Is making and selling weird art toys human scale anticapitalist media?

I think it might be.

It's human scale manufacturing. It's a way to take back a slice of pop culture, to embrace a thing I love without giving money to companies that seek to destroy me. It's done for a niche community, in conversation with, and as a rejection of, corporate backed alternatives.

And for many folks, toy collecting is zero sum. Buy my weird art toy and that's $10 you aren't spending with Hasbro and Disney.

What would you do with a Xerox machine, or a PERQ? Or a Lisa?

A pdp-8 or 10 or 11?

What would you do with a PS/2 with monochrome graphics on an MCA bus?

Or a 1st generation 8080 PC with 256k of RAM?

Specifically, I've been thinking about productivity software, desktop publishing, music and multimedia software.

All those computers that *weren't* primarily used for games.

How were they used? What can they be used for?

When folks pick up an old computer that is not well suited as a gaming machine, what does it do?

I've been thinking about old computers again this evening.

I've gone off about "Human Scale" anticapticalist technology a lot over the last half decade or so.

That is to say, small (often very weird) software built by an individual or small group, to support direct needs of an individual or community, without any hint of marketability.

You know, gemini, the fediverse, tildes, game jam games, little CLI tools, etc. etc. etc.

This is familiar territory for me. I've written about it occasionally. Several other folks have too.

When I say #DIYMedia I mean media made by individuals outside the influence of major media corporations.

This is every youtuber under the sun, but it's also things like Star Trek New Voyages and Journey Quest.

When I say Human Scale, Anticapitalist media, I mean DIY media that exists in direct opposition to major corporations.

Things that self distribute via torrent or peertube or whatever other human scale method, rather than depending on Youtube or Facebook or whatever corporate platform.

Tonight, I'm thinking about Human Scale, anti-capitalist media.

Small, weird media created by individuals and small groups, made for a unique audience, without regard for general marketability.

This is similar to, but not entirely the same as the #DIYMedia stuff I'm usually talking about.

Or, I guess, the way to say it is that it's a flavor of DIYMedia.

There's some overlap between human scale tech and retrotech.

A lot of early computers were full of shining examples of human scale technology.

The beginnings of social media, and the earliest days of the consumer precursors to the web were human scale tech. Community Memory, BBSs, etc.

And, of course, it's human scale tech that brings us here.

I support #DIYMedia, but what I make is intended to be Human Scale anitcapitalist media.

When I say Anticapitalist in this sense, I don't mean that the media itself is about anti-capitalist concepts, but it exists outside of and in opposition to capitalist structures. It doesn't make money, it's too weird and niche to ever find a wide market.

We make it because we want to to exist, we make it for a specific audience. If it grows beyond that, that's gravy.

Hey! I have a couple of folks at the makerspace interested in getting in to animation.

I've never done much 2D animation before, and the only tool that I'm really aware of is Pencil2D.

I saw some stuff about Adobe Character Animator which is frankly tempting as all get out, but I'm not a fan of subscription only software, and I don't run Mac or Windows if I can avoid it.

I used Flash in the past, but it doesn't exist anymore.

What a good starting point in 2D animation that runs on Linux?

I got a few captain video toys in the mail this week, so I made some duplicates today.

The originals are rare but not expensive. The duplicates are good but not perfect, and in a variety of colors.

@hhardy01 Yeah...

@hhardy01 Yes. It does still exist, but it's in a pretty sorry state re: dependencies and recent development. It's limping.

When I talk about our long range wireless, mesh networked, BBS research, it is hard for me to be empathetic to someone who responds "oh, yeah, hard to censor something like that."

It occurs to me that when the frozen peach brigade talks about freedom from censorship, what they want is freedom from moderation, and occasionally freedom from consequence.

They've never been censored. They don't know what that might look like.

Censor my ass, be a kind human being.

Empathy is a practice.

I try to remember to practice radical empathy with the people I meet.

Sometimes it is hard. Today it was hard.

@loppear The day they signed up with MS and allowed XP on that platform was a very very sad day.

@vertigo It was the UI for the XO-1 for OLPC, It was designed to be understandable by children who were not yet literate, but to still be useful to adults.

Today at the makerspace we were discussing The Things We Lost W/R/T the development of computing.

We talked about the Cannon Cat, we talked about Hypercard, we talked about the ST and the Amiga.

One topic that came up towards the tail end of the discussion that is near and dear to me is Sugar, the DE designed along side the OLPC project.

It was a radically different approach to computing, and could have been a strong step towards a more Humane future for computers.

@RileyStarlight yunohost has hedgedoc for markdown and a couple of caldav options, and makes updates and general maintenance dead simple.