#what is Web 2.0

[insertsomthinawesome]

Welcome to the Intergalatic Super Show!!

[sweetonsugden]

[minervadeutonomy]

I really can't get over how many tech illiterate people on this site are sanctimonious about their tech knowledge

[slashscreen]

The internet is usable on mobile

[wistfulvulpine]

bad news i started downloading my exported blog, completely forgetting this blog has been kicking for 13 years

[kkmcshouty]

More code stuff cause funnily enough this is somehow easier to post progress on than actual art. That said, I'm slowly but steadily building my own stream overlay for twitch!

Worst part of this is was the fact that the documentation would have you think that you need to replace the emotes one by one in the code (since the emotes start as just text) but NOPE. When getting the chat messages through StreamerBot there's this fun little section titled "parts" which has the message pre-setup and ready to go in cute little pieces, telling you if they're emotes or normal text or not and they're all in order too! Unlike the section labeled "emotes" which for SOME reason is sorted by id and not position.

tl;dr/say that again in english: I wrote 300ish lines of intricate code just to find there was a simpler way to do it. So simple I'd say it would be usable to teach to beginners as an example project ;; I was able to reuse about 50 lines with minor modification but man. I wasn't expecting EMOTES to take two 9hr days to properly code in

[fedoranon]

Fandom purists far predate tiktok, see also livejournal strikethrough, etc.

[snoopyracing]

wanna be yours 2.0 // ln4 social media au // part one

part two | part three

pairing: lando norris X american!reader / mclaren photographer!reader and slight pato o'ward X reader

warnings: swearing

summary: a remix of my fic wanna be yours in social media au form. or basically lando and the reader both being in love with each other but being too stubborn and scared to say anything so they suffer in silence until one finally crumbles.

contains: best friends to slight strangers to lovers, pining, angst, jealous!lando, asshole!lando, clueless!lando, and perhaps a little lando or pato? situation.

masterlist

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

may 5th, 2024

liked by landonorris, y/bsf, oscarpiastri and 100,000 others

y/n.jpg: miami baby! i think the guy in the second pic won some kind of race involving super fast cars but i could be wrong.

landonorris: who is that guy???? he's really good looking...

↳ y/n.jpg: i think his name is lando onewin.

↳ landonorris: bye. that doesn't even work.

user1: you always take such good pics of lando.. thank u queen

user2: lando always being the first to comment. dude's down bad lol

y/bsf: the kids miss you. please come home.

may 6th, 2024

may 8th, 2024

may 9th, 2024

liked by landonorris, mclaren, patricooward and 200,000 others

y/n.jpg: back at the mtc today for a very special reason! everyone was there to celebrate my amazing photography skills and editing on all the pictures from the season so far! lando was even kind enough to show up with a trophy to give to me! i love my job <3

in all seriousness. could not be more proud of you lando!!! it's been a long time coming, but we both know it's only the beginning!

landonorris: that awkward moment when you tried to take the trophy from me....

↳ y/n.jpg: DON'T SAY THAT PEOPLE ARE GONNA THINK IT'S TRUE.

↳ landonorris: i'll make sure they engrave the next one with your name too.

↳ y/n.jpg: ok but as long as my name is listed first.

mclaren: our favorite photographer ❤️ -liked by author

user1: ok but where is y/n's trophy fr??? she's hands down one of the best photographers in the game rn.

user2: y/n and lando you are so dear to me

user3: pato in the likes??

↳ user4: y/n used to work for arrow mclaren before working for mclaren f1. also pato is literally the reserve driver for f1 this season... honestly the web that is y/n, lando, and pato intertwines so much it's kinda crazy...

may 11th, 2024

may 14th, 2024

y/n.jpg added to their story

landonorris replied to your story

↳ WHY WOULD YOU POST THAT??? IT'S MORE THAN A JUMPSCARE!

oscarpiastri replied to your story

↳ why do you always catching me folding in front of lando like that :/

may 15th, 2024

may 19th, 2024

liked by y/bsf, oscarpiastri, patricooward and 100,000 others

y/n.jpg: imola 2024.

y/bsf: best photographer in the world. i love you!!! -liked by author

user1: not even a pic of lando's car.... oh no :/

user2: no funny caption... no lando like or comment... guys we are in the trenches

user3: we love you y/n! -liked by author

may 21st, 2024

y/n.jpg added to their story

landonorris replied to your story

↳ what the hell?

[exeggcute]

the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators;  reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

[photomatt]

you've probably have gotten this question a million times, but -- what about fundraising in the style of ao3 or even wikipedia? for all the thousands of fourteen year olds running around who don't understand how much it costs to run a website, there's another thousand of adults whom would love to keep using this site forever. it may not be a more-profits-every-quarter kind of situation, but then again, one is allowed to dream beyond the current silicon valley web 2.0 profit driven hellscape

That was the idea behind the Tumblr Supporter badge, a way for people who appreciate the site can chip in towards keeping it going. It hasn't been as successful as we hoped, only about 2,300 subscribers so far (out of 11.5M monthly active users) but over time maybe it could compound to be what drives the site.

[yeorisanaxox]

. ₊˚ෆ xoxo, sincerely yours ♡₊˚ \\ Jung Wooyoung : Valentine's Special SMAU

Pairing jung wooyoung x fem reader

Genre smau! f2lvrs w crack, drama, slow burning?? mid cursing

Synopsis “Finally confessing your feelings to the guy you’ve had a crush on since middle school. Only one problem… your ex best friend has a crush on him too. In the end, who gets the guy??”

A/N: Happy Valentine’s Day/ Month!! Ik that I’ve been gone for a while but that’s only bc I’ve been working on this project in my free time 🥲 so I'm hoping you all enjoy! And thank you for bearing w me! I really do appreciate it.

I also want to add this !DISCLAIMER! this is pure fiction and in no way is any true representation to any of the characters involved. FICTION FICTION FICTION! Mkay?? Okay 😙 I’m super excited as this is my first attempt at a series smau!! Your feedback is always much appreciated and helps me as the writer.

dates/timestamps are all irrelevant to the story btw

start date 25.27.1

end date 25.6.4

Masterlist ♡₊˚

Profiles:

—. main girlies

—. the boyzzz

—. the barbz

Chapters:

1.0 first of the month shenanigans

1.1 it's platonic...right

2.0 the case of bubbly

2.2 now my stomach is all bubbly

3.0 try my luck

3.3 parties connect

4.0 and the drama begins

4.4 web of lies

5.0 houston! we have a "misunderstanding"??

5.5 memory lane is actually this way

6.0 high school all over again

6.6 ay ay captain

7.0 different places, same shit

7.7 stick to the plan

8.0 what now...

8.8 so I gotta let it go

9.0 the war is over

9.9 prep game

10.0 valentine's day

10.10 the debriefing

11.0 the moment we all waited for

11.11 friend or foe

12.0 closure

12.12 that's all folks

Tags 🏷️: @miniature-tragedy @istansquirrels @marvolos @domfikeluva @santineez @ateezswonderland @zzenkha @bellybellasblog @lezleeferguson-120

[communistkenobi]

it’s sometimes frustrating when people respond to posts lamenting like, the fact that every news article is paywalled or every social media site is overrun by reactionaries or that all recipe websites are impossible to use because they’re covered in malicious ads or etc with “here’s a site that gets rid of those paywalls!” “install this recipe-unfucker browser extension on your computer!” “just join [obscure social media site that no one uses] or [dead forum]!” like I get the intent, I don’t take it as like malicious derailing or anything, and I even understanding wanting to spread resources to people esp adblocker resources. but this pattern of response in the aggregate feels like it’s fundamentally missing the point on some level - it is infuriating that you can’t spend an hour on social media without being reminded that the world viscerally hates you and wants you dead for the crime of being a minority, it is infuriating that you’re constantly condescended to about the “dangers of disinformation” by the same professional class that paywalls every single piece of data from the public, it is infuriating that the internet is rapidly approaching a point of total unusability for the express purpose of further lining a billionaire’s pockets, and no browser extension or obscure discord clone is going to fix that. These are structural problems and I think people are using these things as examples to complain about these structures, and it sometimes feels like people are missing that point when they post a link to a mozilla-only browser extension. it feels like unwanted advice to a problem that is already unsolveable via individual solutions. often it borders on patronising, as if people aren’t aware they can log off tumblr and post on a Web 2.0 forum that 1000 people collectively use or haven’t heard of the concept of an adblocker. but again like what else are you supposed to do the next time you want to look up a chili recipe or watch cat videos online or read the news. sucks ass

[sleepyslag]

What you and anon said about the hard launch are my thoughts exactly!

*TITSPOILERS AHEAD*

I think what dnp said in TIT about not wanting to be trapped in a web of conspiracy or in any real or metaphorical closets anymore supports this. I really got the sense that TIT is to the hard launch as ii was to the CO if that makes any sense. Both shows were dnp clearing the air before taking the plunge. I might be completely wrong though. Guess we'll see.

Yeah, it feels very glass closet to me. Some people seem to have come away from tit with the impression that dnp either aren't together or aren't ever going to reveal their relationship and I'm just. Did we see a different show?? "Two bros sharing a bed zero feet apart because they were STRAIGHT UNTIL 2019" was very. Loud. They showed me photographic evidence of them sharing underwear. Dan got down on one knee proposal style at my show!!

All of the videos they've posted during tour are also Extremely. They called themselves newlyweds. Keep making husband jokes. Touching each other a billion times. They're trying to kill us I think.

The whole thing with clearing the air so we can all move forward feels like something is going to change majorly after tour. I'm very scared and excited for dnp 2.0.

[alcrego]

Digital walls, but walls

I encourage you to have a seat and read this little 'essay' I wrote back in 2014 if you really want to understand what I'm doing today. I would be really grateful and I'm sure you'll have a much better understanding of my whole work.

Digital walls, but walls

On the way to space and public art | came across the digital walls. They can be "painted" but they also have the function of limiting, of delimiting, of separating...

A change of paradigm has been happening for some years now with the arrival of the internet, which has completely changed some aspects and concepts that have to do with the world of art and more specifically with urban art or public art. From the beginning, this type of art has been carried out in public places with the aim of being observed by anyone on the street and thus making it free, accessible and free from any premise or institution when it is created. (not considering the "warlike coexistence” with the advertising).

The appearance of the Internet has changed it. A vast majority of the art is seen online on a screen, what questions that the street is the natural canvas of this art discipline. While it is for the one who creates the piece, it is almost never for the one who looks at it. Public spaces are no longer just physical, in the same way that the plastic arts are no longer just plastic.

Due to the access to technology and its cheapness, nowadays it is inconceivable to think of art without considering the whole digital sphere, whether as a tool, a method of creation or of dissemination. But at the same time, all these centuries of art history condition the understanding of art, sometimes acting as a burden in terms of understanding what art is.

The dragging of already preconceived ideas and the weight of the genetic inheritance makes us repeat concepts about what art is and was. In the face of such a rapid change of paradigm, it seems that we find it difficult to understand that this whole new digital world is still the world. Both virtual and augmented reality are also reality, but the fact that it is appreciated through a screen sometimes causes it not to be considered as something artistic or even real. Thinking that way we could say that looking at a piece of art on the Internet does not have its complete experience, since we are not seeing it in the place for which it was devised, and neither are we perceiving it in a direct way, but with a screen as an intermediary. But at the same time, I think about all the content that we consume today with these devices - movies, series, photographs, news, and even art, current and classic - and not because of that we think or say that they are unreal.

At this point, where the analog space merges with the digital space, a new artistic expression is born that is entirely digital, where the final piece is born and ends up in the digital realm. Conceived through digital tools and deposited in the public digital space. These pieces of art suggest skipping the step of "existing" first in the ‘real reality’ to reach directly the virtual reality, which is also reality, and once from there, to have an impact on the analog reality.

It would also be curious to reflect on the parallelism between urban art and digital art, since, being in public places, both are susceptible to being stolen, altered or appropriated by other people for different purposes. And also, on the idea of anonymity, always used by urban artists to be able to work in the street without risk of infringement, and now also used in the digital environment. Either by often using copyrighted content that we find on the web (street 2.0) for an artistic purpose or by the "erosion of sharing” in which at some point someone does not credit the work, but it is still shared. In this case there should be a new word to define those people that everybody knows, but nobody knows who they are. “Famonimous" characters or the concept of "famonimity"; people or artists who are known precisely because they are anonymous.

Since the beginnings of urban art, the idea was to use public space to express oneself freely, but we must bear in mind that public space is nothing more than the remainder of the space divided by the private, the "leftovers" after the developers pass, the worthless places left open to the common people by institutions, etc., etc..... With the change of social, technological and artistic paradigm, urban art has been normalized and is now used as a method of decoration of places in poor condition, as a complement to a public road or simply as a means of open artistic expression as it has always been. Because if the initial objective was to make art accessible, direct and open to everyone, that idea has moved to the internet and, in some ways, the radical idea of urban art would no longer have that sense.

Therefore, if we understand urban or public art as a type of art accessible to everyone, free of charge and without any kind of condition, | believe that digital art fulfils this role today, since it inhabits all public places, whether analog or digital. Urban art needs this digital sphere to be able to expand and be visible. Because nowadays most urban art is seen through screens, not in the place where the piece has been created, which makes all these works more accessible to everyone at any time. And so, the ���paradox of the graffiti artist’ is born, the one who expresses his freedom in the walls that imprison him. These walls generate private spaces and what is outside them is considered public space by the mere fact of being spaces where people pass through. But it does not mean that this public space is open to intervention. Every public space is under the supervision of a privative entity, whether it is a municipality, a company or simply, the property of an individual. Public space does not exist, neither in the ‘real reality’, nor in the virtual one. It is always subject to something superior that manages it.

Within this dilemma, augmented reality becomes another alternative to the path of public art. It gives the possibility of creating art in public spaces, only seen on digital devices, and using the ‘real reality’ as the piece’s canvas. Until recently, photography and/or video were methods of capturing reality. Now, with this change of prism, these disciplines moved from being the purpose itself, to becoming raw material for the creation of other new artistic expressions. In this direction, | want to focus on the gif format. This format is strictly digital, so it gives us the option to edit, to add movement to pieces that, before, condemned to live still. We can spread in on the Internet and make it accessible to everyone at any time. When adding augmented reality, the two concepts intertwine, urban/public art and digital art, what gives rise to new artistic expressions that call into question deep rooted concepts such as museum, art and reality.

There are already many centuries researching, testing and creating the same type of art, whether sculpture, painting.... Except for the birth of new "isms" within these disciplines, it gives the impression that they are exhausted. At this point it would be convenient to think about the idea of unique work, copy, forgery, recreation... Thinking about the evolution of art we must consider that all new progress is born of the technological options that occur in each era. Nowadays, the difference is that progress happens every day, very fast, and it seems that it is difficult (or unwilling) to understand this change because of the speed of it. This cultural and genetic heritage blurs our vision and sometimes prevents us from conceiving new artistic expressions as such, since there are no previous references to support them.

But, at the end of the day, every new artistic expression, in its beginnings, was not art. "Science develops ideas that come from art that is inspired by science.” The world of classical art enjoys an aura of untouchable deity because when we are born it has always been there, but we cannot forget to think for a moment with perspective that all this classical art was created mainly by the entities of power of each era: kings, church, political powers...

This is why today (without underestimating the technique and the work of the artists) these types of classical art enjoy an invulnerability as, in the end, it was created by and for the power itself.

Then, this type of art collides with the urban and/or public art, along with digital art. In the public and digital space those who decide what is "art" are the people.

I am sure that the first Cro-Magnon who used a tuft of horse hairs instead of his own hands to paint was seen as an art/magic/belief apath.

Now we live in a new paradigm shift, but in this case it is not local or national, it is global and immediate.

A. L. Crego, 2014.

[river-taxbird]

Have YOU got an old Windows PC Microsoft has told you can't run Windows 11? It's time to give it a new life!

How to install Windows 11 on unsupported PC Hardware using Rufus. You can also disable some other Windows 11 bullshit like data harvesting and needing a Microsoft account.

It has been in the news a lot lately that Windows 11 isn't allowed to be installed on PCs without certain requirements, including the TPM 2.0, a chip that was only included in PCs made in 2018 or later. This means that once Windows 10 stops receiving security updates, those PCs will not be able to (officially) run a safe, updated version of Windows anymore. This has led to an estimated 240 million PCs bound for the landfill. Thanks Microsoft! I get you don't want to be seen as the insecure one, but creating this much waste can't be the solution.

(I know nerds, Linux is a thing. I love you but we are not having that conversation. If you want to use Linux on an old PC you are already doing it and you don't need to tell me about it. People need Windows for all sorts of reasons that Linux won't cut.)

So lately I have been helping some under privileged teens get set up with PCs. Their school was giving away their old lab computers, and these kids would usually have no chance to afford even a basic computer. They had their hard drives pulled so I have been setting them up with SSDs, but the question was, what to do about the operating system? So I looked into it and I found out there IS actually a way to bypass Microsoft's system requirement and put Windows 11 on PCs as old as 2010.

You will need: Rufus: An open source ISO burning tool.

A Windows 11 ISO: Available from Microsoft.

A USB Flash Drive, at least 16GB.

A working PC to make the ISO, and a PC from 2018 or older you want to install Windows 11 on.

Here is the guide I used, but I will put it in my own words as well.

Download your Windows 11 ISO, and plug in your USB drive. It will be erased, so don't have anything valuable on it. Run Rufus, select your USB drive in the Device window, and select your Windows 11 ISO with the Select button. (There is supposed to be a feature in Rufus to download your ISO but I couldn't get it to work.?

Choose standard windows installation, and follow the screenshot for your settings. Once you are done that, press Start, and then the magic happens. Another window pops up allowing you to remove the system requirements, the need for a microsoft account, and turn off data collecting. Just click the options you want, and press ok to write your iso to a drive.

From there you just need to use the USB drive to install windows. I won't go into details here, but here are some resources if you don't know how to do it.

Boot your PC from a USB Drive

Install Windows 11 from USB Drive

If you had a licensed copy of Windows 10, Windows 11 will already be licensed. If you don't, then perhaps you can use some kind of... Activation Scripts for Microsoft software, that will allow you to activate them. Of course I cannot link such tools here. So there you go, now you can save a PC made from before 2018 from the landfill, and maybe give it to a deserving teen in the process. The more we can extend the lives of technology and keep it out of the trash, the better.

Additional note: This removes the requirement for having 4GB Minimum of RAM, but I think that requirement should honestly be higher. Windows 11 will be unusable slow on any system with below 8GB of RAM. 8GB is the minimum I think you should have before trying this but it still really not enough for modern use outside of light web and office work. I wouldn't recommend trying this on anything with 4GB or less. I am honestly shocked they are still selling brand new Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of ram. If you're not sure how much RAM you have, you can find out in the performance tab of Task Manager in Windows, if you click the More Details icon on the bottom right. If you don't have enough, RAM for old systems is super cheap and widely available so it would definitely be worth upgrading if you have a ram starved machine you'd like to give a new life.