eunuch temple priestess
@riley@fiera.social
I had a very interesting experience watching Network recently, a film from 1976 about the influence of television, and I had a strange realization that TV then was nearly as old as the internet is now. This just feels like a natural point in the history of a communications medium that people begin to think critically about its effect on people and the way we think.
If the Play Store becomes required like that then Android’s already-shaky status as an open source base platform is going to go out the window. I’m glad there are non-Google distros of Android but there really needs to be more of a push to make a completely FOSS phone platform.
The tech savvy will just buy a Raspberry Pi and install yunohost on it.
It was the early days of a new technology and way of listening that was completely different compared to the past 60+ years of recorded audio. I guess as a more modern analogy it’s like those cheap 3D films at the height of the fad that felt the need to gratuitously shove objects directly in front of the camera to get the most out of the 3D effect.
Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who produced Pet Sounds, was actually deaf in one ear. Despite that, he got along just fine in a monophonic world, but the switch to stereo completely left him behind. It was a huge change in how music was mixed.
You have to understand that mixing consoles from that era were supremely limited in channels (think four, eight, later sixteen), to the point where they would often have to mix one section (say, the drums) and then record that mix to tape so it would take up a single channel and then do the guitar, bass, and vocals on another channel. The idea of having two of the same thing going through two channels was an exorbitant luxury they couldn’t afford!
Hey just so you know in many people’s minds SW doesn’t stand for software.
Fedora is what I’ve got on my Thinkpad right now and so far it seems pretty good! Silverblue is very intriguing to me but I chose not to go with it because I need to be able to modify aspects of how the lower system works (using JACK for audio for music production purposes; afaik this is not really supported through Flatpak). Compared to Arch or Nix OS or whatever else that’s popular with the hardcore Linux enthusiasts, Fedora is just right for someone that needs a working system to just get stuff done.
As an audio engineer, I was very confused about what this had to do with Direct Injection for a second.
Workers co-op
That seems really exciting! But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?
Genuinely the only way I want to use my phone. Everything I use daily is on the home screen, everything else I have to go searching for. White background, black icons, all notifications turned off. Simple and easy!
Hey, don’t just blame the parents. In the back half of this article the author points out that social media harms youth no matter if their parents let them use it or not because of the social webs it creates. If you choose to keep your child off social media then they could just as easily end up isolated from their peers because everyone else IS using it.
This article strikes at a very salient set of points about smartphones and social media. As someone that specifically tries to only use federated social media because it avoids some of these dark patterns, I certainly agree with. I also use my smartphone without any notifications turned on, ever.
Unfortunately the author has a few paragraphs that miss the mark and strike me as coming from more of a centrist or right-wing “kids these days are too soft” which feels very off-base and disconnected from the issue. For example:
This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.”
The scare quotes around microagressions, a genuine issue faced my marginalized communities, is really uncomfortable and gives an unfortunate perspective on some of where this author is coming from.
Putting that aside, I really do feel like most of what is said here is on point. Reducing social media use is imperative. Designing smartphone UX that doesn’t shove notifications at you would also be a good idea. Getting younger people involved in communities and forming friendships is incredibly important.
Every PSP I own must have the following games ready to go at any time:
-Lumines
-Rock Band Unplugged
-Patapon 2
-WipEout Pulse
-Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders (gorgeous small tower defense game, but with enough strategy behind it for hours of play)
(Your local library also likely has a large library of CDs you can check out)
Buy used CDs and rip them to FLAC. It’s always high quality and it’s usually cheaper than a digital store. Then you can either keep them or resell them!
As with what others are saying here, pulling out algo nonsense is good, however I do worry that it slowly devolves into something similar to what’s happening with Twitter where you can barely look at anything without being pushed to login. It’s unusable unless you have an account. Websites shouldn’t operate like that.
I acquired my 3DS before the first price drop and unfortunately I never really appreciated it while I had it. It was the first place I played Ocarina of Time, which was a really fantastic experience that I was probably too young to really appreciate at the time. I never got around to playing A Link Between Worlds unfortunately. Beyond that my other favourite was Mario Kart 7. There are a lot of games that I now wish I had picked up but didn’t get a chance to.
The 3DS is also really interesting as it’s currently the last Nintendo handheld that can fit in a pocket. That era of portable consoles has largely passed out of favour (this is why I’ve started collecting PSP Go consoles). A lot of the best 3DS games have been somewhat overshadowed by the Switch now. I feel like its game library may be remembered similarly to the Game Boy Advance, more iterating on older franchises rather than having its own hugely impressive identity.
Completely unique and very difficult to experience with alternative hardware nowadays (compared to the PSP which can be played on nearly everything). The games library is incredibly unique because small budget games still had a big chance to succeed.