RANDOM THOUGHTS
～自問自答～
There is nothing wrong with not taking pictures of every ephemeral moment that happens in your life.
Photographs in Japanese are called "Shashin" (写真) which literally translates to "copy reality". The only moments in
life that should be "copied" are unique moments that require dire proof of something that occurred within reality.
I once had a Black Labrador/Rottweiler mix named Mercedes. There are no photographs of her that exist.
To everyone else, she has never existed. But at least you'll believe me since lots of people have had dogs.
If a purple unicorn materalized in front of you out of thin air on your walk to the park, you better be damned sure that you get a photo of it.
Therefore, don't feel bad if you see people around you taking photos of the mundane.
If there's something that uniquely stands out to you, then take a picture and keep it to yourself,
or show others that you know will be interested in seeing them.
These moments are important to you and you only.
Friday, December 9th, 2022
In the future, the inevitable will happen where companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Amazon, and Disney will
fund their advertising campaign goals to the point where they will arrange low earth orbit satellites into artifical constellations
that will broadcast their logos in the night sky.
Future anthropologists will eventually gain more knowledge into the mythos of uncontacted tribes and will learn of
how they believe those logos are messages from the firmament and how much they will have
shaped and influenced their cultures since being sent into the sky.
Tuesday, December 13th, 2022
In the novel and film Charlotte's Web, Wilbur the pig is saved from slaughter when the titular spider Charlotte
writes "SOME PIG" in her web and Wilbur becomes the talk of the town from there on out.
The message the story is intended to provide you is that unlikely friendships will prove to be valuable despite your differences.
But why is it that Wilbur became famous from a spider that was doing all of the work?
All Wilbur did was simply exist as the farm animal he was.
Perhaps the true moral of the story is that literal talentless pigs will always attract the focus of public attention while the underdogs
fight for the table scraps.
Wednesday, December 21st, 2022
It is the final day of 2022, and the memetic warfare that plagues the internet is slowly but surely beginning to affect the real,
living, rotating world we live in. Real life is beginning to become gamified much similar to how
the entire aspect of social media is meant to function. It will not be long until the entire lack of social media presence that isn't
tied to your real life identity is vilified and frowned upon.
Runescape armor-trimming and WoW boosting scams are being recycled into modern day
cryptocurrency schemes that promises the key to a virtuous digital lifestyle. But worst of all,
the effects of internet advertising on the social noosphere of humanity is erroding the ability to question
quality over quantity and boldening the entitlement that upholds the foundation of class warfare.
Please remember going into 2023 that the internet is illusory and is not meant to represent the real world. The internet is merely
a mirror that reflects the true face of humanity. If this reflection looks terrifying to you,
then it is probably best to focus your attention on more alluring sights.
"There are few who can hold up a mirror and not become evil. A mirror does not expose evil, but rather, it creates it."
- Major Motoko Kusanagi: Ghost In The Shell II: Innocence (2004)
Saturday, December 31st, 2022
Do not believe the gaslighting that "content" creators on YouTube are attempting to espouse to you.
YouTube never had ads back in 2006 and it was around 2008-2010 where people started to get the idea
that you could use YouTube as a source of income. By doing this,
they attracted advertising revenue from different companies that do business dealings with Google to allow their advertisements
to play on anyones YouTube video. People are literally giving these corporations airtime to
play ads on their videos when they make 5 hour dissertations about some topic at interest.
It was never like this before. YouTubers have created this monster and they're attempting to pursuade you that this
isn't somehow a large part of error on their behalf. Keep in mind that a lot of these content creators literally work
for YouTube.
That's why they use the term "demonitization" a lot because they are being paid money by YouTube
to attract more and more people to their channel solely to watch more ads.
One last tangent to note; none of these YouTubers ever espouse any sort of concern for their own viewerbase being able
to watch their content. It's never any concern about "YOU" or "THE FANS". It's solely about their source of income.
Perhaps they should do what people with actual tangible jobs do and go on a labor strike against YouTube. However, the chances
of that happening is almost non existant. It's easier to complain about your entitlement
to people working 50 hours a week that live paycheck to paycheck.
Complaining about YouTube demonetizing you just gets you more views and therefore more money. This happened in 2016, and 2017, and
2018, and so on so forth until 2023.
You want YouTube to stop enacting these damaging policies? THEN QUIT YOUR "JOB" AND HIT THEM WHERE IT HURTS.
Friday, January 13th, 2023
Friday, Feburary 3rd, 2023
It's been roughly 2 years now since the continuous phenomenon of Munchausen by Internet has germinated within the dominion of TikTok and I began to wonder how exactly an eccentric community such as this ever manifested. It's nothing new in the scope of Internet notoriety for people to pretend that they are afflicted with conditions that portray themselves in a limelight of compassion even though it is entirely under false pretenses. People afflicted with genuine physical, mental, genetic, and hereditary disorders usually have personal support groups that exist both online and offline as well as therapeutical services aimed towards helping them survive in a natural chaotic world of indifference. It seems comparatively odd that the able-bodied and neurotypical impersonators on TikTok only serve to provide their followers with gleeful accounts of their daily struggles; creating a positive reinforcing feedback loop for other impersonators to continue with their rather tasteless pantomiming and curating of a community of likeminded people who support them; regardless of the veritably afflicted. I thought for a while about this, and I began to remember only as far back as 2014 where the foundation for TikTok and this self-marginalizing behavior was conceived. And it didn't take long to connect the dots between certain currently famous TikTok stars and where they initially began their careers.
KingBach, Esa Fungtastic, Jerry Purpdrank, Josh Kwondike Bar, Daviz Lopez, Marlon Webb, and Anwar Jibawi exposed an entire generation born online to their guileless performances of minstrelsy. These so called "comedians" were broadcasting blatant self-denigrating, socio-political stereotypes in a shrewd attempt to gain online notoriety unbeknownst to their viewerbase whom were effectively being exploited in the same vein of Munchausen by TikTok to perform their ephemeral sketches as if their careers were rooted in Vaudevillian theatre. Black people being obsessed with eating chicken and watermelon, Asian people consuming dogs and cats while excelling at academics, Latin American people persecuted under the scope of immigration services and sustaining their livelihoods through exploitative manual labor, and Arabic people synonymized with pursuing their daily activities being externally conflated with committing acts of terror did more damage than ethnocentric beliefs could ever dream to achieve. These Vine stars were quite literally creating subtextual propaganda unbeknownst to their viewerbase.
Vine only had 7 seconds for you to watch the video, mentally process the content that you had consumed, and switch to the next short clip that was in your feed. This was not enough time for the average person to conceptualize and examine the fictitious scenarios depicted within the Vine itself. I could only assume at the height of their popularity that the reason for their acquired fame in the first place was because their content was only reinforcing the preconceived and/or institutionalized discriminative stereotypes people had towards these ethnic groups to begin with. This in turn metamorphosized racial stereotypes into racial archetypes. You may disagree with me on this particular notion, but when blatantly stated, it was genuine racism being passed off as humor.
[EDIT 2023-11-15] Coincidentally, this video was so racist that at some point this year, it was taken down from YouTube for content that violated its policy. There is extra hilarity in the fact that the video was up since at least 2017 until then. The video that was in this URL was titled "(KingBach) STEREOTYPES FUNNY VINE!" and I am keeping the original link embedded for future reference
Thankfully, the internet never forgets...
— kd 🇲🇱🇲🇱🇲🇱🇲🇱🇲🇱🇲🇱 (@cestkd) March 23, 2021
It seems that a new hazard for the internet age is upon us netizens regarding the creation of deepfaked content pertaining to that of a pornographic nature. Even if said content was generated using your face as the reference data; pornography isn't even the limit to the worst scenario that people can fabricate with your image.
The solution to this problem is rather simple. Quit posting your fucking face online. No one can make any deepfaked content of you if you don't provide people with the images to build a model around your facial features and speech patterns. For once in your life, spare your narcissistic tendencies of trying to synonymize your real life identity with your online presence just to gain fame and just stop. Deepfaking content based around you only does nothing more than to reinforce the cult of personality that you are trying to build when you already create a community based solely around you. Have you learnt nothing from all those warnings in middle school pertaining to online safety and not giving out more information than neccessary to the public sphere of the internet? Is this really victim blaming when people were able to use Photoshop to make rather unflattering images of you decades before this advent of AI?
USE A FAKE ALIAS. USE A FAKE PERSONA. YOU HAVE THIS FREEDOM.
Thursday, Feburary 23rd, 2023
This perpetual motion machine that is churning out remakes and remasters of old media is the shrewd attempt by corporations to circumvent public domain laws and having their intellectual property be "taken" from them. Is there even a reason in this day and age to still refer to it as "intellectual property"? The whole reason why it's even called that is because it's a "product of the mind" that is comparable to the rights individuals are granted when protecting their own physical property. However, these ideas are typically bought and sold to rich companies. Is it really an idea when you can sell it as if it's a real tangible object? It's all driven by an economic incentive.
There are legitimate uses for IP rights pertaining to patent records and other methodological secrets, but the public domain exists as the metaphorical realm when these products of the mind are no longer protected. But, why even have the public domain when this clear attempt at grasping onto decade old properties is extremely successful? Way back when old titles such as Zorro and Peter Pan hit the public domain, the corporations that technically owned the rights STILL sued other production companies for using their characters. They lost in the end, but the point is they will still fight no matter what because it's all an economic rat race on the copyright of human creativity. That's also why the newer Peter Pan & Wendy film coming out next month in April is explicitly stating itself to be "PETER PAN & WENDY" because now it allows them to launch an entirely new line of intellectual property franchises based on the already public domain "Peter Pan & Wendy" novel from 1911. It seems rather odd that they chose to use the actual title of the 1911 novel now and not back in 1953 when they made "Peter Pan". Why chose now to suddenly be more accurate to the source material?
Just you wait until 2024 since the original design for Mickey Mouse is actually going into the public domain (after Disney had lobbied the US government in the past with the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998). I'm SURE he will TOTALLY be allowed to enter the ability for anyone to take their artistic liberties with that wonderful little rodent. They won't. They will fight and they will fight harder now that they're in the digital streaming era. Don't forget that they're still using the original design!
Seriously. How are you going to defend yourself with your own original creation of the original Mickey Mouse and argue that it doesn't look like the design on the right? (or on the bottom depending on how you're viewing this page)
Wednesday, March 22nd, 2023
All companies that provide any subscription services are going to be in complete control of that medium within the next 5 years. The end objective of these corporations is to make every consumer of their service as poor as possible so that everyone will be unable to afford even the most minimal amount of hardware capability to access their services. Netflix singlehandedly ended the need to use DVD and Blu-Ray players, and in tandem with other streaming services, the physical medium of discs are being rapidly extinguished with each passing year. Game corps like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are offering large libaries of games that are able to be streamed to their consoles or other streaming mediums; completely eliminating the need to buy physical copies of games. This too is also happining at a rapid pace.
Eventually, the end goal of these companies is to have people rent out the hardware to use their services so that they will have complete control on their content that they provide. They will no longer be beholdened to provide great quality entertainment as you will play or watch what is offered with no way to influence their decisions through profit margins. We are already at a state where million dollar productions like "Crater" on Disney+ was pulled merely weeks after being pushed to their service. It has since been rehosted on other services like Amazon Prime and Google Play, but had they felt the need to keep it off any service due to it not meeting their demands, they had full control over that decision. The only way to stop this from happening is to convince people to stop purchasing subscription services as soon as possible. Piracy is easier than ever before, and companies are becoming more and more successful in making people afraid of piracy. Limiting yourself to older forms of technology solely to enjoy entertainment is also completely acceptable in the modern era. Do not fall for the devilish trick known as the "Fear Of Missing Out" (FOMO). Corporations want you to feel like this because that way, it psychologically intices you into buying their service just so you can be like everyone else and not miss the jokes or references to shitty, milquetoast content.
Wednesday, November 15th, 2023
I'm currently sitting in a class that I'm not taking based around digital engineering and the formation of the foundations of database management systems, and it is appalling at how much people cannot shut the fuck up throughout the entirety of the class. They literally cannot stop listening to themselves speak for a single second and whenever the professor would ask a question, not even one sheepish little jab at an answer would pipe up to even entertain the thought of the right answer. I fear for the future when these people are the ones that are going to be handling our data in a world where the algebraic notations based around querying every little tiny data point representing your psyche is being sold and commodified.
Tuesday, November 28th, 2023
There's a glaring issue I have with a vast majority of the so-called "modern internet lexicon" using terms like "gyatt", "rizz", "slay", "bet", "cap", "bussin'", "finna", and "on god" being adapted at large to the point where it spills out into the real world. Most people are unaware that these terms are directly derived from African American Vernacular English which linguistically is an actual dialect from English particularly because of the fact that it posesses unique grammar, vocabulary, and accent features that are simply not found in the Standard dialect of English or its other varieties. All of these terms get shoved under an umbrella and are guilelessly called "internet slang" when they really aren't. Does no one see how fucked up this kind of is where Western culture, particularly Western internet culture, feels the need to prey upon an aspect of culture that isn't universally adapted in the entirety of Western culture? Everyone is aware of how much black culture has been robbed and pilferated over decades and apparently lingustics isn't free from this predation either. If you look up journals and articles that document the rise of these terms, they all unanimously fail to point out that these terms are derivied from a pre-existing culture; especially one that is still marginalized in our current age of information proliferation. They write as though the internet as a whole spawned these terms when that is entirely false and yet no major outlets are pointing out this glaring issue in an era of stringent teeth cutting when it comes to cultural awareness.
Tuesday, December 05th, 2023