I felt like there was a whole lot of opportunity to tell a story with this mechanic

like, imagine in the world of Utils that there are regular everyday ones like bzip, but then there's the mysterious super rare "firebird" that upgrades into "phoenix", and eventually into firefox

but perhaps just like in reality the future of firefox is not so bright and it will again become an ominous "Disused" Util in the future, which looks physically damaged and strangely unstable

one thing I neglected to say is that there'd still be this idea of similarly-named programs 'Upgrading' into each other

though I personally would rather the 'evolution lines' were more based on programs that are genuinely connected.

so maybe "bzip" becomes "bzcat", "bzdiff", or "bzgrep"

I can just imagine the let's plays now, where half the players are like "dammit, how do I remember all these?? I want bzgrep or bzdiff or...?"

while the other half have totally memorised all the basic linux commands from only this game and are a walking encyclopedia of all the bzips and their 'man pages' although they've hardly ever used a linux terminal

= asekai modsphere thread 20.10 =

- Utils modsphere -

"Utils" was an idea i had in about 2017 to sort of reprise #NetworkAdventureBugsite into an entirely new thing keeping basically only the sprite style
(because, whether they intended it as the 'real' appearance of the mons or not, it was absolutely fantastic)

so it was to have this monochrome, angular art style, but the 'cyber beings' were now specific GNU/linux programs.

when i first thought of the idea i imagined sort of this tumblr full of mock trading cards, but then asekai happened

I can't believe my system has a program called "catman"

that just sounds like some kind of weird parody superhero

like maybe you amalgamated catwoman and batman to comment on gender roles in comics or something

> the 'cyber beings' were now specific GNU/linux programs

that is:
"cat" was now a weird avant garde cat,
"tar" was a tahr with cardboard box features,
"man" was an odd abstract humanoid with a manual

I wish there was a way for there to be a 'pine64' of media studios

that is, one technically working within capitalism, but providing useful non-shitty products that usually market pressures prevent from existing while everyone throws up their hands

i imagine this producing something like, 'official' adaptations of what are primarily community projects with no single 'owner'

and selling physical discs etc purely to pay costs before blatantly making the work common property of the fanbase

user #Birdhammer reports over to the Not-Spyrolanders chat group.

"So what's the news on Infinite Birdventures?"
"Game sales have almost met the quota to pay off development. after that, you'll be able to torrent it free from anywhere."
"Nice. I might actually pay for it to move the needle over faster."

a few months later, the so-called "rights" to Infinite Birdventures move to the Media Freedom Conservancy and the studio begins working with a talented community member to draft its next game.

= 'skirograff' thread 4.28 =

in my mind using 'mockbuster' ironically was supposed to do the opposite of dysphemisms like 'piracy':

who are the original mockbusters really hurting when probably way more people review them for fun or watch them ironically than have been tricked?
all they're actually doing is offering more options, albeit usually shitty ones.

I felt like we should exhaust the word until it was no longer negative and people began to see 'ripoffs' of things as synonymous with the freedom to create anything

> in which i jokingly repurpose 'mockbuster' to mean an original clone that may have a few uncanny similarities to the original by design

I've been meditating a bit on what clones and fanworks really are.

one weird idea I've had as I learn about the "art history" behind the things I'm making, what exactly I want to make, and the various places people are taking the concept of 'socialism' is:

non-proprietary product placements.

this idea of retaking the heavily blurred line between content and commercials so that content is now built around advertising things you can "build yourself" or that at least don't require giant corporations to exclusively produce them

@zens

> would these be paid ads [...]

many times i'm thinking about an environment like youtube / mastodon / the-web-in-general where increasingly everybody *sort of* slightly has a platform
yet we're all still playing this dumb game of fighting over attention that will mostly go to "Brands"

when maybe there could be a better option, like uniting and cross-promoting the /totality/ of being outside corporations as the unit that competes with a big corporation

1/3

@zens

so, the idea here was anticapitalist creators trying to drum up enthusiasm for all similar efforts, in whatever way, to create the feel of a 'media empire' formed by many decentralised people refusing business empires

in some cases paid ads could be placed in environments where their topic is usually unthinkable.

though my thoughts on anything like this are usually aimed toward 'what can someone without much money do?' and in this case that's 'make the ads' / 'make parallel structures'

I think part of the success of #linux based operating systems is that they managed to create a nexus for /every/ #FreeSoftware program to distribute itself to interested people, through package repositories and package managers. it's incredibly powerful that you can load up an entire minimum operating system of purely Free Software and then boot up your package manager and go discover more.

I think we need to create something vaguely like that for #FreeCulture to really get it to snowball.

I'm really actually doing this now

I have a whole table of debian packages that I have and haven't confirmed are in arch

I think refracta is just not working for me any more.
it still runs my nginx install nicely but today when I had to use its xfce desktop because my laptop keyboard was broken I had a whole confusion with dbus being "not available" to connect bluetooth and that is just so dumb

I wonder how hard it would be to go down the list of packages and literally replicate a refracta image out of arch packages.

will i finally make a very simple "archbuntu" just because my bluetooth stopped working??

"atril is a simple pdf viewer"

dependencies to install (114):