the pirate's life
- In pursuit of a more pious life, I was reading a book on youth catechism the other day, and a passage from the section on the 7th commandment (Thou shalt not steal) stuck out to me. And then the realization hit me like a freight train - I've built my entire workflow of pirated media! For laughs, I thought about the prospect of going clean so to speak, and reflexively repudiated the idea. Was I really going to act in the interest of greedy corporations who always screw over the author/artist? [...]
muh japanese studies (piracy draft)
- I am currently in possession of about 1000 mp3s, a dozen or so ebooks, and hundreds of hours of Japanese anime ripped from YouTube and peer to peer torrenting networks, and haven't paid a cent for any of it. I have built my lifestyle around the critical consumption of media that I plan to store to some capacity indefinitely on my personal hard drives (in full in the case of music and the books, speech only in the case of the anime). [...]
being a nerd 15 and 30 years ago
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Considering I haven’t learned or come across anything of value to share to you guys, let’s indulge my imagination for a moment. What would my current life look like in previous generations? Hopefully, doing so puts the sheer exponential speed of technological growth into perspective and makes us grateful for the amenities of today.
2008 - A lot would surprisingly be the same.
- I’d have a thiqq secondhand laptop as my daily driver, and I’d probably still be into free and open source software. Coincidentally, it wasn’t much later that a student teacher would walk in with the most chuunibyou smirk on his face and pull out his laptop boasting, “Guys, it happened! Stand in awe at the power of Ubuntu,” as the rest of the class collectively yawned.
my first laptop - Gateway MT6705 (2007)
peak innawoods tech
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I was in a prepper mood, and began to think about what I would and wouldn’t be able to use after the collapse of civilization. Here is a non-exaustive table with some of the more drastic changes I can imagine, in no particular order. The headers refer to Kaczynsky’s [video] delineation of technology - left column being that which depends on a service grid or intricate parts that cannot be sourced by any one individual, and the right column being the opposite.
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