nicetriangle

There’s a book called The Media Monopoly that details how media companies have consolidated to just a handful of mega corps and the book had to be republished 5 times since the 80s because every few years the number keeps shrinking dramatically. The author later released a brand new book called The New Media Monopoly which is essentially the 7th edition of the original book and at this point we’re in a fucked up late stage version of the problem he originally detailed.

From the Wiki on the author:

In 2000 Bagdikian stated, “Every edition has been considered by some to be alarmist and every edition ends up being too conservative.” In this latest version, Bagdikian wrote that the number of corporations controlling most of the media decreased to five: Disney, News Corporation, Time Warner, Viacom, and Bertelsmann. He argued, “This gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more communications power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history.”

The Onion is a bit too accurate sometimes.

The actual fuck did they think was gonna happen? Literally everyone saw this coming except the FTC somehow I guess.

Just like how many people stopped being supportive of labor unions, a lot of dummies out there have this misplaced belief that as soon as any problem goes away, we no longer need to uphold the things that solved those problems in the first place.

Of course that’s not at all how the world works. Bad actors are constantly looking for gaps in our defenses. They’re never going to fully go away because there is an ever present 25-30% of humanity that frankly sucks.

It requires a continuous collective effort to stave these despicable motherfuckers off.

Ok but will this run on my TI-83? It’s a + model.

This was in Altspace VR which unfortunately got axed by Microsoft IIRC, but on there you kinda looked like a less shitty version of one of those Nintendo avatars customized however you wanted.

The craziest anybody looked on there would be to have like rainbow or blue hair or something along those lines. It was pretty tame compared to like the furry anime cat sex doll looking things some people run around in VR Chat with. It also wasn’t overrun with screaming children which I think is VR Chat’s biggest overall problem.

Anyway, that support group thing I think has since moved to another platform, I forget which.

I think the next thing they’re gonna do is go after people who sub for a month and then unsub. Probably by charging a good bit more for month-to-month than paying annually.

Password crackdown aside, I don’t really get the appeal of the service unless you have kids or an abnormally large boner for Star Wars and MCU

There were no insane avatars, everyone looked pretty normal. Sorry to burst your bubble.

I’ll be honest I think their watch and AirPods both look kinda dumb, but they seem to be quite popular. And I distinctly remember that when both came out people were taking shots at how they looked, myself included.

And IIRC those are all PCVR sets and not standalone.

Some people call VR dystopian, but it’s got great potential too.

During COVID while I was living alone and we were under lockdown…

I used a Quest to watch movies in a virtual theater with a bunch of people from around the world. I remember being in a theater watching an absolutely ridiculous Nicolas Cage movie laughing my ass off with a bunch of dudes from Australia. Another time I watched a cricket game with some people who explained the rules to me and kinda gave me some play by play on what was happening.

I’ve also attended a few support group meetings in VR for coping with loss that had quite a lot of attendants. The meeting was run by a licensed group therapist and we took turns sharing and then reflecting on each others stories. It was frankly amazing.

I also played mini golf with friends of mine as well as had a couple meetings over a round of mini golf with the other guy on my design team during lockdown. Honestly the best virtual meetings I ever had.

All of the above were very social and very positive experience. I didn’t feel far away from people, I felt connected to them.

Same way a smartphone can be a useful tool that enhances your life or a screen you stare at for hours consuming bullshit TikTok videos. You’re in control of what you make of it. You can also stick to a dumb phone and not participate at all.

For my particular niche (illustration) it has a way better concentration of active (and also importantly) high quality actual working professional artists on it than mastodon.

The art scene on mastodon is pretty meh and the largest art centric instance is run by unstable authoritarians that are some of the biggest sources of drama on mastodon.

Not a gotcha question, but what things did the LHC discover that have real practical applications right now other than validating some hypothesis? Because I’ve looked into it before and turned up nothing so I’m wondering what I’m missing.

Yeah I’m just not sure how much I believe this thing is worth the investment at all and the fact that it’s 100km just proves these guys were like “uhhh, let’s make it BIG NUMBER KM LONG.”

I think there’s likely quite a lot of other worthier expenditures in science research than this indulgent toy.

lol same

I got into scratch/trash building and kit bash modeling crazy mechs and stuff last year and it’s been a blast.

Please elaborate.

Yeah for sure they both have their pros and cons, I’ve used both extensively. This just happens to be something that would particularly fucking infuriate me and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with it on my daily driver.

Sorta feels like someone kicking the door into your house and tacking up billboards on your walls or something.

To each their own. I don’t care for the bulk of RAID setups or the transfer and seek time of individual spinning disks.

Say what you will about Apple but I don’t have to put up with this insane shit at least on their computers. I really wonder how long they hold out on this stuff.