Lots of sad stuff this month, but also some good things sprinkled in too.
Movies
Ultraman: Rising (2024)
While I won’t ever pay for Netflix my girlfriend wanted to watch this movie and a friend just so happened to have a way to get me access to the movie.
It is a simple children’s movie about the value of family. It isn’t an amazing movie, probably a solid 6/10, but watching it with my girlfriend made it so much better. She loves these kinds of animated films. The art direction was good, sounds alright, writing was bland, and the English voice acting was alright. My girlfriend said that a few of the actors didn’t fit the characters very well.
If you have some kids or are a kid at heart you could do a lot worse than this movie.
Amadeus Director’s Cut (1984)
Another movie I watched with my girlfriend. This one is amazingly done. Basically Antonio Salieri tells a priest about how he killed Mozart. It follows Mozart’s life till his death as told by a crazed Salieri. As the story progresses Salieri becomes more and more obsessed with Mozart and eventually envy leads him to plot the downfall of Mozart.
If you never seen it before I highly recommend it if you are a fan of classical music, historical drama, or just good movies.
Videogames
I’ve still been neglecting playing as many video games lately, but here are a few I’ve touched and enjoyed.
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (Switch)
A classic NIS musical RPG. It is fairly easy and short so I hope to complete it over the next couple months. The story follows Cornet Espoir as she tries to win the heart of a prince and maybe save the day along the way. It isn’t the best RPG in the world, but I think it would be a great first RPG. If my girlfriend can stomach the cringy humor and over the top musical numbers I think it will be a good gateway before I introduce her to more RPGs.
Loop Hero (Switch)
Grabbed this one while I was out and about. Very glad I did. It is hard to describe, but this is an amazing indie game. It is a roguelight reverse tower defense game. Your hero travels around a loop (hence its name) to collect resources to use for upgrading their base. You don’t directly control your hero, but instead place objects on the map that either create more hazards or provide some benefit for the hero. Fighting stronger enemies increases the rewards and most hazards also provide bonus resources so the game has an amazing risk vs. reward system.
I still need to put more time into this one as well, but so far it is a great game to pick up and put down.
Cool Projects
The Controller Project
I think video games are a very culturally relevant art form and should be accessible to as many people as possible.
Unfortunately many suffer from disabilities that input devices aren’t designed to accommodate and specialized equipment can be expensive.
Fortunately The Controller Project provides and sponsors the creation of freely available 3D printed modifications to common game controllers to help make game input more accessible.
It is awesome to see 3D printers continue to make the world more free for everyone.
New KDE Human Interface Guidelines
I love KDE and the software they make (I use it all over my desktop), but contributing hasn’t always been the easiest thing. Over the last few years there have been many initiatives from the project to make it easier though.
One of them is the new Human Interface Guidelines for making KDE apps. Nate has a writeup on why it is important here.
Basically the new guidelines are much more well thought out and reflect the project better than the old ones.
KDE Apps Initiative
This was mentioned on Carl Schwan’s blog last month.
Alongside the new human interface guidelines there is an app initiative to create new KDE programs.
KDE has a lot of useful tools, but their application directory is not the best. There are multiple programs that seem to do the same thing, some that have not been updated in a long time, and many of the less popular programs have little to no documentation.
This initiative alongside the Human Interface Guidelines should greatly help KDE development. It is working for GNOME, it will hopefully work for KDE.
Blogs
Blogs and longevity by James
James shares a thought about how having a website lowers the burden of maintenance for his writing.
When your creations live on many separate siloed platforms you have to maintain that. You have to know where you shared each thing, manage backups, etc.
With a website as your central host for everything you only have one thing to maintain, that website.
What are they doing to keep you? by Ruben Schade
Ruben asks: Why you are sticking to the software, tools, political party, spouse, etc. that abuses you?
Adobe, Plex, Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc. They all abuse their users and yet people still use them. These companies think they own you and you should thank them for taking your creations, training AI on your work, charging you for products only to not support them, and destroying the planet. So why use them? They have to be doing something worth more than the abuse right?
For some they just don’t have a choice, they need these for work and have too much technical debt to be able to learn something else. For some the product being offered has one feature that they can’t get anywhere else or doing it with other tools would be too cumbersome. Some just don’t know the alternatives exist. Some people are misinformed about the alternatives.
For those of you who still have to use Windows after all of Microsoft’s abuses or Adobe after they made you sign the rights to all your work away so they can train AI, my heart goes out to you. I do hope that over time more alternatives become available to support your workflow.
For the rest of us, why do we keep choosing these companies over open and consumer respecting alternatives?
I don’t need Adobe’s features as GIMP and Kdenlive do all I need. I only use Windows for my work because we need workstations managed in Azure. I use Plex because it was convenient, but they clearly don’t care about paying customers. Is that convenience still worth it when the features I pay for are being broken and the product is pivoting to a social media/streaming service that I never wanted? No, I should probably stop using them all together.
What about you? Do the things in your life give you real value or are they just using you? I filtered this through the lense of a techie, but this applies to everywhere: Why vote for a party that only cares about big business, why stay with an abusive partner, why stick to that job that is union busting, why deal with abuse at all without at least fighting back?
The other side of nostalgia, and the IndieWeb? by Ruben Schade
Many personal website owners come from a position of privilege in that we can afford to make a website with no profit motive as a hobby. That shouldn’t invalidate our efforts.
Ruben’s post is a reminder that the IndieWeb is an alternative and counter to the enshittification of the web. Also no one is against you making money from your website, people are against bad business practices and abuse.
Affirmations for bloggers by Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya
Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya shares some positivity around creating stuff. Her post is centered around blogging, but it is true for every creative endeavor. Give it a read if you are struggling with publishing something in the world.
Field notes by Rach Smith
Rach Smith is going to try carrying a notebook with her as she goes about her daily life.
This is one of the best decisions I’ve made. Hope it works for her as well.
AI Drama
I don’t think it is a secret that I believe generative AI is mostly a waste of electricity and mass copyright infringement on the part of large companies. This was going to be in the Blogs section, but there is a lot here. Maybe this should all go in a new Least Favorite Things post, but I’m glad it is leading to some backlash against these companies that think they own us. Maybe all this media coverage might lead to real change.
Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent by Robb Knight
This one is a lot, but basically Perplexity AI broke the social contract of robots.txt and scraped websites without permission or a way to opt-out of them steeling creations for their profit. Worse, they made it impossible to fully block because they lie about their user agent.
For those of you who don’t know, robots.txt is a text file that website owners use to tell bots not to visit their site or only visit specific websites. It uses user agents to identify these bots. If you don’t know the user agent of the bot it becomes hard to block. Robots.txt doesn’t actually block anything and is just a polite suggestion to the creator of the bot to not crawl their website, nothing is stopping them from doing it anyway.
Perplexity AI basically ignored the robots.txt and has violated the social contract between website owners and bots. In response a bunch of personal websites have started resorting to more extreme measures as the law is clearly not going to protect them.
Rob wrote a followup post, multiple news sources covered it as well.
Ruben Schade also made us aware via a blog post of an new article where Microsoft basically said it was okay for them to steel things because it was on the internet.
Matthew Graybosch (Starbreaker) posted a few things about this as well. First telling bots to not index the site with robots.txt and then using .htaccess to outright block them.
Manuel Moreale also found that most crawlers don’t respect robots.txt so blocking them at the server level is probably the right way to go.
At the end of the day where does this leave us?
Well we already knew that big companies won’t do anything about it. The US is an oligarchy in all but name so we know that any legislation will be toothless and while the EU is doing good work it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Unless companies are punished for crimes they will see fines as cost of doing business. No judge wants a repeat of Arthur Andersen/ Enron, but unless businesses are dissolved and otherwise punished they will continue to do evil in the name of profits.
Takeaways from an AI event by Ruben Schade
Ruben want to an AI event and it went better than expected. People are still buying into the hype and marketing nonsense, but some are starting to wake up.
Trust by Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith talks about how adding “AI features” to products doesn’t make them better, it just makes the product untrustworthy. That is ontop of the other issues posted in the posts above.
The Fuck Shit Stack Called AI by Wouter Groeneveld
If you wanted more AI stuff to be mad at Wouter Groeneveld has you covered. He lists all sorts of fun things AI companies have been up to as well as how it has been failing.
YouTube
YouTube is my default time waster and I’ve been trying to cut back on all that infotainment junk, but there are still a lot of good things on the platform.
GOATed Anime You Can’t Watch Anymore by Mother’s Basement
Geoff Thew talks about the tragedy of media loss as licenses expire and the streaming consolidates. He talks about this issue through the lense of someone wanting to watch anime, but this is happening with everything from books and research papers to video games and movies. Culturally important works like Spec Ops: The Line might never be played legally ever again, the original version of Star Wars is near impossible to find, and anime like The Heroic Legend of Arslan and Baccano! are not readily available.
When culturally relevant material is held up in some copyright vault it takes away the ability for us to understand and build upon the culture we have collectively created. Corporations have shown time and time again that they do not respect culture and only see it as a way to make money, it is up to us to protect the works we enjoy instead.
Remember to seed when you sail the 7 seas and spread the word. It isn’t about getting things for free, it is about accessibility and ownership.
Also when you create new works consider using an Open Culture license like Creative Commons, GPL, or other permissive licenses so your works don’t get stuck in copyright hell.
Not Fun Games by Superdude
Superdude discusses the nature of art and videogames as an artistic medium. He asks if games need to be fun.
He doesn’t think games need to be fun or even completable, they can be painful even. Games like This War of Mine are intentionally bleak, depressing, and even sometimes boring to tell a story about war that few other pieces of art have ever done.
Art doesn’t need to be enjoyable and sometimes it shouldn’t be because not all stories are enjoyable ones.
He also has a video about one of my favorite anime of this year, Frieren - Beyond Journey’s End. You should watch Frieren if you haven’t already, then watch his video on it.
How Blogging Ruined the Web by Eric Murphy
Eric Murphy proposes that blogging ruined the web by introducing chronological feeds. It wasn’t blogging’s fault inherently, but it was the fact that blogging tools became the default way of interacting with the internet.
Before the feed people curated pages on their websites for longevity. They would update their pages, create tables of contents, and so on. Blogging made it easy to date posts, post, and forget them. The ease of blogging software that started coming out meant that anybody could make a blog and that diluted the writing being posted on the internet. This ease of use and chronological ordering eventually lead to social media and the way the internet stands now. At least that is what Eric says.
I do agree that not all sites that are blogs should be blogs and it is infuriating to see posts that aren’t curated in any way other than by date, but we have better tools now for making both blogs, general websites, and even digital books. The new way of counter culture non-commercial websites spawned from the web revival and IndieWeb movements have been a boon to the internet as a whole. The web is becoming interesting again. The big enemy of an open and interesting web is the corporate greed of big tech. We still have problems (look at mastodon), but blogging is no longer the problem.
We All Know It’s Happening by Second Though
This is a depressing one, but also a call to action. Second Though discusses the use of assassination, imprisonment, and other inhumane treatment of whistle blowers and activists.
Second Thought is a prominent anti-capitalist/leftist channel so there is a strong biased that direction, but he does make a great presentation of the problem with how monopolies (the natural progression of capitalism) leads to the death of people who speak out against these powerful people and corporations.
He also speaks of how the U.S. uses free speech as a tool to keep people under its control. The moment words are turned to action and it threatens the status quo people are suppressed. We can take catharsis in talking about these issues online, consuming entertainment commenting on the situation, and make jokes about the problems. The moment you take action or become too powerful, you are suppressed.
Creating in a space that isn’t your own by Evan Monsma
Evan Monsma talks about the struggle of being creative in a space you have little control over.
I can relate. My workspace is a corner of a shared living room and it is easy to let that keep me from writing and working on projects.
Sometimes we just need to do it anyway, even if our space isn’t ideal.
Earth has Terrible Worldbuilding by Curious Archive
Curious Archive talks about the absurdity of our world and the human condition.
There is a bit of nihilism in this one, but he ends on a hopeful note.
The answer isn’t Online Masculinity by struthless
This one is likely going to be triggering to some people. There is talk about abuse, suicide, and the capitalist hellscape of postmodernist thought in this one.
There is a lot of talk about masculinity on the internet and Struthless really hits home on why there are issues and what to do about them.
Struthless is a social commentary channel disguised as a self-help channel and might not be for everyone, but he makes some good points and always tries to give an answer to a problem he sees. There is some heart here.
