@TaxDan @DoctorDeathray

There is Snow on the ground, surprisingly, but the roads are fairly clear. We made it off the mountain and in to town without issue.

3 (cont.) - the host never even mentions that free software exists. Doesn't talk about open content licenses, etc. etc.

It's just the Adobe show, which is a real shame, because everything else here is solid.

The whole thing stems from this idea that we must become our own media.

That's something I can get behind.

It mostly focuses on 2D digital design, which is valuable, but not my kind of thing.

And it stops short of being something that I'll outright recommend on three counts:

1 - Lots of casual pot smoking jokes, which I don't super vibe with.

2 - it's entirely focused on static media, and I think Video and Audio should be included.

3 - Adobe.

I've been watching some shows on means.tv.

I started with Preserving Worlds - https://means.tv/programs/preservingworlds?categoryId=26605&permalink=mitchell-zemil-pw_intro_h264_210112mp4-fe3ce9

and their morning news show.

Today I watched several episodes of Seize The Memes, which was a silly Bob Ross-y digital art show. The name is bad, but the idea is that memes server as a kind of modern digital grafitti, staining the walls of corporate platforms, entertaining, radicalizing, etc.

Episode one is called "Make your own Fucking Propaganda"

@djsundog I have sudo sundog, why would I stay logged in as root?

The Flying Ace is a (public domain) 1926 silent film about a black man who returns from WWI to a job as a railroad detective. He investigates a theft, and an employee who has gone missing.

There aren't many surviving films from the silent era that feature a mostly black cast.

I'm glad this one is currently streaming for free (ad supported), but I hope I can get a copy uploaded to archive.org soon enough.

https://www.kinocult.com/feature/flying-ace

@cy community memory was built on a time sharing system in 73.

I think it was adrian marie brown who said "the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible"

I have that hanging on my wall.

@jautero I blame Gates for most things, yeah.

(hardware, of course, keeps getting better. But software? All of it is bad and getting worse. Whatever shall we do?)

@gedvondur @Truck

Our experiences have been different, and I must acknowledge that my experience is not universal.

Some of the software I use on a daily basis is much better than it was 15 years ago, but I can't think of any improvements in the last 10.

I'm glad your experience has been better.

And this isn't one of those "we stopped innovating" things.

It's worse than that.

General purpose computing has regressed.

The way the modern web works precludes older computers from participating, but that's about the edge of it.

But these things were useful for so much, and the thing I see talked about the most often is games.

Games are good, but there's more than games.

I use my Omnibook as a wordprocessor, or specifically as a #zinestation connected to a dot matrix printer.

I use my mac plus as a development box in hypercard, I was previously using it as an email box.

I've used my c64 to connect to BBSs.

I have an amiga that I'm hoping to use as part of a video editing rig.

Think of all the laptops and PDAs and palmtops and Word Processors that are out there. These things that *had* purpose, but don't anymore.

If you come across one, what would you do with it?

The things I *can't* do on a modern computer are not about the computer, they are about the software.

Some stuff that I want (modern SSH libraries, STL slicers, etc.) don't exist on older OSs. Hell, when was the last time you tried to install a new OS on a 32 bit computer?

Unless your in BSD land, you basically can't. Void and Puppy "work" but you're missing so much.

I can do basically everything I do on computers, generally, from DOS or win31/95/98 on a Pentium MMX, including most of the things that require the internet, assuming I'm willing to make some affordances, or cheat with the occasional serial terminal.

But, by and large, I can do all the things I want to do on an old computer without too much trouble.

I also make toys, and I sell those and I've been moderately successful with that. I employ two designers and we're talking to two more. I have two folks who help with manufacturing.

We turn waste plastics in to toys. We take public domain characters and revive them in new toys. We have released some models under creative commons by sa license already, and we will release more in the future.

I do podcasts and I'm working on video and I produce music.

I make these things to appeal to myself and my weird friends, I distribute them on platforms I control, under a fairly permissive (but infectious) license.

I would consider all of these things to be human scale and anticapitalist in structure and distribution (and, in some cases, content.)