It’s gonna train the little robot dog, which they’re gonna put a gun on. And drones. It’s gonna train drones, he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.

I think a lot of people need to learn the lesson that the commercial leftism they are responding to from online is completely worthless false politics and they are demeaning their own value by engaging with it. Imagine how you’d mock your grampa if you caught him talking back to Tucker Carlson on television like Tucker can hear him or would change his grift if he could.

That’s you. None of these fake-ass internet leftists are going to change, but they can waste your time, so they do. Cut them loose, forget about them, and start asking the people you talk to in real life if they intend to vote.

Also, I let go of the “fight against fascism” propaganda when Trump pretended to be shot and every nobody clown on my social feeds started whining their nonviolence bullshit. Sorry? I thought these were Nazis? I thought this was rising fascism? If violence is not appropriate, when will it be? Never?

Never!! Says the middle-class progressive with their nose in the air. They’re always able to slip away to another country when things get bad, what about you? They can hold their ruling class beliefs painlessly while the boots fall on your neck, not theirs.

I guess they were just winding me up, huh, and none of it was as important as their sniveling, desperate need for attention at any cost. When push comes anywhere close to shove, I guess you were playing, not a single shot can you bear to see. You made it sound life or death, when it wasn’t, at all. You lied. This election wasn’t that crucial. It’s not “the end of democracy”, or it would make sense to take up arms, like they are in Myanmar. But you lied, and it isn’t that important.

So I’m done letting e-hype decide how much I care about all this, and how important it is.

Judging by the reaction to Trump’s little near-miss, it won’t actually be a big deal if he wins. It will just be another shitty Republican that you’ve been overhyping as the devil for the last ten years, and I fell for it, like a rube.

Don’t get me wrong, I went and voted yesterday, and I intend to keep doing it every time they let me, but the attention farmers don’t get to decide how important anything is, ever again, not for me. I propose you also take a page from my book. More voting, less paying attention to social media.

If people don’t vote, it will be fine, things will be okay, shit will move on. Get offline, find living people to care about, and let these people scream into the void alone.

I got to thinking about IRC some time ago, and how much creative time we spent solving the fundamental problem of how, exactly, to use the internet without needing some sort of middleman, like a crazy person hosting a server for no clear reason, so that we could all communicate together.

That and designing the thing so that even if the hardware in your closet got hammered with a bajillion visits it wouldn’t stutter because it was all too light weight for that. But also, fuck no I would rather throw myself down the stairs than arrange it so that I have to maintain it a lot. That type of thinking defined an era, and that’s why zombo.com still works.

I have to put more maintenance into my Gmail account than the zombo guy does into the entire website, is what I’m saying. Return to monke, is what I’m saying.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

So what’s the verdict, are the electric unicycles cool? Have they broken the curse? They do look cool, and you better be wearing the full motorcycle getup if you know what’s good for you, because they’re fast as f too.

Ah, the late 1900s when you could still pretend that Apple was the choice of the counterculture for no credible reason except for Apple marketing. Slacktivism, my dude. Worthless.

This meme is truly ancient. I bet those little iMacs go for a pretty penny on eBay now after everyone tossed them in the garbage circa 2003.

There’s a fella on YouTube who talks about game development and stuff. He has a well-respected game out somewhere, and he dropped a bombshell that you probably need to hear.

They took their game, on a PC and consoles, out to some sort of convention to show it off and get some feedback from potential customers, namely, young children, Alphas, 6-12 ish.

He said that every single one of them ignored keyboards and game controllers, shoving them out of the way, not even understanding what they were for, and immediately started swiping their fingers on the screens, assuming they were touchscreens. So yeah.

I believe you can still get “dumb” flatscreens, but they’re getting rare, and they cost at least hundreds more than their “smart” brethren. So of course those sell very slowly.

The older I get the more I miss the sheer freedom that was built into our daily lives back when technology was just a notch or two less advanced. Phones that stayed trapped on their wall, not in your pocket, tracking you. TVs that were made of dumb stuff that could still pull free content from the air. You had to be part of a special “Nielson family”, fully set up with a little tracking box and all that, for the TV to tell anybody what you were watching.

People expected you to basically fall off the earth for 8 hours at work, and didn’t expect to contact you for less than a housefire-level emergency, which meant you spent most of the day free, and not just while you were at work. Nobody blinked if you stepped out for the evening to go shopping and could not be contacted for hours. Now people end up in screaming arguments because they didn’t answer that text fast enough. It’s misery.

I had a shock the other day, watching some YouTube short featuring a young woman (an adult, not a minor) complaining humorously about her mother, who always knows where she is, and thus has all sorts of unwanted opinions on her location. Mother always knows because of an app called Life360, which is basically the kind of spying app that an abusive spouse would hide on your phone. But it’s not hidden. You force your children to install it on their phones. It’s a leash. So now this adult woman, who of course cannot quite afford to leave home, because economy, cannot simply delete this spying app from her phone without consequences and arguments, so she has no privacy in her movements, from anyone, never mind the government and such. Never mind what actual minors are now putting up with.

We have officially left the era where the adults pissed and grumbled about them damn kids wanting them damn phones they don’t need, and we are now in the era where some kid has absolutely been beaten with a belt because he tried to leave his phone in the bedroom and slip out of the house in privacy.

Things like Life360 are normalized among children and parents, so other people will now expect to track you and treat a refusal of tracking as a violation of trust, and probably a sign that you are elderly, thus your rights are becoming debatable.

Again, 5 minutes ago this was evil shit that abusive spouses snuck onto people’s phones, suddenly, it’s normal, and people will just expect it.

I guess the ongoing shock is that we expected Big Brother to somehow slap a shackle on our necks that we can’t take off, but this is all worse. This is putting the shackle on your neck, every morning. It doesn’t even lock. You could, theoretically, throw it into the lake at will. Nobody would stop you. But you don’t. All the chains are made of other people. The whips at your back are the opinions of children, and what they think is normal. The surveillance cameras do not loom from posts in the sky, no. They’re in every pocket. They’re much harder to hide from than a security camera ever would be.

I hope I’m just melodramatic, or something.

The thing is that there are a ton of people who’ve built honest careers on Youtube, mostly by catering to an adult niche. There is a near zero chance that I will suddenly find out that Torque Test Channel have, like, dark problems with kids. These people don’t have scandals. Maybe somebody takes an iffy ad dollar that’s a conflict of interest or something. The end.

But those are things your dad watches, they get a solid 100k views per average per upload and we both know that number is nothing on YouTube.

No, if you want to see serious numbers on YouTube and keep your average views above 1 mil per upload, you need children. You need 12-year-old eyeballs, ones that aren’t supposed to be watching you because you’re for older kids, the forbidden fruit.

If you want tween eyeballs, you need a shrieking fucking weirdo. You need a grown man who will act like the sort of 12-year-old boy that your 12-year-old boy would act like if he had power and people couldn’t tell him to calm the fuck down. They’ll be glued to that fuckin guy. Views and views for days while they live their fantasy of a world where mom can’t tell them no, and they can have stunning emotional fits about video games until they exhaust themselves.

Nothing else will do, is the problem. He can’t really be faking it, either, that’s just annoying, no, there’s got to be something wrong with him that children love to watch.

And so, over and over and over again, it turns out that the exhausting, obnoxious man who you loved as a child is fucked up, for real, once the years wear on, and you finally become an adult yourself, but this kook has had far too long to stew in his weird power trip, probably isolated from adult company because fuck being that guy’s entourage. He’s got too much money, so he can make stuff happen. He’s got no oversight. Even Jimmy Seville had to hide it from the help most of the time. This guy’s in a house alone to do as he pleases.

It’s a bad recipe, and it bakes shitty cakes.

Every once in a while the cube of fate rolls funny, and you get Jerma, who should be one of these guys but instead his audience appears to be grown transwomen and their friends, all of them deranged, poisoned by years on 4Chan and Tumblr, with Jerma at their mercy, so whenever that situation goes sideways we can probably put Yackety Sax over the footage and actually enjoy it. That trainwreck should be a real treat.

That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr’s fields, as well.

Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn’t shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.

So that’s the issue we’re going to have, here, and I’m not sure if the “some guy running an instance for the fuck of it” model is prepared for it.