Like… which scene groups or individuals?

Don’t really have a particular favorite, although Subsplease is pretty snappy for anime if you want it as-it-releases.

Otherwise, for groups focused on US/UK/European media, whatever’s got the quality range I’m seeking and preferably a season pack all from the same group/same quality.

Oh hell yeah. I have a soft spot for these goofy Metroidvania titles.

My partner always ribs me about it “Oh are you playing the Titty Island games again?”

Just a mild burtation.

You can just assume it is every US company because it is.

This stuff doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

CEOs talk to each other about this kind of shit and plan together.

Just like how “AI” has been shoved into fucking everything by everyone even though it is useless and makes a lot of people upset.

Expect all of them to do it so you don’t have a choice and they all did it to “stay competitive with each other.”

Making sure there isn’t another option is one hundred percent part of industry plans.

Just like how trying to replace fast food workers with automation and touch screens has been in the works since the 80’s at least. The tech is just finally cheap enough is all.

Tonight at 11, Japanese company centers japanese media in its media showcase.

Our dreams of technology didn’t meet with the realities/limits of materials science/engineering except for computing and the internet.

Wait… Holy shit it’s real!

EDIT: lmao nearly every comment on YouTube is literally about Butters.

Cause fuck it I can’t save anyone.

You’ve done your best. It’s definitely not personally your job to save anyone anyway. If we can’t figure out how to do it collectively, well, maybe we just suck as a species. Thanks for doing what you could and can and don’t bemoan yourself for your inability to fight a broken system on your own. I don’t expect engineers and scientists and doctors who have been telling us this shit needs to be done for years to have any fucking patience for it anymore. You’ve all done your bit.

Also, thanks because I’ve just been assuming as much has been going on behind the scenes for a long time. I’ve been saying for years the entire nation gave up on any idea of long-term maintenance of anything in the 90’s. We’ve had failing infrastructure grades for bridges all over the country since at least 2010, if not earlier, and fuck-all has been done. I’m not even close to being an engineer, but I’ve helped some friends with some basic construction and I’m just floored at how many corners are cut on so many things in our country. It’s prevalent everywhere, it’s part of why there’s so many data breaches in the tech sector. They don’t want to pay to update old systems to bring them up to compliance. We’ve literally built workarounds in the form of Virtual Machines just so people can run outdated software on modern hardware so insecure outdated software can simply keep being used despite its age. So yeah, feeling vindicated that it’s not all just in my head.

Someone else could write news then?

Well exactly, it’s an uphill battle, sadly. I’ve been upset at how weak our media has been since the Bush years, when I was working in local television for an NBC affiliate. I got to see all the behind the scenes of the beginnings of the War on Terror and how much our media purposefully pumped up both the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and how they helped promote the outright lies of the Bush administration. It was eye opening as a twenty-something to say the least and made me incredibly distrustful of government overreach that was being exhorted by patriotism and nationalism. “Spy and snitch on your fellow Americans to prove how patriotic you are!” It was also part of the beginning of dropping the facade of “racism being over” because holy fuck did brown skinned immigrants all get put in the “dangerous radical Islamist” basket, no matter their real nationality or religion. It deeply colored my view of mainstream media as consistently right-wing, even back then, because of how often they would capitulate to Republican lies to support wars intended to enrich a small elite.

I’ve been wanting to see more independently successful media organizations most of my life, but most of what I have seen is media consolidation, and it’s certainly not like I have the capital to get into the business myself. It’s brutal.

Finally, just as you said, we’re competing with Twitch and TikTok and a lot of these issues really require text documents and references that can be checked more easily than needing to sift through a three-hour-Youtube-video of the issue. The problem is we’ve raised a generation that really doesn’t want to read much at all if it isn’t a subtitle for a video. That’s… distressing. (But not to act like it was much better in my generation, it’s not, it’s part of why we have so many shitty kids: their shitty millennial parents who shove a phone into their hand like Boomers shoved us in front of TVs.)

I wouldn’t even know where to start on how to fix it. I’m with Marshall McLuhan, we’re spitting out new communications mediums before we’ve even really understood the social impacts of the previous mediums. He argued we still didn’t understand writing and we had already jumped headlong into radio and television… Well, look at us now baybeee, shit’s spiraling with the internet, McLuhan. Maybe he’s spinning in his grave to match.

Stop making it a generational battle. That only serves to divide the working class.

That’s difficult when a lot of the news media is owned by *checks notes… the Capital class… and they have vested interest in keeping the conversation about a generational battle.

But yes, 100% agreed. The problem is we’re all commenting on news articles that will never stop presenting it that way.

The next forty years will look like absolute hell and the lack of proper services for the explosive number of diseases in the millennial cohort will directly contribute.

1. Milliennials by and large don’t have enough money to retire, and they are experiencing in striking numbers high rates of immunodeficiency and cancers. (I was personally diagnosed with cancer at 42. You know, the ultimate answer to life the universe and everything…) This will mean they will need more elder care and sooner… and they won’t really be able to afford it.

2. No Child Left Behind has properly fucked US education for the foreseeable future, and US education was abysmal before that already. The elderly are going to be being taken care of by adults who may be functionally illiterate and when you’re functionally illiterate, you can become anti-vax even if you got hired as caretaker for the elderly. (Not all will grow up to be functionally illiterate, but if we’re to take teachers at their word, the gap between the struggling kids and the smart kids is wider than ever. As in C students functionally don’t exist, only A students and F students, and the F students are the larger group who are being passed on to higher grades just to hit numbers.)

3. On top of education being gutted and there being a dangerous future of incapable people being put in these jobs because there’s no one else to do them: The collapse in birth rate because nobody can afford to have fucking kids will also make this problem worse as fewer and fewer workers will be available to take care of more and more elderly and infirm people.

4. Most of the places that take care of the elderly are being bought up at rapid pace by investment groups, private equity, hedge funds, and the like, and all they do is cut services, make things worse, and cause more suffering and death so they can wring more money out of people suffering at the end of their lives. How many of these businesses will even still exist in 20 years? Many of them are shutting down constantly because the numbers just don’t add up, or because the private equity group that bought it has finished hollowing it out and there’s simply no money left.

5. Because of all of this, we will see an absolute explosion of homelessness in the elderly.

6. You can bet your ass fuck-nothing will be done to prevent any of this. Especially if Trump wins in November, then we’re dealing with this process outright accelerating at a breakneck pace.

7. Oh and just for “fun” we can expect to see a lot more police violence against poverty-striken old people. “STOP RESISTING OLD MAN!”

EDIT: Oh yeah, and that’s not even counting climate change, finite amounts of topsoil left, potential pandemics, and the fact that most of the world doesn’t even have access to clean water. I try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.

EDIT II: Get involved in Mutual Aid Groups. We all have skills. No one is coming to save us. No government or political party or corporation. We have to save each other, and that will be very difficult to achieve. I forget the writer, but she said something like “No dictator is ever going to bring about the revolution. It will always have to come from the bottom organizing together.” The only thing we can do is help one another. It will not be easy or fair or entirely successful.

I don’t know how many times we have to keep saying this:

BECAUSE LLMS HAVE NO INTENTION OR ABILITY TO TELL TRUTH FROM FICTION SO WHEN THEY APPEAR CONFIDENT, THEY ARE BULLSHITTING EVEN WHEN THEY ARE CORRECT.

Even a bullshitter can be correct sometimes, it doesn’t make it suddenly not bullshit. Even when LLMs get it right, they’re still bullshitting.

This isn’t complicated. They don’t think. They have no concept of truth. They just fabricate sentences from previously copied sentences, there is no intention, no thought, no planning, no reflection.

The groups producing these LLMs are just sourcing the entire internet, they don’t care how much of it is lies. There seems to be very little curation going on.

Anyone who expected anything other than this outcome is an idiot who isn’t paying attention.

If we survived Tipper Gore’s “Explicit Lyrics” warnings on CDs, I think we can survive this.

Everyone wanted the explicit copy, it made it more desirable.

But, as a counterpoint, traditional media is just as bad, if not worse, because it is desperately trying to stay relevant by selling fear.

“If it bleeds it leads” isn’t exactly new. Maybe all media needs these warnings.

WARNING: This media conglomerate is owned by people who have vested interest in profit over truth.

Oh no… Hoping for the best for McKellen, but I understand the severity of this due to his advanced age.

He truly has always seemed like a genuinely good chap and was pretty open about his sexuality when it was still pretty scary to do so, even though he seems to regret not coming out sooner.

So, here’s hoping for, well, whatever good news there can be at this age.

So in other words… not really free. They’re taking your data as part of the equation and giving it an account to be tied to.

Terminal enshittification.

Democracy Dies in Billionaires’ Hands.

If you want a super secure platform for private communication use Matrix for fucks sake, this is a media aggregator and social network.

Use the appropriate tools for the appropriate use-cases.

Everything on Mastodon gets publicly posted. Like, what even is this?

Security and accessibility are always at odds with each other.

You don’t increase security and safety and also increase accessibility. No, by increasing security, you have decreased accessibility.

Security and accessibility are a balance. If it’s easily accessible, it’s not secure, if it’s secure, it’s not easily accessible.

Further, a lot of that old media tied up in proprietary formats that simply don’t exist anymore.

Fuck, half the equipment I used in local television news broadcasting 20 years ago is all up in smoke. Media from that time is on tapes that probably don’t have easily findable tape decks to play them.

I would suspect its similar happens in print media.

In fact, I know it happens in print media because Adobe PageMaker was big for a long time. I used it to build and format my high schools newspaper when I was in my senior year. I was the layout editor because I was the only one who knew how to halfway use it.

Adobe InDesign was the successor to PageMaker and… for a while… you could convert PageMaker documents to InDesign documents, but they dropped that support years ago.

So you want an old Adobe PageMaker file from the 90’s to recreate lost information from then?

Well you better figure out how to pirate both an old copy of Windows and the final version of Adobe PageMaker just to be able to fucking run it in a virtual machine or something. Adobe is fucking ruthless when it comes to copy protection.

End result: Why would a business hold on to documents it functionally cannot use because the proprietary program or hardware used to “read” it no longer functionally exists? They simply won’t the cost of keep useless documents around is too high.

So only the people who refuse to take precautions should be impacted.

Only if transmission between those people doesn’t result in a mutation that turns it airborne. That’s not an “if” I’d personally like to risk. To assume it will only affect those who don’t take precaution is foolish at best and cruelly disingenuous at worst.

Cloudflare can still go bad, but its usually for high-capacity users who are using way more than the average. I haven’t seen any homeserver users get hit with any trouble, but I’ve seen a couple small businesses have bad situations with Cloudflare, although it honestly seems like the minority.

Cloudflare has issues but for most its probably fine.