I thought this was just known
Do this tomorrow.
The best time to destroy a golf course was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
If you're still on Twitter, it's crucial you no longer respond in any way to anything a blue check says. If it's the most idiotic and vile nonsense, no matter how badly you want to dunk on them: don't! Block, mute, ignore and do not click. They now have financial motive to post the worst rage bait possible.
“The oldest olive tree in the world located on the island of Crete. It is estimated to be as over 3,000 years old and still produces olives.”
—
gotta share @telesilla’s tags -
#that was (give or take) around the time of the bronze age collapse #crete was no longer a major player #and the known world was kinda in turmoil #and yet someone planted an olive tree #i’m not saying there’s a direct parallel #but you know…systemic collapse thanks to many things including climate change #and it sucked for a lot of people #but they still needed olive oil #and idk man…maybe plant a tree #because the world has ended so many times #but the tree is still here #and so are we
the world has ended so many times
but the tree is still here
and so are we
“Last year, Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav made $246.6 million; Disney’s Bob Iger made $45.9 million; and Paramount Global CEO’s Bob Bakish made $32 million. These individuals make more money per year than almost any entertainment executive before them. Just a small portion of each major CEO’s annual salary could cover the cost of the guilds’ reasonable structural and financial demands, and yet, they say it’s not possible. How could that be? Because it’s not about the money. It’s about power and perception. Almost none of these CEOs built the companies they run. We are not negotiating with Jack Warner or Walt Disney. We’re not even negotiating with the people who enriched these companies, like producer Robert Evans at Paramount in the 1970s. These CEOs are basically people who just work there—and who have contracts that allow them very large amounts of money. And right now, they don’t want anyone to know that. They don’t want anyone to know that they don’t actually build anything. They don’t want anyone to see them capitulate and bend the knee to any degree by making a deal with the writers and actors who build the product they fund and distribute. They don’t want to reasonably negotiate with these artists, because they think it will make them look weak. They think it will make them look like chumps, make them look simply like the employees of these companies that they are.”
Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?
Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.
Now, it's just... Social media. That's it. Social media and news sites. And I'm tired of social media and I'm tired of the news.
Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?
Long collection of resources under the cut.
ALSO you should consider browsing Virtual Pet List and seeing if there are any pet sites you might be interested in playing. There is a whole genre of browser games right under your nose
Archive.org has free book lending world-wide (if you make a free account), and free software library of old games! Also a lot of weird public domain video materials.
Something just occurred to me.
You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?
Twitter’s algorithm is literally the social media equivalent of that.
In middle/high school I put all the music I had on an off-brand mp3 player and would just set it to Shuffle All. I quickly realized the player’s shuffle fuction wasn’t purely random–it was weighted towards my favorite songs (aka the songs with the most plays).
Only I had never chosen those songs. They were just the random few to pop up the first time I shuffled everything, and they started playing more and more frequently as this horribly short-sighted algorithm fed itself bad data, until I was so annoyed at those few songs that I stopped listening entirely.
Anyway a few years later Facebook did the exact same thing with my friends list, siphoning me off from seeing most of my feed because OBVIOUSLY I interacted with them the most, therefore they must be my besties. But really they were just the only people showing up for me to interact with in the first place, until I was down to just a few people I never really talked to from high school, a college prof, and my racist uncle I kept calling out.
And shortly after that, YouTube followed suit, replacing “Subscriptions” with “Recommended” as the default category, and trying to find “things I liked” when it was really just whatever three channels I’d watched last, whatever unrelated viral vid it wanted to push that week, and weird perennials like Whose Line clips or lockpick reviews or YTPs that seem to hibernate for months at a time then return like locusts.
All this to say: the big mysterious algorithms that now run all the major platforms on the internet are never acting in your best interests. They’re just that junky mp3 player’s Shuffle All with a fresh coat of paint, and, to be clear, this is by design. They are VERY good at what they do, which is funneling users into nice predictable pockets of content that advertisers can exploit.
If the WHOLE COUNTRY'S economy cannot work without the labor that UPS workers provide, than their labor is worth their demands and more.
No other conclusion can be rationally made from this information.