i was like 'it's weird the way everyone is doing free pr for the catholic church rn just bc the pr for the new pope has already been that good' and someone was like 'wait? why don't you like the pope? did something happen?' i feel insane i'm not exaggerating i didn't even know what to say?? 'did something happen?' yes the last 2 thousand years of global history, and no, going back 2,000 years in catholic history is not dramatic because it's remained consistently that bad throughout and in fact i do think the church should answer for every single century of its sins while all of its assets are returned to the people from which they were stolen and its global power is dissolved.
Times That Copyright Expansion Has Historically Fucked Over Artists On An Institutional Level:
Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists
Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.
The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID
The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.
The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate
The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.
New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.
Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:
You know how there's that genre of posts that's like "[screenshot of something horrid and dystopian happening with technology] hahaha, I sure hope nothing bad comes from defunding humanities while pouring boatloads of money into STEM"?
I need an inversion of that that's like "hahaha, I sure hope we don't run into any problems with masses of artists and writers deciding that it's fascist to understand the law and computer science."
That would have to become a real problem with real societal implications first. I know, your older colleagues refusing to learn how to use Moodle is a bother, but that's nothing compared to literally 1984
It seems like every humanities grad and creative on the internet has decided that the only way they will survive the future is by enshrining copyright laws more expansive than ever before and by being allowed to sue anybody for having looked at their work and had a single thought about it.
Permanent DMCA regime and an end to fair use seems pretty dystopian from where I'm sitting and the fact that the comments on this post are full of uwu smol bean creatives who are very proud to say things like "I don't care how AI works, it's evil" but can't imagine how their attempts to define model training as theft might have downstream problems that harm everyone BUT megacorporations is exactly the issue that I'm trying to articulate.
The problem is not that my elderly colleague doesn't know how to use a software program, the problem is that I'm watching liberal arts majors gleefully cheerlead attempts at implementing absolutely devastating legislation because they don't understand laws or computer science.
It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.
And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.
I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.
Got a voodoo 2 card for free a few years ago... tested it for the first time today (on a pentium4 system lmao, a bit too forward environment :P), and it works!
Parents acquired a box's worth of vinyl records, found a mildly neat record from a Silesia-related choir-and-dance group from circa 1954ish best I can tell
My Windows XP x64 desktop. I have it installed on my main PC alongside other operating systems, and boot into it to either mess about with, get a nostalgia hit, or play around and try to get stuff not-supporting-XP working.
Windows XP remains surprisingly usable today. There are several updated web browsers - one recent appearance is Supermium, which ports the newest/almost-newest Chromium and permits use of Discord, Youtube etc without a sweat under XP (plus it has several privacy tweaks from Ungoogled Chromium, for those conscious of that).
Windows XP had an especially vibrant custom theme landscape - in part because it remained supported and widely used for a humongous amount of time. As such people made great-quality custom themes that encompass all kinds of design trends that popped up over the years. The theme used by me here is "Watercolor Emico: Black" by Jamush, which is one of my all-time favorites.
In service of 4/13, which happened yesterday, I have put up a Homestuck wallpaper, in this instance one of my favorite ones that has stuck around with me on those XP x64 setups ^^. I believe that this
is the original, but it has a couple of small quirks, like the way darker space on the right. I have wrangled it quite a bit on my own end, but I don't remember what I precisely did since it's been ages. It does appear to be a vectorized picture of Skaia, which would make it "recreatable" for anyone interested.
Overall, I enjoy using this system - I normally use Linux, but when I get a desire to use Windows this usually does perfectly. It does, however, have several things that later Windowses clearly do better - for example, the audio system got greatly enhanced in Vista, with per-application volume settings. Additionally, and this may be a problem with my drivers, I get pops and slight skips in certain programs and games (for example, VVVVVV) under XP that I do not get on other systems. Older Windowses certainly had their own warts indeed (as someone who generally doesn't like newer Windowses, I do apprecieate being able to use older Windows versions regularly, to have further perspective on what changes in the later versions I would call definite improvements, and what I would rather have be similar to the older versions ^^)
A very important thing to note is that my hardware is old enough for XP x64 to still be supported driver-wise. You generally can't install Windows XP on newer hardware by default, and while there are modded drivers, custom drivers and workarounds, it is certainly not a task for the feeble. Additionally, the XP x64, being based on Server 2003, and not being a particularly common system (Vista/7 were the first x64 OS's that properly "took off" to put it highly clumsily), has spottier driver support than "regular" 32-bit XP. Indeed, I have to use my GPU with a single screen, as plugging in a second monitor bluescreens the computer! (this is an issue with the driver under specifically 64-bit systems, and while there is a patched version for a later driver version than what I use, that driver version has its own issues and keeps resetting itself into washed-out-colors-mode (clamping the colours to 16-235/"limited RGB" ). So I stick with the older driver version and just use it with a single screen)
So yeah, have an inpromptu-and-overlong description of an OS install I have particularly enjoyed messing about with recently :D
