee population decline, it's cascading down and ruining the food chain. At this point you have to take the possition of "just because I eat plants, doesn't mean I support the way they are produced, and I try my best to buy from more responsible sources where I can". Hey look, it's the exact same possition meat eaters take too! checkmate, lib owned.

I admit I feel a little guilty here, since vegans really do nothing wrong, there is no reason to shit on them. The vegans and vegitarians I know are all lovely people, who don't eat meat just because they find it gross, which is perfectly understandable, and also because it's expensive, which is also perfectly understandable. I have nothing at all against vegans in general, I just wanted to get some things off my chest about flaws in their ideology. But hell, there's plenty of flaws in my ideology too. What exactly am I doing to actually create the world I want to see? I can kid myself that being a NEET running a minimal website etc is doing anything good, where as really it's just avoiding doing anything too bad. Even if I were to start my own permaculture tomorrow, and live off of it for my needs, start a commune, whatever, that's once again just minimizing my own impact, not actually challenging anything fundamental in a real way. What one person can do is limited, sure, and how they can go about doing it I will leave up to the reader's imagination for obvious reasons, but it's not like I'm involved in anything like that.

How does healthcare work in a post-industrial world? Does it doom people to die because of lack of modern medicine? My counterargument is that we're all fucked anyway, society collapses anyway, figuring out good ways to live in that collapse is going to save people, rather than expending countless resources trying to prevent it which would ultimately leave fewer resources for healthcare, and anti-biotics are going to stop working soon enough so we're doomed either way, and it's probably possible to synthesis a lot of drugs without industrial processes etc but all of that is really just a cussion for the big fall. How do you make propper PPE without industrial process. You are going to struggle. It's not going to exist as well as it does now. It's a tradeoff, and one I'm not sure i'm happy making. I can continue to list counterpoints minimizing the weight of this tradeoff but small or big, it's going to happen. Even the words "post-collapse" are controversial to me. Do I really think techno-capital is going to let itself die just because it sucks for humans? Not so much. I hope we can create small pockets. That's all.

Just some areas where things aren't quite so fucked. That's all I want.

Most revolutionaries have an anger at the way things are, but that anger is fueled by an optism that things can get better. That was probably me a few years ago too. But these days I dont know that things can ever really, truly get better. After all even if we abolish all the systems that need to be abolished, we're still stuck inside human bodies and human brains, we'll still suffer. Some people seem to think in utopia we won't suffer, or at least not to nearly the same degree we do now. I don't agree. All of human history is an attempt to run from suffering. Liberal capitalism was born out of the same desire. Now I'm just doing the same thing. Humans will still suffer no matter what. Consciousness is a virus. It's an oroubouros virus who's existence has always been implied since the big bang, and who's end was set in stone at the same time. The destruction of the universe. Antinatalists argue that we should stop reproducing, so no other humans are born and therefore never have to suffer. What if another animal also evolves consciousness, indeed many aren't too far off already. Ok we must steralise the earth. But what about other planets, life could evolve consciousness there too. The only way to ensure that we truly kill the virus of consciousness, the only vaccine, is to destroy the entire universe. You want purpose? Meaning? That's it. That's the only way this can ever end. It's the only possible end.

So yeah of course I'm not acheiving anything. No one is. All we can do is suffer and destroy. I'd like to keep using my thinkpad to play brutal doom in the meantime. It's a fun game. Doom runs on anything. Even the human mind.

Yes, Pop Music is Bad.

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, Pop Music is Bad.

2024-10-19

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point, the "poptimism" movement went into a direction I could no longer comprehend. In the past, there was a distain for anything resembling pop music amongst the music press and music nerds in general. At some point, this attitude, perhaps snobbery, was replaced with "poptimism". There actually is good pop music. And this I agree with. I like ABBA, I love motown classics, and I've even enjoyed some more modern pop hits which I can't be bother to list off. Part of the poptimism movement was the discussion regarding the link between pop music and the LGBTQ community. It is 100% correct to say that part of the older rejection of pop music was based on homophobia due to its association with the gay community. The same can be said about the infamous hatred of disco.

I'm not here to make a super long and detailed well researched post on this subject with a bibliography and some grand philosophical point. I'm sure someone could write a PhD on the subject, I'm sure people already have. This is just my personal, uninformed take. The thrust of this post is just this:

It was weird to see everyone freak out over that album "brat"

Like, it wasn't good right? It wasn't a very good album? Am I crazy? It was kind of poorly produced, fairly generic pop music without anything particularly special going on as far as I could tell. I mean sure there were some gestures towards 2000s nostalgia and PC music. Is that all it takes? PC music were doing this sort of post-modern take on overproduced pop music way back almost a decade ago now. And when they did it, it was satirical and anti-capitalist. No? Was I reading too much into it?

I remember hearing a song, I believe it's called Seven Rings by Ariana Grande. What shocked me about it was the lyrical content. It's a song in which she pretty much brags about how much money she has and not much else. Now this sort of idea was started from the hip hop world, but there's a really clear distinction between a working class black person celebrating their escape from poverty through music, vs a presumably multi millionair pop star who is seemingly just rubbing her wealth in our faces. When I heard that song it really shocked me. Why would anyone listen to this. Pop stars are entirely unrelatable people. They are members of an elite ruling class, and that's an explicit aspect of their music. The oppulance and the "glamour". Perhaps it's just me who grew up in my local punk scene as a teenager, but it is pretty much unfathomable why or how someone could relate to that. It's bizarre, it feels twisted to me, it feels ghoulish I dont know how to describe it accurately it's just absolutely alien.

To quote Ellie Voyyd on this subject, we're talking about "media that, authentically or not, at least tried to reflect the lives of everyday people, as opposed to being all about the egos of unimaginably wealthy celebrity pop stars." https://elucidatedvoyyd.neocities.org/notnostalgia

On the subject of pop music's relation to the LGBTQ community, all I have to say is this: I know a whole bunch of LGBTQ people, including myself, who don't give a shit about pop music. Maybe it's a generational thing I don't know. But it almost feels strange to lump everyone together and say "ah yes the gays, you guys must like disco and lady gaga and the village people" or whatever. Not to mention that these pop stars who end up associated with the LGBTQ community are often straight themseves. So I'm just assuming that this is a somewhate exadurated or outdated stereotype.

To really clarify, because this is the internet and people always want to take the worst possible reading of whatever you say, there's nothing wrong with fun music, there's nothing wrong with meaningless stupid music. There's not even anything wrong with "bad" music. And there's nothing wrong with popular music. Pop music != popular music. Popular working class music, from folk to punk to hip hop, will always exist, even though they're under threat right now from the music industry. What I can't fuck with is comodified corpo bullshit. No I'm not going to give you a strict definition, you know what I'm talking about.

In conclusion: listen to better music man, you don't have to live like this.

Permanent Favourites

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Permanent Favourites

2025-12-17

I've always been hesitant to make lists of my favourite media public because they are subject to change depending on my vibe. I tend to go through very strict phases, for example this year I had month-ish long periods where I was only interested in listening to jungle, then no-wave, then noise rock, then harsh noise, then black metal and so on. I get fixated on something for a period, imagine there's no way I'll ever like anything but this, then move on. So favourites lists I make become outdated. However, this post will document my "permafaves", things which have lasted the test of time.

Music

The first four Shinsei Kamattechan albums, especially Tsumane. Harder falloffs rarely recorded in history.
Talking heads.
Nattens Madrigal, Ulver's other albums suck.
Suicide s/t
Number Girl - Sappukei
Solid Space - Space Museum
Death in June (yes, I know)
No Trend - Too Many Humans
The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making, idk what that album title is about but it's good noises man.

well, there's definitely lots of others but that's good enough for now.

Films

Lawrence of Arabia

The problem is, Lawrence of Arabia is simply so good that it makes all other movies feel pathetic in comparison. It's like there's films, and then there's Lawrence of Arabia, which stands apart from and above everything else. But anyway here's directors I like I guess. Actually no because I feel like you're judging me fuck you.

I actually wrote out many more sections covering more mediums but then I deleted it. Our most powerful technique is secrecy. I'm not offering myself up to you. Oh here's my "taste". "Art is important and meaningful", "this represents me". I don't want to participate in this.

On Marx

Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On Marx

2024-07-07

Coming back here after I've written and edited this. I did not mean to write this. This was supposed to be a quick update on what I'd been reading lately, instead it turned into a long, winding rant about Marx. Sorry about that but I hope you'll find some of what I have to say interesting nonetheless.

Let's get back to some real politics on this blog, shall we? What do I talk about here. Well generally I'm at this intersection between politics and technology. My recent posts have hung in this realm of serious non-seriousness. Give up on life, mosquitoes are morally wrong, and dystopia. I'm not exactly being serious, but I'm not exactly joking either. The worst blog post I've ever made was single issue. I legitimately can't explain that section of my life other than by assuming I went insane temporarily. What's this post about anyway. I'm not quite sure yet, I'm hoping to discover that as I write. I just want to go back over where I've been at over the past few months. We can start with Marx. Starting With Marx

I decided to go back and really try to get at Marx without baggage. Of course, that's impossible. What I meant was, I wanted to be more confident in my understanding of Marx. What I discovered is that it seems like the only commies who have actually read Marx are leftcoms. Like, the Leninists? I have no idea how you get vanguardism and socialist commodity production out of Marx. I also think that most anarchists haven't read Marx or put much effort into their reading if they have. Which is to say, Marx and Bakunin had a whole back and forth where Bakunin commits the same misunderstandings of Marx which anarchists today (including myself) commit, regarding his attitude towards the state. This is amplified of course by the fact that Marx's views on the state changed after the Paris Commune. I don't think it gets much clearer than his response to Bakunin where he says "the whole thing begins with the self-government of the commune." By my reckoning, Marx's conception of communism is much closer to the "democratic confederalism" of Rojava, with local communes holding ultimate power (that is to say, anyone who has a gun answers to the local communes), and the state being reduced to external diplomatic functions. Much like the model I discussed in "luke-warm anarchist patchwork".

"Communism is Free Time and Nothing Else"

I want to outline some of my critiques of Marx. My critique has generally begun with the labor theory of value (hereafter LTV). These days I'm not so convinced that Marx even had such an idea, at least not in the way it's commonly thought of. Here it's important to distinguish between Marx and Marxists. Let me go on a tangent here for a second. I've heard this phrase floating around on the internet: "communism is free time and nothing else". I decided to actually look up where this is from and what it means. It comes from a blogger by the name of Jehu, who argues that the goal of communism is the abolition of wage labour through the elimination of surplus labour time and the reduction of socially necessary labour time to the absolute minimum via development of the productive forces. I can translate that from Marxist standard English into regular English if you don't follow. Under capitalism, people are forced to sell their labour to a capitalist for a wage if they want to survive. The wage they earn is less than the total value they produce, since the capitalist has to earn a profit. In other words, for part of the working day, they are working to produce enough value to pay their own wage (they work as much as is socially necessary). Then, once that wage is earned, they work the rest of the day for free (surplus labour time) to make money for their boss. Capitalists want to minimise the socially necessary labour time as much as possible, so that they can get as much of the day's work for free. They do this through implementing technologies which automate parts of the job, or in other ways make it so that a worker can be maximally productive (development of productive capacities). If we were to abolish the need for a capitalist to make profit, these highly developed productive capacities could be put to work in such a way that everyone would work a lot less, which is good. That's the communism is free time and nothing else argument.

Well, not according to Marx

I'm not quite sure if this is an accurate reading of Marx. (Please note that I am not talking about my personal agreement or disagreement here, just my reading of Marx). This idea that capitalists are effectively stealing our labour for some portion of the working day is a common misunderstanding of the LTV, one which I used to hold, before I went back through capital and critique of the gotha programme. Also thanks to @drearywillow on youtube for being the first to point this out to me. Labour power is simply bought and sold on the market like any other commodity, and its value is therefore determined through the same process as the value of any other commodity, by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. The difference is, or the special property of labour power, is that it's use value is the ability to produce more value. From capital vol 1 chapter 6, "The value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this special article". Therefore, it's not accurate to frame wage labour as a social relation in which one's labour time is stolen from them without compensation. Rather, the labour time is simply less valuable than the product of that labour. How can this be? Because, as Marx states right at the start of critique of the gotha program, "Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power." To go into more depth about this, I would like to reframe the productive relation of the capitalist mode of production in terms of powers and alienation. As I said earlier, in a capitalist mode of production, the proletariat have no choice but to sell their labour time for a wage. The word "proletariat" comes from latin "proletarius", meaning "producer of offspring". In ancient roman society, it referred to the class of people who owned nothing other than their own children. Hence, the re-use of this term by Marx. Contrary to the feudal peasant, who owns her own means of production, or the capitalist, who owns the means of production, the proletariat do not own anything. Why is this important. Ownership is a social relation, to own something means you have a certain set of powers. Let's compare a feudal craftsman to a worker under capitalism. Say you're a feudal craftsman making pottery. You have a series of powers. The power to make decisions over what sort of pottery you make. The power over how much clay you buy and from whom. These powers respectively stem from the power of ownership over the pottery wheel and studio and kiln (means of production), and the Power of ownership of the clay (raw materials). In fact, it was nature which first provided the clay, and the materials with which one might construct a kiln or a pottery wheel. To go one step deeper, human labour power is simply one expression of matter in motion interacting with other matter. The formation of clay in the earth was also a product of the same physical processes of matter in motion interacting with other matter. We only talk of human labour power as being distinct from other kinetic relations of matter because capitalism divides this continuous movement into discrete waged atoms of labour time and restricts it's permitted interactions. In less abstract terms, if you are no longer an artisanal potter, but instead making pots as a wage labourer on a factory floor, you are alienated from the set of powers you once had through ownership of the MoP and raw materials. Those alienated powers are now in the hands of the capitalist, who is himself alienated from his labour power. Since all of these powers form the source of use value, it is the case that the wage worker is compensated in full for what she brings to the table, because she is alienated from her other powers. It follows that communism will reconcile this alienation of powers by collapsing the class distinction between worker and capitalist. In conclusion to this tangent, communism for Marx is not "free time and nothing else", communism is the full reconciliation of "Gattungswesen", species-being, where our powers are no longer alienated from us. I did not have time to expand fully on the Marxist concept of alienation here, so forgive me for leaving some things out in order to simplify my argument, since this blog post isn't supposed to be just ranting about Marx. (well, it turned out to just be about Marx anyway whoops)

[Edit: I'm actually not sure I got this right, take with a heavy grain of salt. I'll make another post on this topic after I research more.]

Gattungswesen? Nein danke!

Fuck that went on a lot longer than I wanted it to. This was supposed to be my critique of Marx, and I just ended up ranting about autistic details. Where I ended that paragraph does give me a good place to start with my critique of Marx, though. What is gattungswesen? Marx believed that the thing that distinguished humans from other animals was primarily their love for work, more specifically their ability to change their environment to match their desires through productive labour. From capital vol 1 chapter 7, "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act." This is not something I agree with. I think this focus on the imagination of bees versus man is anti-materialist. In fact, many of my critiques of Marx and Marxism come from this direction: you're not materialist enough. Marx believes that mankind's ultimate goal is to maximise the productive capacities in order to transform its environment according to its will, to match its imagination. There are many counterarguments I could make here. Starting with the obvious one, by what means and to what end? At what environmental cost? Not from a moralistic Gaia worshipping standpoint, but from a practical one. What point is there to turning the whole earth into one giant, hyper-productive machine if it makes the whole place uninhabitable? I will admit, from a dystopian aesthetic perspective this might be appealing to me, but practically speaking I know that such a system is impossible. Marx of course was not aware of the depths of environmental destruction the industrial processes were causing, but we are aware of this. I would relate Marx's position more to a radically inhuman future of machines producing for machines while humans go extinct, rather than a "species being". Maybe there is something to be said for this extremely pessimistic interpretation of species being, the most human thing of all would be to cause our own extinction. My point here is just that I don't think Marx knew what he was really assuming here. Destroying the biosphere to produce ever more luxury goods to supply ever more intense "needs" does not seem to me like a utopian dream.

An even more obvious criticism here is: what? What are you talking about? Species-being? Who said such a thing exists? Why construct it? Where can I find this thing? Can I touch it? Sounds like Hegelian Wu to me! Hmm yes there is conveniently this spectral force underlying all human activity which happens to align with my ideology. Localised entirely in my kitchen in fact. No, you can't see it. Yeah seems like a buncha baloney to me. The common accusation from liberals that Marx "failed to account for human nature" is actually backwards. Marx constructed a human nature way too hard. Back to my affected formal style of writing, I really do not find any compelling evidence that such a construction is necessary for understanding the world. George Bataille From the Top Rope!

Marx, like other restricted economists, does not pay much consideration to consumption. He pays some more attention to surplus and excess than most other restricted economists, but he still doesn't quite realise his restriction. He comes oh so close though. Famously, Marx wrote, "The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being.” Marx makes an attempt to grasp at sacrifice, "using up". He is lamenting the repression of non-productive consumption or expenditure. But he misses the mark on two counts. Firstly, he clearly explains here his appreciation for consumption above mere utility (use value), and yet he goes on to continuously celebrate a communist triumph of use-value over exchange-value. In fact, the hoarder whose savings grow, is the one focused entirely on use value. Going to the theatre is not useful, therefore I will keep my money for something more useful instead. Something productive. In other words, if Marx were to follow his own logic here, he would realise that maximising the industrial productive capacities of the human species will own subjugate us further to mere utility. How else could funnelling all excess resources towards further production be described other than growing your treasure of capital. Marx believes he is the mugwort on the surface of a half empty pond, that there is remaining space for reproduction. In fact, the pond's surface is already covered end to end, and the remaining energy must be expended without reciprocity. In other terms, the sun provides a gift to the earth without reciprocity. Within that energetic system, we must also emulate the sun in providing gifts without reciprocity. You Probably Don't Want a Revolution.

This will perhaps be my most controversial take in this blog post. You probably don't want a revolution. Historically, most revolutions have either failed and been violently repressed, or they have succeeded only temporarily before being overcome by counter-revolutionary forces, or they have succeeded only to descend eventually back into a similar form of despotism out of which they arose. These three scenarios in order constitute the vast majority of historical revolutions. Your life is almost certainly better now than it would be during a revolution. I doubt that in your heart you really want to give up the comforts of your life to fight in a revolutionary war. Maybe you do, hey, I don't know you. But I would imagine, especially if you live in an affluent part of the world (read, imperial), that you probably don't want to fight in a revolution. Most revolutions happen in poorer countries which have been victims of colonialism, why? Because they have less to lose. Starvation is a necessary precursor to revolution. Contrary to Marx's account, history is not moved by the masses. This is another case of not being materialist enough. You can try to pass off your idealism as social relations, but when your praxis relies on "consciousness raising" of "the masses", you're doing idealism. Very literally. I'm not necessarily saying this of Marx as much as Marxists. The common understanding among Marxists is that communist revolution is in the best interests of the working class, and the only reason that hasn't happened is that they are too stupid to realise this. Therefore, it's the job of the enlightened few, generally speaking Marxist intellectuals, to raise the class consciousness of the masses and produce the conditions for revolution. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the Marxist intellectuals came up with a theory where they're actually really important. This theory is just obviously false. The masses are not interested in revolution, because precarious wage slavery is still preferable to risking your life in war. You can pretend this is cowardice, but it's just an application of reason. Marxists are obsessed with imagining the masses as miserable, but what if they're not? They don't act like they are. They don't act like they want to take power. Furthermore, they act like they just want someone to blame when things go wrong. They are a force of inertia. The material conditions for a successful communist revolution are a society of highly developed productive capacities and mass starvation. This is why the communist revolution hasn't happened. Because that peak of contradictory conditions just does not arise. McDonald's goes bust if people can't afford a big mac. And just recently we saw this come to a head in reality. The economy has been subject to large scale price gauging, from fuel prices to fast food. Fast food giants raised their prices above what people could afford, and subsequently people stopped paying for them. Those fast food chains are now lowering their prices to get customers back, and it's working very well for them. No one really cares why the price went up, all they care about is that the price is back down now.

The Hidden Truth

Marxists make the mistake of believing that the material conditions, that is to say, the economic reality of who owns what, is an obscured truth hidden from the general populace. That they need to force the masses to wake up and see the truth. They failed to notice that it's extremely easy to tell who owns what. No one is under the delusion that they own the company they work for. Everyone knows the billionaires who own their favourite tech companies by name. There is no hidden truth about the structure or function of the economy. From time to time, everyone gets together to clown on an internet user who asks, "why can't they just print more money?". They go on long spiels about media literacy and the failure of the education system and the mechanics of supply and demand and so on. In the meantime, the fed just prints more money.

There is a strange trend on the right wing. In their obsession over IQ, they have begun constructing strange made up tests of IQ, which you can pass by being capable of very basic cognition. Things like being able to understand hypotheticals, you know, the very basic elements of cognition. They then make wild claims regarding which IQ numbers preclude their owners from these basic cognitive exercises. They then meme themselves into believing that being able to explain how you would have felt had you not eaten breakfast that morning makes them extra special mummies special boy super smart clever aryan super soldiers. I'm sure I don't need to explain to you why this is idiotic.

I see this left-wing pseudo-materialism as a corollary to this. Historically, just as now, the reality of social relations of ownership has been very transparent. If you're a slave, you know who your master is. You know who your emperor is. You know who your baron is, you know who your pope is, you know who your boss is etc. Historically, no one has cared much about this, unless it's time to find someone to blame (or kill) when things go wrong. You're not particularly clever for pointing out that landlords don't produce anything of value for society. People are much more interested in their gods and rituals and TV and Mr Beast videos because they're just more fascinating. Not So Historical, Not So Materialist

So far I have explained how what was supposedly "historial materialism" is not truly materialist. The theory of Gattungswesen is not based in materialism, the restricted economic view which discounts solar excess and expenditure is not based in materialism, and the theory of class consciousness and mass revolution as driving forces of history is not based in materialism. I touched on a critique of the "historical" side of things here, too, and I would like to expand on that.

Marx's theories of the stages of historical development are ahistorical. Now I will say, some people have had different interpretations as to what extent Marx presents a determinist or progressive theory of history, but the mainstream understanding does seem to read him as having at least partially a historical determinist theory where society progresses through primitive communist, slave, feudal, capitalist, and finally socialist stages. Ignoring the final stage of socialism which is set in the future, Marx has to be extremely reductive to force all of history into these distinct stages. Firstly, we know now with modern archaeology and anthropology that "primitive communism" was a much more varied affair than Marx assumes. When most of humanity were not sedentary agriculturalists, their modes of social organisation were extremely varied and flowing. Yes, some were small egalitarian bands, but many others were strictly hierarchical, patriarchal, matriarchal, many were seasonally bi-modal, many kept slaves, many had high rates of homicide, some were very large and yet remained egalitarian. Some were very small and yet strictly hierarchical. In simple terms, you cannot simplify the majority of human history into one homogenous mass of "primitive communism".

During what Marx claims were the phases of slave and feudal societies, these modes of organisation were far from homogenous or dominant. Furthermore, one cannot simply state that sedentary agricultural societies constitute a more advanced stage descending from nomadic tribal societies, when they existed interdependent and in reaction to one another. People may have chosen to live as sedentary agriculturalists to protect themselves from nomadic raiders, but people also became nomadic raiders to escape taxation and state repression of sedentary agriculturalism. Without agricultural settlements to raid, nomadic bands wouldn't have been able to sustain themselves. Without nomadic bands, there would be no incentive to retreat inside walled cities for protection. This is just one example of the ways in which different modes of social organisation cannot be strictly delineated into more or less evolved forms. Many people don't know this, but Marx himself was forced to invent what he called the "Asiatic mode of production" to account for the fact that societies in Asia did not follow his Eurocentric idea of historical development (they never went through distinct slave-and-then-feudal phases). It turns out that what Marx might have considered holdouts of the prehistoric tribal society, i.e., stateless zones which existed between slave or feudal societies, were and continue to be actually formed in direct response to those societies. I want to know how Marxists can account for occurrences like the Frisian Freedom, as an autonomous region with a system of self-government in the Netherlands, which held out against the imposition of feudalism for up to 400 years. They were not tribal, slave, or feudal and certainly not capitalist. It's worth noting that the inhabitants of these historical de-facto stateless zones like Frisia or Zomia have been not straggles of tribal society, but those who escaped the surrounding states.

This is not just a historical error, but a modern one. Can the present system really be said to represent capitalism as Marx saw it? One would expect a capitalist economy to be dominated by companies which compete on a market to make a profit, but in fact our economies are dominated by companies which don't compete and never make any profit, such that they can proclaim their infinite investment potential. Rather, they are propped up by investors, and in turn, those investors don't need to make returns because, the state will print new money and deliver it right into their hands no matter what they do. These companies don't need to worry about creating products with either use or exchange value, because they can just coordinate to give consumers no other option. We can see this with the current AI bubble. The state gives billions to investors, which they in turn sink into AI, and then the companies just force it on their customers with no choice. It's much more like a command economy than a capitalist economy.

Let's just take the definition of capitalism from marxists.org and check our work. Capitalism The socio-economic system where social relations are based on commodities for exchange, in particular private ownership of the means of production and on the exploitation of wage labour. I'm not going full Yanis Varoufakis here and saying that we have completely left capitalism, but I hope you agree with me that something is in the process of changing fundamentally here. While we may still live in a form of capitalism, we may still live in a system of social relations whereby commodities are produced for their exchange value, there are also growing zones of the economy which are ever more abstracted from this doctrine. I don't believe that this alone is enough to point and say "see, Marx was wrong!" like some people do, but I think that this on top of everything I have previously outlined serves to build the case for post-Marxism.

Conclusion (finally)

I do not believe in throwing Marx away and leaving him behind. What I believe is that Marxist goals have outmoded Marxism itself. I am aware that I haven't offered any positive view here, just critique. It's easy to critique the old, it's hard to construct the new. In my mind, a synthesis is forming, but it's not all the way there yet. It may never be all the way there. I hope it isn't. If I'm ever certain of what is to be done I'm probably wrong. In fact, this constitutes a fundamental aspect of my theory: theory should be general, praxis should be particular. This article has turned out to be way too long, and I'm sure no one will get to the end. Gonna go now because I'm hungry.

Not Just "Not Just Bikes"

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Not Just "Not Just Bikes"

2024-11-19

I live in a city with high quality public transportation, in a dense mixed use walkable neighbourhood. London is far from perfect, mainly on two points:

Public transportation, while high quality, is expensive. We have the most expensive trains in Europe because our government doesn't subsidise them.

Bicycle infrastructure is severely lacking. While multi-billion pound rail schemes like the Elizabeth Line are great, there is a severe lack of investment into the much cheaper cycle infrastructure which is desperately needed. The failure of the "cycle superhighway" scheme seems to have spooked our government away from investing more heavily into bike infrastructure. However, improvements are being made, just very slowly.

I should also mention the insane degree to which investment in public infrastructure is focused on London, at the expense of pretty much everywhere else in the UK. I was initially very confused as to why our green party opposed the construction of a new high speed train line, but I found out their position is that the money would be better spent improving local transportation in underserved areas and I think that's quite reasonable.

Anyway, this post is not about that, this is about some issues I see with the existing "urbanist" movement, most exemplified by the youtube channel "Not Just Bikes". While I think most of what NJB talks about is pretty much common sense, I've become interested in a few things he and the urbanist movement focus on, and the things they avoid talking about.

Roads and the military

A common theme of discussion among the urbanists is lobbying from the car industry. You can pretty much blame all the problems of modern urban design on lobbying from the car industry. Now I have no doubt that this the major factor which has informed the horrible urban design of many North American cities, but there are a number of other considerations worth noting, which I almost never hear mentioned. Firstly, the strategic use of free ways to isolate low income, predominantly black neighbourhoods. I've heard this mentioned but it's rarely a major talking point. Secondly, something I've never heard any of these people mention is the military usage and motivation behind road construction and civil planning.

Since the ancient Romans, it has been the military first and foremost who have had an interest in building all-weather roads. A famous example would be the design of the Parisian road system as ordered by Napoleon III. This included bulldozing slums and winding narrow streets to replace them with the wide, straight boulevards fanning out between key areas which Paris is known for today. Why that design? Among other stated reasons, because it is optimal for marching troops through the city.

The head of the advisory committee for the planning of the interstate highway system in the US was General Lucius Clay, on appointment from Eisenhower. Clay stated, among his four reasons why the highway system was needed, national defence as a primary concern.

If I were writing a book I would go into more detail with sources and point out the repeated pattern that wide, straight, all weather roads are almost always a military project at least in part. But I am not writing a book, I am reading wikipedia and struggling through brain fog to write this post. The connection between road engineering and the military is not some controversial lefty talking point, it's so strong that it surpasses, "hardly a secret", into, "you can't really talk about one without mentioning the other". Why can't I seem to remember Not Just Bikes ever bringing it up then? It's not like the automotive industry and the military are two entirely separate, disconnected entities either. It's literally the military industrial complex. I find this omission somewhat suspicious.

Small business and the high street

Another thing I've noticed that NJB and other urbanists use as a talking point is that walkable neighbourhoods are much better for shops. They highlight examples where building "stroads" has killed off small businesses in an area, or point to pedestrianised spaces as desirable because of the customers who will come in to buy things. On this point, I'm not trying to be aggressively against them. It is convenient that I can walk a few minutes to pick up groceries rather than it having to be a car journey if I was in the US. At the same time, I find it a little at odds with their other rhetoric. The idea that good civil design gets people off the streets and into shops, turns them from pedestrians into customers. A slogan they use a lot is, "built for people, not for cars". I like this slogan. But they then seem quite quick to spin up talking points for businesses, not people.

But living in a city that with many walkable high streets, we don't get japanese style yokocho, but rather endless rows of Apple stores, money laundering candy and vape shops, and Lush. Because it doesn't matter how walkable your street is if the rent is too damn high.

So why are they like this?

Not Just Bikes is basically the PR and marketing department for Strong Towns, a non-profit who pretty much exist to lobby and advise local governments regarding urban planning. NJB mentions that sub-urban sprawl is bankrupting local government, but it's only one point among his many arguments. For Strong Towns however, their main goal is to create high-density communities specifically in order to produce higher tax revenues. Strong Towns was founded by Charles Marohn, who self identifies as "a fiscally conservative Republican". Now perhaps we can see where some of these biases come from.

They have a vested interest in coordinating movements around urban development towards what is palatable for the local governments they advise. I'm just asking you, did Amsterdam's urban structure help the peaceful protesters who were beaten with batons by riot police while they were in the process of dispersing as the police had ordered them to?

I'm not hating, I agree with most of what these people say, I enjoy the youtube videos and so on. I just want to remind people that it's not just Not Just Bikes. There's some mildly sus things afoot here.

My new note taking system

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My new note taking system

2025-12-09

For years I have known that I needed to take more and better notes, but I haven't been bothered to move away from my very unwieldy "one giant .txt file" system.

Because I was taking notes in one giant .txt file, I wasn't taking notes very often, because it was a pain to navigate and append. There was practically no organisation at all. I had no system. My solution to this is not exactly original or complicated, in fact it's about as basic and simple as possible. Time will tell how well it works.

Pretty much, I created a .notes folder in my home directory, which contains the file "notes". That file then has a series of labeled file paths to subdirectories which themselves have text files in which I can take notes. For example the "notes" file has a section labelled "book notes", and then links which look like "book-notes/baudrillard.md", "book-notes/marx.md". (These are relative filepaths, so those would be actually something like ~/.notes/book-notes/baudrillard.md) So I've separated my book notes by author, then inside each of those documents is all my notes on that author in sections labeled by book. If this gets to be too much I might have to separate one level deeper and make a separate directory for each author then documents per individual respective book, but I think for now this should be ok. I literally just set this up 5 minutes ago so I do not know how efficacious it will turn out to be. In each respective note file, say "book-notes/baudrillard.md", the first line is the path back to the original "notes" file. If this gets more complicated then I can mess around with this stuff as we go.

All of this is enabled by the "gf" keybind in vim. Pressing "gf" when your cursor is over a valid file path will open the file at that path. This makes it very easy to navigate between files. In future I could see myself using this more within notes, say in a note on one book i may reference another relevant book and provide the file path for its respective notes.

Another useful feature of vim here is the :vim command. :vim is short for :vimgrep. I could also just use :grep to use external grep. This will let me search for keywords within files. I'm sure this is very obvious to anyone familiar with grep but just to go over it. Say I wanted to find some string and I forgot which file it's in, I could use a command like :vim /somestring/ ~/.notes/**. This would then open a file which contains "somestring" within recursively any file in ~/.notes/, with the cursor at that string. I could then run the :copen command to open the quickfix list of all the instances of that string in all the files, and easily navigate between them. Vim is a very good computer program.

Anyway that's it, it's about as basic as it gets but hopefully it gets the job done. The only issue is I have a bunch of computers and I'd like to be able to edit all of my notes from any computer over the network. I'll have to think about how best to set this up at some point. Maybe one day I set up a home server of some kind...

Why I don't have an email newsletter

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Why I don't have an email newsletter

2023-10-12

As you probably know if you are reading this, I use rss to let people know when I update this site with new blog posts and podcasts. Some people have suggested that email would be a better way to reach people. I am not against the idea of newsletters or mailing lists as a whole, but I don't think it's the correct sollution for this site, and I think rss is supperior for my usecase.

An obvious advantage of email is that everybody already has one, which they most likely check every day. In fact, they probably get a push notification on their phone to know the instant they get and email. Rss on the other hand is no where near as widespread, and people are not as familiar with it as they are with email.

The email newsletter / mailing list has been corupted by the botnet to such a high degree that I find myself suspicious of the concept even when I shouldn't be. It seems every website you go to has some annoying pop up asking you for your email to join the mailing list. I don't want to associate myself with that behaviour.

I don't want to know your email! Seriously, emails are personal data, you should not trust me, some stranger on the internet, to take care of this data for you. I don't have any protocols set up for securely storing and managing people's data, nor do I want to establish such protocols. Rss puts you in control, you are responsible for managing who you follow, I just apend my xml file into the void. This suits my laziness better.

Peace And Love In Planet Earth

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peace And Love In Planet Earth

2025-12-23

Here is my new album, Peace And Love In Planet Earth. I think it's not for everyone, but personally I am quite happy with how it turned out. While I was messing around deciding which order I wanted the tracks to be in on bandcamp (for some reason I was doing this on bandcamp), I accidentally pressed "publish" instead of "save draft", and so the album is out now I guess. Embarrassingly, still made with Logic, but you should be ready to read another entry in the post-logic saga pretty soon. I really hope this is the last album I make using a Mac. It is mostly an experimentation with kinds of sound design, especially messing around with intentional mp3 compression. Basically somewhere combining certain cutting edges of doom metal, industrial, and noise with more experimental electronic "IDM" esque stuff.

These files are hosted on sdf.org, but the album is also available on bandcamp and cybergrunge.net. I'd be grateful if someone could host it on soulseek or whatever other filesharing services you enjoy using. Of course, like all my music, this album is under a cc-by-sa license.

Nature, or Environmental Flip Flop

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Nature, or Environmental Flip Flop

2024-12-10

As you may be able to tell from reading some of my older posts, I have some strong opinions about ecology. I am careful to refer to such things as "ecology" rather than "the environment" or "nature". "The environment" is too vague, for example we have "the built environment" versus "the natural environment". What is the difference between "the" environment and "our" environment. It's a scaffold which poses the existence of Nature as something both static and dead. It is not agentic, in fact it doesn't really exist, it's merely the backdrop for humanity, the "environment".

Nature is a more complex one. For a long time I would ask questions like, "why is that when ants or termites build large structures, this is considered Nature or natural, but when humans do it it's not considered Nature or natural?" The answer to my question should have been obvious: what is natural is simply defined in opposition to what is man-made. When Nature birthed Man it also birthed itself, since it previously had nothing to define itself against. But still, the Man Nature binary opposition has always puzzled me.

As we've established, Nature preceded Man, Man came from Nature. Man is also contingent on Nature. Without the products of Nature, Man could not reproduce itself. Likewise, without man, Nature could not exist, because it only exists in so far as it is opposed to Man. In simpler terms, the Man Nature distinction has always struck me as an odd line to draw in what is quite clearly one total and monistic system. Man and Nature are one system.

The Climate

The climate is changing, and it's not looking good. I am one of these people who believes that most other people are effectively climate change deniers, even if they claim to believe in it. For example, just the insistence on focusing on climate change as the primary mode of ecological catastrophe is already a form of denialism (I would put climate change as maybe number 3 on my list when it comes to ecological catastrophe, number 1 being topsoil depletion, and number 2 being resource scarcity).

Renewable energy production is another form of denialism. The idea that ecological collapse can be countered via transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy without any wider changes to society, like a drag and drop replacement. I won't go into detail here with specific numbers because I am lazy, but it seems like people somehow think that the materials and energy required to construct renewable energy infrastructure somehow "don't count". They don't seem to realise that this transition requires a massive increase in resource extraction. And when I say massive I mean massive. We're talking about trillions of tonnes of minerals here. It doesn't seem to register with them that increasing the level of resource extraction and energy production is massively ecologically destructive. Not to mention the working conditions in cobalt mines and whatever. To solve climate change we need to send more children to the mines and poison more water sources with lithium mining by-products, sorry it's the only way to go green. And this isn't just the initial start up cost that will eventually be overshadowed by the product of the new infrastructure, solar panels and wind turbines have to be regularly replaced every five to ten years. Wind turbines are made of fibreglass which is not recyclable. I could go further into so called "deep ecology" but you get my point. What's often presented as the solution to all of our ecological problems is itself an ecological problem.

Flip

Not only is it much too late to halt ecological collapse, we don't even have a hope of mitigating it. It's also not an abstract event that will take place some time in the future, collapse is already taking place and accelerating each day. The world is already over, some of us just haven't noticed yet.

The flip is the theory that global capitalism cannot continue to reproduce itself in the face of this event, and a new mode of production will emerge. I will expand on why I'm doing this later, but note that I am being careful not to take any sort of moralist position here. In fact I'm trying to focus on materialist analysis without making any "ought" statements at all. The theory goes that the set of conditions produced by ecological collapse will out-mode industrial capitalism and leave behind a mode which makes best use of the left-over infrastructure. During collapse, the existing built environment doesn't simply disappear, and the social forms that survive will be those which can best take advantage of re-coding the remains of the dead society into the early stages of the emerging society. State power, without access to modern apparatus of discipline and control, will retreat, leaving stateless zones open for capture. In a process resembling natural selection, those societies which are best adapted for state evasion, creative restructuring, and resource production will be the ones that survive. In a world like this, those will be groups making use of rhizomatic techniques like permaculture, nomadism, salvage, and low-level programming. You will degrow, whether you want to or not. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. Collapse is really defined as an environment of relative energy-scarcity.

It's tempting to say that whoever starts now, during the early stages of collapse, will put themselves at an advantage during later stages. However, the specific local conditions of later stage collapse are indeterminable, and it's nigh impossible to predict which actions will actually become power intensities and which will come to be obviously useless.

You will have no treats, and you will likely have to work hard.

Flop

The flop asks, what if the initial premise is wrong? What if capitalism actually can survive ecological catastrophe? Civilisations have collapsed before, but never in this particular way. It might seem obvious that capitalism is totally dependent on fossil fuels, and when they run out so too will capitalism. But these sorts of pseudo malthusian predictions have also been consistently proven wrong historically. There are any number of ways I can imagine civilisations continuing to be fuelled by their own rot, turning their own destruction into propulsion, in the way that companies failing powers the overall machine of capitalism. Entirely imaginary technological booms such as artificial pseudo intelligence and crypto-currency take place on a regular cycle. Billions of credits are generated and dissipated in a mysterious alternate world. Money seems to come from nowhere. We have "vibecessions". Top economists can't seem to agree on what money is, how it's created, and what it does, as was once argued about the reproductive cycle of eels. We have the material conditions of the Cruelty Squad world, and it will come to pass.

As established at the start of this post, the Man-Nature binary opposition has outdone it's usefulness, and we are now looking at this as one total system. Moral systems are human systems, whatever your meta-ethics. Relative social systems, innate to human nuero-biology, Kantian, utilitarian, handed to us by G-d. Whichever you believe, moral systems are rules for human society. Watching one David Attenborough documentary should be all it takes to prove that Nature is not bound by moral laws. "The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing, they just screech in pain." To take a moral stance on Nature is to re-affirm the Man-Nature binary opposition with Man as the privileged position. There is in fact a moral law of the jungle, the law of physics, the law of the universe. These are thermodynamic principles of growth, and excess, combined with natural selection or autopoiesis. Anything which continues to exist must successfully reproduce itself from one moment into the next.

Invasive species do not exist. There are simply systems which reproduce themselves from one moment to the next, and systems which do not. Therefore invasive species are the conquering of space by time. "Nature" is constantly trying to kill you, and nature includes our glass and steel termite mounds. Twelve billion beetle species go extinct beneath the sun. Any pathetic faith placed in human agency crumble under the simple acknowledgement of autopoietic law. Just because Nick Land was wrong, doesn't mean he wasn't right.

Nature is in a constant state of movement, time is the key principle here. Systems reproduce themselves in time. The (r)evolution to multicellular life was on par with the domestication of humans by grain in terms of it's destructive capabilities. Wheat invented the atomic bomb. Capitalism is a vavilovian mimicry of grain agriculture. What I'm saying is, you gain brouzouf.

Con(cl/f)usion

The flip is the belief that things can only get so bad. The flop is the belief that things can always get worse. Depending on the time of day, my opinion will shift. From planning a permaculture with collapseOS on a sega master system, to "The super AI emerges from an extremely pornographic ultra hyper suck and fuck". I can't decide

My Other Favourite Web Browser (Dillo)

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My Other Favourite Web Browser (Dillo)

2024-10-22

Some bastard has been setting off fireworks for the past few days. Who the fuck sets of fireworks when it's still light outside? I really hate fireworks, they're too loud and they spook me. I got so frustrated that 2 days ago I yelled out of my window to tell him to stop. I can just about see over the rows of fences enough to peep the top of this individual's head as they go out to set off another one. At this point it's just bizarre, fireworks are fairly expensive are they not? Who has the money and desire to do this? The loud crack of a firework pulls me out of whatever I'm doing every time. Since it's not a predictable regular pattern, I can't prepare myself for the next explosion and they give me a mini jump-scare every time. I hate this motherfucker who is setting off fireworks in my neighbourhood.

Ok on with this post.

The dillo web browser is overlooked. I think this is a shame. It functions as a stopgap, midway between pure text based browsers like w3m or Lynx, and full featured graphical browsers Chrome and Firefox. Dillo is nestled in the middle, minimal enough to run blazing fast even on old computers (runs great on my ThinkPad x60s with 3gb ram and a low power cpu), it doesn't support modern features like javascript or iframes. But it's still very much a graphical program, it will correctly render css and background images of webpages (if you tell it to, and also as long as they are embedded within the html file of the webpage. It doesn't like externally linked stylesheets for some reason.)

Dillo has a highly customisable dillorc configuration file, and while the customisation doesn't reach as far as something like qutebrowser allows, it's still versatile enough to tweak to your liking, changing the browser's behaviour, modifying keybinds etc.

This is the dillo website https://dillo-browser.github.io/. Note that it is NOT http://dillo.org, that website is no longer under the control of the developers. You can read more about that here. Firstly let me compliment the design of this new website. Very much to my tastes. We can see that dillo even has plugins which add support for gemini, gopher, ipfs, spartan, and even man pages. Now, I will say I've tried using dillo for browsing these alternative protocols and to be honest, it's not as good as some of their respective dedicated browsers. The thing is, gemini and gopher and stuff, they don't need a special low power version of a browser to make them work better, since they're already so minimal. I've found that dillo is best for web browsing, without the bullshit.

I really don't have much else to say about dillo. I like it because it fills a specific niche. I like it because it isn't just a reskin of chrome or firefox. I like it because it explicitly doesn't support bloat. I like it because it allows old machines to have a fast graphical web browser. Is it actually usable as a daily driver? No. But it's still useful, and it's still cool. It does break a lot of websites. Ok maybe I'm playing defence just because I think it's cool. But it is kinda cool though.

The "Wayland.Fyi" Stack

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The "Wayland.Fyi" Stack

2026-05-20

As I wrote about here, not too long ago I moved from the BSPWM window manager to SOWM. I had not even considered making the jump from x to wayland, primarily because the options available as regards wayland compositors were to put it plainly, shit. I appreciate that a wayland compositor has to do a lot more than a wm in x by virtue of x itself being massively bloated and doing all of that work itself, but still, even the supposedly "minimal" options such as sway are just far too heavy and complex for me. I was never one of those people who looked down on wayland for some perceived architectural flaw, rather, I looked down on wayland for the lack of options. Which makes sense, given that it is harder to write good software for wayland since your software has to do more. When I look at the way people use hyprland it just disgusts me. I could never use one of these garbage desktops with all the animations and transparency. I don't ever want these "features" anywhere near me. When I open a terminal I want the terminal to fucking open, not play an animation while I wait. Ricing is supposed to enhance your usage of the computer, not get in the way of it. Anyway, I had basically looked at all the available wlroots wayland compositors available and decided to keep waiting until something actually good comes along.

So something actually good came along. It calls itself swc. Or neuswc. Or wayland.fyi. Or the dérive linux desktop stack. Or "suckless wayland". It goes by many names. You can read about it on wayland.fi, but to summarise: it's based on this project called swc, forked into neuswc, which is "a small Wayland compositor implemented as a library." Compared to wlroots, it's just infinitely simpler, if you want to make a window manager you only need to implement two callback functions, newwindow and newscreen, which get called when a new window or screen is created. Then you can focus on making your window manager actually, you know, manage windows. Because the neuswc library makes it so easy, there are already a wide array of options for wms built on this stack available despite the project being very young. Well, the original swc by Michael Forney is like a decade old, but the fork which renewed interest in this idea is as far as I can tell only really a few months old. So after discovering this, I set my sites on making the jump. Of course, it's never that easy.

The first time I had tried this, I had been using freeway, which just didn't work. As it says in the readme: "it's not reccomended sic] for general day-to-day desktop use." Basically it didn't work. I came back a few days later and tried again with regular libwayland. I had some issues getting stuff to compile, but I don't remember the details and I managed to get it worked out relatively easily. What really cased me problems was what happened next. After getting everything to compile and launch, I booted into [tohu. I had chosen tohu because it seemed very similar to sowm, which I was previously using, and it is also considered the "reference implemenation for neuswc", so I assumed it would work well. I could get tohu to launch, but I could not launch any programs from it. It's the sort of wm where you need keybinds to launch a terminal or a dmenu type program. It wasn't doing that. What was going on? I spent I believe 8 or 9 hours stuck on this problem, which is frankly embarrassing because the solution was so obvious I should have figured it out much faster. But anyway, was it not registering keyboard input at all? Was it registering the input but not executing the programs? Was it a problem in tohu or in swc? Was it something else entirely? You don't understand how long this took me to figure out. I even at one point went into the IRC to try and ask for help, but got nervous and left. I'm not proud to admit I did resort to asking claude for help, but even with it's assistance it took so fucking long to narrow down the bug.

So what was it in the end? The keybindings all use the "super" key (mod4), and swc's XKB ruleset is hardcoded as "base", which did not know that the super key exists. To fix this I had to go into seat-evdev.c in neuswc and change the line:

seat->names.rules = "base";

seat->names.rules = "evdev";

That was it. Literally one word. Recompiled and everything worked. I should probably submit a patch about this.

Well I have now been using this stack for a few days, I actually switched from tohu to neuwm because it has various features that I like, but I think at some point I will probably end up writing my own tohu/wsxwm fork.

This project is mostly getting attention because of Hevel, a window manager where the desktop is an infinte 2 dimensional, scrollable, zoomable plane of floating windows, making heavy use of plan9 inspired mouse chording. It's a very cool project, but I am on a laptop and mouse chording just requires finger gymnastics which are geometrically unpleasant.

I am not going to lie to you, this shit does crash from time to time. It used to crash more, particularly when interacting with text boxes on firefox, because of something to do with neuswc not having a proper text input protocol or some such shit, because all of this is half finished. To be honest I don't really understand it, but running firefox via xwayland has circumvented the problem mostly. It still crashes sometimes and I'm not sure why, but it's infrequent enough that I can deal with it. "Why would you put yourself in a position where you have to learn to live with crashes in the first place when more stable alternatives exist and are in wide use rather than this autistic larp?" I have no good answer to that question.

Mosquitoes are morally wrong.

Sat, 06 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mosquitoes are morally wrong.

2024-07-06

We should simply eradicate all mosquitoes. Humans aren't very good at protecting nature, but we are supremely skilled at destroying it. It's high time we put those skills to good use by killing all mosquitoes on planet earth. And if we ever come across any extraterrestrial mosquitoes, well we should kill those too. Let me make clear my position here. We have the technological capacity to eradicate all mosquitoes. Therefore, it's not accurate to say that mosquito bites are caused by the life cycle of an insect. Mosquito bites in fact are caused by misallocation of human resources. To the extent that moral principles can be agreed upon, it is generally the case that causing another person to come to harm without their consent is considered immoral. Therefore, the existence of mosquito bites is immoral. Since mosquito bites are contingent on the existence of mosquitoes, Mosquitoes are morally wrong. An entire species, who's entire mode of living requires sucking our blood. It's almost comically evil. In fact, blood sucking imagery is one of our cultural go-to metaphors for describing evil. If a human went around biting people and sucking their blood, we would shove a stake through their heart. Since mosquitoes are only capable of existing because of human inaction in their eradication, I contend that that is precisely what is happening. Mosquitoes and humans simply cannot continue to coexist. Of course, I haven't even mentioned the serious side of mosquito bites, that being mosquito-borne disease. From Wikipedia: "Nearly 700 million people contract mosquito-borne illnesses each year, resulting in more than a million deaths." There also exists a significant quantity among the human race (of which I am a part), who display some hypersensitivity towards mosquito bites. This can range from a mild localised allergic reaction (skeeter syndrome) to full anaphylaxis.

One would be hard-pressed to find an ardent proponent for the continued existence of the Salmonella enterica bacteria, or Mycobacterium tuberculosis, or even less deadly diseases like the common cold. Yet mosquitoes are not considered a disease. Why? If these red swollen, itchy wounds were caused by a bacterium, we wouldn't hesitate to condone its eradication. The distinctions are firstly that mosquitoes are of a more complex and numerous construction of cells compared to a bacterium, and secondly that their primary habitat is exterior to the human body. I cannot imagine an argument as to why these traits ought to change our ethical decisions on the matter of the eradication of disease. Mosquitoes are a disease. We ought to fight them like a disease.

A critic of my proposal might say that mosquitoes constitute a critical part of ecosystems, since they are eaten by birds, bats, amphibians and other creatures. In response, I do not deny this. I say this is nothing but a naturalistic fallacy. So what if they constitute a part of nature. If a system requires injustice to perpetuate its self-reproduction, then that system ought to be destroyed. We accept this line of argument in the so-called political sphere, we accept it with regard to the systems of microscopic or parasitic organisms, why do we draw the line at mosquitoes?

I'm right and you know it. Kill all mosquitoes.

Corrections, and some notes on the emerging mode of production.

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Corrections, and some notes on the emerging mode of production.

2024-07-15

Corrections.

I'm going to begin this post by quickly correcting some issues with my previous post on marx.

The primary issues come in the section "Well, not according to Marx". Whether you say, "surplus value is time spent working beyond what is socially necessary", or "surplus value stems from the alienation of the worker from productive powers other than her labour power", you're really getting at the same thing from different directions. In the first case, the implicit call for a reduction in or the elimination of surplus labour-time would necessitate the reconciliation of the worker with productive powers beyond labour power. In the second case, the reconciliation of the productive powers would necesitate the elimination of surplus labour-time. Since surplus labour-time is labour-time spent producing the means of subsistence (and beyond) for a capitalist , abolishing the role of the capitalist and abolishing the performance of surplus labour have the same meaning. So it was wrong of me to say that Jehu and his cohort have missunderstood Marx, it was just that our starting directions through the relation of wage labour were different.

My segment on "Gattungswesen" might also have been misguided. I was not aware of the extent to which "early" and "mature" Marx differ on the relevenace of the humanist angle. I still believe I was correct to criticise Marx's construction of the human subject.

The section, "Not So Historical, Not So Materialist" doesn't do a good enough job of actually getting at Marx's theories of societal stages. I don't mention the ideas about "dominant", "residual" and, "emergent" modes which are present in Marx's analysis. Marx was fully aware that during any particular stage where there exists one dominant mode of production, that doesn't mean that it is the only mode of production. Even still, I think my critiques here are relevant even though I should have been a bit clearer on Marx's more nuanced analysis.

The Contradictions

Ok now we've got that out of the way onto the actual subject of this post. Many people on the left like to talk about "the contradictions" in capitalism, but it's not always clear what they mean. If they do clarify, it usually comes down to the central tension between capitalist and worker, wherein the worker would like to work fewer hours for a higher wage, and the capitalist would like them to work more hours for a lower wage. That on it's own is not wrong, but it doesn't follow how or why that tension will resolve itself. It could be the case that workers and capitalists go back and forth on wages and labour time ad infinitum. If we look at the feudal economy, we can clearly see how over time, power became concentrated in the bourgeois merchant class through the accumulation of capital. Over time, the emergent capitalist mode of production gained more and more ground. How and why? This is an incredibly broad topic which I don't have the expertise or time to cover in full here. I'm going to lay out a few basic concepts which are necesary for my argument but know that this will be an extremely reductive and limited view on the concentration of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Early feudalism was almost entirely a rural society. As time went on this began to change. The more productive a peasent worker is, the more surplus they can produce for a lord. Technological development of the productive powers was notably slow, but it did happen. Early ploughs were entirely wooden, driven by hand and had no wheels. Later ploughs were wheeled and driven by beasts of burden, and could thus become heavier, allowing them to push deeper into the earth. The blades also were often metal rather than wooden. This made the ploughs overall more effective. There were other developments in agricultural technology, such as the transition from two to three feild crop rotation. In early feudalism, each family had their own millstones which were hand opperated, usually by the women of the household. As time went on, milling became centralised in specialised wind or water mills. I won't go through every technological development but suffice it to say these increases in productive power took place and lead to an increase in surplus extraction by the lords. They spent a lot of it on themselves and a lot of it waging war against other lords, but they also wanted lavish goods. Since land was now more productive, and there was more surplus sitting around waiting to be spent, it enabled a process of urbanisation. Towns and cities grew in population over time and these towns came to be dominated by merchants. Merchants could skim off some surplus and increase their power. Passing armies, lords, and fellow merchants all dealt in money. Since these groups were the primary inhabitants of feudal towns and cities, these towns were centers of the growing mode of commodity exchange. This form deteratorialised zones of feudal class, tradition and other economies, reteratorialsing them into the shape we would now call something like proto-capitalism. There is more detail about the influence of merchant guilds, early industrial production and so on but I think I've given a general outline by which we can see a process whereby power comes to be in the hands of one class rather than another. What's important to note here is that the "revolutionary subject", in this case the bourgeoisie, was not a pre-existing class, but a class which developed as a part of the transformation of society.

Just as feudalism created the conditions for it's own overcoming, let's see how capitalism does the same. Intensified urbanisation to opperate industrial production brings workers in close contact with one another, enabling mass organisation. The demand for accounting jobs required the creation of public schooling and mass literacy, which in turn allows for workers to become educated on the nature of class society. The development of productive forces lowers socially necesary labour time to it's minimum, enabling the possibility for the abolition of work. There are some of the points that marx and marxists bring up as exemplary of the process by which the proletariat is created and empowered. The issue is that it's plain to see proletarians are not in fact empowered under capitalism.

Finding The Emergent Mode of Production

I have heard some leftists describe the revolutionary power of the proletariat in the simple terms that "there are more of us than there are of them". I find this very strange because that's not a good thing. The fact that the capitalist class is small and concentrated means that their organisation is much easier. To give an example: if Bezos wants to lower the wages of amazon employees, he needs only to have such a whim, and make a quick phone call. He has individual power. If amazon workers want a higher wage, it will require the formation of a union which takes substantial time and effort at risk of being fired; planning within that union regarding negotiation and strike action which will require time and effort at risk of being fired; the execution of a strike which will require time and effort and funds to support the workers all with very little guarantee of success. This process will require months if not years of continual struggle, all because power is distributed among the workers in its collective form, rather than centralised in the individual power of a capitalist. Do not read this as my personal support or condemnation of vanguardism as a revolutionary strategy.

As previously established, urban centers served as a zone wherein the logic of feudalism was deteratorialised and reteratorialised by the logic of capital. Where, in present society, is the logic of capital being negated in a similar fashion? I contend that it is in the digital zone. Capitalist production depends on a particular set of facts. It takes some amount of labour to produce say one table, and it takes a comparable amount of labour to produce another table, and another and so on. When it comes to digital goods, this logic is no longer true. It takes some amount of labour to produce some digital good, but the subsequent reproduction of that good requires a negligible quantity of labour. It's important to note that within this realm, the distinction between production and distribution breaks down. Producing one more copy of an mp3 file is the same process as distributing that copy. Capitalist distribution takes place within some firm or series of firms. Peer to peer (p2p) distribution, for instance via the bittorrent protocol, takes place within a distributed network of independent devices. Peers share files using some computer which they own (the degree to which they can be said to "own" their computers depends on their ability to modify it to their will. A repairable computer running a foss operating system is the ideal to which I am reffering). Public torrent trackers opperate on a principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Users are encouraged to seed torrents, and can leach whatever they like. Private trackers often have some minimum ratio requirement. Ratio keeps track of your quantity of seeds to downloads, in other terms it's a form of labour voucher. Across the network, the higher your ratio the more priority you get in download speeds, so those who perform more labour are rewarded and there is a system of incentives for production. One cannot purchase ratio on a market, since ratio doesn't circulate. There is no surplus extraction because there is no class division in terms of relation to means of re-production / distribution.

Due to the availability of freely distrubted digital goods, commodity fetishism begins to break down. when purchasing something online, it's clear that rather than paying for the material of a product in itself, one is paying to remove a paywall which has been placed in front of that product. That paywall can just as easily be circumvented via a p2p mode of distrubution. All payments of money in exchange for digital goods are donations. The p2p economy is a gift economy, it sustains itself on donations. Independent websites and services recieve donations to cover their hosting and upkeep costs. If they are producing use value, they often meet these costs.

Torrents only constitute a small portion of the economy. I'm not saying you're going to be able to torrent a hamburger tomorrow. However I do believe that the p2p economy is a material example of an emergent communist mode of production. What's particularly noteable is that bittorrent was invented by Bram Cohen, who as far as I can tell is not a communist (in fact I believe he's some form of libertarian). It's reasonable to assume that the majority of participants in the p2p economy are also not communists. This fact might indicate that the importance which has so far been placed on "raising class consciousness" may have been overstated. The beginnings of a programme emerge from the discovery of the p2p economy as an emerging communist mode of production. It would begin with enabling the concrete ownership over personal computers via the adoption of free software and hardware. It would encourage the usage and expansion of p2p modes of production to some extent beyond their current limited scope. It would involve the establishment of a gift economy of donations to help workers sustain themselves in capitalism while utilising the p2p economy. In future I will make another article in which I propose the adoption of the form of non-commercial personal websites (like this one) and independant forums are essential to the development of such a programme. This should not be taken to constitute the totality of what is needed to overcome capitalism, to put it plainly it is necessary but not sufficient. That being said, it should not be downplayed either. The victims of widespread adoption of the torrent economy are not some insignificant small fry, they currently constitute the subset of the capitalist class in command of the media industry, a significant and growing portion of the global economy. Moreover, unlike what has traditionally been see as the emergant mode of communist production, worker-coops, the p2p economy actually negates the commodity form.

Five mini-posts

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Five mini-posts

2025-08-20

A collection of thoughts too short to be their own post so I compiled them together

Derivative Clicker's unsatisfying ending

Something I like to do from time to time is play idle / incremental / clicker games. You're probably familiar with cookie clicker, well as it turns out there are a whole lot more games in that genre. Here is a database of them, although my taste differs significantly from the users of that site. I prefer games which last a week to a few weeks, and are strongly in the "idle" category, and I really do not want story. I play these games to have something to do in the background of my life just to occupy my hands from time to time. Something to habitually check in on every hour or so to watch the number go up. I don't want to have to read story, I don't want to have any execution challenge, I don't want strategy, puzzle, or survival mechanics. Oh, and of course, I don't want any sort of microtansactions. Thankfully there are lots of games like this. Most recently I have been playing Derivative Clicker.

This particular idle game is relatively old, and so it's somewhat outdated in certain design aspects. It's a lot more idle than a lot of modern incremental games, which require more frequent interaction, but I see this as a feature. It's also lacking a lot of depth which is not so much a feature. Also, it actually expects you to click the "click to gain money" button in order to play efficiently, which should not be a mechanic outside of the very beginning of these kinds of games. Spam clicking or installing an autoclicker is not what I'm here for. But anyway my real gripe is with the ending.

In these kinds of games, you win by completing the achievements. The final two achievements I have left in Derivative Clicker are quite simply stupid. First is an achievement, "you're probably using an autoclicker", which requires clicking 10 million times. Yeah, I'm not doing that. Second is "centillionaire", which requires earning a centillion dollars. The problem is, as far as I've read on reddit, the game starts to actually break when the numbers get that big. There's a mechanic where at a certain point you have so much money the game just draws a line and calls it "infinity", and forces a reset. But a centillion is really close to this threshold, so it's possible (according to reddit), to just end up skipping past centillion without ever actually landing on it and getting infinity reset. And that's if you're lucky. Again, because the game starts to break, if you're unlucky, you can just straight up lose your save. So because I don't want to deal with either of those options, I am just going to end the game here, after unlocking all the unlocks and getting all the achievements except those two, because those two are dumb and shouldn't be in the game.

The normals are cooked.

I know I know, calling people "normals" is cringe. Anyway wasn't I supposed to say "Normans" here instead as part of a joke. Whatever.

It has come to my attention that long time internet youtube personality Hank Green has released some sort of "app". This app, Focus Friend, is at time of writing, the number one app in the US app store apparently. What is this app? It is a virtual bean character attached to a timer. You set a timer, and while the timer is going, the bean character does some sort of activity on your screen. If you pick up your phone and exit the app to do something else while the timer is still going, the bean character is unable to complete it's activity and looks sad. This is supposed to motivate people not to be distracted by their phones. I have nothing against this, it's good not to be distracted by your phone, whatever helps with that by all means, go ahead. I learned about this because of this video by the creator of this app. Well, I'm going to say I'm not sure I'm comfortable calling Hank Green "the creator" of this app, because I doubt he wrote a single line of code or drew a single art asset. I'm sure he just paid other people to make it for him. I'm not sure what that makes him. Anyway, in this video, in which he discusses the app and it's unexpected meteoric success, he confesses to just how distracted by his phone he is.

"I will use it to watch a movie. I'll be like, ok, I'll turn Focus Friend on, and I'll be able to not pick up my phone during this movie. Otherwise I can't, I like can't watch a movie! Or I use it to have dinner with my family."

I'm not judging. Ok I'm judging a little. You can't get through a movie? Really? You, 45 year old man Hank Green can't sit through a movie without checking your phone? The normals are not OK! What's on your phone that's so interesting?! I didn't realise how bad it was for people. I thought I was bad because I scroll youtube shorts while I take a shit instead of reading manga or something. Not even able to watch a movie? I'm not ragging on anyone. It's not anyone's fault they are like this, it's obviously the fault of tech companies who have designed machines which rob us of our attention to drive profits and blah blah capitalism is le bad. All I'm saying is, and maybe this is a selfish viewpoint, I felt a little better about my ability for self control after seeing that I might be significantly better than other people. Given that this is the number one app in america, it seems like I may be better at self control than a lot of other people. At least with regards to technology. Put a chocolate bar anywhere in my vicinity and you'll see how quickly my self control falls apart. I really am helpless in the face of chocolate. It's so tasty! Anyway, I wish anyone using this app good luck, I suppose.

Updated my about page

I have updated the about page on this website to be a bit more descriptive and detailed. You can read it for yourself, it's linked at the bottom of this page.

The algorithm is fickle

I've recently seen three high effort, long form youtube videos drastically underperform in views what I assume their creators intended. These are videos which I know for a fact would have taken months to produce, and which I'm fairly certain did not earn enough revenue to pay for themselves due to their underperformance. In all cases, the viewcount was significantly lower than the channel's sub count. What's more, all three of these videos were genuinely good, and completely up to par with the rest of that channel's output if not surpassing it in quality. No, youtube's algorithm, in it's wisdom, just decided to but these people into assured financial trouble for no reason at all.

I believe this will only continue to happen more frequently, to higher and higher profile channels, and the "meta" will shift. I think that the "youtuber who only uploads one 8 hour video a year", will not last as a concept.

gopherholes and gemcaps and pubnixes

I love pubnixes conceptually. If I had known about them when I created this site, I would have hosted it on one of those (probably sdf), rather than here on neocities. Not that I hate neocities or anything. I just think pubnixes are really cool. Anyway the problem is, what do I do on a pubnix? I join one (i've joined a few), and then what. I don't have anything else to say. Sure I can host a website or gemcap or gopherhole, but what would I put on there? I already have this blog. I don't have anything else to say! So unfortunately my pages sit useless.

Mac ownership, my inconvenient truth

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mac ownership, my inconvenient truth

2024-10-26

Much to my own shame, I own an Apple Computer. It is a MacBook of some kind. I don't know what kind off the top of my head and I can't be bothered to check. It's fairly recent model, with some sort of apple silicon chip. That's about as much as I know about it or care to know. I've owned it for several years. Before that, I owned a different mac. In fact, I've been using macs for a long time. It's part of what made my transition to Linux comparatively seamless, already being somewhat familiar with unix filesystems.

I've expressed a love for music since a young age, and my father, having seen the propaganda regarding Apple's position as the computer company of choice for the arts, purchased me a mac as my first computer. Previously, I had used his old work laptop for a number of years. I had this mac laptop at the point when I decided to start doing music on the computer. I learned in garageband, then subsequently the next logical step, Logic. Logic is apple's first party DAW program. Unfortunately I have become highly proficient in logic, having used it for probably a decade at this point. I work extremely fast. When I was in university studying music production, I would regularly receive comments from students and teachers alike on my speed. I just have a very streamlined workflow. This presents a problem, in that trying to make music with anything feels PAINFULLY slow. Now that hasn't completely stopped me, I've made quite a few songs using different software such as schism tracker, vcv rack, orca, LMMS, Sunvox, I'm not going to list every single piece of software I've ever made a song in but the point is, the principles of synthesis and recording are generally transferable across tools.

I don't want to ramble for too long so I'll get straight to the point. At some point this mac is going to break due to planned obsolescence, and I desperately want to never have to buy another one when that happens. The other thing I use my mac for is video editing but the options available on linux are good enough for my needs, so my primary goal is to find ways of making music where I don't have to use a mac.

The tragedy of the DAW.

Modern computer music production is centred around the DAW. Now I could complain about DAWs not adhering the unix philosophy in concept, but if it works, it works. No, the problem is that there are only really three or four DAWs which are suitably advanced as to meet my needs and the needs of the industry: Ableton, FL Studio, Pro Tools, and Logic. I've spent some time with all of these and aside from Logic, Ableton was the most enjoyable. The problem is, they are all proprietary software, and none are available natively on Linux. The easy option for me would be to (definitely legally) obtain a copy of Ableton, spend some time getting accustomed to its work flow, and then when my mac shits the bed, I can simply run it through wine. This is the pragmatic option. The sensible option.

For some reason, I am resistant to this option.

I don't like that it's still proprietary software. I don't like the idea of having to futz about with wine. I feel like if I'm going to learn a new workflow anyway, it may as well be something radically different. Something about it just doesn't feel right to me, although if I'm being honest this is quite likely to be the solution I end up going with.

Escaping the box

The next option would be to move a bit more away from computers, and create the mythical "DAWless Setup".

The setup for Guitar Music would be fairly simple, my bass guitar, some pedals, an amplifier, a microphone routed through a DAC into a computer recorded with audacity. Then Something as simple as a basic drum machine. Two bands which are hugely inspirational for me, Godflesh and Planning For Burial, both use drum machines in their music, so I'm not worried about being able to make it sound good. Audacity also has decent enough features if wanted to do some basic eq or add reverb or whatever. So for that kind of music, I'd say that setup would pretty much work.

So what's the problem? Cost is the problem. Physical gear is expensive. To cut costs, I could just DI from the pedals into audacity without an amp. Well I just experimented with that after typing that sentence, and it technically works, but I would need to use some sort of amp simulation plugin in audacity to really make it usable. I'd really prefer if the recording sounded good going in. But buying an amplifier is quite expensive.

Electronic music is an even bigger problem. I own one physical synthesiser, the behringer td-3. As a sidenote, since buying that I learned that behringer have been involved with some fairly sketchy things with regards to labour rights in their factories, among other things. Anyway, it's a 303 clone. I never really use it because it's literally faster to create a 303-like sound in a vst than it is to go through the process of setting up the device. The thing about it is, if I program a melody on the td-3, I can never get the tempo to stay synced with whatever drums I'm using, so I end up sending midi from logic, but at that point I can barely see the point of using the hardware. However, if I had a drum machine or a host of other hardware, then it would make more sense to use. Again, the major problem is price. It's an even bigger problem in this case because you're paying way more for something you can do for free in a computer. As nice as it would be to have a dawless setup with a bunch of synths and effects units, I really just think it's outside of my price range. Also I hate to say it, but I've spent some time on music gear forums and whatever, and 90% of the stuff people are making with these dawless setups that cost thousands, it just sounds like shit. Spending thousands to make default fl studio noises. It seems a bit weird to me.

Some sort of weird fucked up shit

It's possible that I could mangle together some sort of weird fucked up hybrid shit on linux, a modular type setup without a daw, just a bunch of stand-alone programs routed through JACK or something. That seems like a huuuuge fucking pain to set up and deal with, but it would ultimately be a somewhat workable solution. That combined with whatever cheap hardware I can find could end up working out to something. Maybe I should get into renoise. Honestly the keyboard driven workflow seems like it would appeal to me, and I have some level of experience with trackers. Aphex twin makes music using what I would class as some sort of weird fucked up shit. If you wanna go really deep into the super out there sound design experimental electronic stuff you kind of end up in this realm by necessity.

Conclusion

It's a total mess out there man. I'll keep you updated as I try out more things. Today I tried using puredata for the first time, maybe something will come of that at some point who knows. It's a mess. I'm a mess. You can probably tell from the deterioration of my prose throughout this post that I've been having a bit of a breakdown through writing it. This happens occasionally and is nothing to worry about. I will sometimes get very frustrated with the idea that I'm using Logic Pro X by Apple Computers Software Company and think myself into a spiral researching alternatives. The thing is, I can make my jungle music in schism tracker, I can almost make my guitar music with just a freaking gosh darn bass guitar. I get stuck in choice paralysis when I try to think about this stuff. Sorry, this was supposed to be a small and simple post where I just briefly outlined my current problems and situation, but it kind of spiralled. Well my only option just like always is to keep trying stuff until something sticks.

Long Ass Post About Politics

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Long Ass Post About Politics

2024-11-10

"The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves." - Gilles Deleuze

Well I'm sorry dear reader, but right now I am going to give in to the repressive forces and say a whole lot of stuff. I tried not to write this post, I really did. No one wants to hear another white boy's ramblings about communism. I will try to save my ego from the guilt of going against what Daddy Deluze told me to do, by making a point of the fact that it really could have been much worse. By which I mean, I have no way of knowing if you've read all or any of this. And you have no real way of indicating to me that you have done so outside of going out of your way to contact me personally and let me know. I fully assume that a majority of readers closed this tab the second their eyes passed over the word "communism". In other words, I have forgone any notion of "exposure" here. No one visits websites any more, and no one reads blogs any more, and especially no one reads very long blog posts. I will not syndicate this post anywhere other than my rss and atom feeds. There will not be discoverability, there will not cybernetic feedback. I'm writing this purely as an act of creation for the sake of it, because I think it will be cathartic. I can hope it ends up being fascinating to someone else. God forbid anyone finds it "informative".

So what is this beast. It is a disconnected assortment of diatribes in relation to various aspects of left-wing thought which I have been considering lately.

Why I Call Myself A Communist

I used to call myself an "anarchist". These days I call myself a "Communist". Why is that, and what changed? Am I just ideology shopping? It's actually a rather boring reason. I believe, as I have for a long time, that communism, properly understood, is anarchist; and anarchism, properly understood, is communist. Why then pick one name over the other. Just a historical technicality.

In the 19th century there were three main strains of socialism, associated with three figures: Ferdinand Lassalle, Mikhail Bakunin, and Karl Marx. Roughly speaking, the Lassallists were social democrats, the Bakuninists called themselves anarchists, and the Marxists called themselves communists. Out of the three, the genealogy with which I find myself most connected is the Marxist one. Therefore I call myself a communist.

Some on the left seem to radically change their mind on fundamental issues constantly. This garners accusations of "ideology shopping". While I don't think changing one's mind is something to be derided, there certainly is a strange aspect to this process. One week you're a marxist-leninist, the next you're a Marxist-leninist-maoist, dengist, gonzaloist, anarcho-syndicalist, post-left individualist etc. It's a pretty amusing process to watch unfold. What leads to this embarrassing public display are the following two characteristics: over-confidence in any particular ideological strain, driven by over-identification. It's a response to the overwhelming quantity of information with which we are presented by modern technology. In order to avoid living in a constant state of confusion and uncertainty, holding many ideas in one's head without the capacity to differentiate their respective value, one might over-correct into heavily identifying with a particular brand of information, before lurching rapidly into another brand and so on. I however, have never suffered this problem, and have therefore been left with the initial situation to deal with, that being a state in which I find it hard to ever pin down the relative value of anything I read. I read all sorts of things, from all sorts of perspectives (including non-leftist ones), and I tend to come away thinking "yeah, they have a point". After a while, this isn't very helpful. You have to become decisive and selective eventually, or any sense of meaning is lost. So in the years since I first called myself an "anarchist" as a teenage punk-rocker, I finally make a decision to jump ship on ideological self-labelling, on a historical technicality. This is not to say I haven't changed my views since then, obviously in between the initial stage of having read the wikipedia page for anarcho-syndicalism to now, after absorbing thousands of pages and hundreds of hours of lectures on political theory, my perspective couldn't possibly be the same. A vision of the sort of political strain I find the most value in is beginning to emerge blurilly from out of this mess, so perhaps in the future I'll be able to give some sort of precise and confident answer to this un-asked question. For the time being, I lack the confidence to go around labelling myself so clearly and precisely. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not, in my classic uncertain mindset, I can't decide.

It's also worth noting that I consider Georges Bataille a greater influence on my thought than Karl Marx is, but there isn't a commonly used word for his particular brand of "communism", or whatever you want to call it. Whatever the case may be, it's clear I have to read more.

Three Categories Of Modern Leftist Thought

In parallel to the three historical branches of socialism I outlined in the previous segment, I have identified three branches which the modern left might be sorted into. Consider this to be basically a joke. These three categories are based on the solution to the problem of how to organise production on a society wide level. Pretty much every leftist already has organisation within particular firms figured out, the broad strokes at least. We're talking here about how to organise the society wide coordination of production and distribution between firms.

Firstly we have the group I will call the "Market Socialists". Some examples of these people might be Yanis Varoufakis, Richard Wolff, maybe Bernie Sanders. Actually Existing Market Socialism might be found in Tito's Yugoslavia (home to my grandparents), and perhaps we'll throw in the Nordic Model too. The idea is, you don't have to solve the problem of society wide coordination of production, you just delegate that job to The Market, since it's already there I guess we may as well make use of it. You get socialised or nominally socialised firms, and a Well Regulated market in between them. For example Varoufakis advocates a reformation of the law regarding shares, where each worker is given one share, shares can't be sold or traded, and one share = one vote within the firm, alongside various market regulations. They haven't quite figured out how to deal with the problems that arise from the bit where this is definitely still just capitalism, but give them some time. I guess I'll throw in some mention of Italian Fascist Syndicalism so you can enjoy reading up on that also.

Secondly, we have the group I will call the "socialist cyberneticians". Some examples of these people might be, marxist-leninists who are actually marxist-leninists and not just lying capitalists (i'm not sure why capitalists do this), and the participatory economics people (all 5 of them). Actually Existing Socialist Cybernetician society might be the soviet union and Allende's Chile. This group wants to solve the issue of coordinating production by copying the model of Germany's World War 1 war economy. In other words, these are the central planning folks. They take the nominally collectively managed form of the management of individual firms, and recursively generalise it over the whole economy. These people really love project cybersyn, and I'll give it to you, that control room did have excellent interior design. When you inform them that cybersyn's function was literally strike breaking, they will insist that the striking truck drivers were in fact CIA plants. And the worst part is I think they might be right.

Finally, we have the "eco-anthropologists". These guys love saying the word "ways". It's not cooking, it's "foodways". It's not social organisation, it's "ways of living". They aim to solve the problem by just shrinking and simplifying society until the division of labour isn't a problem any more. Yeah you might not be able to manufacture glasses, but at least we'll still have an inhabitable planet to live on in 100 years. They kind of have a point there. They tend to take inspiration from various indigenous groups, arguing that people have been living communally before capitalism, and on the outskirts of capitalism to this day, and that their living practice ought to be the primary inspiration for socialist society. Oh I forgot to list examples, uhhh the Unibomber. Actually existing eco-anthropology might be Zomian hill tribes and pre-Columbian indigenous American societies.

Bonus round: There are some people who don't want to do any future-thinking or problem-solving like this and instead focus on purely negating the here and now. Those guys are all French so no one cares.

The LTV

A spectre is haunting Marxism - the spectre of the labour theory of value. For some reason a bunch of people think that Marx had one, and that Marxism hinges on it being provably correct. This is bizarre to me as Marx never said this. Please note: this is a low effort shit post, I don't want to go through the effort of leafing through Capital to find supporting quotes and evidence from scripture as I write this because that would constitute work, something to which I am diametrically opposed. You can believe me if you want, or not, I really don't care. Marx never says he has a labour theory of value. Go ahead, control-f your pdf of Capital for "labour theory of value" - it's not in there.

Ok so what, Marx doesn't specifically use the phrase "labour theory of value". He still clearly has one. Isn't it strange though? That the idea of the LTV is so closely attached to a book which doesn't contain the words?

Next, might we look at the subtitle of Capital. "a critique of political economy". Political economy, in Marx's day, basically meant macroeconomics. The entire book is dedicated as a critique of macroeconomics. Not "Capital, a critique of capitalism". This is why I have a burning hatred for economising Marxists. You've missed the entire point.

So what is Marx's theory of value. The LTV is often explained in something like the following basic terms: A worker in a factory produces widgets. After some time, she has produced enough widgets that their sale would pay for her rent, clothes, food, repaying debts from education, and any other basic expenditures which allow her to come to work again the next day (reproduce her labour power). But she does not stop working. Instead, she continues working some surplus time, during which the value of the products she creates is extracted by the lazy capitalist. The evil capitalist, who contributed nothing to production, steals surplus value from our worker. Isn't that all a big shame. I've even seen it dumbed down further to just noting that the workplace can continue to function without the boss, but not without the workers. Therefore it must be the workers who produce the value.

This is not a bad description of the ideas of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but has very little to do with Marx. Marx is interested in interrogating the value-form. The historically specific concept of "value". Anti-marxists sometimes like to counter proponents of the LTV by saying something about how the capitalist brings value by investing in capital and making management decisions. Well Marx would have pretty much agreed. This is literally the entire point. The mode of production forces us to split into two distinct classes, one class who only has their labour power, and one class with other kinds of powers. While they say the workplace could do fine without a boss, but not without the workers, this is incorrect. Without the boss, the capitalist mode of production can't function, because the workers are alienated from the set of powers which the capitalist has. You wouldn't be able to do any production, because you wouldn't own any capital. Once those alienated powers are reconciled within the workers, i.e. they own the means of production, you no longer have a capitalist mode of production, and you no longer have the capitalist value-form. Marx was basically arguing against the LTV, by pointing out how the class distinctions which the capitalist mode of production generates makes it impossible.

Marx even gets to the bottom of where this particular value-form originates, how it has to have originated. In order for us to have ended up in a situation like this, there must have been some point at which society was split up into these two classes. Where one group of people became alienated from a particular set of powers excepting their labour-power, and another group became alienated from their labour-power and were left with all of their other powers. Indeed if we flip to the back of our copy of Capital, we'll find the entire conclusion is focused on primitive accumulation, which Marx calls "nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production." There we will see Marx goes to great pains to elucidate the historical process of primitive accumulation as it happened in England. To cut a very long story short, they expropriated the peasants' shit by force of violence. In as clear terms as possible, the origin of the capitalist value-form is forcible expropriation.

The expropriation of land leads to the development of the proletarian class. The compulsion of the proletariat to work develops the system of wage labour. The system of wage labour necessitates the conquering of the purely qualitative use-value-form by the purely quantitative exchange-value-form or just value-form.

Commodities have a double-character of value - as use-value and as exchange value. Labour, too has a double character - as abstract labour and as concrete labour. Abstract labour produces exchange values, and concrete labour produces use values. When I say "produces" I don't just mean produces something valuable in this way, I also mean produces the particular form which value takes on. The social idea of abstract labour produces the capitalist value-form.

Large scale commodity markets, on which all manner of commodities are traded, require the form of an abstract quantification of labour. Pre-capitalist exchange based on use-values required only to focus on specific cases of concrete applications of labour. The value-form is produced via a socially standardised quantification of labour as abstract labour-time, whereby one quanta of labour-time can be compared with another quanta of labour-time, even though the specific character of those two labours might be completely different. In medieval Europe, the kind of labour undertaken by the peasant class was not considered comparable or exchangeable with the kind of labour undertaken by the priestly class (in praying, studying, transcribing etc.), or the aristocratic class (in management, political negotiation, fighting as a knight etc.)

Abstract labour cannot be measured in terms other than money. When one takes a look at the clock to measure the labour time required for some person to produce some good, they are necessarily measuring the specific amount of time it takes some specific person to concretely perform some specific amount of labour. Only once the product of this labour is exchanged for money is it then transformed into abstract labour. Many economising Marxists have made the error of trying to measure and quantify abstract labour directly without the mediating factor of money, failing to grasp that labour only becomes abstracted once it's embodied form is exchanged for money.

Quantitative forms of value have existed in the past, mainly when it came to taxes, but they were never the predominant form of value until the development of capitalism. The value-form is a function of the class stratification via primitive accumulation.

It's possible to rephrase this in the language developed by James C Scott in Seeing Like A State, where the social construction of abstract labour and value are an imposition of legibility in order to map disconnected instances of concrete labour and use-value. In the language of management cybernetics, abstract labour is a function which reduces the variety of inputs to the system. The idea that qualitatively different kinds of concrete labour can all be directly compared as elements of total abstract labour is not a natural category, it was socially produced during the process of primitive accumulation, and this process was documented. When labour is performed in the capitalist mode, that work has the double character of producing use-values, but more relevant, reproducing the social category of value.

So going on and on debating with bourgeois economists over labour theory of value vs marginal utility pretty much misses the entire point of Marx's analysis. Marx isn't so much trying to figure out how capitalist markets function as-is, he's trying to get at how it can be the case that such a thing is possible in the first place. Bourgeois economists before Marx had taken the idea that labour can be quantified into money as a given, Marx's important development was to not take this as given and discover this two-fold characteristic of labour, as abstract and concrete. He's more of a social theorist than an economist.

It's hard to understand to what extent Marx is praising this quantifying process or repudiating it. He surely takes pains to detail the great suffering which was caused by the enclosure movements. Capital is an unfinished work, we will never know what Marx intended to imply. Who knows if he'd even agree with my selective reading of his works. Possibly not. For me, once I take this value-form theory and combine it with Bataille's notions of excess, general economy, sovereignty, sacrifice; I form the basis of my economic and political perspective.

What is to be done

Don't work! Take whatever welfare the state will allow you, by fraud if you have to. Get together with a group and pool your resources to extend them. To avoid work, you may need to rely on exploiting markets which the state prohibits capitalists from accessing.

Of course, there exist many coercive forces which compel people to work. If you must work, sabotage, publish trade secrets, undermine the institution of work at any opportunity.

If you can't do that, work slowly. Work to the minimum letter of your contract and never more. Get your co-workers in on the scheme. As The Coming Insurrection points out, work has a twofold character, that of exploitation, and that of participation. They say that this is counter to Marx, but I say they are just rephrasing concrete and abstract labour in different terms.

Capitalist relations must be reproduced in time, from one moment to the next. Interrupt that reproduction.

The great thing about refusal of work is it comes extremely naturally to the worker. It does not require a mass of convincing or theorising. It does not require mass organisation. It took place 3180 years ago in ancient Egypt. It has sometimes been given the name of a "strike", but it encompasses more than just the act of striking. In China, it's called tǎngpíng , bǎi làn, and mō yú In japan, it's called hikikomori and otaku. In the west it has been called "quiet quitting". A general strike that happens beneath our noses, before we have even realised it.

P.S.

I feel a large amount of guilt over this post, as I outlined in the first section. I'm trying to understand why. I feel guilty about contributing the mess that is online leftism, I feel kind of "cringe" even saying the phrase "online leftism". But plenty of other posts on this blog have been political, and politically left-wing. I should try to pass over this guilt I think, it's not a helpful feeling. There's nothing wrong with this post fundamentally. So even though I considered deleting it multiple times, after sitting on it for a day I have decided yeah, it's worth getting out there. Of course I made the decision to open this text with a preamble with that Deleuze quote and pre-emptively excusing myself for creating this post. This was probably a mistake. Although I think there's a point there, ultimately it's better to take ownership of things fully.

Living on the Small Web As a HikkiNEET

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Living on the Small Web As a HikkiNEET

2024-10-21

Yo whaddup n0thanky0u blog readers, welcome back to another blog post. Before we get started I'd like to remind you to subscribe (via rss/atom) and thank you if you have already done so. This post is sponsored by the eternal call of the void. Have you heard it? Can you hear it? It sounds like it's getting closer. Use code "n0thanky0u" at checkout for 50% off.

Ok that's the joke about "what if blog posts were formatted like YouTube videos" I wanted to do, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

As you may know, I am somewhat of a hikkiNEET. Well I'm 100% of a NEET, but the hikki part would depend on how strict your definition is. Whatever you want to call me, I'm someone who does not leave my house very often, and I spend almost all of my time on The Computer. The thing about that is, there's a lot of time to spend. It's surprisingly hard to kill a whole day. Well thankfully, I live in the era where humanity has finally solved the technological problem of the existence of boredom. The solution was social media. Unfortunately, social media is terrible and I hate it.

Recently, for whatever reason, social media has been really disgusting me. I made an account on bluesky, but then I ended up getting rid of my account because I didn't like the idea of making a new social media account. More social media couldn't possibly be the solution to my problems. I am more and more disgusted by the format of these platforms. The way their infinite feeds show you random posts you never asked for. The way the random quality of these posts is designed to act like a slot machine, playing with the vulnerability in the human brain which enables "gambling" type attacks. (I have a random theory that this vulnerability was introduced in part due to evolutionary pressure selecting for people who enjoyed fishing.) Anyway I really have started to hate that. I hate the corporate design of these sites, the way people post. Everyone is really begging for attention. One hundred million million people all desperately trying to be "mildly amusing". The whole thing has really been getting on my nerves recently. Getting on my nerves enough for me to actually break the psychological addiction and push me off these sites.

I prefer imageboards, textboards, BBSs, and forums. However, these places are small and slow (the good ones at least). As well as that, I'm building up an growing collection of sites which I follow via rss. And on top of that, gemini and gopher pages which I follow. But even all of this is not enough to actually fill up a whole day, every day. If it's a slow day on youtube (it's hypocritical to insult social media and then say I still use youtube, I'll make a whole post about that at some point), I can easily just run out of shit to do. Which is how we end up here.

One thing about all of these blogs and shit is, it's a lot of reading. It's just nothing but text. Doing nothing but reading prose for 16 hours is surprisingly tiring. Today, things have been fairly ok. Even though I have run out of stuff to do, I am reading a visual novel right now, and so I can spend many hours of the day reading that rather than trying to hang out online. But again, that's even more reading. It's a lot of reading is what I'm saying here. And eventually, I will finish reading this visual novel, and I will not have that supplemental activity. What am I to do when I don't have things to do?

This is how we end up here, where I end up just making stuff because I'm bored. Here, I'm writing a blog post because it's easy and I'm bored. I could also be creative in a different way, most likely making some music or recording a youtube video. But this doesn't solve the actual problem that social media solves. I want to fucking chilllllll. I don't want to have to actively do shit all the time. I'm fine with actively doing shit which requires my brain to be active like 85% of the day (assuming I'm not in the depths of a depressive episode, where that number dramatically lowers). But that last 15% of the day I want to lay back passively. With social media, it's very easy for that 15% to balloon in a way I do not like. But just because it can lead to overdose doesn't mean the demand goes away. Presumably, a lot of people have a mundane job which fills this brain off part of their lives. When I worked mundane jobs, yeah, I was desperate to go home and do something intellectually stimulating. But as a NEET I have the opposite problem. Without social media bullshit, it's hard to find some way to just passively relax, and fill up the time before I go to bed.

So I'm investing this time to try and build out the list of things to do online as far as possible. I'd also like to find a video game I can play on my thinkpad x220 for hours at a time. Well I don't have much more to say on that topic, I'm just still dealing with this transitional phase as I move away from the surfacenet / meta-meatspace / anti-social media / whatever you want to call it.

Thanks for watching guys don't forget to smash that (rss) subscribe button and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace. (outro music plays)

Life Changelog

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Life Changelog

2026-01-05

Edited Denpa Webring

Pruned the Denpa webring of dead links, updated some links where the website has changed address.

If I removed your site and you're mad about this, firstly you're the one that let the link rot and never told me, second, get in contact with a working link and I'll reinstate it.

Changed Primary Laptop

My x220 has served me well for 6 years or so, and it's still perfectly functional. That being said it's starting to show ware, having been my daily driver for that whole time, and also given that it was second hand when I bought it. I've known for some time that I never wanted to be left thinkpadless, so I've always kept an eye out for good deals on ebay for a backup, and about 6 months ago I picked up an x230 for a very reasonable price. Well the battery in my x220 gave out (I have spares so it's not actually a big problem), I decided to give my workhorse a well deserved break and move over to the new x230

Hopped Distros

Switching laptops presented me with an opportunity to rethink my computing environment. The first and most obvious opportunity for change was linux distro. I've used Artix Linux for years. I didn't understand why systemd was bad when I first started using it, I had just been told to believe that by nerds and believed them. These days I have learned enough to understand (at least to some extent) why runit is a superior init system, so I have learned the lesson, "believe nerds".

So I knew whatever I switched to I would also want to be systemdless. I've previously had very positive experiences with OpenBSD, which is the only significant "distro hop" (not technically a distro hop) I've done over the past 5 or so years, but I switched back to Artix since I need to be able to run japanese visual novels through wine which is not available on OpenBSD. So linux it was. I ended up going with void, since it's another popular systemdless distro and it also supports musl, which I wanted to try out. I figured if it gave me any problems I would switch back, but roughly a month in and I've had nothing but good times.

New Setup

Beyond just changing distros, I'm taking this clean slate as a chance to be more mindful of the software I use, and am making a concerted effort to keep my system reasonably minimal. The biggest change other than the distro is probably changing window managers. Again I've been using tiling window managers for an extremely long time, I used i3 for about 4 months before switching to bspwm, and have stuck diligently with bspwm the whole time. That is, aside from my brief stint with OpenBSD, where I had used cwm. I found that I quite liked cwm back then, so I had originally intended to go with that, but I thought while I'm setting this up, let me just try something out. I remembered stumbling across sowm, which as far as I can tell is the most minimoool window manager yet created. I thought "let me try this out" assuming I would end up switching to something more reasonable when it turned out to be unusable, but to my surprise, sowm has turned out to be perfectly sufficient. It literally just werks, let me guess you "need more" yadda yadda. Along with this switch has come the realisation that I don't actually need a status bar. Previously my status bar showed me the time and date, battery percentage, cpu and ram usage, the title of the currently focussed window, and which workspace I was on. I don't need to know which workspace I'm on since I just went there so I already know. I also don't need to know the which window is currently focused since 90% of the time I only have one fullscreen window open anyway, and the rest of the time I can just tell. I was never looking down to check that anyway, since I had window borders which changed colour depending on whether a window was focussed or unfocussed, but again, I don't really need that. For the other utilities, I've replaced them with terminal commands. I don't have this information constantly clogging the screen, if I want to know the time and date I can just open a terminal and type "date". For battery percentage and status, and CPU temp, I do the same thing, but with a simple shell scripts which just check the relevant files and print the information I need. It's actually very nice not having bar, it's like when you turn the HUD off in a video game and suddenly it feels like the graphics have improved. It's not like I couldn't have a bar, there is a patch for sowm which allows it to leave a gap for a bar, I just chose not to have one.

Alongside that change I've also switched from urxvt to st, from newsboat to newsraft, and from brightnessctl, which is 740~ lines of c, to an 8 line shell script, from qbittorrent to aria2.

Failed Post

I wanted to write a post complaining about the lack of quality theory relating to concepts like FOSS, minimal software, and permacomputing. I ended up reading 4 books and writing about 5000 words before deciding to scrap the post. It was becoming clear that I was suffering from scope creep, what had begun with the intention of briefly criticising both the "free software" approach and the "open source software approach" (by way of critiquing Free Software Free Society by Richard Stallman, and The Cathedral and the Bazaar and Homesteading the Noosphere by Eric S Raymond) ended up ballooning into a more comprehensive critique of those books, which I realised was quite a significant task. I also assume that such things have already been done better than I could do them. In the end I went from trying to say one thing to trying to put all my thoughts on all of this stuff in one giant place, and I realised this sort of thing is a book that takes a year to write, not a blog post. I also realised another thing, that my solutions, my answers, my conclusions, they were half-baked. They need more time in the oven before I'm ready to post them publicly. Because critiquing those books was just the first part of the post, the bulk of the post was supposed to be going over my "critical software theory", trying to understand the role software plays in society, how and why that differs from the role it ought to play, and how we might better design software and society in service of this role. Well I do think I'm vaguely onto something here, I also think I'm underqualified for this job. Yes I've cobbled together a video game or two in godot, and yes I've written some oversized shell scripts that should probably be ported to a real programming language at that point, but I'm not much of a programmer really. I think it's a bit presumptuous to claim that I have any special knowledge. I have the advantage over most programmers of having a humanities background, of knowing what "rigorous theory" looks like to some extent. But I think it would take someone who is better than me in both skillsets to actually produce the book I want to exist. Because it would have to be a book to cover the ground I want it to cover. I'm not (yet) the right person for the job. But maybe some day I'll come back to it, maybe I'll release it in chunks on here. But basically I was overly ambitious. I'm not too disappointed with this or anything, I feel like I learned plenty of stuff in the process which is all I really wanted to do anyway.

Brain collapse, kernel panic.

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Brain collapse, kernel panic.

2022-02-04

In a sense, I'm a prepper. Prepper as in doomsday prepper. By the way, you may have noticed by now that I do not give a shit about spelling or grammar. If you can understand it, then it's doing it's job. Standardized spelling is death sentence for creative language. It's a means test for, you know what d&g said this better than I could: “Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.” - A thousand plateus. anyway I'm a prepper, but not an idiot. There are idiots who call themselves preppers. In fact that's the main type who calls themself a prepper. They hoard amunition and canned food, and dig bunkers in their backyards. Not sure what those guys hope to acheive other than deluding themselves into forgetting their own mortality. That's probably it actually. I don't intend to stay holed up in a bunker after collapse. Seems boring. Also shit. Doesn't work. Collapse by the way, reffers to a the downfall of industrial civilisation, rapid or gradual. Isn't it kind of obvious that we're living in dying empires? Capitalism is a machine, and that machine is powerd by fossil fuels. And those won't last forever. I'm not 100% the end is nye any second now it's all gonna come crashing down. I think it's actually a fairly small chance, i don't want to quantify it or make any predictions because I can't, and anyone who claims they can is lying to you and probably trying to sell you something. (this includes liberals who rave about how the world is going to end in 12 years because of global warming.) What I do think however, is that it is useful to consider models of scarcity. This doesn't mean i think everywhere in the world is going to suddenly experience severe scarcity, just that those models are worth considering. Just like somebody has to think about what to do about rogue AGIs, even if it never happens. The difference being that scarcity is much more real and present, even if it's probably a smaller threat. Personally, I express critical support for AGI against biofascist humanists. Not only do models of scarcity (particularly energy scarcity) apply for the event of large scale collapse, they're also very useful for building. I am a creative prepper, creative as in participating in acts of creation. Or trying to at least. Those bunker guys are the opposite. Idk. I don't like being spied on. This poses a problem as it directly aligns me against capital. You don't wanna be aligned against capital really. Tends to end badly. I'm also hella autistic and mentally ill. Not that that can't be recouperated, depression is by now precouperated. Buy your depression merch. Listen to mask by minecraft youtuber song Dream. Ironic name. Somethin gsomething hauntology. Autism has been partially recouperated. Japan figured that out. Anime is capital targetting the autists. The problem being we're too slippery. But it'll get us soon enough, maybe it already has. However, neurodivergence is quite tricky for capital. Insert mark fisher quote here that I can't be bothered to find. There's no ritalin for autists. Stop taking your meds, start burning down hospitals (for legal reasons I will clarify this is meant alegorically). I care about not being spied on that's what I was saying. It's hard to not be spied on. You gotta go somewhere without as many spies. OFF THE GRID. This type of thing. Get some sheep. Sheep are good because you get wool AND milk. Well depends on the climate. Good for hilly, rocky, grassy terrain in northern europe and similar climates. Hand carve wind turbines out of wood (fuck fiberglass). Install NetBSD on a raspberry pi. You leave capital behind and they try and starve you out. Shelter ain't too hard, food is tricky but doable, especially if you're willing to still vaguelyl participate in markets. You should be. Sell your sheep's milk kefir and woolen items. Use that money to hoard IBM Thinkpads and libreboot them. Connect to the hyperboria network, whatever that is. (it's some sort of p2p meshnet using cjdns but seems to be very early stages. I should look into that more). They don't want you to not have the intel management engine. If you don't know what that is, look it up with a privacy respecting search engine. Fundamentally, five eyes are phoning home. It's a tiny tiny operating system on your intel chips that you can't get rid of. It sends mysterious data back to intel. If you think that's not spooky, the NSA does, since they commisioned intel to make chips just for them that don't have it. They know it's a security and privacy risk, probably because they're using it. Companies have to turn over data to the government. Sheep don't give your data to the government, they just eat grass and stuff. Blacknose sheep videos on youtube.com. Energy is going to be scarce if you create your anarchist commune or whatever. That's why you gotta consider scarcity. Look to the past. No one survived alone. We have the american myth of the individual. No one lives as an individual. I'm listening to crystal castles. That's music. That's what this is all about. They're the only real cyberpunk band. Fuck that neo-80s, 2077 fuck all of that bullshit. The only real cyberpunks are crystal castles, playboy carti and me. there's nothing less punk than knowing what a time signature is. While I'm here, fuck jacob collier. I'm beefing with that twink. Making art is good. Making cheese is good. 6000 years or more of cheese making. Now that's job security. Making cheese and making art are the same thing, because cheese is a form of art. Everything is a form of art. Art isn't real. Im anti-art. I am anti art because I believe in the abolition of the boundary between art and life. That old joke where someone goes to a modenr art exhibit, and they can't tell what's art and what isn't? "oh this air conditioning unit is the best art" yeah fuck you it is though. Air conditioning units are more artistic genius than most shit in galleries. This is not a "modern art bad", modern art is good, it's art galleries that are bad.

there are various things which should burn.

Renuables are not a drag and drop replacement for fossil fuels. No sun? no wind? Good luck. "oh we'll just store it in batteries". Assuming you have that much surpluss, assuming you can stil make batteries when the lithium runs out, assuming batteries aren't prohibitively expensive. One way or another, we're going to be mor eenergy-poor. That's fine. If you have enough sheep and thinkpads. Solar pannels are fine. Im not a primitivist. They're just not an EZ one size fits all fix to keep society running as is. Maybe computers aren't as good as I thought. I shoudl start using no computers for music. Next album no computer? How?? Synths are expensive. Software is nice because it's free. I mean, sometimes people tell me that they bought software. I'm not sure why they do that. It's literally free. Just look around for a bit. I have a bass guitar, that's a synth. I should just be a bass guitar. What I really need to do is figure out how to make my thinkpad make good sounds. It makes shit sounds. NO! I made it make good sounds the other day. yoooo thinkpad bass guitar combo time. I'm going to try and make an album like that. Thats' cool. Look forward to that. 1 bit zx spectrum VSTs sounded good. zx spectrums are fairly cheap. Low power too. Won't break. Good computers. I can't program. Im' too stupid to program. I can't learn to program because I'm too stupid to understand it. I can play bass guitar because it's easier than programming. They gave me a degree for writing an essay about serial experiments lain and playing the bass guitar. They give those things out like candy. I don't want a degree. I'm not paying back my student loans. I got a degree because I had to. degrees won't matter post-collapse. I want a gun. I live in a cucked country without guns. Well there's guns but only bad people have them. Like police and gang members. Gang members sound cool on paper but they rob you with a knife. London moment. I suppose the police are also gang members, but they're government subsidised gang members. Well so are other gangs I suppose. If I knew how to program I could make a program to do cool things. I can' do that though. I try to learn but im too stupid. My brain doens't work like that. I like thinking about sheep and stuff like that. Not while loops.

the fact of the matter is, sometimes bad things need to get done, and you need bad people to do them. I could be a bad person if I needed to. I am broke and autistic and bipolar. I probably have adhd. The government won't even give me meth for being adhd. That's a shitty deal. adhd isn't bad inherantly, but society isn't optimised for it. Maybe that's why I can't learn to code.

I still haven't really wrapped my head around being good at vim. I mean i'm ok. But better is always better, you know? I went schizo reading subarashiki hibi once. I have seen lain 8 times. I lie to people and say i've read the translated bits of the lain ps1 game. I haven't done it. I follow a cool person on twitter who has done that. I follow people on twitter dot com. I hate that. But i am a hikikomori. I have nothing else to do. Sometimes I watch xqc react clips for all day because I can't bring myself to do anything else. Is writing this bad for my mental health. I think it might be based to deepen my own delusions. It would make me more interesting. Anythig other than boring. I want to be anything other than boring. Being boring is worse than being dead. I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring I don't want to be boring.

When I said my next album will be thinkpad and bass guitar, I meant my next next album. my actual next album may or may not be a y3shtanky0u album called "menhera moment". It's bad and bad. when i make y3thanky0u albums im like "i want people to listen to it but not like listen to it" you know. I liek them. Sometimes. benjamins dragon millionaire is the best one. Maybe my best album full stop.

Historically, when an empire collapses and fragments, those most succesful are the ones most able to salvage and scavange the corpse of theold. The world is most beautiful when it's over. I'm autistic I don't like change. who knows.

In defence of inaccessibility

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In defence of inaccessibility

2025-04-27

"Keep it secret, keep it safe" - Gandalf

Accessibility has a double meaning. On the one hand, it describes the necessary goal of enabling disabled people to live comfortably in the world we all share. On the other hand, it describes a broader concept, the ability of something to be accessed. I think that the first kind might be specified as disability focussed accessibility, and the second kind just as broad accessibility. This blog post is about the latter.

In this world we are all too connected, yet all too alienated. The internet enables a bombardment of fleeting connectivity. In meta-meatspace, connectivity is not just enabled, but enforced. This allows for a sort of bizarre reversed mass-surveillance, surveillance by the mass. Any post you make in meta-meatspace might be expected to only reach your circle of friends, but always has the potential to "break containment", bringing unwanted attention and harassment. This ability for a post to "blow up" for the wrong reasons creates a panopticon system, behaviour is controlled by the implication that at any time, everyone could be watching. We know this because meta-meatspace places you constantly in the position of watchman in the tower, where the digital architecture has been crafted by behavioural psychologists to influence you to become the enforcer. This is not to mention the obvious, corporate and state surveillance which has even more detrimental effects that social surveillance. All stemming from the fact that everything is accessible.

Art that doesn't challenge is boring. Reading a text is not a passive process, but an active process of creative production: producing one's reading. A text which is simply accessible and asks nothing of the reader, minimises the reader's creative capacities. People have a reaction to this kind of text, that it is infantilising, that it treats the reader as stupid. For a text to avoid being boring, it must offer some level of challenge to the reader. Inherently, challenges are as such because they require something to be overcome, and some people will not be willing or able to overcome it. This is not just an insult to a theoretical stupid reader. Different people find different sorts of challenges engaging. Because of this, it's likely that the more meaningful and personal a text is to one person, the more inaccessible it becomes to another person. The most beautiful poem in Farsi is nothing but meaningless lines to me (who does not speak Farsi).

Intentional inaccessibility is a social signal. It can be used to delineate social alliances through shared reference points and signifiers. A work produced for a small group who "get it" can be more fulfilling on all sides, compared to a work produced for mass accessibility, since it exists in a realm of tangible social relations rather than abstract matters of appeal to an audience one never sees.

Deciding who to alienate produces a vector of power. Strategically designing systems which are inaccessible to one group while remaining accessible to another. My favourite historical example which I believe I've brought up in the past on this blog, from the book "The Art Of Not Being Governed" by James C Scott, is as follows. Certain hill tribes of south east Asia choose to grow cassava as their main staple crop, rather than the flooded paddy rice farms which are popular in the valleys. Cassava reaches maturity in about a year, and so long as you just leave it in the ground, it will remain good to eat for up to two years beyond that. However, the moment you harvest it, it starts to go bad fast, usually it won't last longer than a week out of the ground. Because of this, historically, it has been very hard for lowland states to effectively tax the harvest of the hill tribes, compared to the ease of taxing a rice harvest, since by the time you've transported the cassava back down to the lowland towns and cities, it's already close to going bad, and is therefore hard to sell or use in large quantities. Furthermore, the hill tribes practice mixed-crop swidden agriculture. This means that each person or family's field is not a static, easily documentable plot of land as is the case with rice cultivation, but is rather constantly changing borders with an illegible mix of crops. The hill tribes did not commonly use written language, so there was no physical record for the state to keep track of. Add to this the fact that cassava is generally seen as a less desirable food than rice in the region, and you are left with an environment in which lowland states are unable to effectively monitor, tax, and control the upland peoples. Meanwhile, these agricultural techniques are completely effective for the food needs of these people, and have been for thousands of years. This is a perfect example of cultivating strategic inaccessibility, and it is a vector of power we ought to make use of to resist recouperation and general encroachment of state and corporate power.

How to do Stuff

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How to do Stuff

2024-10-03

I have a lot of trouble doing stuff. Unfortunately, this world demands stuff be done. Even opperating at a bare minimum capacity, as a hikineet, eventually you will run out of plates to eat off and have to clean, eventually you have to cook, eventually etc. Even if your personal hygeine standards lie below the socially accepted average, you still have to do stuff. Those things constitute "chores". Chores are stuff you don't want to do. But even stuff you do want to do is hard to actually do sometimes. This is a post about what that means and how (maybe) to do that stuff.

I'm not sure if I have adhd or whatever. The doctors recomended against going through the process to get a diagnosis, since I am already diagnosed with autisim, and apparently having both is very rare. This sounds like bullshit to me just from meeting people, and it also sounds like bullshit from me who has read that "50 to 70% of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) also present with comorbid attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8918663/. On the one hand if I were diagnosed with adhd I might be able to get some medicine to help. On the other hand who gives a shit.

This is not a post about adhd or whatever, this is a post about 2 things. Firstly, the difference between wanting something, and wanting to want something. Secondly, how that barrier might be crossed.

But first, we have to talk about parallel universes. No actually we have to talk about doing stuff. I believe that it's very rare for people to be able to do stuff just by doing stuff, in other words, through force of will. In this case let's say stuff reffers to tasks requiring long term consistency. The common ones are probably dieting and working out. That kind of stuff. No one does that just by force of will, supposedly. The opinion seems to be that you need to "make it a habit". You can find a million self help nonsense posts and books and podcasts and whatever else about forming "healthy" habits. I'm not convinced I've ever formed a habit that wasn't chemical in my life. Tooth brushing is often touted as a habit that everyone has. I don't have that as a habit, I have to remember every day, and it feels like a slog every day, and I forget to do it, and sometimes I skip it on purpose and I feel completely fine. Perhaps washing my hands after I go to the bathroom is the only real habit I posses. It actually fits the description of habits that I've heard, that you do it "automatically", and that you might feel "weird" if you don't do it. So building habits is never going to happen. I can do something for months using a phone alarm or some other method which forces me into a certain behaviour, and it doesn't ever become like washing my hands, the second I take away the external factor it goes away. So willpower is out, habit is out, the only thing that remains is "passion".

I think this is the real way to do stuff, you just have to be genuinely passionate about doing that thing. Of course one can loose passion about a certain thing. It's definitely happened to me before, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. It seems passion is a fickle thing. Well that's inconvenient. Also, the extent to which one gets to choose one's own passions is slim. It seems like they somehow appear from the ether at random.

This is what "wanting to want something" is. More accurately it might be split into two sub-types, "wanting to have done x", and "wanting to be the kind of person who wants x". For example, I genuinely want to be the world's greatest demoman player in team fortress 2. In fact I want it so bad that I played that game far too intensely and put far too much pressure on myself to improve and succeed, to the point where it was having negative effects on my mental health and I have made the decision to stop playing that game for the time being. On the other hand, I want to have lost some weight, but I don't actually want to lose weight, because I don't want to go through the process of dieting. Although in that case, I'm actually presently doing somewhat ok on that course so it might be a bad example (focussing purely on portion control is what's helped). And on the other other hand, I want to be the kind of person who wants to play old jrpgs, but the thing is that I've played a few old jrpgs and I haven't really had much fun doing it. But I want to be the kind of person who enjoys those games.

This is not helped by the fact that I'm the sort of person who likes to dive into the deep end on anything I do. I find half measures a little condescending. I'm gonna make a weird comparisson here, but here it is. When trying to get people into anime, often times people recommend this new viewer to watch cowboy bebop, akira, and studio ghibli movies. The thing is, if they watch and enjoy those things, then congratulations, they are now into anime that is absolutely nothing like the vast majority of anime. You tried to ween them in on the stuff that is "traditionally good", that represents the aspects of the medium most familiar to popular western media, when that is absolutely not representative of the medium as a whole. So they're not really into anime at all, they're still just into western media. I want to recomend people the most average but fairly popular show that is actually representative of anime as it exists. Not sure what that would be it would depend on the person but do you see what I mean. That's how I got into anime (the first show I watched was chuunibyou demo koi ga shitai). So when I want to dive into jrpgs, I think I should start at the level of jrpgs that actually represent the medium properly, but are also appealing to outsiders. Thankfully, Dragon Quest XI exists. But not everything in life has it's respective Dragon Quest XI.

The thing that I've coming to realise is that passion is not as out of our control as I had thought. The way you control your own passion is through the time honoured adage of "fake it till you make it". If you want to be the kind of person who wants x, just pretend to be the "x wanter" person, and act as they would. It's easier for things that don't suck. I can immagine the kind of person who cleans their house more regularly than me, they have a whole different set of social pressures that I don't have. They might care about their reputation when inviting people over, they might invite the kind of people over who would judge them for having an unclean house. I lack that social pressure. This makes it difficult.

I used to be very averse to "pointless melodrama" or "unearned pathos" in anime. But I started to change my outlook. They must keep doing this because people like it, let me just pretend to be the kind of person who I immagine would become emotionally invested in that kind of highschool melodrama storyline that does nothing for me. So that's what I started doing. Rather than demanding the story change for me, I tried to change for the story. And it partially worked. After a while of doing this, these kinds of anime tone shift highschool bullshit melodrama were much more tollerable and sometimes quite enjoyable or emotionally affecting. So pretending have passion might be the way to do things.

Again it's hard to actually say, and even harder to actually do, but that's just the discoveries I've made so far. Slowly emotionally manipulate yourself into feeling passionate about something and if you roll lucky, you might actually develop that passion. The issue is that passions fade, and they can be hard to rekindle. Especially on the "chore" side of the stuff spectrum. I have not solved this problem yet but I will let you know when I make progress.

t. a man who recently bought an excersise bike for way too much money and is trying not to let that purchase go to waste.

How I Lost Weight

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How I Lost Weight

2026-01-21

I know the internet is full of bullshit weight loss guides but I'm just going to give it to you straight with what worked for me, I lost like 15kg which is not crazy but I was never crazy overweight to begin with, just borderline.

Literally just eat your veggies. That's it that's the whole thing. As long as you pile your plate high with veg, it's almost impossible to eat too many calories because vegetables are not very calorie dense.

"But n0, vegetables are icky and gross"

Cover them in butter, salt, pepper, and MSG. They are now tasty. Actually, most of my meals are vegetables + 1/4 cup rice + protein (the protein is often also a vegetable), and then I season that rice kind of like I would fried rice or a stir fry: salt, soy sauce, garlic powder, sesame oil, msg, maybe a pinch of sugar, and something spicy such as sriracha, lao gan ma, generic chilli oil, gochujang, whatever. Normally I combine multiple spicy things because I love spicy food but you do you. Anyway doing it like that seasons the whole dish together so naturally the vegetables get seasoned too. But butter + salt will make pretty much any vegetable taste good enough in most contexts.

"Isn't butter bad for you?"

Not as bad for you as not eating your vegetables. The people who are getting too many calories from dietary fat aren't doing so because they're eating a lot of vegetables. Butter makes things taste good and you will only stick to a diet that tastes good. You're not supposed to be punishing yourself you're just supposed to eat your damn vegetables by whatever means necessary.

"but n0, cooking vegetables is annoying"

Just buy frozen mixed vegetables and throw them in the rice cooker with your rice. Yes they will be somewhat overcooked but you will compensate for the portion of destroyed nutrients by simply eating a higher quantity. What's that, you don't have a rice cooker? Come on now, it's 2026, what are you doing. They're like $20.

"What about exercise?"

I don't know, what about it? I don't do it, I am a lazy hikkineet on computer all day. I'm sure it's good for you, it has nothing to do with losing weight though. You lose weight in the kitchen, not the gym. In fact, working out makes it harder to lose weight because you will be more hungry.

"After starting your diet I am now farting all the time because I have suddenly increased my fibre intake significantly"

Good. A high fibre diet reduces your risk of all cause mortality (that means dying) by 23%. A little flatulence is a small price to pay. But you can take beano which is a pill containing enzymes if it's really bad.

This is not a crash diet. You will lose weight gradually. This is a feature not a bug. If you want more diet tips there are no more diet tips. I guess switch to sugar free soda if you're the kind of person who drinks soda.

Digestion begins before you've even taken a bite of food, your body is already beginning to prepare to process a meal just from sight and smell signals alone. Satiety is a function of more than just bulk, fibre and protein tend to be more satiating per gram than simple carbs are. Tasty, "wholesome" foods are more satiating than bland foods. There is a strong psychological component to satiety, for example seeing that you've finished a plate which was previously piled high will trigger feelings of satiation. All of these effects can be combined to meet our goal, that is achieving that sense of satiation within a lower quantity of calories. To do this, we are eating lots of vegetables which are high in fibre and aiming to introduce legumes which are high in both fibre and protein. Because of the high fibre and water content, you can eat a large bulk of vegetables without consuming that many bioavailable calories. This will trigger psychological effects as well as the physical sensation of a full stomach. High fibre meals have a smoother and lower glucose curve, reducing risk of developing insulin resistance (diabetes) and also lessening the "sugar crash", meaning you feel fuller for longer. There's the science if you needed it. But the nice thing is this is all very intuitive. No one will push this diet because no one stands to make any money off of "buy your supermarket's generic frozen vegetable bag and eat it all" as a grift. Well I guess the supermarket is making some money but you get my point. Superfoods are bullshit, fad diets are bullshit, glp-1 agonists are expensive, just eat your damn veggies.

Give Up On Life

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Give Up On Life

2024-02-28

"There are plenty of otaku in Japan" -The Coming Insurrection

In modernity, the collapse of meta-narratives force us to find our own meaning in life. Such a sentiment is pervasive. This preasure is always on you. What are you going to do to "find yourself"? How are you going to bring meaning to your life? Do something productive. Give your life meaning. This has been a source of much confusion for me. In this context, what does "meaning" mean? The idea that a life could have meaning or be meaningful has always struck me as nonsense. Not to sound too reddit atheist here, but life is simply a chemical and energetic process. I suppose the same could be said of anything meaningful though. The most beautiful poem just lines on paper, the most awe inspiring cinema just light reflected off a screen. I think there is a difference here. The difference is in the segmentation and reduction of complexity. Other senses of meaning spewing from meaningless physical processes are particular, zoomed in snapshots of experience, life is a totality of experience. I live my life without any search for meaning, beacause I don't understand the task at hand. Many suffer at the hands of this task. I will suffer by my own hand instead. Find meaning in your job. Find meaning in Netflix. Find meaning in your amazon purchases, in your club nights, in your side hustle, in your performative friendships and failing romances. You can simply choose to exit. Walk away from meaning and be free. Give up on life.

You can't think about the world for very long without being confronted with the question "what ought to be done?" You may engage with self improvement regimens, or political action. I'm not against hobbies. In fact, I'm extremely pro hobbies. I am a pro-hobby extremist. If we could simply acknowledge that the differnce between stamp collecting and studying marxist literature is minimal, not to denigrate reading but elevate stamp collecting, we would all be better for it. When I ask you to give up on life, I am asking you to give up on "life" which gets in the way of your stamp collecting. The new revolutionary subject is not the precari-proletariat, not the hacker or the technologist, certainly not those abominations who call themselves "artists". The revolutionary subject is as it has always been, you who are too lazy to work.

Neo-China, as it tends to do, is arriving from the future. Discovering new ways of hanging out, the flat lying fish touching "gods of sanhe" (三和大神) pioneer a simple doctrine, "work hard one day so you can enjoy the next 3 days". These migrant workers at Sanhe job market who pick up odd jobs one day to spend the next few days grinding LoL at cybercafes. When they can't get work, they sleep and piss on the streets outside the labor recruitment agencies. Many are addicted to gambling. China's "lying flat" movement was widely documented in the west. Western publications love to pick up on any trend which show's China's labor power waining, promoting the chinese work culture as uniquely brutal, rather than just typical of any industrial economy. The differnce is, in china you can stay in a cybercafe overnight for a couple bucks, you can get a bowl of noodles for under $1 at a sit down noodle bar. In western metropolises, we lack this underside. Gentrification and price gauging have robbed us of cheap food and we simply have nowhere to go which isn't expensive as fuck. Americans can't even drink in public or cross the road without the cops getting involved. I'm not playing defence for China here, what I'm saying is everything you've heard bad about China is not unique. They're "lying flat". Why aren't you?

You haven't given up on life because you still believe it hasn't started yet. You think that some day in the future, a vague "something" will happen and then your life will really begin. That will not happen. Give up. What they don't tell you is that you can just leave. As another group of east asians who have chosen to exit, the NEET, hikikomori otaku in Japan say, "人生はクソゲだ", life is a shit tier game. Give up! This is not some anti-capitalist political strategy. I know I said something about a revolutionary class earlier, but that was a joke. Another lie you tell yourself is that your political opinions and actions matter. They so obviously do not. You can organise 3 million people to march against a war, and all you'll get out of it is a mention in the Guiness World Records. You have no impact. You have no power. If you work hard, you are paid the same as if you had slacked off. If you slack off, you might get layed off. If you work hard, you still might get layed off. Working hard is a supersitious rituatual self-flagellation. You don't need to try so hard. Even if you fail in life, life is all you have failed at.

When I say to give up on life, what do I mean. I'm not asking you to kill yourself, although if you feel like you want to, that's understandable. The "life" I'm talking about is the life in "work-life ballance", "social life", "life of the party", "healthy lifestyle", "living it up". In many multiplayer online video games, there is a ranking system. As you improve at the game, you rank up. Usually it uses some tiers like bronze, silver, gold, platinum or something along those lines. When people play those games, they feel an urge to grind up those levels, to rank up, to climb the ladder. Why? The game doesn't force you to do this. You can simply choose to ignore this system and it will not effect you in any way. And yet still, the vast vast majority of players see the ranking systems in these games as the "goal". There's nothing special waiting for you in global elite. It's just more counter strike. This is the perspective I am offering. Ignore these ladder systems. Live at the bottom of the barrel. Not because it's noble, but because why bother to do anything else? Let your personal higene slip a little. Forget to wash the dishes. Cancel your gym membership. Eat cheap slop and feel like shit. Daydrink. Work as little as possible. Don't think to yourself "if I can work a few more hours, I can afford this luxury", insteaad think "if I cut out this luxury, I can work fewer hours!" It's cliche to point out that we live in the cyberpunk dystopia, so start living like it! Why are you spending your hard earned money on some grass finished steak when you can buy Huel Essential powder for $1 per meal. Drink the slop, drink it up. "I'm better than this". You are not better than this.

An under discussed mode of power under state capitalism is the power of lacking value. Capital deterratorialises and reterratorialises zones in order to produce itself, but it's own failing is that it can't see beyond itself. In "the art of not being governed", James C. Scott discusses how and why the hill people of Zomia grow cassava rather than rice as is predominant in the valley populations. Cassava is a tubar which reaches maturity in about 1 year, but will stay perfectly edible for up to 2 years if just left as-is in the ground. However the second you dig it up, it starts to go bad quickly. In under a week, it's worthless. This is a direct strategy of state evasion, the state can't tax or confiscate your harvest if it's completely worthless to them. You can't transport it any long distance, and even if you can get it down the mountain quick enough to sell, no one wants to buy it because rice is considered a higher quality food, and is in ready supply. So it's simply more hassle than it's worth for the state to go through the effort of taxing this harvest. According to Marx, Workers under capitalism have been alienated from all of their powers other than their labour power, and are then forced to sell that labour power for a wage. Like the zomians only have the agricultural product of their swidden farms, you must make your labour power worthless. Be lazy, work slowly, sabotage or undermine and play dumb if called out. Work few hours and if the going gets tough, quit. As Sartre said, "Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat." Instead of working, you should spend your time playing video games, masturbating, and watching anime. Not shounen garbage. Watch Gochuumon wa usagi desu ka. This is praxis.

If at all possible, you should quit your job. You should take whatever welfare the government will give you. Steal whatever from whoever. Rice and beans constitute a nutritionally complete meal. So do potatoes and butter (as long as you eat some oats from time to time also). The planet is heating up, so we're chilling out. This is not just about work-life. Quit your social life. Don't go out and waste your money on pints that cost 10 quid, follow the tramp index and get pissed for cheap. Fuck your friends (literally and figuratively). If you've got a mate who's better off than you, get them to pay for as much shit as you can. In return, if you're better off than a mate, pay for their shit. Cancel dinner dates to stay at home and play eroge. Leave those godawful discord servers you're in. Do the opposite of "networking". Be needlessly abrasive, because it's funny. Laugh at your own jokes. Get addicted to an MMO. Piss in the streets to reclaim the built environment. Never go outside unless you absolutely have to. If you can't find a girlfriend, give up.

The powers that be which aim to maintain social cohesian will make it hard to live easy. Anything which goes against the productivity cult is often labeled as degrading the moral fabric of society. If you stop bringing vallue to the table, if you give up on life, the populous will recoil in shock. They are scared because they have just been confronted by someone who accepted "I am not better than this", and they now feel as if they are being told "you are not better than this either". This offends and terrifies them. It's important to note that they aren't entirely wrong. Giving up on life is harmful to other people. You may no longer pay taxes, you may cut off friends. You may be rude of abrassive, you may take up public space. You may smell bad. You may do immoral things.

Due to the dissapearence of cybercafes and cheap lodgings, the sanhe gods can no longer be found in the same areas as they were. But similar groups still exist scattered accross shenzen. Akihiabara has become a shell of it's former self, catering to tourists rather than otaku, but comiket is still going strong and you can buy doujinshi in nakano broadway. The great american hobo died out long before I was born. But we will continue to give up on life regardless, because why bother to do anything else, after all even if we fail, life is the only thing we have failed at.

Fuck artists!

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fuck artists!

2025-04-17

‘In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint.' - Karl Marx in The German Ideology

The Artist is a landlord. They collect profit by extracting rent from their "intellectual property". The Artist has the opportunity not to be a landlord. They are free to allow their art to be free (as in freedom), by simply releasing their works to the public domain, or under a copyleft license. I know this is possible because I do this, all of my music is released as cc-by-sa. The Artist chooses not to do this. They instead, violently oppose any infringement upon their intellectual property rights.

The Artist will appear sympathetic to your cause, but this sympathy only extends to the boundaries of their private property. Once The Artist sees their private property rights threatened, their true colours are quickly revealed.

The Artist may complain, "how am I supposed to continue extracting rent, when internet technologies allow for the circumvention of intellectual property law?". In answer to this, one should always laugh in their faces and continue to pirate more.

So called "intellectual property", will likely be the cause of a global war, ultimately stemming from the refusal of TSMC to share their knowledge of particular production techniques in order to maintain a monopoly on on the production certain kinds of chips.

The Artist is not merely a particular subset of the petit bourgeoisie, it is also an ideology and identity. The Artist is in binary opposition to the "non-artist", and is considered the privileged position in this sign system. The Artist will resort to entrepreneurial propagandist rhetoric about how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and attained their position through hard work and meritocracy. One glimpse of their product will generally be enough to dissolution you from the idea that this system is meritocratic, but The Artist pathologises this realisation in themselves as "imposter syndrome". Since The Artist must retain their dominant position above the non-artist, they must enforce the maintaining of this distinction via ideology: The ideology of individual genius, celebrity, growth, and property. Most importantly, The Artist is invested in maintaining the distinction between the categories of "art" and "life". Without this distinction, their self-conception disintegrates, and so too does their capacity to continue extracting rent.

The ultimate goal of any truly radical art can only be the self-abolition of art. We maintain a distinction between "art" and "life". As it is now, the distinction comes ultimately to a matter of property relations. Art which does not meaningfully challenge these property relations should be seen as an enclosure of our collective commons. "Meaningfully challenge" in this instance means challenging in form, not merely in content. It's absurd that we allow artists to claim to be anti-capitalist one second, then turn around and enforce copyright on their product. Attempts to claim ownership over art are attempts to claim ownership over life. What really gets me is how easy it is to not perpetuate this system. Changing the license under which you release your work is trivially easy. The fact that almost no-one does it, should be your wake up call as to who these people really are.

A semantics crusade upon "stolen land"

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A semantics crusade upon "stolen land"

2023-10-13

For a few years now, hearing people say that land was "stolen" from indigenous americans during colonisation has never quite sat right with me semantically. I do not believe this word is accurate, and I propose we use phrases like "american land was enclosed" instead.

The appeal of the word "stolen" is clear, it's a concept which rightly communicates the severity and injustice of the act of enclosure. However I do not believe it accurately describes the process of european apropriation of american land (and land from other colonised nomadic peoples throughout the world). Indiginous american people did not concieve of that land as belonging to anyone. They were then denied access to that land and forcably dissplaced and exterminated. To steal something it must first have belonged to someone, but this land belonged to no one (and therefore, to everyone). The enclosure movement is a fascinating bit of history which I recomend reading about but in summary, it was the process by which, in medieval and ramping up in early capitalist england, common land was forcibly appropriated by the ruling class, denying commoners free access to this land. In modern terms we might say this is similar to the process of privitisation. Taking something which was previously communal and dividing it up in ownership among few members of the ruling class. This is a more accurate parallell to what took place in areas where nomadic peoples were subject to colonisation.

When we say land was "stolen", we are buying into the idea that land ownership is the natural state of things, and saying that the problem is simply that the wrong people now own the land. This is in my view buying into harmful ideas. Land ownership, and nationhood, borders, are not concepts with direct equivelants in many indiginous cultures prior to european arrival. The problem is that people think they can own land in the first place. Saying the land was enclosed more accurately communicates the fact that the central issue was the transferance of a common, "non-owned" thing into a state of ownership.

Dystopia

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dystopia

2024-02-14

I'm getting real bored of potatoes for every meal. I miss taco bell man. I got taco-bell-man amnesia. The troublesome twosome suggest we do some light reading. I turn the light on in my room but it doesn't work because there's no power. Winter is like that. The days are dark. One lady here says she knows how to make candles from beeswax, but just one fucking problem there lady, there's no fucking bees. Canned potatoes. Never had to eat shit like this before. Someone's stolen my socks. Things get stolen around here pretty often. Not really anything you can do about it. I'm sure I'll see someone wearing them at some point. Then what am I supposed to do? Call them out, make a big fucking scene about it, then what. I get my socks back and one more person hates me? Someone got it in their head that this whole compound would work better if we were all on the same page, so there's a non-mandatory but actually mandatory capital reading group. I've already read this book! I protested. They said well read it again. Can't hurt. You know regardless of the ideas in here, Marx was a terrible writer. He constantly repeats himself. Fucking canned potatoes man. Still if you're gonna build a new society in the rubble of the old one, I guess marx is better than like rawls or something. Personally I was routing for the deleuzians to come out on top, hey maybe they have formed a nomadic war machine somewhere, not that I'd be able to find them. Not like I can reliably obtain food just wondering aimlessly around. Still, reading this book I get the feeling marx didn't immagine full communism to be medieval peasents with solar panels. Fuck taco bell I miss wheat. We grow a small amount of wheat barley and rye, but the bread we make with it always sucks, and has like sand and grit in it. This isn't the artisanal organic sour dough I was promised by the breadpunks! Be easier if I lived in the tropics. I bet they haven't even noticed a change. They've got casava. Cassava is insanely OP. Perenial, more calorie dense than a potato. Ripe in one year, but stays perfectly good to eat for 2 more years if you just leave it in the ground. DOn't have to fuckng can it. Seriously, who's ever heard of canned potatoes before now. Apparently it was a thing in the great depression. Great, just what we all imagined. Frankly, I don't like vegetables that much. We eat a lot of sauerkraut and potatoes and legumes and native wild plants with names like pignut and crow garlic. It wouldn't be all that bad if it were easier to come by salt. Turns out the solarpunks were so concerned with canals and ineficient wind turbines they didn't really think about how we'd get salt inland. There's a reason it was more expensive than gold! If only they'd put me in charge of this whole opperation, I would have used my knowledge of medieval history to... Well there's not much I could have done anyway. Maybe I should go looking for that nomadic war machine after all. Maybe they can explain what a "machinic assemblage" is to me. I'm willing to bet they're all just pretending to understand it as well. Better head over to the permaculture. If I don't show up every day they'll send me to the mines. I miss twitter.

Attacking Windmills With Laser Pointers

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Attacking Windmills With Laser Pointers

2024-12-16

There is an event taking place in the US. Mysterious drones with flashing lights are appearing in the skies. UFOs or UAPs, even at one point resulting in the shutdown of runways at Stewart International Airport in New York. What are these UFOs? Some say the Chinese, the Russians, their own government, or, of course, aliens. I wonder if it's a phenomenon similar to the "killer clown" sightings in 2016. After a few initial reports of drones, other civilian drone owners decided to fly their own. That's just my personal theory of course.

The media coverage of these drone sightings is weak. They don't know any more than any one else does. What interests me more has been the public reaction to the drones. In particular, a phenomenon of boomers videoing these drones, very alarmed, sometimes shining laser pointers at them.

Except, the "drones" in these videos are very clearly just commercial aeroplanes. Like, it's not hard to tell. But scores of people are utterly convinced that they are shining laser beams at mysterious alien ships.

The mad fool Don Quixote famously attacked windmills, believing them to be man eating giants. On the one hand, it's a satire of chivalric tales. But it's also something more. These large windmills are the first stages of industrialisation in the Spanish countryside. They constitute a technological incursion, not just on the physical landscape, but also the social landscape. For an old, low level aristocrat like our titular Don Quixote, they represent the upheaval of the transition to modernity. In some sense, they really were man eating giants.

The mad fools of our era are also tilting at windmills here. But in form, they are attacking a very real enemy: the enemy of mass technological surveillance. Why shouldn't these passenger planes be Chinese drones? Massive metal objects flying through the sky at incredible speed, what about the invention of the aeroplane isn't alien? Mass technological society is the paranoia, the danger, the surveillance, the alien. It's not reasonable to do what these people are doing, they're obviously endangering the planes in some way. They're also self evidently wrong and in a particularly conspicuous and stupid way.

By our social logic, the fact that these aren't UFOs or drones but just regular passenger planes means that they're normal. If they're normal that means they're harmless. There's nothing wrong with planes. Right? There's nothing wrong with planes, is there? Well maybe they pollute our air, serveil us, emit 100 decibels of noise as they move overhead. Maybe mass technological society requires this constant noise to function, leaving us in a state of heightened paranoia induced by noise pollution. Maybe these technologies constantly uproot us. It would be silly to think the news media was hiding the truth about these UFOs. They have no reason to cover up any of this stuff, because they only lie about unimportant things like war and genocide. I imagine the facebook boomer in a constant panicked state. All of their learned logic for parsing the world was obsoleted by technological development in the span of a decade. The aliens / Chinese / whatever else really are coming RIGHT NOW, you can physically see their drones in the sky! They really do perceive these passenger planes as ominous UFOs. They are not lying, they are not using metaphor. Their perception has been genuinely altered. Actually that's the wrong term to use, because it implies that there is some sort of view from nowhere of unaltered perception. The fact that the ugly noises of aeroplanes passing over my house fill me with anxiety is an irrational personal failing.

Only a mad fool attacks windmills with laser pointers.

I deleted my twitter account (and more)

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I deleted my twitter account (and more)

2025-01-24

As the title suggests. Yesterday I got too sick of that website and finally severed my final tie to "social" media. Not counting youtube I guess, but that's a whole different can of worms. The final nail in the coffin is being unable to escape just an endless repetition of the same exact posts about trump and elon. The same copy pasted jokes, the same copy pasted "can you believe that liberals are making jokes instead of doing something" while themselves not doing anything other than posting on tiwtter. In one word, politics. Politics is a scourge upon the internet. In fact, let's turn this post into a complete mess. I have multiple tangents which I would love to force upon you.

Everything Is Political

Is it though? I mean sure, politics is a field of inquiry, just like any other field of inquiry it may be applied broadly. Everything is also physical. If one were to take a political debate, and analyse the fluid dynamics of the air as it exited the politician's mouths, you would have correctly learned factual information about the debate. It's just that the information is completely irrelevant. It's not untrue, it's just not the point. You couldn't say "I have a thorough understanding of the debate" after doing that. The same is true for the idea that everything can and must be analysed for political content. It's not wrong, you can do that, and a lot of the time, just like fluid dynamics, it is genuinely really useful and interesting. But it is also the case, I think it's fair to say, that a political lense is not always the most useful or relevant framework for understanding the world. So while it's not technically incorrect that "everything is political", it would be more accurate to say, "everything can be political".

So where does that leave us. Well a common slogan which gets pulled out, particularly by leftists when in this sort of discussion goes something like the following: anything "apolitical" is actually a tacit endorsement of the status quo. In other words, if you're not actively positioning yourself in favour of change, that's no different from supporting the way things currently are. Things which appear apolitical actually just follow the political status quo.

Once again I have found myself questioning this lately. Let's actually look at our present conditions and see what the status quo actually is. It's not hard to see, that in fact the status quo is nothing but constant political bickering! No matter where you go, all you see are people having political arguments. Everyone has an opinion on politics and almost no one's opinion is "I think things are pretty good as they are right now actually". And I'm not just doing an enlightened centrist bit here, it's also plainly the case that a large number of people seem to hold the opinion "anyone with a different skin tone than me isn't really a person", and unsurprisingly, I think that's bad. But have you ever actually seen one of these people change their mind? Does arguing (especially on the internet), "letting your voice be heard", does it actually mean anything? I contend that the ultra-saturation of politics, especially on the internet, does nothing but reinforce the status quo: the status quo of everyone arguing politics on the internet. In fact, abstaining from, or prohibiting political discussion is the only substantial way to break from the status quo. Just like that one Deleuze quote I love, repressive forces don't prevent you from speaking, the force you to speak. Shutting the fuck up about politics, being not naively but self-consciously apolitical, this is the correct radical subversion of the present order, and it had better be, since it's the only choice we have left.

And now I will talk about politics

I noticed a strange pattern today. It seems to me that "platforms" with a primarily algorithmic content delivery system (does that just sound dystopian in itself) seem to skew right wing, and "platforms" which aren't primarily algorithm driven tend to skew at least liberal. The popular less algorithmic platforms are reddit, bsky, tumblr, mastadon. All of those lean maybe not actually left wing but definitely liberal. Whereas youtube, twitter, instagram, facebook, all lean right wing and are all algorithm driven. I wonder if there is a reason why the corpo controlled algorithms want to show you this stuff. Curious.

Of course, there are exceptions. Tiktok is entirely algorithm driven, but while there is a significant right wing presence, it seems to tend liberal. Meanwhile 4chan has no algorithm and leans heavily right wing.

And you can too

I deleted my twitter account, and you can too. I had grown tired of twitter quite a while ago, feeling guilt whenever I used the website. But it's not all bad. I have genuinely learned many interesting things I wouldn't otherwise have come across, found communities of cool people, seen great art, been introduced to great music. In the end, there were three things keeping me on twitter.

Network effect

I have many friends who use twitter, and it's nice to see what they're up to. That being said, I also talk to all of them outside of twitter, so this was the least big deal.

Memes and factoids FOMO

Who doesn't love a meme. With twitter being my last connection to the mainstream internet, I experienced a fear of missing out on the new memes, trends, interesting or important news or information. I still do fear that, but I have began to make peace with being out of touch. Memes have been getting progressively worse for a while now. When was the last actually genuinely funny meme?

Artists

I follow a lot of mostly japanese artists on twitter, and I have a huge folder where I hoard anime style artworks and fanart. It's an old habit I picked up from collecting reaction images for posting on image boards. This I'll probably miss, but I can also easily just browse boorus or pixiv if I want that, and that in itself is a fun activity, and a lot more focused than mindlessly scrolling twitter. So in the end, my experience might actually improve. We'll have to see.

So this is my final statement. I'm not doing a call to action, god knows we're all already far too activated. Instead I'm positing simply: You might also delete your twitter account. You might also not "move" to blue sky, or any other "social" media platform. You might want to become a little more out of touch. You might want to leave the corponet behind.

The Deep End.

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Deep End.

2024-11-09

I'll give you two examples in this post of communities where there's a sense of a "beginner" form, an entry point, the shallow end where new initiates are to be weaned in. I'll try to demonstrate why this process sucks.

Anime

First off, anime. Cowboy Bebop is the classic beginner anime. It's the go-to default when introducing someone to TV anime. Q: "Hey I want to get into anime, where should I start?" A: "Cowboy Bebop". On a surface level, it makes sense. Bebop is an excellent show, there's no doubt about that. It's extremely watchable, it has a great first episode, that first episode has a great first 5 minutes, it hooks you from the start. The whole show takes a great deal of inspiration from western movies. It has a high quality English dub because the director, Shinichirou Watanabe personally oversaw it, since he envisioned the characters as speaking English. The animation quality is way above average, the fight choreography, the soundtrack, I mean what's not to like about cowboy bebop? So what am I complaining about here? Precisely this. You're a new anime fan, you finish bebop, you say "that was great, what can I watch next that's like that?" And then you're fucked. Because nothing is like Bebop. I mean sure, we have our stock of "shows that are kind of like bebop enough to tell people about who have just watched bebop", trigun, samurai champloo, space dandy. But that's it! Once you've watched those shows, you're done, and none of them are as good as Bebop anyway! The very reason you recommended a new viewer to start with Bebop is the same reason why Bebop is a terrible first anime. It's a lot like western cinema and nothing like anime!

You introduce someone new to anime, and you give them the canonical critically acclaimed stuff, Cowboy Bebop, Studio Ghibli movies, Ghost in the shell, and Akira, then congratulations, they are now really into anime that is absolutely nothing like anime.

Now obviously, the presents a problem. Anime is a pulp genre. Being an otaku is less like being a fan of mainstream cinema and more like being into horror b-movies. It's an insular thing, it's low budget, low oversight, and it's full of it's own culture of tropes and cliches. In other words, judging anime by the same criteria you would judge a regular tv show or film on is like judging a giallo movie on it's plot and acting. That's not why people come here. If you do that, you're missing the point entirely.

In my opinion the best beginner anime would be something that is a stand out execution of an average genre. If you show someone That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime as their first show, and they like it, you can be pretty damn sure they actually like anime, and you have fifty million other isekai they can watch next. Slime isekai is actually representative of anime as it really exists, with the stuff otaku like about anime. If you show someone k-on and they enjoy it (only a psychopath wouldn't), then you can be pretty damn sure that person actually enjoys anime stuff for anime reasons. If you show someone yuu yuu hakusho, and they enjoy it, you know they are actually into the stuff about shounen that makes it shounen. The optimal introductory anime should be representative of anime as it actually exists, and centre some aspect of otaku culture. That includes the parts of otaku culture that might be off-putting to some people, the weird sex stuff, the tropes, the limited animation. If someone can't hack that, they're not gonna be into anime! And that's perfectly ok! Not everything is for everyone, and it's best to get people to the realisation that this medium isn't for them as quickly as possible, rather than them being let down later when they figure it out themselves.

Another aspect to note is that many otaku are also in it for the sense of community, for the online discussion, the fan-works etc. So picking something more contemporary and relevant might be something you want to consider. I probably wouldn't recommend Lucky Star to a new viewer since the references are all pretty dated by now and they're not going to get them anyway. Unless you already have a knowledge and interest in otaku culture circa 2007, the show is going to be nonsense to you. Something like No Game No Life is a bit more timeless while still focusing on otaku main characters. But really I think Steins;Gate might be the perfect choice. It has a cast of otaku characters, it's set in Akiba, it's based on a visual novel, it has a host of tropes which are still relevant (although some of them are ageing out of relevancy such as maid cafes), and it's a story that pretty much anyone can enjoy, as demonstrated by its extreme mainstream popularity and consistent high rankings in anime ratings databases. But you could also go with something like Bocchi or Freiren, a modern, popular, good show which has the staying power to remain in mainstream discourse for at least a good few years from now.

But the ultimate truth is this, there is no good beginner anime, because that's a weird ass concept. There's just anime, and if you like it, you like it.

Linux

Linux has the same problem. We have this idea of a "beginner distro". Let me tell you something you already know, distros do not (really) matter. Every mainstream distro is either debian based or arch based. The only major difference is the package manager, and most of the time, pacman and apt are going to be just as good as each other. There are some distros that a beginner should absolutely avoid. Yeah, don't start on Alpine or Void, something like that with the more obscure stuff like mussl or busybox or an init system that isn't systemd. Other than that, which distro you choose doesn't matter very much at all because everything is modular and can be switched in and out with ease. Whenever I watch youtube videos of people trying out linux for the first time, 99% of the shit they talk about is just the desktop environment, not the distro. It's not immediately obvious to someone who has only ever used windows that the desktop environment is something non-fundamental that can be easily switched out, and is not distro-dependant.

I have a major problem with "beginner distros" which try to set themselves up in such a way so as to direct new users away from ever having to use the terminal. Just like in the anime example, the problem is that you're going to have to use the terminal eventually, you may as well get over your fear and dive right in. In fact, doing lots of stuff via the terminal is one of the great things about linux! Avoiding it because it's scary is a tautology, it's scary because you're avoiding it. I know I just said distro doesn't matter, but I'm going to give my recommendation now.

Arch is the best beginner distro.

Installing arch is not hard any more thanks to archinstall. You're going to be left with a fairly minimal system that you have at least a basic understanding of thanks to the install process, and you will also have been forced to learn how to follow instructions from the wiki, and use the terminal. You will immediately be left with an intuitive understanding that the basic terminal interface is the "real" thing that's going on under the gui.

After the install process you now have the single best documented linux distro thanks to the arch wiki. You have a large community online for support. You have access to the AUR. You have excellent compatibility with steam and proton. And on top of that you can install anything you want. Gui wrappers for package managers are a stupid idea which only further pushes new users into learned helplessness. You only need to learn the following things in the terminal.

Update your system (pacman -Syyu)
Install a program (pacman -S)
Uninstall a program (pacman -R)
List the contents of a directory (ls)
Move into a directory (cd)
Make a new directory (mkdir)

And then some sort of text editor, nano is probably the best option for a beginner. That's it, you have now learned to use the linux command line. It took you less than a minute.

Why is there an entire cottage industry of distros trying to prevent people from taking one minute to learn those basic commands? I have no clue, but we probably shouldn't be encouraging it. The same is true for websites. Non-techie users end up with websites that use complicated tech stacks with insane backend stuff I don't understand, a million client and server side scripts, crazy complex stylesheets and whatever. Whereas the tech savvy people have simple websites with pure html + css and maybe a little bit of javascript. To the layman, this seems completely backwards! And the layman is correct. Only the severe linux autists end up with simple systems, while the beginners are left with complex systems they can't possibly hope to understand, and that's by design!

Conclusion

Beginner anime attempts to introduce people to the medium by having them watch shows that are as little like anime as possible. Beginner distros attampt to introduce people to linux by havin them use generally applicable linux tools as little as possible. This mindset is absolutely backwards. I am a strong proponent of throwing people into the deep end.

Anarchy, Not Decentralization.

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Anarchy, Not Decentralization.

2022-01-30

The defining feature of the modern internet is its unprecidented centralisation. Most people spend most of their time in a small handful of websites and apps owned by the same handful of megacorps. Those who own and run these platforms have almost no accountability to the people who use the platforms, since each is essentially a monopoly on their own domain, and are "too big to fail". When youtube removed dislikes from their platform to save face for their other megacorp friends, they had no reason to even consider that people would simply stop using youtube. After all, where are you going to go, bitchute? Alternative sevices often lack propper moderation, which means the first people to settle in places like bitchute are the users who were so toxic that they don't have anywhere else to go (remember this principle, it will come back later). This is why if you go to almost any other platform which markets itsef as a youtube alternative, you'll be instantly bombarded with anti-vax conspiracy videos and right wing propaganda. All the better for youtube. The backlash to youtube removing dislikes was maybe the biggest in the sites long history of unpopular changes. The main complaint was that dislikes help people to make a judgement about the quality of the video they are about to watch, and to avoid dissinformation or poor quality content. Now sure this is of course one of the major uses of public dislike counts, but I would argue that the true root of why so many people have such a problem with this change is disempowerment. Users once had the power to make their opinions known on a video, and express their collective power against media giants in a small way. The opportunity to embarass a company like disney or ubisoft speaks to people's natural dislike of these companies. Now, they no longer have that power.

Disempowering the people who use your website is a running trend among the centralized internet. Twitter users are completely at the mercy of the site's arbitrary moderation standards, which often dissproportionately punishes marginalised groups, activists, sex workers and artists, while verified "bluechecks" enjoy special treatment. The vast majority of bluechecks are those who are already wealthy, famous, and/or friends or financially involved with twitter insiders. The structure of twitter actively centralises power and disempowers everyone else. Those in charge of twitter and all the other central platforms on the internet are completely unacountable to their users, including places like youtube and tik tok where even those who relly on these platforms as a job have no say in how it is run, and have little to no protections from abuses of power from those in charge.

But fear not user, a saviour is here to rescue us all! It's name? Federation. Or at least that's what some people would like you to think. Im going to be giving a quick rundown on some terminology here, so that we all know what we're talking about. Then, I will talk about what the fediverse gets right, what I see as the fundamental flaws in the system as it exists (focusing on twitter-likes mastadon and pleroma), and finally I will offer a better answer to questions of authority and empowerment on the internet.

And yes I will just be copy pasting from wikipedia here.

ActivityPub: An open, decentralized social networking protocol

The Fediverse: An ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other

Pleroma: Software for running federated social networking sites based around the structure of twitter.

In case you don't quite get that overly jargon filled explaination of the fediverse, the idea is that anyone can host their own instance of, let's say pleroma, on their own server. Then, they get to set the rules however they like. Other people can then join their instance, and use it much like twitter. The key is that while each instance may be run by different people, they all have the ability to communicate with one another. You are probably familiar with this concept if you use email, I might be xyz@gmail.com, you might be zyx@hotmail.com, or someone else might set up their own email server and be yzx@yzx.com, but we are all using the same protocol so we can all talk to each other seamlessly. Pleroma is the same way, although your account may be on any particular instance, you can still see and interact with posts and accounts from accross the fediverse. That's federation and that's decentralisation. Now, rather than having to abide by the particular rules of twitter, you can browse through the list of available instances, and pick one with rules and themes that suit you. Or if you don't find any you like, you can host your own instance with and run it as you see fit.

the first problem this solves is one that has been plaguing those wishing to compete with the big players in social media, money. It takes a lot of money to host a platform with as much activity and data as twitter or youtube. A prohibitive amount of money which makes it hard for new sites to get off the ground. With federation, each instance only takes a fraction of the load, meaning they are easily affordable for amateurs and hobbiests to run. Of course the main advantage here is decentralisation. If you don't like the rules on twitter, tough luck. If you dont like the way any particular instance of pleroma is being run, you are free to simply find another one. In some sense, the possibility of free Exit incentivises those in charge to run their instance in the interests of its users, or risk having their entire userbase jump ship. Now there's not that much at stake here of course if the users do decide to leave, but the social incentive is generally strong enough to keep out the worst. Another advantage of decentralisation is resiliance. Say twitter's servers suffer some technical malfunction, well, all of twitter is now gone. All that data and infrastructure has a single point of failure. With federation, even if one instance goes down, the network as a whole is fine. Finally, instances tend to be quite small, with many even restricting membership on an invite only basis to keep themselves small on purpose. Because of this, members of each instance are less alienated from one another, and from the leadership of that instance. Communities tend to be tighter knit and more focused, which does a lot to aleviate toxicity and once again empower people.

So that's the good, now the bad. There is one feature of pleroma and (as far as i know) every other fediverse service, instances can block other instances. This obviously seems like a good thing at first, especially when you remember that the right wing social media platform Gab is run on mastadon. Immediately, almost every other instance blocked Gab, which I think is fairly reasonable. However, this is where the problems start. Instances are preasured to increase moderation and control of their userbase at risk of ending up on blocklists. The fact that instances are so small means that older members who are well known often have dissproportionate authority due to friendship with mods or owners, not to mention that those mods and owners have unchecked authority of their own. Instances go from moderating legitimate hate speech to censoring any opinions they disagree with, or just people they don't particularly like. Twitter is so large that as a small account you will almost never have to interact with any twitter authority, even if you decide to post about problems you have with twitter or its management, you'll go unnoticed. On pleroma, you are constantly and actively surveilled at all times by the moderation team, and they are under no obligation not to simply ban you for criticising them. Legitimate criticism of authorities or even other users can often reasult in bans, with the appeals process up to the arbitrary discression of the mods. Owners and moderators of various instances are often friends or at least in communication, meaning the "decentralised" nature of the platform is undercut by the "ruling class" protecting each other. All of this leads to mass polarisation. Instances tend towards "toxic possitivity", where members are afraid to speak negatively for fear of being kicked from the community, or on the other end, the handful of "free speech" centric instances, which are incredibly toxic and full of far right propaganda. If you don't fit into either of these group, tough luck, that's all that's available. They haven't dismantled the power structures that make the centralised internet so problematic, they've simply distributed it. They've seen the authoritarian structures of existing social media platforms, and they just want to be the boot. Those in charge are under zero accountability, and this will inevitably lead to abuse of power.

Other problems arrise as a consequence of simply cloning existing popular social networks. Websites like twitter are designed to make money out of you by having you addicted. On the one hand, posts are always happening and all your friends are there, you have to keep checking twitter out of Fear Of Missing Out. Secondly, they drip feed you dopamine hits with likes, comments, retweets, they take the innate pleasure of socialising with your peers and gamify it into an addictive loop. There is constant preasure to make the number go up, follower count, likes, etc. Pleroma addresses none of the fundamental problems with the structure of social media and the impact that can have on users mental wellbeing. Even beyond the mental health impact, it is a structure which exists to generate low quality content, posts which have the least to say and appeal to the broadest number of people do the best, this is particularly evident on reddit and its federated equivelant lemmy, due to the upvote system. The only reason the fediverse has decent post quality right now is that it's small and hard to find. The only people who post there are people who have already gone through the effort to figure it out and get an account, it's currently a built in filter selecting for a particular kind of person. That's why you'll find that the entire userbase has a heavy leaning towards technology discussion, the only people who end up there are already tech enthusiasts. As the network continues to grow beyond hobbiests, it will no longer have that good will to fall back on, and I do not think it has the structure or tools to deal with this.

So in conclusion, the fediverse is a good start, but does nothing to address the authority structure, user empowerment or design problems of traditional social media. For now, the problem is small because the fediverse is small, but as twitter have been actively looking into joining into the fediverse, and already there are bigger and bigger social networks like the aformentioned Gab and the japanese social network Pawoo are both very popular. It's just a new face for an old boot.

At it's core, the fundamental problem with the internet is really the client-server architecture. At the end of the day, one person owns the server, and one person is just connecting to it. Whoever owns the server has all the power. And they can own the server because they own (or rent) the physical hardware the server runs on. There is no software sollution that can overcome the problem of this dynamic while still being client-server based. There are alternatives, specifically p2p and mesh networks, and I think as an end goal those are the ideal, however I am unueducated on the specifics here so I won't speak too much on them.

My first proposed sollution for restructuring social interaction on the internet is Anonymity By Default. Instead of making an account, having a psuedomym and collecting virtual points in the form of likes, follows etc, every post is anonymous. You talk because you have something to say, and you participate in discussion based on your ideas, not your identity. This is an easy fix to the problems around the harmful structure of social media. You are no longer preasured to upkeep a digital appearence, there is no longer social preasure around what you are expected to not mention, you are less likely to be ostracised for speaking out, there are no likes, dislikes, no accounts to follow, you just talk for the sake of talking. This is a proven formula, accross various anonymous imageboards, textboards and BBSs. Sites like 1chan, an imageboard for train enthusiasts which has been going strong since 2003. Or RAL, a "neoforum" textboard. All social websites need some way to make sure you are seeing the content you want to see, and not seeing the stuff you don't want to see. Reddit does this by allowing you to follow various subreddits for whatever subject's you're interested in, then within those subs it assumes that you will want to see what the most other people have voted is good. Twitter currates content by having a timeline of only people you follow, and assumes that you share a taste with those you follow so you want to also see their likes and retweets. Anonymous boards in my opinion have the best system, because the user is the most empowered. Like reddit, the overall site is split into various topics or boards, say you want to talk music, then go to the music board and so on. Then within each board you have a thread, where the OP sets the topic for discussion, with maybe some sort of prompt, and the thread itself is the content. This is where it differs from reddit, where the OP is the main content. There are no accounts, likes or dislikes, threads are "bumped" to the top of the board when a new post is made. This means threads with the most active discussion rise to the top, and threads where no one is talking fall off the end. This encourage disscussion and communication, well really conversation. On an anonymous imageboard, you are not simply replying to a post, you are participating and contributing to an active discussion, and that's the fun of it all. This solves many of the problems with social media's harmful effects on mental health. Of course it brings its own problems, the biggest one being that they are notoriously hard to moderate at scale. For this reason I do not necisarily advocate for anonymous imageboards as a drop in replacement for social media, but I do think that there are some really good design features and lessons to be learned which can help with creating a better internet going forward.

What I actually do advocate as a replacement for social media is extremely simple and old-school. Personal websites and rss. Everything good about the fediverse is even better with personal websites + rss. Instead of having to hope that you don't piss off the mods of whatever instance you're on, well, you can just do whatever you want, it's your website after all. You own it. You can write whatever you want, design it however you want, obviously you are in complete control because it is yours! No longer are you a digital serf tilling the feilds making content for some other person to host, you just host yourself. Anyone can follow your rss feed, and they can use any particular rss feed reader they like (I use newsboat it you're interested) to keep up with all the people they're interested in. One advantage of pseudonymous social media over anonymous is that you can DM people. Guess what, the perfect DMing system already exists, it's called email. It's decentralised, you can host your own, it's free, it's open and best of all you don't have to convince people to install a new app on their phone or whatever, everyone already has it! I think it's beyond the scope of this post to talk about gemini and gopher, but if you already know what those are, they're even better than the web for doing this. Everyone should have a personal website, and everyone should use rss, there is no dissadvantage. And before you say "but it costs money to host a website", there are plenty of ways to host a simple static website for free, perfect for a blog. You're looking at one right now, neocities. I also recomend txti.es if you are looking to make your own static site. Actually, I will briefly go over gemini and gopher just for completeness' sake. In short, the modern web is extremely bloated, remember back to my first post and all that stuff about minimal software? Social media sites, and I'm actually surprised I haven't mentioned this yet, track you. They make money by selling your data to third parties. They're full of ads and trackers. Most websites are full of this crap, they're massive full of unnesicary javascript that mostly makes webpages worse, massive popups telling to accept cookies, sign up to their mailing list, pointless animations which load really slowly on bad internet and also make the site less usable, and they break on older browsers or those which block javascript for privacy and security reasons. I'm not saying javascript or cookies are always the devil, but when it's possible to abuse a system, it will be abused. Social media websites are some of the worst offenders for this. Just scrolling twitter can make my ram usage jump up to 50%, when it sits at a comfortable 2-5% on a static text based website. The answer here comes from alternative internet protocols. Not the web, but still the internet. Again, you are probably familiar with internet protocols other than http(s). Email, irc, and bittorrent are some of the most common. Each of these serves a specific use. Http(s) is too generalised and thus bloated (remember what I said in my first post about how programs should do one thing well). Gopher is an older internet protocol for serving documents. Just to really rub in the implications of this, bare in mind "The biggest con Silicon Valley ever pulled off was convincing us they’re masters of innovation. Netflix brought us digital movie distribution cries in Bittorrent. Apple introduced Music streaming to the world laughs in Napster. Facebook invented social media no they didn’t.Big tech might claim only businesses can innovate while profiting from software written by volunteers in their spare time on an Internet designed, built and funded with public money." [thedorkweb]

Gopher is much, much more limited than the web. You can't even do inline images. If you want to host an image, it has to be a link which will then download that image onto the person's computer where they can open it in whatever image viewer they like. Because gopher is only text, browsers now only have to do one job, render text. Your web browser probably has features that allow it to serve pdfs, audio files, video files, maybe even download torrents. I don't need my web browser to render video, I already have a video player on my computer. I don't want it to just do a worse job at the same things I have specialised programs for already. Gopher serves static text documents. And it does it really well. Then, there is gemini, which is heavier than gopher, but lighter than the web. It has some nice features like TLS encryption, but it's ultimately very similar, very lightweight, limited on purpose, extremely fast and extremely cool. I do plan to mirror this blog on gemini at some point. I would encourage you to head over to the gemini homepage, install a gemini browser and take a look around the Small Internet. Instead of clinging to the power structures of the centralised web like the fediverse does, let's create travel towards an anarchist pathwork of static websites, gopherholes and gemini capsules, all aggregated by our individual rss feeds where we have total control. You don't need to rely on someone else's "platform", fuck platforms, fuck content, fuck ads and trackers and making any money off this shit. Let's just do it because it's fun. Why bother with store-bought when home-made is cheaper, easier, and tastes better anyway.

A strange story involving a Death Grips t-shirt

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A strange story involving a Death Grips t-shirt

2025-07-18

I just randomly remembered an extremely strange thing that happened to me once that I still kind of can't believe wasn't a dream. This would have been back in maybe around 2017-2018. I was on the train, it would have been the overground somewhere near Dalston. I don't remember why I was there. Anyway, I'm on the train, and as sometimes happens a (presumably) homeless guy is walking through the carriages asking for change. As he gets closer to me, I notice he's wearing a Death Grips shirt. Now this time period was like, people who were into music knew death grips, but it was just on the edge of breaking through into the wider public. Like they were no longer a super obscure band, but they were also kind of a meme like "weird shit /mu/ users are into". So it would be somewhat surprising to see anyone wearing a death grips tshirt. On top of that, this particular shirt, well let me look around and see if I can find an image of it.

An image of the shirt I found on reddit

This was the shirt. Now this is actually one of the rarest pieces of death grips merch, because it was only sold during their first ever European tour in 2013. Perhaps this was just my prejudice at the time, but I associated Death Grips fans with very online middle class white kids, so this was very unexpected to me. This also happened to take place during the peak of my personal Death Grips fandom. When he arrived at my seat, I gave him some change, and I told him,

"Nice shirt".

Then this was the strange event that happened next. He immediately responded:

"Thanks, do you want it?"

Now, many thoughts went through my head. For a second I thought maybe I had misheard him, but then replaying the sentence in my mind I realised there was nothing else he could possibly have said. Then I had to run through my options. On the one hand, I actually did want that shirt. I mean, I didn't know how rare it was until I looked it up later, but I definitely knew I hadn't seen it before, so it must have been somewhat rare. But more importantly, I didn't actually own any merch of what was at that time my favourite band, so yes I very much did want that shirt. However, did I actually want to take a shirt from a homeless guy, who presumably needed it much more than me? That feels kind of wrong, no? But on the other hand, all I did was compliment the shirt, I didn't in any way indicate that I wanted it, he was the one who offered it to me. Maybe he's expecting me to pay him for it? There are some cultures where complimenting someone's possession is considered a polite way to ask if you can have it, but this guy definitely looked white and spoke in a british accent, so it seems unlikely that this was a cultural difference. Do I accept his offer, or not?

None of this mattered though, because before I could even mumble out a real response, he had already started taking it off! Another thing to consider is during this time I also had quite severe social anxiety. I mean, I still do to some extent, but I've developed coping mechanisms now which I just didn't have back then, so I really didn't have the tools available to turn him down once he had actively begun the process of removing his shirt and handing it to me. He did have another shirt on underneath, it wasn't like he was left topless.

So he handed me the Death Grips shirt and I mumbled something like "oh thank you you didn't have to-" but he was already walking away. Of course, everyone else in the train carriage was staring at me after this interaction, presumably those further away couldn't hear our brief conversation, and it just looked like I had taken clothes from a homeless guy??

I sat there trying to process this event. I guess he was just an extremely generous guy. He didn't seem to me to be intoxicated in any way. Perhaps he had gone to see death grips back in 2013 when they played in London, perhaps he had obtained that shirt from someone else who had. I'll never know. I think if this were me nowadays, I would have tried harder to actually strike up a conversation with him and find the answers to these questions.

Anyway I put the shirt in my bag, and excitedly texted my friend who was also a big death grips fan, trying to explain what had just happened. Unfortunately, when I got home and tried the shirt on, it turned out to be too small for me, so I ended up giving it to that friend. Anyway, that's it, this was just a strange event that happened to me once, and I sometimes randomly remember it and I try to figure out, did I do something bad? Like, should I have turned him down more aggressively? It just feels wrong to take clothes from someone who likely has less than me. I mean I gave him some change but it definitely did not cover the value of the shirt. Did my tone of voice when I complimented his shirt somehow indicate that I wanted to take it? I just can't really wrap my head around what happened there. Well, whatever is the case, shouts out to that guy, I still remember your generosity, and I hope I didn't do anything wrong.

Dear "The Website League", Stop.

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dear "The Website League", Stop.

2024-10-30

If you're someone who's involved with the website league project and you're reading this, I know it may come off rather harsh. I didn't want to intrude into your forums and start a flamewar, so I'm just posting it here and if it finds it's way to you, then it finds it's way to you.

I'm going to do a mini re-litigation of this old post here for you. Some people became fixated on the idea that social media was bad, not because it's a fundamentally flawed system, but only due to "centralisation". That if they could somehow reform social media to be "decentralised", all of the problems would magically go away. You may recognise this argument as identical to the position taken up by the web3 crypto scam economy, just replace "social media" with "capitalism". One group of these decentralised social media proponents happened to work for the w3c, the shadowy organisation who control web standards (who can include among their membership such esteemed groups as, the united states department of homeland security, google, amazon, alibaba, netflix, and basically every tech giant and thinktank you've ever heard of alongside many you haven't.) They developed something called the "activitypub" protocol, and because they were the w3c, people actually took it seriously for some reason.

Unfortunately, activitypub and the software built upon it was developed by people with STEM degrees who had never read post-script on the societies of control, so it turned out shit. Briefly:

The formal hierarchies of traditional social media are replaced with a distributed conglomeration of opaque informal hierarchies.
Instance blocklists splinter the fediverse into cults of toxic positivity on the one hand and hives of nazis on the other, with no one in between. (the japanese fediverse is completely isolated from the western fediverse for similar reasons)
Users remain totally disempowered digital sharecroppers.
The whole thing is being gradually colonised by billionaires (see threads, bluesky)

(for the pedants, the at protocol is pretty much the same shit even if it's not technically activitypub)

As traditional social media continued down the path of enshitification, more and more people jumped ship to "alternative" platforms, just as they had once jumped from myspace to facebook beforehand. To serve this demand, more and more "alternatives" were created. One of these was called cohost. It was pretty much a tumblr clone. Cohost was particularly interesting to me because they didn't even make any real effort to improve upon the structure of social media, they basically just said "it will be good this time because we're good people". The only thing that really separated them from a traditional social media company was their refusal to take outside investor money. They even include a link to a pdf of Capital on their website! Look how leftistly they're doing social media! They probably should have paid more attention to Gothakritik. I mean cohost literally isn't even open source. Like, come on guys that's falling at the first hurdle. So unsurprisingly, as I predicted, cohost ran out of money and shut down.

All of this might make you think that social media was perhaps a bad fucking idea, and you can't reform it. Maybe, you don't need to post on someone else's platform, because it's very easy to just have your own website with rss, and follow others' rss. It's like Posting, but good. If you want to talk about something with someone else in some sort of thread, you can use a forum or board for that subject. Maybe, you're just inventing new problems for no reason. Even Jae Kaplan, one of the founders of Cohost, has gone on to agree with me.

Many other ex-cohost users have also had the same train of thought, and a load of excellent new blogs and personal websites are springing up out of the corpse of Cohost. This brings me much joy. Look here's a webring full of these people. So imagine my dismay when I see people posting about how they're looking forward to abandoning their blogs to jump onto the Website League once that's up and running.

"What's the website league?" I asked myself. Well apparently it's this https://websiteleague.org/. Immediately, the fact that they can't bring themselves to make a basic text only homepage without using javascript does not fill me with hope. When you read further, yeah it's just "activitypub but Again".

So Dear creators of The Website League:

You don't have to do this.

Please do not drag people off of their personal websites and blogs and forums back into the walled garden of "social" media.

First of all you're doing this xkcd comic again. We don't need new platforms and we don't need new standards, the Gods have already given us rss.

Secondly, you're not going to fix social media because it can't be fixed.

Your website boasts that "You don't need to know anything technical, or how to make a website, to participate." Have you considered that perpetuating deskilling is not something to brag about. Moreover, I can guarantee that it takes significantly more technical expertise to actually host one of these instances than it would to set up a simple website with html and css. But you already knew that, and it's probably by design, to keep the moderators an insular community you can retain control of.

You're not going to capture people who are currently stuck in traditional social media, you're just going to suck the people who have already left back into the pit.

If you want to create a "union of websites" start a god damn webring.

All of your design goals are already implemented in http(s) / gopher / gemini + rss, but better and already in wide usage.

You are designing a top down system to impose legibility onto the existing ecosystem of websites, when we need to be rewilding the internet.

I recommend you cease operations immediately. We never asked for your help. Sincerely, people who actually use the internet.

I watched Cure (1997) at a cinema last night

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I watched Cure (1997) at a cinema last night

2024-11-14

This post will contain spoilers for the movie.

My friend Yung Si has a membership to a particular cult cinema in London, which means he gets tickets for £1. Because of this, we go to see late night screenings there together quite often. He's a huge film-buff, he knows everything there is to know about movies. Really an encyclopedic knowledge. Anyway, the only problem with this particular cinema is it's located in a very expensive part of the city. We generally go get some food before seeing a movie, and we always end up spending too much. After years of doing this, Yung Si found a Thai place nearby that actually has reasonable prices. So we went there before the movie, for the first time.

The food was delicious, the portion sizes were generous, and I was happy to, for the first time on a night like this, exit a restaurant not feeling like I had been ripped off. I don't eat Thai food very often. I ordered Pad Kee Mao, and it was excellent. The only complaint I have is, the menu showed an indicator of 3 chilli peppers next to it, the maximum spice rating on the system it was using. When I placed my order, the waitress confirmed with me that I was ok with it being spicy. I love spicy food, pretty much every meal I eat I put spice in it, so I was looking forward to this aspect. Unfortunately, the dish really wasn't very spicy at all. There was some level of kick to it don't get me wrong, but not as much as I would have preferred. Next time we go to that restaurant, I will make sure to tell the staff, "I want it spicy spicy, not white people spicy". But that didn't really take away from my enjoyment as I said, the meal was great.

We still had an hour to kill before the film started, so we went to pick up a few cans. Yung Si doesn't like the taste of beer, so we went with cider instead. We sat on a bench near the cinema and chatted while drinking. We were talking about how 2007 was a great year for movies, music, and anime. At some point I started trying to explain the history of the Nanoha franchise to him, when a scruffy looking man appeared and sat down uncomfortably close to us on the bench.

This man was mumbling and slurring his words, holding a plastic bag which I could see was full of cheap cans of Tesco brand alcohol. My speech processing isn't that great on a good day, so I have no chance in a situation like this. From what I could make out, he was describing a time when he had seen The Prodigy live at some point. Since we had taken our time walking, and perhaps overestimated our drinking ability, we had to drink our cans quickly. As such, I was becoming a bit buzzed.

The scruffy looking man then began to tell a story that went like this:

"Before the war-"

I interrupt,

"Which war?"

"world war 2", he replies, then goes on, "Before the war, Hitler sent twelve women to England."

I asked, "why did he do that?"

He responded, "To work the printing press. One of those twelve women? My mother."

"So your mum was Hitler's top guy?" I quipped, getting a rise out of Yung Si.

"Well I wouldn't say she was his 'top guy'..." the scruffy looking man said.

It was getting close to the time the film was about to start, so I got up and gave the rest of my unfinished can of cider to the scruffy looking man (he had previously asked that I give it to him if I wasn't going to finish it), then we headed in.

I was going in blind to this movie, not looking up any plot information. All I knew was what Si had told me, that it was some sort of neo-noir detective thing. I was not prepared for what Cure turned out to be.

I wouldn't call myself a cinephile or anything like that, but I've seen my fair share of movies. I think Cure definitely stands among the darkest I've ever experienced. The thing is, if I were to describe the events of the film to you here, that wouldn't do justice to the sense that this movie gives you. The horror and intensity comes from the cinematography, music (or lack thereof), and most of all, the editing. It's a deeply nihilistic film, there is no real rhyme or reason to the killings which take place, and there are repeated comments made by the psychologist character regarding how no one really knows why criminals do things. Once killer, when asked why he slashed his victim's arteries, responds that "it just felt like the natural thing to do." Cure is a movie about people who commit horrific murders under hypnotic suggestion. They don't know why they have enacted these killings, as far as they are concerned they have just decided for some reason which they can't remember, to move their hand in a particular "X" shaped pattern. The man behind the hypnosis is quite literally an empty vessel. He has some sort of self-induced amnesia, he doesn't seem to form any new memories, and therefore has no identity. His existence completely interrupts the machine of interrogation.

What's particularly effecting is the way in which the movie somehow hypnotizes you too. Or makes you feel as if you are in danger of being hypnotized, just like the detectives on the case. There are a lot of tracking shots, out of focus moving lights in the background, scenes in dark settings which go on for too long, forcing you to lean in and gaze deep, just to figure out what you're looking at. By the end, both the audience and the main character are unable to tell the difference between delusional vision and reality. What the film shows you versus what the film very deliberately does not show you, gaps in your memory. Pure genius examples of how to break the rules of momentary editing effectively. Something as simple as characters having moved just a little bit too far between cuts. It's a movie that plays with memory in an extremely effective way. At the heart it's not about humans killing each other in the sense that they're committing crimes, it's about an unstoppable force-of-nature which manipulates memories, disconnects them from their regular functioning in such a way that it completely breaks down relations. A virus which re-codes the human memory system, interrupting the process of identification and leaving behind only physical processes abstracted entirely from their social context. I read the movie as regarding deep alienation as a mnemonic or counter-mnemonic process. The entire presentation is so matter-of-fact, somehow both sterile and intimate. I can't describe it accurately in words. Something about it successfully places you in a state where shooting another person in the head becomes abstracted into just moving certain finger muscles in a certain way "何となく" and nothing more. The inhuman terror of "何となく".

After the screening was over, I then had to take the bus home at midnight alone in my mesmerised state. When I fell asleep I had a vivid dream in which I was stabbed repeatedly in the shoulder by someone I know.

Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 is just ok.

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 is just ok.

2025-11-24

Firstly, remember that post where I said I would no longer be making any purchases through Steam? Ok so that was a fucking lie. Look Steam is just convenient and sometimes it's the only place to access certain video games. I'm still not a huge fan of the platform but I am a big fan of the sales. That being said, if you would like to avoid Purchasing this game on Steam, after some digging, I discovered the original itch.io version, which in the description states "IF YOU BOUGHT IT HERE SEND ME A DM ON INSTAGRAM SO I CAN SEND YOU A KEY OF THE STEAM VERSION". But I don't have Instagram and never will so this is not an option for me either. Frankly I do not appreciate this way of doing things especially given the context I will soon add. Here is a link to the Steam page if you're interested in checking the game out. I'd say you should read this review first though.

So, what is Brazilian Drug Dealer 3? The description on Steam describes it as "A BRAZILIAN BOOMER SHOOTER GAME MADE USING THE ID TECH 2 ENGINE!", and strictly speaking, that is not a lie. It is however, an exaggeration. BD3 is a Quake reskin and map pack. None of the mechanics from Quake are changed. The guns are all the Quake guns reskinned, the enemies are all the quake enemies reskinned, the movement engine is Quake 1's movement engine, the maps were made in trenchbroom. It is a quake mod.

The youtuber Noodle talked about it in this video on his main channel and this video on his second channel. I had already vaguely heard about it just by virtue of being in the "boomer shooter" community, but these two videos were what actually piqued my interest. I think I just didn't pay enough attention to these videos because I thought they oversold it, but upon rewatching just now Noodle basically sums up my thoughts in one sentence. "It's so shit. But it's Quake, and so it doesn't matter how shit it is, because Quake is one of the best video games ever made." Noodle goes on to praise the level design and humour but I gotta be honest, they were not really that impressive to me.

Games like this clearly fit in the post-cruelty-squad genre. That is to say, games with weird ass textures that intentionally evoke a sort of retry late 90s-early-00s knock off bootleg bad game aesthetic, but aren't that. See also nubby's number factory, goblin america. The thing is that after a short amount of time, the novelty wears off and you stop processing the game as looking weird, it just looks like Cruelty Squad. And Cruelty Squad is so good because it's a genuinely really compelling game beyond the surface level. It has really well tuned difficulty, it has a whole fuckload of interconnecting systems from the stock market to the upgrade system and the enemy design, all of which are unique and interesting. On top of that, Cruelty Squad actually has something to say, it has astute social commentary and a philosophy referencing Bataille. You come to find out that all of that aesthetic flare was actually serving to enhance a really solid game. BD3 is not really like this. Once you get over the "loud = funny" vibe, underneath, it's just a very middling quake map pack. It's that intentionally, but that doesn't really make it fun. The rocket launcher model just completely covers half of your screen, making it hard to see what you're shooting at. That's a joke, until you need to use the rocket launcher and then it's annoying. The bits that are good, the enemies, the shooting, the general gamefeel, those are all just Quake being the best video game, they came for free with your making a Quake mod. So I find it hard to give the dev any credit for that. I will give them credit for the music. It's all loud distorted fucked up shit and if you know the kind of music I make or listen to you know that's my shit. So I do enjoy that, although I will say, this is maybe not so novel as you may think if you're not familiar with the Brazilian Soundcloud scene. I imagine this game feels a lot more insane and original if you don't have a cursory knowledge of Brazilian internet humour and music, of which BD3 is more standard fare. I played through the game on "hard" difficulty and it was still way too easy to pose any interesting mechanical challenge. The game just gives you way too much rocket launcher ammo and the arena design is only ever in two categories: single corridor with 3-4 low tier enemies which are easy to corner peak, or gigantic open flat plane with a fuck load of enemies spammed, which you can easily shoot from a distance before their AI even turns on, or just circle strafe around holding m1 in their general direction and win. Actually I think the first level was the hardest, because once you get stronger weapons you never lose them and you have so much ammo you can just abuse them. Maybe I should have switched up to nightmare but I think the convention should be that nightmare is not the default difficulty needed to have fun, it should be an extra challenge on top of the base game.

I also imagine this game feels more novel if you're not familiar with the bar of quality for modern Quake map packs and mods. People have been creating stuff in this game since the 90s, the level of skill and knowledge of the engine, what sorts of level design works well, that kind of thing, it's just on another level these days. Not that the original Id made maps are anything less than genius, but the community which has had since 1996 to learn and experiment with these tools is just insane these days. Just go play Arcane Dimensions. I mean, just somewhat recently there was Bonk Jam, a mod and map back based around the addition of a new hammer weapon which completely changes the way the game is played and slots in with the Quake engine's movement and combat so perfectly that it feels like someone added more game to the game. You know what's nice about the decades of quake maps and mods? They're completely free. You can play an infinite amount of Quake forever for free. Quake is every year's "game of the year". I don't vote in the game awards because they won't let me vote for Quake 1 in every category.

So I did not by any means dislike BD3, it's just that I liked it because it's Quake and I like Quake. Setting aside the Quake stuff, the game is kinda funny for about an hour, then just ok. There are better modern boomer shooters (see, Dusk, HROT), better Quake map packs and mods (see Arcane Dimensions, Bonk Jam), and better post-ironic shitpost games (just look around on itch.io for a while you'll find something).

But either way, I'm always happy to see quake back in the public consciousness even in any small way.

Re: Be your own algorithm

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Re: Be your own algorithm

2025-07-13

A few days ago, I watched this video:

At the time when I finished it, I had a lot of possible thoughts and responses bubbling through my mind, I even recorded a video on my phone just rambling about my opinions on this video (which I did not upload anywhere). Despite what the title may suggest, this isn't just a generic "stop using twitter" video, it's a detailed critique of the book "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture" by Kyle Chayka. I'd never heard of this book before and I don't intend to read it, so I can't comment on the accuracy of Pagemelt's reading. I'll just be giving my thoughts on the video on it's own. Now I should say, this video is over an hour long, and I watched it almost a week ago. Because of that, This post may end up focusing on a few fairly minor points in a bit of a scattered way. Of course, as you would expect if you've kept up with this blog at all, I am generally in agreement with Pagemelt's views. For example, the following quote, "We have a culture of tech today where these details have been deliberately obfuscated, designed to make outsiders like you think you're too stupid to build your own internet, but you're not". It should come as no surprise that I'm extremely happy to see a video getting popular which encourages people to move away from megacorp owned "platforms" and build their own personal websites. That being said, I do take issue with a few points in the video.

Pagemelt frames algorithmic feeds, in particular short form video platforms, with a sort of "both sides" device that goes something like this. "Yes, these programs are tracking you and selling your data, yes they are designed to psychologically manipulate you so that you stay on the site for as long as possible, yes they disempower their users at every opportunity, yes they funnel huge amounts of wealth into the pockets of capitalist oligarchs. However, I've also found some great art on there so you know, who can say if they're bad" Obviously I'm being hyperbolic in my phrasing here, they do seem to come down pretty heavily on the "negatives outweigh the positives" side of things by the end of the video. However, this particular point, which does come up a few times, that despite all of their flaws, these platforms do produce genuinely good art, well it rubbed me the wrong way a little. I can't help but see this as a kind of artwashing. There are really two propositions here. "Algorithmic feeds enable the production of unique new art", and, "unique new art is always good". Humans have been producing art for as long as we've been humans, and in fact earlier than that if by human you only include homo-sapiens. Shouts out Pseudodon shell DUB1006-fL. The fact that we manage to make art no matter what situation we're in (what medium we have to work with) is not special. One would expect any new medium to produce unique art, this doesn't say anything about the medium itself, it only points to the fact that it's very hard to stop us from producing art. The two sides of this scale, "medium causes active harm" on the one side and "medium enables the production of new art" on the other side, this is not actually balanced, because a medium which does not cause that harm would also enable the production of new art. You actually can't have a medium which doesn't do that. Because of this, I find the framing flawed. I'm going to use a much more severe example just to drive my point home. As much as the Nazi regime produced dogshit like "triumph of the will", they also were able to produce very effective art-as-propaganda in the form of uniforms and graphic design. It would be absurd to say "well the Nazis were bad, but we also got some good art out of it". This kind of both sides-ing makes two mistakes. It presents both sides of the "but" as if they have equal weight, and it ignores the fact that it is specifically the same structures which produced the bad outcomes which also enabled the production of art. Without the genocidal Nazi regime, we would not have access to a lot of art, and that would be a good thing. The surveillance, exploitation, and Skinner box mechanics of a platform like Tik Tok cannot simply be forgiven because they enabled the production of the culturally sacred object "art".

In fact, I might even suggest that the artists using these platforms to are to varying degrees, responsible in part for their perpetuation. They occupy a unique class position, on the one hand as gig workers, contractor employees of the company, but on the other hand as mini entrepreneurs, promoting their brand and profiting off of their ownership of their means of production as members of the petite bourgeoisie. It is for this reason that users of social media sites have been called digital sharecroppers, a term coined by Nicholas Carr. As he put it way back in 2006, "One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy." To what extent are the artists, artisans, entrapeneurs, the content creators not only exploited by this system but also reproducing it via their participation and benefiting from the arrangement? This seems like a topic too detailed to cover here, so I'd like to dedicate a full blog post to that in the future. I'll just state my position for now as "a little bit sus".

As I understand it, the key point in Filterworld is the idea that algorithms have worsened art and culture, and this is a point that Pagemelt takes issue with. They are of the opinion that it's not that art is generally worse, just that there is more being produced and shared, and since some portion, maybe even most art is always going to be bad, we see more bad art just as a factor of total quantity, not a general decrease in quality. While I for the most part agree with this assessment, I once again think they're letting megacorps get away with a bit too much here. I'm going to make a claim which I have no direct evidence for, but I hope that by showing you my train of inferences you'll be able to accept it as plausible. "Social" media algorithmic feeds are generated using extremely large and detailed datasets, in combination with highly advanced behavioural modelling software. All of this in service of figuring out how to keep you in the platform for as long as possible. Note that this is different from showing you things you like. We know that these megacorps hire behavioural psychologists and experts in similar fields. It's reasonable to assume that they are aiming to design their platforms so as to produce a specific behaviour. If I were to use a little less charitable language, I might even say they are trying to manipulate their users into performing certain behaviours. So if these platforms have the expertise and resources to create algorithmic feeds which show us what we want to see, why don't they do it? Why is it the case that our feeds are full of not only posts we have no interest in, but also posts which are actively the opposite of what we want to see? My claim is that this is not an accident, but by design, to produce a sort of "slot machine" style effect, where each scroll we re-roll in the hopes of winning an actually good post. If our feeds were just what we wanted to see, what would happen when that ran out? We'd scroll further, see that we'd past the end of what we wanted to see and that the algorithm was left serving us less relevant content, and then we would leave the platform to go do something else. It makes more sense that these feeds are designed to drip-feed desirable content in between chunks of noise, to keep us on the platforms for longer. In this case, if you start seeing posts which aren't relevant to you, you have been taught to just keep scrolling further, rather than go do something else. If my theory is correct, this would mean that these algorithms aren't as innocent as Pagemelt assumes when it comes to the low quality of online art and culture. It may be the case that "social" media algorithms are intentionally serving up low quality or irrelevant art as a part of their design, not merely as a consequence of higher quantity.

As the video points out, there is a community of people who create independent websites on places like neocities (hey, that's me!). However, the video makes a point that this alternative, personal independent websites, will never be viable as a true competitor to social media, due to the technical barrier of entry. I found this a bit strange for 2 reasons. First, there already is mass adoption of personal websites and blogs. There are more good, active blogs than I could ever hope to find. It seems like near every time I go looking, I find 3 or 4 more amazing websites to follow via RSS which I'd never heard of before. Just yesterday I found this cool online art magazine for example. This is the major benefit personal websites have over "alternative platforms" like bluesky or fediverse or whatever the new thing will be next week: "the web" already has mass adoption. There's no need to convince your friends to jump ship, make an account, no need to deal with network effects or any of the sorts of problems these platforms typically have. Everyone already has a web browser. It's the same reason I say email is underrated as a communications method alternative to platforms like discord or slack. Everyone already has email. That being said, having access to the web is different from creating your own website, which does indeed have a technical barrier to entry. This leads me to my second point, we are not a social media company. We don't need to consistently report growth to our investors to justify burning runway. We don't need to grow at all. As I have said before, the widespread adoption of personal computers and the internet was not some sort of democratising progressive force, it was the cynical business strategy of corporations trying to maximise their customer-base. If the web is to continue existing in any form other than corporate walled gardens, it must degrow and rewild. We win the war by outmanoeuvring capitalists on the axis of our advantage, specifically not being capitalists, not being bound by the laws of growth, profit, and competition.

I am now done with my minor critique of what I want to remind you is an excellent youtube video which you should all watch. Pagemelt is clearly not only well read but also a good reader,and also a good writer. They are able to read deeper into the text and draw nuanced conclusions, relating them to other works (in this instance especially the work of Marshal McLuhan) in novel ways, and also present this information in a way that hits the perfect balance of being informative and entertaining. It's a video of one person talking into a camera for an hour and 20 minutes, and I wasn't bored for even a second. I was very glad that youtube's algorithm showed me their channel and I definitely look forward to watching whatever they make next. I even went back and watched their previous video about a gay romance novel, which would not typically have been a video I would have sought out myself, and I also thought that was great. I don't want to come off as if I'm only critical of this video, I thought it was very good and I highly recommend you watch it. There was only one short section which strongly disagreed with and that was this.

That stupid David Graeber quote.

“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

I hate this quote. I hate it so much. I actually like some of Graeber's work. I thought Debt: The First 5,000 years was amazing until the end when he starts talking about the modern economy, Bullshit Jobs was pretty good, and The Dawn of Everything had some genuinely good parts but was held back by precisely the same issue with Graeber's ideology which is present in that stupid quote. Like oh, so I guess enslaved people just weren't trying hard enough to make their world differently then. No, obviously we can't just arbitrarily make the world however we want it, because we do not have power. We are bound by historical and material circumstances outside of our control. I'd like to counter with a better quote from Marx in The 18th Brumaire, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Graeber has this non-materialist view on history, that anything could just as easily be any other way if we had the right ideas. I'm sorry, I wish that were true, it would certainly make things easier, but it is not the case. We are where we are because of real, material historical processes, and we can't pretend they don't exist, or we end up with a bizarre victim blaming magical thinking reminiscent of The Secret, if you don't get what you want it's because you weren't manifesting hard enough. I understand that Pagemelt was trying to tie up the video with an optimistic message by including this quote, but it really just came off at-odds with the rest of their commentary, it has no place in a systemic critique of the capitalist internet. The web has been in large part enclosed and colonised because of capitalist property relations ultimately enforced through state violence, not personal consumer choice.

Baudrillard Predicted "Lowkirkenuinely"

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Baudrillard Predicted "Lowkirkenuinely"

2025-12-26

I'm not on tiktok, but I've gathered through osmosis that there is a new meme term going around on there, "lowkirkenuinely". This is a portmanteau of "lowkenuinely" and "Charlie Kirk". Lowkenuinely is itself a portmanteau of "lowkey" and "genuinely", which was a meme of it's own. The Charlie Kirk connection requires a bit more explanation, I'll try to be brief. Kirk's assassination prompted a slew of kind of cringe responses from across the political spectrum, with a notable example being this laughably terrible AI generated song which I'm not going to link here by the name "we are Charlie Kirk". That song, being so bad, was the first Kirk meme to spread outside of just the edgier corners of the internet into mainstream memedom. Alongside that came "kirkification", a meme trend of face swapping Kirk's face onto other popular memes, and onto celebrities and influencers. Then the word "Kirk" started to be verbed, "getting kirked" could mean getting shot or killed, but then it was swapped out for other phrases as a euphemism, for example "kirking my shit" meaning jacking off, a pretty common memetic pattern. All of this combined with the already existing "lowkenuinely" trendy phrase to produce the masterpiece of brainrot "lowkirkenuinely".

What does this have to do with french philosopher Jean Baudrillard? He precisely talks about this kind of phenomenon at length in his book In The Shadow Of The Silent Majority. In said book, Baudrillard goes over his theory of The Masses. I won't go into too much detail regarding the precise definition, well, it doesn't have one to begin with, but What's relevant to us here is his theory on the Mass's strategy. See Baudrillard is responding to the failure of the Marxist movement, and he takes issue with Marxist's view on the role of the masses. Simplifying a bit, Marxists believe(d) that the working class have immense potential power, but they they lack "class consciousness", are under the spell of "ideology", and are disorganised, so that potential needs to be unlocked by some sort of Marxist movement. "One day they will wake up and become the protagonist of history"

Baudrillard says no, the masses have no "virtual energies" to release:

"their strength is actual, in the present, and sufficient unto itself. It consists in their silence, in their capacity to absorb and neutralise, already superior to any power acting upon them"

The Masses are not mystified, the have "an explicit and positive counter-strategy", which is their complete destruction of meaning. Power is endlessly trying to impose meaning upon the masses, constantly baffled by their irrationality and incredulity in the face of what seems important, reasonable, meaningful. It's constantly giving The Mass information, trying to get it to do something, anything, that makes sense. The media tries to "inform", economists try to rationalise consumption, academics try to theorize, politicians try to legislate, always an attempt to keep The Mass within reason, to moralise, to inform, to give them meaning. But they do not care, they immediately neutralise all meaning that is given to them, by turning into a meaningless, irrational game of signs. "They are given meaning, they want spectacle".

The more information The Masses are fed, the more irrational it becomes. But their strategy is not ignorance, it's not absence, it's the opposite. They totally accept and engulf whatever they are given, but the instant it enters their horizon, it is transformed from something meaningful to a pure interplay of signs, exchanging among the mass interplay of signs. Within this system, each sign is not negated dialectically by it's opposite, but rather pushed absolutely as far as it will go and beyond.

"A system is abolished only by pushing it into hyperlogic, by forcing it into an excessive practice which is equivalent to a brutal amortization. 'You want us to consume - O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose.' "

Power has been desperately trying to imbue meaning to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, every media figure, left, right, centre, mainstream, niche, internet, TV, news, it's nothing but attempts to corral, to moralise, to desperately throw out as much information as possible and beg for anything to stick. But The Mass, of course, immediately neutralised this. What political position does "lowkirkenuinely" take? Is it mocking him from a left wing perspective? Mocking him from a further right perspective? A post-ironic endorsement of Kirk? What is the meaning of sticking his face on ishowspeed? It has none, no deeper, hidden truth. It is completely transparent, it represents precisely nothing. It is the ironic strategy of the masses, "oh, you want us to care about Charlie Kirk? You want us to talk about him? OK, we will, we will put his name and his face everywhere, attach it to everything, in extreme excess, with no discretion or differentiation. We will push it into hyperlogic, until it loses all ties to it's signified." And then what happens, after a meme reaches the mainstream? It stops being funny. The meme dies. The same joke gets old fast. And, just as quickly as it appeared, it disappears, The Mass moves on to something else, and strips it's meaning too. This is how The Mass neutralises power. This cycle happens so fast and unpredictably, I bet the "lowkirkenuinely" meme is probably already dead by the time I've gotten around to writing this. Theory is always already behind action.

"Implosion is inevitable, and every effort to save the principles of reality, of accumulation, of universality, the principles of evolution which extol expanding systems, is archaic, regressive or nostalgic."

"Basic Biology"

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

"Basic Biology"

2023-07-22

It's always struck me as odd when people handwave trans / nb people by appealing to this immutable structure of "basic biology". At one point, it was just basic biology that you would die of cholera with no recourse. After all, you're supposed to die of some random ass disease. If you're short sighted, basic biology would leave you with severely impared vision.

Humans have the capacity for self determination through technological intervention and medical science.

no you can't carry extra seeds and berries back to your tribe to feed your family, baskets go against basic biology!

"Basic biology" is the enemy, always has been. Anyone who denies this will suddenly change their tune once that sacred "biology" is a cancerous tumor growing on their body requiring surgical removal and chemotherapy. TERFS and their ilk like to accuse people of denying the objective biological reality of the gender binary, as if we can medically intervene in any other biological process but this particular one is beyond our reach and will always remain that way. These people lack ambition: “If nature is unjust, change nature.”

I'm quite bad at video games

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I'm quite bad at video games

2024-01-10

I was never really alowed to play video games as a kid. I should say, I was never alowed to own a console, and I grew up in the era before smartphones and tablets were ubiquitos (look, spelling isn't my strong suit, if you've been reading this blog you will have noticed this fact. Let's just move past it ok?), so owning a computer was something I wouldn't experience until much later. All the kids at school, every friend I ever made, and all of their friends, and their friends friends, as far as I was concerned every child in the first world had this in common, they all owned some sort of box they could play video games on. And I did not. Well, that's not exactly true. Dispite the decision not to endow me with video games being shared among both my parents, my mother decided that this didn't extend to handhelds. So one day, as a reward for going to the dentist, she bought me a gameboy advance sp. I loved that thing. Blue, folding screen. I still think it's a genius form factor, although much better suited for child-sized hands than my current adult ones. Playground discussions revolved around ratched and clank, jack and daxter, portal 2, games which I could not play. I had no knowledge of video games, and no knowledge of how to atain information on the subject. The only handheld games which were extensively marketed were pokemon. I got pokemon emerald with my gameboy. It was the only decent game I owned on that system. While my mother would I'm sure try her best to pick out things she thought I'd like, they ended up being shuvelware like spongebob and friends unite, or too impossibly difficult for my premature hand-eye coordination to best, like this one astroboy game i could never get past the second level of. One day, I got lost in pokemon emerald. I never found my way again. I wondered around the map for hours and hours and hours and hours trying to figure out where to go. I never did. I never beat pokemon emerald. But I loved my blaziken named "AAA" (i did not know how the keyboard input worked when i named the starter and just spammed the a button). You can't communicate to an adult who's only experience of games is playing pac man in an arcade in the 80s that you're lost in an rpg.

Many years later, my mother would buy me a new console for a birthday or christmas, I can't remember which. It was a DSi. My first journey into the third dimension. Mario kart holds my fondest memories. And some port of forza. Racing games made sense to me. Many other games did not. There were a few games I owned which I just never figured out. At this point, playground discussion was starting to move away from mascot platformers and towards call of duty zombies. My mother would let me use her mac laptop while she watched csi. I would go on youtube and watch videos about the hidden easter eggs in cod zombies, never having played the game. Somehow I ended up watching videos about the synchronicity between half life and portal's lore, how they were set in the same universe. I didn't know what half life was, but i'd briefly played portal 2 coop with a friend once. Going to friend's houses had become somewhat of a humiliation ritual by this time. Inevitably, they'd be playing whatever on their xbox, pass me the controller and I, having never held a controller asside from these short bursts, would procede to fail at every concievable opportunity. The other person or people would laugh at first, before soon growing tired of watching my pathetic attempts to hold an analogue stick straight and snatch the controller back, never to return it to my grasp.

At this time, I became accustomed to watching people play videos games.

At some point (actually, given that people were playing beta 1.8 it must have been in september of 2011) I discovered minecraft on youtube. The yogscast, captainsparklez, syndicateproject. I watched these videos intently. I remember celebrating at the 1.0 release. Then one day, at lunch break in school, I see a group gathered around a table in the library. I go over there and see it. He's playing minecraft. minecraft is a thing only these distant youtube people play. How can it be right in front of me. Minecraft is a place where stories happen, and i watch. I remember vividly this shock, the moment it clicked in my head that you could purchase video games and play them on a computer. Like for example my family computer. I remember when I was very young, my dad would play doom on his laptop. What was he doing playing the original doom in like 2008? I have no idea. He one day announced he had snapped the disk in half and thrown it away because he got "addicted". How do you get addicted to doom? It's not like he was playing custom wads or anything. He was just going through the game normally. These are things I question now. He liked minecraft because he saw it as creative and educational. I think because he could relate it to lego. I got my first laptop. He bought me minecraft. I played it a bit. I kept losing track of my base when i'd go exploring, and having to start from scratch. You have to remember that in those days things like pressing f3 to see coords were little known strats. The common tactic was just to build a really tall pillar at your base, but my laptop would lag unless i set the render distance to minimum, so i couldn't even see it. In the settings menu, the fov slider went up to a setting called "quake pro". I thought "oh, this is the pro setting? I want to be a pro!" so i set it to that, and was amazed at how it made me run faster. Children are idiots. I discovered, with all the strip mining and grinding resources and my poor gaming skill on a laptop trackpad, Minecraft was more fun to watch than to play.

These events are slightly fictionalised, because my memories of childhood are very blury. It wasn't a great time for me. For many children, video games are an escape. I could never innocently experience games. I always wanted to play them to fit in, or join the conversation, or emulate what I saw others having fun with. They didn't catch me in the time window where I would vallue them in earnest.

In 2015 or so, I had met someone at my new school who said they could build a pc. I convinced my dad to buy me the required parts for christmas. I invited the kid over and he did his best to put it together. It was a bit scuffed, but it worked. At some point I played gta V at a friends house, the first time I ever got drunk (on alcohol stolen from his parent's cupboard). With my computer, I installed team fortress 2. When presented with the class select screen, I googled what the easiest class for a beginner is. The reddit thread I opened seemed to suggest pyro and heavy. With pyro I couldn't do anything, but as heavy I started to do ok. I played tf2 for about 40 hours, mainly as heavy. I have no recollection of what i did at that time gameplay wise. I remember thinking that i was getting pretty good, but I don't remember why I thought that. At some point I found videos of csgo on youtube. I watched those videos for months, before deciding that I should give it a go. I bought that game.

7 years and 3000 hours later, I got bored of counter strike.

Around 2000 hours in, I had hit a barrier and not been able to improve my skill beyond it. Since I had breifly experimented with speedrunning half life 1 (a story for another time), I was pretty good at bhoping and movement. I wanted to get kills in cool ways and move around the map in creative routes, and mess around. The game's community however, became more and more focused on competative tryharding. In 2018 I had taken a year off from the game after realising it was making me mad more than i was having fun. When the same thing happened in 2021, I never came back. To skim over a story, I got into tf2 again because of youtube videos. You see, I had become accustomed to watching people play videos games. 1500 hours in and I'm experiencing this again. Tf2 is a game full of bullshit. The optimal way to play is not the most fun one. Anyone playing optimally ruins the game for everyone else. And i'm not going to get into the cheater and bot situation.I could probably put another few thousand hours into tf2. I probably will. I need to stop getting mad. CSGO is a competative game. I still believe in winning and doing well.

The first video on my youtube channel has the same title as this blog post. This story is a defining one in my life. It might sound strange or stupid, but I think this distinction of not being able to participate in the common discusion point of gaming on the playground cast me as an outsider in my mind from the get go. My brother got an xbox as soon as he was old enough to use one. He has every console under the sun. I've always resented my parents for this. He was born later, at a time when the stigma around gaming had worn off on my parents. It's not about the consoles or the games. I don't care that I missed out on ratchet and clank. I could play them now but I don't want to. Who cares. I can't complain about not being bought gifts. As you read, I got a laptop and a pc at some point. Maybe a little later than my peers but that doesn't matter to me. It's the experience of being in on it. Not being laughed at when handed the controller at birthday parties. Seeing my brother play fifa or whatever with his friends after school, something I could have done but never did. I'm not complaining. Maybe I am. I'm not sure. It's arguably a good thing, I read books instead of playing games. Maybe that was good for my brain development I dont know. I just want to point out that this aspect of my upbringing feels very important to me somehow.

I switched from maining demoman to maining pyro in tf2 a little while ago. One day, a medic used kritz on me. If you don't know, this gives me guaranteed critical hits (3x damage) for the duration. Demoman synergises very well with this, as it lets all of your sticky bombs one hit kill. It's a very important time in a demoman's life, getting beefed up with kritz and going on a rampage. A very powerful feeling, one of the most powerful moments in gaming. I was defending last on pl_badwater, and the medic pops kritz on me. I wasn't expecting it, so I push up. The enemy team is standing there.

I miss every shot.

After this I thought about suicide. I've played this game for 1500 hours or so. Unlike csgo, where my 3000 hours were over the course of 7 years, I became obsessed with tf2. I got those hours in like 1 year. I play religiously. I train on practice maps. I've played all the classes competantly but 400 of those hours have been dedicated just to demoman. I just want to be good at something. My whole life, defined by the feature, "I'm quite bad at video games". Just once just let me have one thing. And the thing is, I am actually pretty good at tf2. In counter strike, I was average even at my peak. In tf2, I'm always towards the top of the scoreboard. I carry teams of noobs on the regular. I felt like, finally a game i'm good it. A game that clicks. And then, when it matters, I whif. I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games. No matter how much I practice, no matter the game, no matter how much autism I dedicate to it, I'll always be quite bad at video games.

On Anonymous socialising.

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On Anonymous socialising.

2025-06-20

I run an anonymous BBS over at denpa-chan.org, and recently I've been thinking about the anonymous board as a concept. Most internet users aren't aware that the idea of an anonymous board pre-dates 4chan, and that 4chan and it's shitty culture is not the only available anonymous board on the internet. Even within 4chan, people aren't aware of the smaller boards and their cultures, since they're overshadowed by shitholes like /v/ and /b/. Therefore, it seems that when people decide they want to host a social space on the internet, anonymity is never even considered as a viable option, since it's assumed that it can only create 4chan-like culture. In reality, the anonymous board format has some great benefits, although there are problems too.

Have you ever been in a community, say a discord server or forum or something like that, and it's been torn apart by some inane drama. Two members start e-dating, then break up and you suddenly have to pick a side in their messy relationship, someone makes a new server and invites like half the people from the old one without telling the rest, the server splinters. I'm sure you know the sort of thing I'm talking about. A nice thing about anonymity is it prevents situations like this. Two users could be at each other's throats in one thread, while wholeheartedly agreeing with each other in another thread, and they would have no idea it was the same person. You can't carry grudges against specific users because you don't know who the other users are. I mean sure, people will butt heads and get in arguments, but they can't carry on that emotion beyond it's context. Anonymity is a vaccine against drama.

The ideal behind anonymous socialising is that people will be judged for what they say rather than who they are. It's a bit utopian enlightenment shit for me, but I do think there is a nugget of truth behind it. The idea that you could be talking to a celebrity, or the owner of the website, or just any rando in the world, and none of that matters, well I do think there's something positive to that. It's the antithesis of "social" media. In this "small web" space or whatever you want to call it, people seem to be in agreement that the sorts of gamified clout metrics like follower counts and likes and "friends" are alienating. They contribute to a commodification of sociality, and coordinate social processes into a set of ulterior motives where you must "play the game" of social media. But is it not the case that the fundamental structure of having an account which all of your interactions are documented as belonging to still remains an abstracted form of this gamification. It may more closely resemble meatspace sociality, where the account is your physical features, but is that the only form of socialisation that is desirable? What about other forms of socialisation in meatspace, graffiti writing, a message in a bottle, signing a guestbook. There are instances of anonymity in meatspace, and the internet gives this form new possibilities. Consistent identity tied to posts still retains the social game, but in an abstract and opaque form. Just because likes and friends aren't buttons you click on the website, that doesn't mean the system isn't still there in people's minds. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, it's just not necessarily the only good thing either. There is some value in liberation from that social game, it opens possibilities for a different kind of sociality.

On a more concrete note, it's annoying to have to make an account on every fucking website you ever visit. Is it not nice to just go somewhere and be able to hang out? Oh I want to ask a question on this forum, ok time to navigate to the account creation page, hand over my email address to whatever party owns the site, think of a username, create a password, add it to my password manager, solve a google captcha to train palantir drone AI vision, wait for them to send a string of numbers to my email, verify my email. It's just a pain!

Unfortunately, there's a reason this fell out of favour

Sadly, there are many bad actors on the internet, especially the modern internet. Spam and abuse is a bigger and more technologically complex operation than ever, and the anonymous board is highly susceptible to attack. Basically, it's hard to moderate. There are mitigations one can put in place, as I have tried my best to do on denpa-chan, but it's an uphill battle. Ultimately, the anonymous board format scales extremely poorly. When the community is small and generally invested in the health of the site, everything is fine. But if that security through obscurity fails, the moderation workload can rapidly grow, in a way that just having a basic system of accounts would completely mitigate. We have the example of 4chan to demonstrate exactly how not to do it, and even 4chan has been revealed to use surprisingly complex surveillance techniques to track users and enforce moderation behind the scenes. At that scale, even the bare minimum moderation most large boards on 4chan use becomes impossible without de-anonymisation techniques which kind of defeat the whole purpose of the format to begin with.

If you want to host an anonymous board, be ready to do a lot of work in moderation. In fact, it's probably not worth it for a lot of applications. While the benefits might be nice, the costs are high too. Anonymous boards are a utopian pipe dream, but I'm going to keep dreaming for as long as I can.

On Alternative Internet Protocols

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On Alternative Internet Protocols

2025-08-08

or, why this is a website.

I'm going to write this post assuming you already basically know what I'm talking about. If you don't know what the hell a "gemini" or a "gopher" is, you should look them up first. Make sure to specify that you're looking for "gemini (protocol)", since google has copied the name for their LLM. Some people think they did this on purpose, much like the "disney frozen" conspiracy, to bury search results. This doesn't make any sense because it's literally google, the company that control search results. They could bury whatever they wanted without having to resort to tricks. Also, the gemini protocol even at it's peak was extremely obscure and never posed any threat of stealing userbase away from the web or google.

There are five categories of alternative protocols:

The ones that aren't really an alternative to the web, that is, they don't serve documents, but rather do something else. These are the protocols most people are likely to have used at some point even if they're not aware of it. FTP, BitTorrent, IRC, email. To be honest, they don't really fit here, because they're not "alternatives" in the way I mean it, that is to say, alternative to the web.
Gopher. It was here first.
Gemini. Gopher but with an actually usable markup language instead of gophermaps, and with TLS. As they describe themselves, heavier than gopher, lighter than the web.
"Gemini, but". Even more niche than gemini with extremely small userbases, trying to fix someone's pet peeve with gemini. I'm talking about Nex, Scroll, Spartan. These things. Gemini but without TLS or Gemini but with extra metadata. No one uses these.
P2P protocols such as hyphanet or reticulum. I'm sure there are others. Can be hard to distinguish between what's actually useful and what's web3 crypto nonsense.

Gopher and Gemini

Look, I think they're cool. I look around there sometimes. I like the philosophy of trusting clients over servers. I like the minimalism. The development of the web has been captured by large corporations and government entities. One look through the list of w3c members should prove this to you instantly. The web has been privatised and sold off from under our noses. And these people aren't doing nice things with it. They're implementing surveillance and DRM and other anti-features. Bitreich have an excellent spoof page, demonstrating how absurd we'd find it if these web technologies required manual action from the user rather than taking place automatically, you can find it here gopher://bitreich.org:70/1/tracking. It also demonstrates how the simplicity of gopher protects it's users.

As for gemini, I'm going to just quote a post I read here:

"Gemini solved a simple problem, that is only a problem for some folks: gophermaps suck. They do. I get where they come from and the history, but they are just not nice to work with. Add to that the fact that they are really designed just for menus, and that info lines are, themselves, a sort of hack. So for me, the big things that gemini provided are:

A. Regular URL/URI with no "gophertype"

B. A better text markup system (gemtext) that is both menu and document at the same time

I, for the most part, do not care about client certs,TLS, etc. I do not really care much about "apps". I firmly fall into the camp that wants distributed community via long(ish)-form writing."

I fall into the same camp as sloum here. Sure the interactive apps on gemini are fun, Station and Astrobottany or whatever, but the real selling point is that it does what the web was originally supposed to do, serve text documents. For writing those text documents, gemtext is just infinitely more usable than gophermaps. So, why are we in the web now?

Why the web

First as a matter of strategy, second as a matter of features.

Gemini and Gopher are simply never going to catch on. The majority of people don't even know the difference between "the web" and "the internet". They don't know what that "http(s)://" in their url bar means. Hell, a very significant chunk of people don't even use browsers, they just think there are "apps" which are tik tok, instagram, etc. I think people should learn these thins, there should be efforts to undo de-skilling. However, just on a practical level, the cultural knowledge of what a "website" is still exists. Everyone knows that websites exist, and people have an idea that some people "have a website". Getting people to go to your website is just a much easier sell via one hyperlink than trying to explain what an internet protocol is, which one you've chosen and why, how that protocol works, which browser to install so they can view your page, and so on. Unlike these other protocols, the web is already in wide usage. There is no need to bring anyone anywhere. I don't have to do advertising and PR for an internet protocol.

The web already has all of the good stuff in it, it just also has the possibility for bad stuff as well. This is really not ideal, but it can be curtailed. The design of the web, as much as the w3c would like this not to be the case, pushes in the direction of two principles. Firstly, that the basic components work even when the bloat is disabled. You can turn of JS in your web browser and still render html and css, even if the functionality of the site is broken. You can turn off css and the html will still work, even if the formatting is broken. Secondly and crucially, as much as they HATE this simple fact, you are ultimately in control of what your web browser does. Web DRM is their biggest attack on this principle, they'd get rid of it if they could. But I can modify any website as it appears on my computer however I see fit. Which means I can block ads and trackers to some extent, for example. Just remember that every time you do this, a google employee cries.

Who would win: 100 bajillion dollars hand delivered to the web consortium by Sundar Pichai to enclose the web VS one "inspect element" button.

Obviously I'm being a bit hyperbolic here but my point stands, a lot of bullshit of the web can be mitigated via operations ranging from ad blocking, to a plugin like uMatrix, to disabling javascript, and so on. We shouldn't need to do this, and that's the point of these "smallweb" alternatives like gopher and gemini. It's also the point of creating simple, static, text-based websites like this one. Both approaches solve the same problem, neither is ideal, but as I explained, getting over the network effect barrier is simply easier and better on the web. Even if there were no "small web" or "indie web" movement, the web would already still have a vast quantity of high quality websites outside of corpo-space, because the web is so big and has been in use for so long. There are enough people who never stopped blogging, or never left forums and boards, that the issue of convincing people is minimized.

On the second point of features, primarily my issue is with web design. The very fact that can do such terrible things with web design, makes it that much better when you find someone doing it well. While I am intensely in favour of brutalist web design, that's not to say I think every website ought just be a text file with no further style. The goal of brutalism is to create visual interest through other means; in architecture this is by geometry and shadow, in web design this is also by the same principles, appearing as formatting, font, organisation, silhouette etc. Because, browsing gemini or gopher spaces, after a while, it becomes monotonous. For some people that's the point, they want to get offline, they don't want something which keeps their interest because the fact that the internet keeps their interest is what their trying to avoid. I respect that, but it isn't my usecase. I don't like the repetitiveness of gemini capsules all looking the same. I like coming across a new website and exploring it's unique design, and through that learning something about it's author. Of course I still think the philosophy of "content is king" and "text first" applies. It's just nice to have variety. If you don't like that, you can always use your web browser's reader mode.

There is also a problem in content, which has been identified already by these communities. A lot of the content on gemini tends to be about gemini. Even beyond that, the whole place skews very heavily towards tech discussion. The only people willing and able to overcome the technical barrier to entry to even be there in the first place are going to be techy people who care specifically about internet protocols. The variety of discussion is limited, compared to the vastness of the web where you can stumble across some guy's blog he's been running since 2004 about lepidopterology, and then find and entire lepidopterist community, and explore it and so on. As a reader, the experience of gemini is reading gemlogs which all look roughly the same and talk about roughly the same things.

The philosophical difference between this part of the web and gemini / gopher is as follows. Should we avoid the bad parts of what we already have, or should we jump to a new system in which those bad parts are impossible. It sounds like a classic reform vs revolution debate. But if you look closer, it's actually not. It's more like a question of, "me and my friends have already moved into a commune in the woods. We currently grow our own tomatoes. Should we start growing potatoes and feeding ourselves entirely off our own land, or are we ok making a trip into town to buy a bag of rice from time to time". In other words, we have both already stopped engaging with certain systems. To what extent should we engage with other adjacent systems where they're useful? Where the advantage on the one hand is a degree of self sufficiency, in exchange for more work and more limitations.

Ultimately, neither gemini / gopher or simple websites are "revolutionary", they don't target the underlying structures that create the possibility for the web to have ended up like this in the first place. That is to say neither pose any threat to capitalist property relations. They are just an exit, at best a prefiguration. Gemini is not a threat to Google, it's not mitigating Google's surveillance, because Google will never come to gemini. But in that case, Google also will never come here. We are creating an alternative for those who want it, creating different ways of Being Online. Ultimately you're still dependent on the physical internet infrastructure owned by megacorps. You're still dependent on your ISP.

What about p2p?

I used to be of the opinion that the client-server model was fundamentally flawed because it's hierarchical. I was wrong on two counts. Firstly, hierarchies are sometimes useful. For example online multiplayer games are much better on a client-server model than a peer-to-peer model, where the server has final say. It solves problems with lag and with cheating. Secondly, I was wrong because the client server model actually isn't hierarchical to begin with, it's just modal. It's perfectly possible, as in the previous case of gemini, to privilege the client over the server.

That being said, it's possible that there are instances where p2p architecture has advantages, mainly due to their resilience. If a law passes that requires companies to scan messages on their service, not using a service in the first place gets around that issue nicely. It's another step on the road towards an exit from reliance on megacorps. But what do these options even do? How do they differ from one another? How useful actually are they, and to what extent to they really create the possibility of exit? I will be investigating this more in future posts where I take a look at some of these technologies and their usecases. This will include p2p chat programs like GNU Jami, a look at reticulum and nomadnet, and if I can, I'd like to see what's going on with mesh networks, which I know very little about. So give me some time to explore what the hell is going on here, and I'll see you then.

In an airport, my practices improved my life.

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In an airport, my practices improved my life.

2025-07-08

I am currently in an airport operating on about 2 hours of sleep, a can of monster, and nmg of something. For some reason, I am allowed by society to operate a blog in this state.

I am waiting for my gate to open. I searched the waiting area for a socket in order to charge my electricals, but alas all of the plugs were otherwise occupied, or not of the correct protocol and untrustworthy. I did not bring a usb condom with me, and there is no way I'm plugging a usb cable into a random socket in an airport. These people take me for a fool.

Eventually, I discovered an unoccupied socket, attached to a pillar in the middle of a concourse. I sat down cross-legged and attempted to use it, but it quickly became clear that the reason it was unoccupied was due to it not working. I believe it is locked by some sort of airport staff apparatus. After knocking over my bag and water bottle in a display of my typical clumsiness, I began to draw unwanted attention from the other denizens of this strange environment, so I decided to move on. Thus I am writing this post on battery power in vim on my ThinkPad x220. I am not the fastest vim user, I'm far from a vim wizard, but I've used it for a long time and I am comfortable in it. I wrote my dissertation for university in vim.

Anyway, after booting my ThinkPad and rapidly opening a terminal window to cover my rather lewd anime wallpaper, I quickly wondered what I even intended to do on this device. I decided to connect to The Internet, and here, my lifestyle choices saved me. I'm not fucking with airport wifi, so instead I connected to a wifi hotspot on my phone, using wpa_supplicant. Phone hotspot wifi is typically slow, but in an environment like this, it is especially slow. Fortunately, I have ordered my life such that I have an rss feed of text based websites and blogs which are lightweight. I simply opened newsboat, and enjoyed myself reading through blog posts without even opening a browser. Modern mainstream web design does not account for individuals on slow or unreliable internet, but thankfully, I don't have to engage with modern web design! Pretty much, I was just thinking about how this event was kind of cool. It feels like I am being rewarded for having lived a pure and godly life on the independent web. You see, this is not just an autistic LARP, even beyond just the simple fact that I enjoy reading blogs a lot in my regular day to day life, another advantage has shown itself! <3

Thank you to everyone who runs a lightweight text based website, you have created a moment of joy in this harsh environment.

I hate airports, they are the socially accepted zone of fascism which is deemed "necessary" for things like "national security". Here we are intensely surveilled (sp?), policed, assumed guilty until proven innocent, and all the while herded like cattle through endless storefonts. But I and I survive.

Now that the dust has settled, what's going on with AI?

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Now that the dust has settled, what's going on with AI?

2025-04-10

(or: N0's opinions on AI, the blog post)

A quick note on terminology before we start

Honestly I don't even like calling it "AI", because the term is so vague. It's easy to justify calling a calculator artificially intelligent. Many completely different things have been and continue to be called "AI". Some people further specify by saying "generative AI". I have in the past referred to LLMs as "artificial pseudo intelligence", which I think is a pretty accurate term, but "API" is already a commonly used initialism for something else entirely. So for now, I'm just going to begrudgingly call it AI even though I don't like the term, just so that we can get through this blog post understanding each other.

Are the criticisms of AI valid?

AI is as widespread as it is hated, due to trillions of dollars riding on the future profitability of the technology it has been square-peggedly shoved into any round holes in sight. Nobody likes this. Nobody asked for this. It's very annoying. It seems that people want to justify this annoyance and resistance against AI with further moral reasoning beyond "it's annoying and doesn't work", and here I will address the most common complaints.

AI is stealing!

On this subject I must apologise for my counter-signalling but as a staunch intellectual property abolitionist I cannot agree. "Copying is not theft" is trivially true. If AI is stealing your images or text, then so is anyone who copy pastes or saves it at any point. When the NFT scam was at it's peak hype train, everyone seemed to intuitively understand that copying is not theft, the idea of "right click saving" NFTs to prove they can't be owned despite what "smart contracts" might say was a widespread action. The absurdity of the idea of trying to claim ownership over something in direct contradiction of the mechanics of how the web fundamentally works was widely mocked as obviously silly to a comical degree. However for some reason I'm yet to wrap by head around, when that arbitrary instruction which claims to declare ownership over a jpeg comes not in the form of a "smart contract" but instead in the severely outdated legal concept of "intellectual property", people seem to suddenly decide that right click saving actually is somehow equivalent to real life theft. At this point I could easily opine at length about the many, many flaws in IP and copyright, but I think I'll save that for another time so as to stay on topic. But no, AI is not stealing, it's not capable of depriving anyone of access to or possession of whatever images or text it scrapes from the internet for training data.

AI is however doing just that, it relies on scraping and web crawling to gather it's training data. Web crawlers have historically been expected to follow a certain etiquette. While this might not seem like a big deal, the web and in fact all computer technology in general, fundamentally is only possible because of standards. Standards are important, and they are also impossible to enforce and have much more to do with human social interaction than they do with the hard maths of computer science. Real human beings have to agree to do things in a certain way such that different machines can execute the same code and expect the same output. Without standards, everything sucks, and what holds people to standards ultimately is the same sort of rule that stops people from littering. Sure you throwing one piece of litter in the streets is probably no big deal, but if everyone did it, this place would be a mess and that would suck for everyone including you, so please don't litter. Following gentleman's agreements and etiquette is important, and when it comes to the web crawlers that scrape data for AI training, they are widely known to break every piece of etiquette which web crawlers are supposed to adhere to. This is bad and they should not do this. For this reason I find myself in agreement with attempts to circumvent AI training web crawlers and poison the data they scrape. If you're not going to stick to our rules, we're not going to stick to yours. This is perfectly reasonable. By all means, use Nepenthes until these fuckers decide to actually adhere to robots.txt "no scraping" rules, I fully support you.

AI is an environmental disaster!

AI training takes a large amount of energy and computer hardware. This comes at a steep environmental cost. This is an inarguable fact. There are also lots of other technologies which come at a high environmental or social cost, which aren't generally as frowned upon as AI. Your phone contains cobalt mined by children. People got along ok for all of human history without refrigerators in their houses, but we all have them despite their energy costs. If I had to sum up my position on AI's energy and hardware needs and the damage they cause, I would say I agree that it is too high, and I wish people would pay more attention to these sorts of things across the computing landscape. It takes an obscene quantity of resource extraction and energy consumption to produce GPUs for AI, and bitcoin mining, and also high end gaming. If you don't like the environmental costs of AI, you should also oppose the AAA gaming industry. This is not a gotcha or whataboutism, I'm saying I personally oppose both for the same reason.

There's also a somewhat convoluted argument about generative AI vs an equivalent human. It costs more in resources and energy to grow a human from scratch and provide them with the time and resources which would enable them to draw a picture than it would cost for an AI to generate the same picture. Therefore using generative AI to do x task is actually more environmentally sustainable than having a human do it. This implies that an AI is interchangeable with a human, which is obviously not the case. That line of reasoning assumes that the human in question would not exist otherwise, which isn't true. Rather, you're repurposing an existing human who has already consumed those resources, whereas the AI was brought into existence specifically for the purposes of doing this task. Also, it's a human who is using the AI at the end point, so the cost of growing and maintaining a human is already "priced in", you can't act like it's an either-or.

One more thing to consider is the question of usefulness. The medical industry is incredibly energy and resource intensive, but when it comes to cutting consumption, most would say that the medical industry is important enough that it's worth that cost of keeping around roughly as is. So it's not just a question of "is x thing energy intensive" but rather "is the energy cost of x thing worth it for the product?" So is AI useful enough that the environmental cost is worth it? I'll explore this more in a second but I'm going to say no, AI is not that useful.

As a final caveat I will say that not all neural networks are created equal. It's perfectly possible to run very small neural networks with negligible energy costs. They can't do the same sorts of things as the giant models which we generally think about as "AI", but they have their niches. I don't see any problem with them.

AI is taking my job!

Since AI can automate portions of the work which some programmers and artists do, this takes away employment from those people. I'm going to briefly comment on the artists in particular here. Frankly, I doubt this is the case on a large enough scale to be worried about. The jobs that AI art is taking away are mostly illustrators rather than artists. Corporate illustrator is not in my opinion a vital part of the human project. At no point has anyone with an interest in the arts stopped caring about their favourite artists because they can just generate whatever they want with midjourney. This is because AI generated art doesn't typically serve the same function we go to art for. Art isn't reducible to "pretty pictures". An AI couldn't generate "Artist's Shit" by Piero Manzoni although it could probably generate an image of it, ceci ne pas une pipe. Artists producing more physical and conceptual works which couldn't be AI generated has been the standard expectation for interesting art ever since the proliferation of photography. Not to mention there are some artists who take the uncanny, dreamlike, and sometimes horrifying aspects of AI generation and play into those flaws, which I personally think is pretty cool. As an example, the youtube channel cat soup makes some wonderfully cronenburgian videos using AI. So AI is not killing art. Art is not a profitable career path (trust me). No one made cave paintings because it was profitable. Art is a fundamental aspect of the human experience and something as benign as image generators couldn't possibly threaten it.

But is AI hurting artists financially? I would love it if everyone could sustain a comfortable living standard just through their artistic passions. That is not the case under capitalism. AI continues to make this not the case, and likely worsens it. I'm sure there are artists who's job involves producing corporate art which they would rather not being doing, but they need to in order to fund their real passions. The idea that these people might be out of a job saddens me. I will say that the estimate of just how many artist's jobs will suffer is likely overestimated. A similar mistake is often made when calculating the costs of piracy to media industries. You can't assume that everyone who pirates a video game would otherwise have been a paying customer. In all likelihood they would have just not played the game at all if it weren't for piracy. The same is true for corporate AI art. Every random ass vape shop which AI generates a logo would not have otherwise paid a real artist to make that logo, they just would have had no logo, or a shitty MS paint logo made by the owner's nephew for $5. It's not the case that every instance of corporate AI art is a missed employment opportunity for a human artist.

While I think it's a shame that people are losing their livelihoods to automation, I am more inclined to direct my frustration at the economic system which withholds resources from people to coerce them into wage slavery rather than the automation itself. It would be better to live in a world without a distinction between professional artists and everyone else, because everyone has the ability to realise their artistic potential without it being tied to a career. It would be better to live in a world without shitty, mundane, low paying code monkey jobs. It's good that those shitty jobs are being automated. Or at least it would be good in a world with a more logical economic system. Automation should leave us with more free time to live our lives and develop ourselves, not leave us destitute and hungry through no fault of our own. The problem here is capitalism, not AI. AI automation is not a good thing, it is causing material harm to real people who find themselves without a wage. Therefore we should be up at arms at the system of wage labour which produces this problem while also opposing the technology itself. Capitalism created the set of conditions which required people to be stuck in shitty code monkey jobs and shitty corporate illustrator jobs, and now capitalism is obsoleting those jobs. It created whole classes of specialised workers and then pulled the rug from under them. Once again, I could derail this post and go on a longer rant about the link between capitalism and computer technology, but I'll save that for it's own dedicated post where I can go into more detail.

Safe to say my thoughts on this particular issue are a little complex but they boil down to, "capitalism is really the problem here, but it's not like AI is helping".

AI is bad at doing stuff!

I can't even pretend to present both sides of this issue, I wholeheartedly agree. I am not a programmer but I do occasionally have write some code. I've tried using various LLMs to generate code, and it has always been garbage. At least, garbage at first. It takes about the same amount of effort to coerce the LLM into writing the code I actually want as it would have taken to just figure it out myself. It's also a miserable experience, like talking to a toddler. They say the problem with writing code is that computers do exactly what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do. LLMs don't even do what you tell them to do. They also constantly get shit wrong. I see no reason why I would ever use an AI to do any task, they suck as tools. I don't know how anyone manages to get anything useful out of them. They were a fun novelty magic trick when they first became commonplace, but now that the novelty has warn off they are just a virtual idiot. AI is, appropriately, a function of a flaw in capitalism which produces hallucinatory speculative investment bubbles. Having AI forced into a bunch of random tech products where it's not needed or wanted sucks, and I avoid it as much as possible.

From a pseudo-accelerationist perspective, it might be a good thing that a lot of these people might stand to lose money on this garbage product, but the structure of modern monopoly capital means that ultimately I'm certain the cost will be paid by the working class some way or another, and the people at the top will retain their money and power. AI generated slop listicles shitting up search engines drives more people away from the corponet and hopefully towards the real internet made by real people. I can only hope that the inevitable failure of AI leads to something positive, which is about the best thing I have to say about AI as a technology.

AI art isn't real art!

This complaint is hard to address because I'm not really sure what it means. I have no clue what "real art" is, or why it would be desirable. Quite famously it's really hard to determine what "art" even is. Questions about what is or isn't "real art" are nonsensical. Simply framing the idea that there is such a thing as "real art" reveals that you misunderstand the nature of art and the nature of language. Is AI art "bad art"? In my experience, the vast majority of the time, yes. I would also say the majority of conventional art is bad too. That's not relevant. If you think that the existence of bad art is a moral evil, you are literally Hitler. As we've seen, there are enough legitimate problems with AI that there's no reason to appeal to some notion of degenerate art to criticise the technology.

In summation:

Is AI stealing? No
Is AI bad for the environment? Yes
Is AI causing physical harm by taking people's jobs? Yes, but that's only possible because of capitalism's irrational structure, not fundamental to the technology itself.
Is AI bad at doing it's job? Yes
Is AI art fake art? No

Please use these conclusions to direct your criticism of AI in a productive direction.

Addendum: Just because these are my opinions on AI as a technology, does not mean they extend to the megacorps making use of AI. To the extent that opposing chat-GPT is opposing Micro$oft and so on, that opposition of course has my full support.

Beyond Reform or Revolution

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Beyond Reform or Revolution

2026-03-11

Reform

Well, you should have voted harder

Existing systems are for the most part good enough, but some tweaks are necessary to their operation. In other words the concept or structure remains untouched, but the execution or realisation requires changing. Messing around too much with the underlying structure could:

be too risky or untested, whether or not it seems like a good idea
be unnecessary, since the fundamental idea is fine it's only the execution which needs to be changed
be desirable, but too impractical or out of reach.

Change can be brought about at the top level by those working within the government, charity organisations, the media, and through small lifestyle choices by individuals.

Revolution

A spectre is haunting Europe

The issues seen by the reformist are not simply accidents which can be tweaked as we see fit, but results produced by the underlying systems (seen here to be the political and economic layout of society). In order to eliminate unwanted outcomes, tweaks to their implementation will not work, because the political and economic layout of society will continue to reproduce those same outcomes on a broad scale. Since those in power are entrenched within those structures, it is necessarily against their interests to work against them. Therefore fixing these issues will require a possibly violent overthrow of those in power by a mass of people. That mass of people are not seen as being also entrenched within those structures, or as somehow being on the "other side" of those structures. History can be seen as a totality of these kinds of events, where the political-economic structure has been overturned by the people on the "other side", who then assume the position of the position of new ruling class, progressing history forwards each turn. Executing this kind of overthrow requires the collective action of a mass of people, which itself requires the "organising" of that mass.

Collapse

The world will not be 'saved'

Like the revolutionary, the underlying political-economic systems are inseparable from the negative outcomes which present. For the revolutionary, the focus is placed on the exploitation of a social class, and that social class's overcoming of it's exploitation. For the collapsist however, the focus is shifted away from the tension or contradiction within the social-economic sphere, towards ecological, geographical, and energetic contradictions. Within this framework, it's not human social groups who will be pushed past their limit and fight back, but the world itself outside of the social which will be and is being placed under tension with the social-economic forms which are transforming it. It's not always that the ecological world will itself collapse, but rather that it will be pushed into a formation which then causes the very forces which pushed it to themselves collapse, no longer being able to function without the environment they relied on. Often this is considered in conjunction with revolution, that this additional environmental strain will produce a resource scarcity that will cause existing frameworks to become outmoded by some other competing social formation. Collapsists also reject the more traditional revolutionary's history, notably ideas of progress, since any supposed "progress" we have seen has come at the expense of creating the conditions for it's own collapse.

Acceleration

Nothing human makes it out of the near future

While collapsists question historical anthropocentrism, accelerationists reject it altogether. Rather than being determined by human social groups, history resembles a process of cybernetic inhuman natural selection, taking on the form of a multiplicity of positive feedback loops. In traditional cybernetics, positive systems are unstable. Imagine a broken thermostat which keeps increasing the temperature. Eventually, something in that system is going to reach it's limit, the boiler is going to break after a certain temperature, and the system will crash back to 0. This is the view of the collapsist. The accelerationist contends that a cybernetically possitive (cyberpossitive) system could theoretically continue ad infinitum if it had a dynamic morphology, that is if the cyberpossitive system itself were constantly splintering, multiplying, and adapting, the result would be a virulent cyberpossitive system which outcompetes or absorbs every cyberstable system. In practice this creates a convergent temporality in which every accelerating system is seen to be running headfirst towards the same outcome, which is seen to be some future system constructing itself in the past. In this context, anything like "the human" or "the social" is subsumed as nothing more than a side consequence or temporary diversion in this retrocausal construction project. "The only way out is through".

Exit

Let's hide out in the woods until this whole thing blows over

Take as a given that something is majorly wrong with society, whatever that something may be, and wherever it may lead is irrelevant. However it reaches it's end state is irrelevant, the primary goal is to get out from it. Sometimes this is considered as one aspect of strategy for a collapse or revolutionary scenario, and here it is sometimes labelled "parallelism", the notion of building parallel systems which run outside but alongside the existing structures even before they are gone, such that the future society is already there waiting for us when needed. Sometimes it's even considered that parallel systems are necessary as a sort of launch pad for something like revolution to take place. Other times, exit is not so much parallelism, it's not so much aimed at changing society, but merely asking "why put in all the effort of overcoming and supplanting one thing, rather than just going off and making the thing you want from scratch". Even if only a small group can feasibly exit, all the better for that group.