@allpurposemat I live in a city centre in a Nordic country; it's just that fibre rollout has been very, very patchy. (It's very expensive and time-consuming to dig here, compared to suburbs and the countryside.)
@datarama fair, fiber took a long time to arrive in the previous town I lived in due to similar reasons, and it was prohibitively expensive once it finally did.
I hope to see fast internet become accessible to everyone in the future, but we are still quite a ways away from that unfortunately.
I'm having my gallbladder removed tomorrow. I've been told that the procedure itself is pretty much routine, but also that I can expect to be in quite a bit of pain the next days and that I'll probably need morphine.
So I've stocked up on comic books / "graphical novels"; that's probably around the level my brain will be able to handle.
One of the things I've picked up is a really nice collector's boxed set of the Danish series "Valhalla" that ran from 1978-2009, and it made me think a bit about cultural power.
Comics weren't taken seriously as a medium in Denmark at the time (unlike eg. France and Belgium), and the main artist was just a high school kid. The first character sketches are literally on graph paper surrounded by his maths homework.
A long time ago, these stories were told around campfires. They became songs, and books, and theatre plays, and operas. In the 1970s they got made into comic books and a box office bomb cartoon, and that's the form a few million people (who live on top of the ashes of those campfires) now have as their main reference point to them.
I think that to me, Thor will probably always be this guy:
I am thinking about making a Lisp-based fantasy console as my next hobby project, as a way to break me out of the creativity funk I've been in for a while. What would the home computers I grew up with have been like if they were made by Commodore-Symbolics?
(But I still feel that it's kinda pointless - we can't share anything we make online anymore, unless we want to contribute free labour to loathsome AI companies. The nice thing about a fantasy console is that it's economically worthless.)
It's this feeling of pointlessness I can't shake, and haven't been able to for a year.
Aside from the general feeling of devaluation generative AI instills: Why would I create anything, when I cannot ethically share it with people? When "sharing" practically means "handing over work to AI companies intent on destroying people's livelihoods for their own profit", how could I possibly justify doing such a thing?
Of course, even if they nominally respect it, they'd probably just do what Stability AI did to get around this legal hurdle: Fund a "non-profit" to do the actual data gathering for "research", and then that non-profit just happens to provide a data set that Stability's commercial products use.