When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
As a musician and composer it really took the life out of my identity as a composer seeing an alternative to bandcamp never really form and then one day waking up to it bought by Epic.
I didn’t cry that day, but I might as well have, it made me extraordinarily sad to see that headline and I imagine there are actually countless talented musicians out there who will never actuate on their creative vision because the environment for music production is at this point, downright hostile towards artists and musicians considering the amount of work music production is.
It takes an obscene amount of work to take a song from something that has promise to being as polished as listeners demand nowadays, and listeners won’t even give your song a chance on actual speakers. You have to twist and warp your music so it sounds good on essentially monophonic phone speakers with shitty frequency coverage or otherwise nobody will give it a try on speakers for actually listening to music. Doesn’t matter though, nobody is going to actually support you for the art you make.
🙃
It seems like resonate.coop is still around tho which seems like a cool idea (a coop owned streaming service where listeners can stream-to-own a song).
Gotta love all my friends who are really into music who happily use Spotify and don’t give a shit it is a weapon of class warfare being used on musicians disguised as a music player!
I basically lost all my drive to make something of my love of creating music seeing how little anyone in my society actually values music or musicians in terms of material support and reward, it is honestly pretty scary how broken music has become.
I’ve always said the Pro-Palestine crowd and the MAGAs are basically the same people.
Why because you are an ideologically bankrupt centrist that finds it convenient to equate protestors desperately trying to stop a genocide with MAGA heads… who tried to violently overthrow the US government because it wasn’t hateful enough for them?
You aren’t welcome in the progressive coalition if you desire to ignore reality in favor of a “both sides” narrative to the degree you are doing. We are talking about a genocide here and you are saying the people trying to stop it are crazy, violent hateful extremists who are obsessed with hurting trans people for no reason, fucking over women and taking power away from everybody but white men.
I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
I think you should talk about accessibility here, and everywhere else you visit on the fediverse. Especially here though. Accessibility isn’t just an ethical impetus to make community spaces accessible to everyone not just ~90% of people.
I am not dyslexic but I use the Open Dyslexic font all the time because it is easy to read when my brain’s word processing neurons are totally fried from a stressful day.
I am not color blind but I love color blind options in games for the UI since it often simplifies the AI’s color scheme down to a point that makes me feel more relaxed.
I am not deaf, but I love closed captions as they let me watch things at any volume, and allow me to process what people are saying better.
I am not a wheelchair user, but I can’t count the amount of times wheelchair ramps have been useful and helpful in my life (especially when moving big bulky things on wheels).
I am not someone who typically gets powerfully triggered by things that evoke a past trauma, but I find content warnings have massively improved my mental health when using social media because they bring agency into the microblogging/twitter form, an agency I never thought about not having, where I don’t get ambushed by real world, depressing news that I want to learn about but need to check in with myself before processing (especially if I went onto mastodon for cute cat pics, not to catch up on the latest shitty thing).
I am not queer, but every single fucking piece of accessibility accommodation that queer people and their allies have fought for has meaningfully made my life better. You know what drops the bottom out of toxic masculinity violently forcing men into super unhealthy and emotionally stunted existences? A bunch of queer and proud people drilling holes into the foundations of binary gender and blowing it the fuck up so toxic men are too busy panicking about trans people to keep building the widely accepted definition of masculinity towards even more toxic places.
I am ADHD and the world shits on actually accommodating me everyday, to the point that loved ones hurt me constantly even when they are trying to do the right thing because that hatred of ADHD people goes so deep down into the US protestant work ethic hellscape… that it is like a really bad trip that people don’t seem to be able to escape even if they wanted to.
I know what it is like to not be accommodated at a very deep level. It is violence.
I also know what it is like to be in a community that prioritizes accommodating the “edge cases” of humans (I mean that in a kind way), i.e. making sure the people most sensitive to overstimulation have a space they can retreat to and chill for a bit, or making sure the person in the wheelchair can access the building, or making sure that images have image descriptions for blind people. It is missing the point to lament “oh but these people are outliers from the dataset of humans, we shouldn’t waste too much time accommodating them”. Accommodation is HOW we innovate and evolve the Fediverse, and the barometer for how well we are doing can be almost directly translated into how well the Fediverse accommodates those with disabilities and specific needs (and also how suffocatingly white a space we make the Fediverse by tone policing black and brown people from life experience’s we don’t know shit about).
It is funny how people will readily agree that the challenges NASA has faced and overcome with putting a measly handful of spaceships and humans into space has had many indirect, but nonetheless MAJOR benefits to our society in the development of technologies that went on to be useful for entirely different contexts. The challenges of making the Fediverse (or any community space) accessible are no different except though they are far more diverse and far more vital.
yawn the economics don’t matter, this about beginning the process of completing commodifying CGI work so conceptually anybody doing the labor of animation can constantly have the threat of AI replacing held over them.
In this sense, as I have said many times before, it doesn’t matter if AI works well in this capacity or not, it only matters that AI facilitates a permanent reduction in the leverage animators and computer graphics artists have to fight for a decent quality of life and living wage.
thoughts (no self harm talk, just sadness!)___ My society clearly hates me and doesn’t want me to exist, my parents bought the modern austerity riddled American dream hook line and sinker and so they believed they shouldn’t help me too much after I became an adult and basically they severed that deep link between parent and child for… some shitty neoliberal ideologies that are empty as fuck? I am a millenial and I exist, I don’t want to, even though I was given a lot of privilege when I was younger I am ADHD as fuck and life is honestly genuinely miserable. The world wasn’t designed for my brain, it was designed to shunt someone with my brain into jail or a death spiral of some kind of addiction (you ever looked up the percentage of prisoners in US prisons that likely have ADHD? It is shocking).
It would be one thing if things were getting better for ADHD people, but they are quickly accelerating towards being worse in every aspect, random ADHD med shortages because the FDA wants us to die, more and more executive function required for basic tasks (more paperwork, more scheduling, more consequences for not following rigid schedules perfectly), less and less energy and free time available left over after work, less and less tolerance for simple mistakes at work, more complex and brittle steps to get healthcare help that involve a million carefully designed give-up points custom designed to coax an ADHD person into never utilizing their healthcare because they can never get through the hoops to do it. The job application process of sending out resumes to online job after online job alone is catastrophic for my ADHD. I am not going to hurt myself, or by extension others around me, after all that is precisely what is making me sad in the first place. I have lost that flame inside me because I know I won’t be able to live a fulfilling life where I am genuinely happy in a way that I don’t always go to sleep at night wishing I could disappear painlessly and be forgotten by all…. unless I win the lottery either literally or get the rare job that doesn’t treat me like shit. (Then I am happy and am surrounded by a bunch of dying people like me that I have to try to ignore…?). It is hard because therapists are usually older adults and they just can’t understand this depression as a rational response from an entire chunk of a generation rather than an individual pathology. Focus on the positives! they say….and I think… I will eventually die of old age or health problems (hey can’t afford the doctor or dentist so that will speed it up :P ) and wont have to force myself to survive in a society with rules designed to put me in a constant state of suffering while constantly coding my desperate struggle to keep basic aspects of my life together as laziness, naiveness, lack of work ethic, lack of personal responsibility etc…
Thank you so much, I deeply appreciate these kinds of posts that don’t attempt to fix me but just engage in solidarity :)
on a related note, I left christianity a year ago, and holy fuck has that been an adjustment. most of my optimism was always rooted in religion, and without that worldview, it’s suddenly on me to find new reasons to be even a little hopeful, even to want to be alive. I’m not suicidal, but for a while there I couldn’t say that I wasn’t. I do feel like I’m happy to be alive now, and that’s great, but holy crap this is not as easy as it was when I believed in an all-powerful benevolent god. ah well.
I think the least interesting question about religion is whether god exists or not. There are many things you can take away from yourself about christianity that don’t have anything to do with a bearded man in the sky existing or not. It is enough to appreciate the beauty of how a spiritual perspective on life and the beings around you can lead you into a happier, better life even if you that spiritual perspective is fundamentally not reflective of science or reality as we know it.
It is like how I don’t necessarily believe we have souls (I mean whatever, but there is zero scientific evidence of souls or even suggestions that they exist), but the concept of a soul and how it can be affected by the world and other people is an incredibly useful way of looking at the human condition. It is a concept and word that does not derive its power from the fact that it exists, and you can appreciate that outside of believing there is something like a soul literally imbued into ourselves in some magic/spiritual way.
i’m sorry for the dreams that’ve been taken from you and the injustices you’ve experienced. you deserved better, and so did I, and so did most of us. thank you for being honest about it. 🫂
Literally nobody was confused by those grammatical mistakes, this is just a stupid grammatical rule designed to be a gotcha that grammar people can wield as proof that someone isn’t well educated.
Put the apostrophe wherever the hell you want, just write in a clear way that gives enough context that unless someone is a computer program incapable of tolerating slight grammatical mistakes they will understand fine.
Notice how they don’t have that nice big pretty volcano cone shape? It just looks like some drunk geologists scribbled on a map and drew circles around a low lying area with a lake or two in it and called it a “volcano” or a “volcanic zone”.
The reason though is that the BIGGEST and most destructive volcanic eruptions tend to happen with lava/magma that doesn’t flow very well and like when you get a stuffed nose, everything gets blocked up. Like many of us, these volcanos don’t solve the problem and go take a decongestant or blow their nose, they just sit there sniveling and stewing, failing to release the pressure that keeps building and building and building.
These eruptions are called felsic eruptions (the opposite of mafic, goopy eruptions you have seen footage of from Hawaii where the lava comes out like a fluid). An immense amount of gas is released by magma as it becomes exposed to the surface (which then we call it “lava”) as the gas is no longer kept in the magma at immense pressures. The magma can’t flow and “pass the gas” so to speak so a plug forms and what you get is a terrifyingly big pressure cooker that just builds and builds like that person on the plane next to you that just keeps sniffing and sniffing and never blowing their nose.
When the built up pressure finally overcomes the plug, the resulting explosion is so catastrophic it doesn’t leave a clean volcano shape. What you are left with is an uneven low topography dotted with lakes that marks the site of an incomprehensibly large explosion, hence the topography of Yellowstone, Wyoming and the Taupo Volcanic Zone on the North Island of New Zealand.
TIME FOR SOME STATS THAT WILL BREAK YOUR BRAIN
"The Taupō Volcanic Zone has produced in the last 350,000 years over 3,900 cubic kilometres (940 cu mi) material, more than anywhere else on Earth, from over 300 silicic eruptions [my edit: “Felsic” means “has lots of silica/silicic (silicic? seriously wikipedia?) and wants to form minerals high in silica like quartz and feldspar”], with 12 of these eruptions being caldera-forming. Detailed stratigraphy in the zone is only available from the Ōkataina Rotoiti eruption but including this event, the zone has been more productive than any other rhyolite predominant volcanic area [my edit: Rhyolite is a record of catastrophe, it is a Felsic, silica-rich igneous rock like Granite except it cooled FAST at the surface instead of in big underground “batholiths” (that make up a good portion of the Canadian Shield and the NE of the US among other places) where the minerals had time to grow into big pretty crystals, same ingredients as Granite but with much more exciting baking instructions] over the last 50,000 odd years at 12.8 km3 (3.1 cu mi) per thousand years. Comparison of large events in the Taupō volcanic zone over the last 1.6 million years at 3.8 km3 (0.91 cu mi) per thousand years versus with Yellowstone Caldera’s 2.1 million year productivity at 3.0 km3 (0.72 cu mi) per thousand years favours Taupo…
…The last major eruption from Lake Taupō, the Hatepe eruption, occurred in 232 CE. It is believed to have first emptied the lake, then followed that feat with a pyroclastic flow that covered about 20,000 km2 (7,700 sq mi) of land with volcanic ash. A total of 120 km3 (29 cu mi) of material expressed as dense-rock equivalent (DRE) is believed to have been ejected, and over 30 km3 (7.2 cu mi) of material is estimated to have been ejected in just a few minutes."…
…“The main extremely violent pyroclastic flow travelled at close to the speed of sound and devastated the surrounding area, climbing over 1,500 m (4,900 ft) to overtop the nearby Kaimanawa Ranges and Mount Tongariro, and covering the land within 80 km (50 mi) with ignimbrite [my edit: the name for pyroclastic flow deposits, i.e. pumice and ash, that kind of thing]. Only Ruapehu was high enough to divert the flow. The power of the pyroclastic flow was so strong that in some places it eroded more material off the ground surface than it replaced with ignimbrite. There is evidence that it occurred on an autumn afternoon and its energy release was about 150 megatons of TNT equivalent. The eruption column penetrated the stratosphere as revealed by deposits in ice core samples in Greenland and Antarctica.”
Such a simple but beautiful act of love to spend your last moments of life doing that knowing that if those photos might help people understand volcanoes and their associated hazards even a tiny better in the future it was worth it.
You could call it tragic, and of course it is, but I prefer to call it badass.
Any program can be added to steam by putting the Steam Deck into Desktop Mode (hold power button and select Desktop Mode), finding the app in the start menu Right clicking and selecting “add to steam” from the menu. Remember the “game” added to steam will have its own separate controller profile, choose keyboard and...
I am still in the process of ironing out how I want my control scheme, but when looking for a web browser to run in Gaming Mode on my Steam Deck that worked well (Firefox was being funky when run in Gaming Mode/Big Picture) I experimented a little bit with Qutebrowser....
Next you are going to tell me Hamas is a pathetic rag tag group of resistance fighters that could never even hope of fighting a “war” against Israel (like how, would they beat fighter jets and some of the most advanced main battle tanks in the world with some assault rifles, rpgs and maybeeeee some IEDs?).
🤪
It would be one thing if the resistance fighters had any amount of territory to hide in, but Gaza is essentially an open air prison that takes an f16 all of probably a minute and a half to fly over on afterburners, there is simply no way for Hamas to really even take the first step of fighting a traditional war with Israel since one must concentrate their troops to win a traditional war, and Hamas doing so in any numbers would lead to near instant and complete obliteration by the hands of Israel fighter bombers, artillery, or troops backed by main battle tanks.
This is not a war, this is a genocide of the Palestinian people.
I am making the claim that no matter how much technical debt there is in a code, it is not remotely comparable to occultism and demons.
I mean I am all ears, convince me computers don’t have as much arbitrary bullshit and strict specific details to processes, beliefs and rituals that don’t correspond to any intuitive rationality?
The last sentence is particularly confusing because it’s implying that most if not all company protocols are just as arbitrary and supernatural as attempting to summon a demon.
I think division is actually very important, younger generations face an existential need to sever themselves from the worldview and belief systems their parents raised them under (and return to value systems that have embodied humanity for literally the entire rest of our history) in order to save as much of humanity and nature as possible.
Inaction as well is possibly our most potent weapon against the coming mass experience of suffering that climate change will wrought upon us. We all have to stop doing, we need to grind the global economy to a halt and scare the shit out of capitalists to the point that bargaining with us is preferable to letting the scarier alternative happen.
I take this as a valid critique of myself and the way I write sentences like contestants on those shopping blitz game shows where you get a limited time but you can keep whatever fits in your cart if you make it back to the finish line in time.
The metaphor is imperfect because I (clearly) don’t have a timer.
The neoliberal colonialist stranglehold world order is collapsing so fast it is making my head spin.
The centrist, austerity minded democrats who have enjoyed power in the US for the last couple of decades are absolutely self immolating, they look like utter absolute murderous clowns when they claim with a straight face that the Palestinian Genocide is not a Genocide.
Make no mistake this is a turning point, no matter what happens in this election, this kind of democrat who supports whatever Israel does because… well because… to the point of pretending an ongoing genocide being done with your weapons and fighter jets doesn’t exist is toast.
No matter what happens in this election, the kind of mainstream media that is towing the line Israel by giving them complete diplomatic and narrative immunity towards being the bad guys when Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinians every day as we speak… it is detonating the strangehold of conservative, ideologically bereft centrist who have been trying to manage the global status quo without actually conceding to progressive changes to it.
The critical change here is that milquetoast democrats used to be globally regarded as at least somewhat rationale and ethically minded compared to the dumpster that is american conservatism, but this genocide is thoroughly proving to the world that most centrist democrats are just the good cop to the bad cop republicans, and if push comes to shove a good cop has no problem filling in for the role of bad cop when they perceive it will retain their violent power.
I really don’t think the rich and powerful who controlling basically everything in the US have any idea how deep a majority of US citizen’s revulsion over the pointlessness of the Iraq war has burrowed into their psyche. They really don’t get it, they think we are just going to roll over and accept US imperialism/military industrial complex as “just the way it is honey” like our parents did but we are FAR stronger and more politically aware than our parents were and FARRRRRRR more jaded in a way that makes us suspect of the basic legitimacy of the military industrial complex at every turn we have to interact with it.
Errrr…. you realize the US is one of richest nations that has ever existed and yet ~95% of people living in it are one or two crises away from collapsing?
There are homeless everywhere and if anything centrist democrats are giddy to criminalize the state of being without a home. Biden was an instrumental part of the crime bills that came to define some of the most vivid failures of neoliberalism. Kamala Harris has a similar history. Have these politicians evolved and changed? Yes of course but that isn’t my point.
My point is that is it really disputable at this point that modern centrist leftwing political groups in the US, UK and similar political environments are as associated with austerity policies as rightwing politicians? There are degrees of difference, but it is a contrast of magnitude not of ethics of attitude.
I have unfortunately not been able to figure out how to load controller configurations that I have shared to steam into games that weren’t the original game I made that controller config in. I click on the controller layout and it fails to load and reverts back to the layout I already had selected....
After announcing increased prices, Spotify to Pay Songwriters About $150 Million Less Next Year (www.billboard.com)
When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not...
EXCLUSIVE: ICC seeks arrest warrants against Sinwar and Netanyahu for war crimes over October 7 attack and Gaza war | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
For discussing Fediverse accessibility, where would you recommend me to go? Or stay here?
I’m asking because it is really difficult to find a place for discussing accessibility in Fediverse posts beyond the limits of any one Fediverse server application....
Major Pixar Layoffs, Underway In Restructuring - 14% of workforce cut, which is 175 of 1300 people, is part of Disney's cost-cutting measures. (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
The move, less than reported 20%, was delayed because of production schedules & studio not focusing on direct-to-streaming series but on its films.
Consumers are so demoralized by inflation and high rates they've given up on saving for the American Dream and are spending money instead, economist says (fortune.com)
checkmate, big geology!! (mander.xyz)
Recording & Editing Steam Deck Gameplay Videos With Kdenlive (lostpod.space)
Any program can be added to steam by putting the Steam Deck into Desktop Mode (hold power button and select Desktop Mode), finding the app in the start menu Right clicking and selecting “add to steam” from the menu. Remember the “game” added to steam will have its own separate controller profile, choose keyboard and...
A Solution To Web Browsing (in Qutebrowser) And Text Input Without Touchscreen Keyboard Or Mouse (piggybacking on Vim keybindings) (sopuli.xyz)
I am still in the process of ironing out how I want my control scheme, but when looking for a web browser to run in Gaming Mode on my Steam Deck that worked well (Firefox was being funky when run in Gaming Mode/Big Picture) I experimented a little bit with Qutebrowser....
Pentagon says none of the aid unloaded from US pier off coast of Gaza has been delivered to broader Palestinian population (edition.cnn.com)
Stardew creator won't rush Haunted Chocolatier: "better to have a good delayed game than a bad game on time" (www.eurogamer.net)
In Star Trek, Commander Data is socially awkward because he lacks training data. This might be because he was built and developed in isolation from the rest of society.
descriptions of Demons and the arcane rituals required to banish them feverishly relayed by occultists in ghost/horror stories are a direct homomorphism to computers and actually how awful they are
Unironically....
deleted_by_moderator
‘Not genocide’ says Biden after ICC warrants sought (www.google.com)
Biden: What's happening in Gaza is not genocide (www.gmanetwork.com)
“What’s happening in Gaza is not genocide. We reject that,” Biden said at a Jewish American Heritage Month event at the White House....
An Easy Way To Copy A Controller Layout Configuration From One Game To Another
I have unfortunately not been able to figure out how to load controller configurations that I have shared to steam into games that weren’t the original game I made that controller config in. I click on the controller layout and it fails to load and reverts back to the layout I already had selected....