only if you aren't keen to share them with your friends.
if you watch an obscure show or movie or read a rare book, most people will be eager to share it with their friends, and their friends will be eager to learn about it. It's not the preferences or experiences that make you lonely, it's whether you trust your friends enough to share them.
truly, nothing is more fun than finding a cool movie and then showing your pals, who then also love it. That's the best!
well, it didn't say their descriptions were WRONG, just different. The insinuation is that highly social people were informed by what their peers think and say, so their descriptions will likely mirror other socially connected people. The lonely people would just have to come up with it on their own.
I know there's a tendency to dismiss groupthink as negative and wrong and bad, and for huge amounts of people that's true, but for small social groups it's often a sign that you've all become familiar with each other, experienced the same things and are just similar in general, and in terms of selecting for safety, these are all markers of who you will likely feel safest with.
there's a hypothesis that singing and instrument usage like drums came about as a way for a community to show cohesiveness and immediately find out who strangers are. By the time you've learned their songs you're not a stranger anymore, but if you can't sing or talk like they do, you're very likely a stranger to be wary of. Makes a lot of societal evolutionary sense.
we gotta stop chasing the whole "line go up" ideology. I know that's all capitalism is and how it exists, but we need to be okay with just simply doing well for the sake of doing well. You don't need to instantly go berzerk with investors and stocks and shit. unfettered growth will never truly pay off.
That's circular reasoning. You're defining "success" as "line go up" and then saying we made the "line go up" therefore we were successful. If you define success as GDP per capita, then sure, the countries with the highest GDP per capita won. However, even by other flawed metrics, such as Real GDP with purchasing power parity taken into account, India and Russia are also top of the list[1]. Even this metric is flawed, though, because humans are complicated and GDP != happiness or success.
Any single number is worthless for comparing quality of life, per capita or not. How do you use a number to take into account the fact that some people don't have access to healthcare in the US or "freedom" in Russia?
My point isn't that GDP per capita is the end-all-be-all of quality of life metrics. It's that pointing out that Russia and India are at the top of the GDP list, and therefore GDP per capita (your previous comment seems to conflate the two) is a flawed metric, is such a poor argument that you're not giving the pro-GDP side a fair shake and possibly misrepresenting their argument. No "line goes up" or "GDP = quality of life" proponent thinks India has high quality of life because their country level GDP tops the list.
Pick any measure you like. Free markets are the most prosperous.
> India and Russia
Do you really think their standard of living is higher than the US? Why is Seattle full of Russian and Indian immigrants? Why do you think zillions of immigrants are coming to the US? Because the US is a hellhole?
> GDP != happiness or success.
If you're happier being poor, just give away all your stuff to your favorite charity. Nobody is forcing you to be prosperous.
China is the worst example you can make for that point. They're sitting atop of a giant pile of debt, particularly in housing, and millions of people have lost their life savings as a result. China's economy is a house of cards just waiting to come crash down, and that's without the threat of the CCP wanting to take over Taiwan.
I had a great conversation about this the other day with a bunch of strangers- we all shared the exact same early 00's internet experience and were all reminiscing about those halcyon days
The internet has completely consolidated itself into a few websites now, and that's the entirety of people's experience using the internet now. They go to, at most like 5 or so separate sites regularly if that many and that's it. As well, social media is made to feel ephemeral so you must check it every 10 minutes or you'll have lost loads of context or information and be out of the loop- forget about doing it only once a day. Since Twitter, tumblr, instagram etc have closed their APIs, there's no chance at accessing updates through an external reader, and you're forced to scroll and scroll to get anything, most of which now isn't even who you follow but rather just what they assume you might like or what is garnering the most rage engagement at the time.
back in the old days, "surfing" was a huge part of your internet usage: after you checked up on your forum threads and usenet keywords- which was easy to do since you were able to simply read up and then you were caught up for the day- you could check out affiliate links or webrings for new sites to enjoy. Surfing around was lots of fun and you found a bunch of new stuff all the time that way, and almost all of it was made by hand by one or a few people.
I enjoyed Live Journal, where if you were a fan of whatever early 00s TV series or movie, there'd be a community made there for you to go and instantly fold in with a bunch of other fans. No need for pretense or establishing context, they'd all watched the show as well, and you wouldn't have to tone down references or discussion for laymen who stumbled across it like you do for most social media today. You can't have an in-depth conversation about something you enjoy on social media, and if you try, you're in a crowded room yelling over other people walking by, everyone can hear and see, and you're forced to act like you're being observed by thousands of passers-by instead of having a conversation in a room.
the vibe is so different. Everyone I know who used the internet back then remembers it fondly, and kids today who never did think it's a much better idea. What do we have to do to just... go back?
Gemini gave me a LJ vibe last time I checked it out.
Other than that, "just go back"? The old mailing lists are much quieter than they were now that quite a few of us are dead and only a few of our kids had any interest, but many of mine are still chugging, complete with high context in depth conversation.
Blogs felt like digital degradation back when Winer was first pushing them, but as they've proven to be better than their successors I still have buckets of them in my newsboat* config.
The kids wail about "discovery". When I grew up, finding other geeks was a physical matter of 'zines and cons, uphill in the snow, both ways. Sure, now you won't get them served up in your algorithmic feed, but it's still much easier than in the old days: you go click click click click click click click click. It's real easy.
(but those clicks have to be choices, not scrolling)
> “When I use a tech,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it connects how I choose it to connect (albeit sometimes more than less).”
> “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make a tech serve so many different purposes.”
> “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”
LiveJournal of course famously got sent on a long march to Russia because a group of photographers didn't like that they were using their photos while having an active moderation team.
Did you catch the ages of the judges that decided the case? They made Biden look spry. Welcome to the system that determines the legitimacy of who gets to create media.
So now instead you get the enshittification and the media that can survive in a section 230 environment (random lossy memes, onlyfans and mr.beasts).
Personally I built a LJ-type of site for a single niche (kpopping.com if you're curious) and there's a handful of sites like mine, but you need to look hard -- in most cases they'll be buried by Google under a dozen corporate fandom-types and don't forget the wordpresses with neon backgrounds that have figured out how to install Yoast-- never can get too many of them either.
art is subjective, you need to really think about it, and reflect on it, to engage with it and enjoy it at its greatest depths. For some, this exercise is part of the joy of art. It's like discovering new things, every time. Discovering and considering things in subjective art is almost addictive, and it's very fulfilling.
but that's a lot of mental energy. Intellectual laziness would prefer things be black and white, correct or incorrect, good or bad, and then once things are sorted into one of those binaries, lean back and stop thinking about it because it's now sorted. Once everyone's decided that the Rothko paintings are just big blocks of a single colour, they're easy to make and boring to look at, then there's no further thought needed.
I feel like generative AI art is kindof a culmination of this: the idea of artists and creative people deserving to live and be supported simply by the things they contribute to society in the form of art and humanities, because it isn't hard labour or a trade, is laughable to the point of genuine hostile animosity. It's hard to even describe it until you've experienced it. Seeing people get angry at artists or writers or creators and thinking them being paid for the art they create is unfair: they produce it like a cow makes milk, so why the hell should they be paid for what they'd be making anyway? And if an artist labours to create their art it's more valuable and "better" than someone who piles candy in a corner and writes a story about it resembling how their gay partner was slowly diminished by AIDS. Anyone can do that!
I wish I knew how better to instill appreciation of art and artists in people. Seeing AI generated picture enthusiasts laugh and jeer openly at the artists whose pieces comprised its dataset in the first place as useless and that they're going to starve now has left a bitter taste in my mouth.
I think you and share all of the same premises about art, and I'd love to get a drink and have a conversation... But: Please don't use Rothko as a negative example! Have you seen any Rothko pieces in person? They are by no means solid blocks of color (though some do look it in reproduction), and they grab my attention immediately. Like, they dominate any room they're in, and pull me back towards them over and over again. It's hard to articulate, but there's something both stimulating and restful about his canvases. Especially after walking through a gallery, or a city, where my visual senses can get overloaded, standing in front of a Rothko is like an immensely welcome psychic reset. I used to walk across the bridge to the Tate Modern specifically to go stand in the Rothko room for a while.
I realize that's all subjective taste, but I'm hardly the only person who reacts to him that way. You're right that lots of people assumed the secret was "hey, it's just large blocks of color", but none of his imitators produce anything like his effect on me. There's something else going on with his work.
I used Rothko as an example of a famous and in my opinion highly underrated artist that those who "hate art" love to use an example of "bad art" because "anyone could just do that". Of course his pieces are breathtaking and once you're aware of the process of how they're created it changes them forever for you.
a lot of capitalism is just gambling, and being able to rig the casino so you keep winning doesn't somehow make you a smarter gambler, it doesn't make gambling less wrong, it doesn't make you more deserving because you figured it out. The entire thing is a wash. The people in control of making laws shouldn't be exploiting those laws. What's the point of laws at all, then?
the phenomenon of "red sprites", massive discharges of electricity upwards into the ionosphere that counter every single lightning strike, are only now being observed and photographed.
these energy ejections are SO powerful, they temporarily cause miniature aurora displays for a split second, by ionizing the same layer of the atmosphere where they appear. it's amazing to see photos of it.
The wikipedia page actually has some incredible images as well, including several from space that show their scale and position in the atmosphere (high up)
yeah, its pretty cool how most of these photos they were trying to take a picture of something else and the red sprites just happened to be in the right place because of a storm front moving in.
Sprites and similar phenomena have been reported for many years by pilots and others, but scientists didn't believe them until recently because it didn't fit their flawed models. It's similar how scientists didn't believe centuries of stories about rogue waves from mariners until one was recorded with a buoy in 1995.
what I've noticed is that many arguments have little to do with you, the "opponent", or the topic argued about or even which of you is right.
it's more about the arguer re-enforcing their beliefs of being correct, and therefore morally righteous and powerful, to themselves. If you can argue your point successfully or at least cause your opponent to secede or give up and ragequit or block you, you won, because it isn't about correctness but power to remove or eliminate their influence from the argument, and if taken to the farthest conclusion, society at large.
you begin noticing that all these conversations are about power over the opponent and if they could humiliate them enough- either with numbers by ratioing them with chatgpt bot replies or reddit downvotes or whatever- they will be silenced and you can pretend it was your power that did it.
It reminds me of catcalling on the street. The guy catcalling a girl knows very well they won't turn her on, she isn't going to be receptive, she isn't going to fuck him. She might just shoot him an angry look. But it doesn't matter because that wasn't the goal, the goal was to get a temporary sexual power trip- you just made that girl think about you against her will!! you were powerful enough to occupy her mind for that moment. You win!
you also see it in the sort of cultish thinking of all kinds of ideological things like wild flat earthers or MRAs or pickup artists or pizzagaters or whatever stupid shit. It's never about the thing they say they're all about, they don't really care about the earth being flat, or men's rights, or manipulating girls, or child abuse- they care about feeling like heroes to themselves and their peers- culturally righteous and powerful.
instead, don't do it because it's disrespectful to people. A lot of people weren't made aware- or didn't have the option- to object to that TOS change. Saying "well, THOSE guys do it! why can't I!" isn't a mature stance. Don't take their images because it's the right thing to do
if you watch an obscure show or movie or read a rare book, most people will be eager to share it with their friends, and their friends will be eager to learn about it. It's not the preferences or experiences that make you lonely, it's whether you trust your friends enough to share them.
truly, nothing is more fun than finding a cool movie and then showing your pals, who then also love it. That's the best!