tootkin-goblin

[tootkin-goblin]

Oh I have a few anecdotes, like that time my dad went through days of troubles to actually buy digital music, to end up having to pirate it anyway because the DRM were so strong he couldn't get the music into his mp3 player.

Or when I was in video game school, the IT guy explained to us that every software on our computers were cracked. They had all the licenses up to date in case of controls, but we were in the countryside of the south of france, long before any talk of optic fiber. It was simply and technologically impossible to have a single computer with a constant reliable internet connection to stop the DRM from shutting down the software. Let alone a hundred of computers.

But for me the last blow came a few years ago, from Autodesk, when I tried to get back into 3D modeling.

See, I am actually a professionally trained 3D artist. I love 3D modeling, it's my passion, I could talk for hours about how incredibly cool this art medium is! And I learned 3D modeling on 3Dsmax, "developed" by Autodesk.

It's a shit piece of software, full of enormous bugs. for example, in the last version I used, the biggest bug was "if you are rigging a character, you select a vertex, then do a ctrl+z, all the vertices associated with the legs of the character get scattered in the scene, effectively making your whole model explode and you have to go back to the last save of your file". But I also encountered the bug "If you try to make a render of your scene and the computer isn't strong enough, the software crash, corrupts your file, then delete one of its feature at random permanently. Yes even if you reinstall." But I was using it daily so I knew exactly where all the bugs were and how to work around them.

it also costs hundreds of dollar per user per year, so I can't imagine how much they make from this single software.

I went through shit in my life, leading to an almost 10 years period of not doing any 3D. So when I came back to it, I didn't want to have to learn a new software, so I downloaded and installed 3Dsmax. What I saw after ten years was: no new feature. most of the big bug repaired. And new bugs were introduced.

So I actually had to learn a new software! Because even though it had nothing new to offer, I had to relearn all the paths around all the new bugs!! One of the new bug was "the whole animation module is broken"!!!!!

So I said fuck it, let's bite the bullet. If I have to learn a new software, might as well go FOSS and learn Blender, even if it takes week.

I installed Blender, and in half a day I learned the whole rigging tool and did the whole character rig that took me a week to almost finish in 3Dsmax, where I already knew the whole process.

I got so mad. It was so easy. 3D modeling with Blender, a Free Open Source Software that relies on donations, is so incredibly stable and easy to use compared to 3Dsmax, an industry standard that rakes in millions every year. They get all that money, and they barely do anything to improve their software.

Once you've realized that this big companies model is not to make a good software and sell it, but to buy a good software made by other and crush it to extract as much money as possible before discarding it, you can't go back.

Oh hey since I mentioned sci hub again

I'd love to hear people's stories about small things that radicalized them in benign ways. I'll start.

I was already pretty leftist at this point, but being associated with academia so long means I've gotten free access to a variety of scientific journals, software, and more for... Basically my entire adult life. On campus, all of those systems have automatic logins. But off campus, usually there's janky, half-functional systems associated with actually inputting your credentials into these sites. Scientific journals especially are really and at tracking logins, and oftentimes have to link back to your uni's generic login page, which they're bad at pinging. Software installation usually requires

So instead of using services that the university had already paid for, for me to freely use, like adobe, journal logins, and Microsoft products, I started using free equivalents. Sci hub, gimp, libre office, Ubuntu... Not because I was invested in open source and free access mentalities at the time, but because they were literally quicker and simpler to use.

And then I started thinking about all of the little bits of tech infrastructure I was using to access my "free" stuff.

Someone coded those systems.

Some tiny portion of a server is devoted to handling those pings an login requests.

Someone spent hours upon days of work moving office 365 and adobe from actual pieces of software that fully live on your computer into stripped down versions of themselves that now have to verify

Someone made the payment system for Nature.

So. Much. Wasted. Labor. Just to block people from already existing services. That have alternatives. That are as good. For free. And they can be free largely because they don't have all of the bullshit associated with locking them down and keeping them proprietary.

Tech and science are of course what I have the most experience in, but I feel like once you start realizing that in one sector, you start seeing it everywhere.

Anyways this is a barely focused unmedicated ADHD ramble but I'd love to hear other examples

[tootkin-goblin]

Mobility assistance

[tootkin-goblin]

Jk… unless…?? 😳😳😳

[tootkin-goblin]

dolmistaska is my webcomic and it's out there for you to read for free. it's more than free to be honest I have to pay to keep the website up. i am paying for you to read my webcomic for free.

please read it and enjoy. it's ongoing and i do this for the love of the game

[tootkin-goblin]

“eldritch horror beyond your comprehension” and it’s just a generic monster with tentacles and eyes

[tootkin-goblin]

Something about little guys, packed up for travellin' 🤌

[tootkin-goblin]

Trenches

[tootkin-goblin]

[tootkin-goblin]

[tootkin-goblin]

once i satisfy my yawning hunger for lime popsicles its drawing time

[tootkin-goblin]

[tootkin-goblin]

箱根町 神奈川県　

hakone, kanagawa

[tootkin-goblin]

"you can use ai to improve spelling and grammar"

[tootkin-goblin]

おくで/Kosuke Okude

[tootkin-goblin]

おくで/Kosuke Okude

[tootkin-goblin]

おくで/Kosuke Okude

[tootkin-goblin]

We litteraly all need massive amount of vastly diverse drugs to survive. It just so happens that we usually produce most of them. When we don't, it's normal to need external supplements.

You never see people telling you "watch out!! If you take this drug you won't be able to live without! Your skin will break down and all your past wounds will reopen and your teeth will fall!". No, what you hear is "eat some fruits once in a while", and yet vitamin C is a drug like any other.

drug dependence is real, but sometimes people use this to further this idea that it means those drugs are a categorical harm in all contexts. sometimes you are already experiencing the thing that they warn would happen if you take drugs and then stop later. sometimes the worst case scenario is already your life before the drugs, and people will still try to present it like a scary consequence to avoid through abstaining from the medication that would alleviate it.

like I've had chronic insomnia for most of my life. I cannot sleep at night without drugging myself. is this great? no, it sucks. but this was the case before I got access to the drugs, too! and yes I tried everything anyone recommended about sleep, trust me.

people warned me like, "if you take those, you won't be able to sleep without them." ...I literally already could not sleep. I couldn't sleep without them before I had them. I can't sleep without them now. nothing has changed except now I have access to drugs that allow me to sleep.

at a certain point you just need to make peace with the idea that some people need drugs to survive. sorry if it makes you uncomfortable, but that's just how it goes.