Comic Strips

One of the things I deeply miss is sleeping under the stars. I grew up in a tiny rural town, and we used to have long power cuts during summer. I am talking like more than 9 hrs every day. During nights, we used to sleep on terrace to stay cool. I don’t miss the power cuts, but I also miss those uncomplicated days.

Now a days, I feel like we are living in a unholy mix of Cyberpunk, Orwellian and Kafkaesque dystopia.

to be fair, there wasn't much that needed blocking back then either. Mass tracking came about later.

Having a few hours of the day where you went offline because you wanted to because either you couldn't find anything interesting, your downloads were going to take hours, your PC was down, the internet was down or someone else wanted to use the computer.

So you had no choice but to go spend time going something else ... go for a walk, play a sport, hang out with your friends, read a book or just walk downtown for no reason. And in all that time you were out, you had no phone and no connection to the internet which meant your mind was free to not really think of much for a few hours.

I like the internet and I like social media but I dislike the ability of everyone having, wanting, needing a perpetual connection to everyone and everything all the time.

I feel like a junky sometimes ... I want to go offline but I'm so addicted to it that I never leave.

I do miss not being expected to have my phone with me all the time

I didn't have a cell phone for long after they became mainstream. I still remember a friend hitting me up on Facebook with a message saying he had been calling me all day and kept getting VM, asking why I don't answer my phone. I thoroughly enjoyed saying "I wasn't home and don't take my landline with me when I go out". I do have a cellphone now, and I dislike how people freak out if you don't respond within 10 minutes. Like, chill the fuck out dude, I'm doing things.

I do miss the era of physical media

I still buy vinyl records, and love listening to them. Thankfully they're hipster now, so you can get high quality, deep cut records for just about any album. I buy CDs at the thrift store for $0.25-$1.00. I've managed to buy every CD I lost throughout my life, plus everything else I always wanted, but couldn't afford. I even found the Pink Floyd Pulse album in perfect condition for $2.

Both are kinda true. We didn't have all of human knowledge in our pocket at all times, the ability to meet people of the same interests across the planet, and the ability to order pretty much anything we want within the day.

We also could afford a decent living situation, it wasn't a daily struggle to remain thin, and weren't seriously worried about a Christian Nationalism take over.

It is like everything that depended on shared institutions got worse and everything that depended on one individuals or single companies got better.

Had to walk to school, uphill both ways in -40C everyday, all year. Things were better back then.

It's just funny-sad. We both have it the easiest and the hardest.

I didn't laugh either. Though I think the contradiction of "life fucking sucked back then" followed by "life was fucking awesome back then" was supposed to be funny.

"back when good music was made" ad nauseum

And more moving parts that wear out, yay!

I mean, the 80s were an objectively awesome time for music.

(I wasn't alive yet)

I like today's music but it seems derivative. Maybe I'm full of shit, and feel free to tell me why, but it seems like music from my dad's youth (which I also like) was way different than mine, but nothing has changed that much since then.

You could take today's music and put it on a radio station in the 90s and it wouldn't seem out of place if you didn't know any better. I don't think the same is true for 90s music on a 60s or 70s station.

Western Europe, 1950s era. Capitalism had to make compromises. The soviet union was right next door - if people realized that seizing the means of production would improve their quality of life, they'd have a communist revolution on their hands. So concessions were made. "See, you don't need communism to have a good life, we're giving you all those things too!"

And finally, the capitalists won and the soviet union was no more, parceled up and sold to the capital owners in the west. Now they don't feel the need to make concessions without a major communist power in their backyard. So they roll back the progress slowly, hoping no one notices.

We had pogs, they have pogchamp. That's called progress.

As someone who grew up poor, I never got the record store experience, because if I wanted music, it would either be on the radio, or I'd need to play it myself.

The limited childhood budget would be like $20, which means, you could buy one CD with eight or ten tracks to listen on repeat, or.. buy something like SimCity 2000, for possibly hundreds of hours of fun (I had a family friend neighbor who threw out an old PC/donated it to us because they got outdated real fast in the 90s).

Accounting for inflation, that $20 is probably closer to $40-80 now, and a Spotify subscription is definitely a lot less costly than even that, for not one disk, but an endless amount of music.

The value proposition, the cost of entertainment has dropped precipitously, and now as a rich adult and technocrat, artificial intelligence can autonomously create new music, much in the way Spotify can discover tracks that "you like".

Every night, I've got 138-357 MB of brand new music, that no one's ever heard of, courtesy of my algorithm, recombining chunks of music from everything I've ever heard, to create brand new bangers.

If these tracks were released to Spotify, people wouldn't be able to tell they weren't made by people. AI is after all, a plagarism machine, built on the hard work of real people and artists.

But between plagiarism and piracy, I feel this new streaming world answers a great need:

The desire for culture, to be free, for any and all, to enjoy.

But it's also improved music in general. It used to be possible for an artist to make one or two good tracks for radio play and then create subpar filler for the rest of the album, but now all of the tracks of the album are sold separately so every track has to be of equal quality. Additionally you aren't bound to just the one song played on the radio when looking for new artists.

4:20? 🤷