deadryn.

i would like to, i guess, complicate the "everyone should move away from streaming services and only distribute music using direct file downloads" sentiment that i see given all the time:

• many, many people nowadays, especially gen Z and younger, have very little conception of organizing and managing files on a hard disk (i have taught programming / web design to undergrads and been astounded by how much i have to explain about what a directory is. this is a well-documented problem that universities are finding themselves in). maybe they can do it, but they would never want to.
• a lot of phones and tablets and cheap laptops and other things people use as their primary devices have very little storage and/or have no option to expand storage. and in places where mobile data is dirt cheap, why would you bother having anything but a phone with 64 GB of storage?
• where do you start building your collection? the blogs where you could download mp3s are withered away. you can use sketchy, finicky telegram bots to download .ogg or .flac directly from spotify or tidal. bandcamp is lovely, for as long as it exists, but a lot of what you want to listen to is just not there. for some artists, nowadays, it is not easy to even find a place where you can legally purchase a download of their music!
• how do you sync your collection between your various devices? there are many ways to do this but you gotta set it up manually, yourself. if you are not terribly tech-inclined, getting it to work just the way you want is not a trivial task.

i agree the world would be better if more people did this, but current conditions create so many little barriers and frustrations - the hardware that people have, the software they have, the knowledge, the mobile data speeds, the lack of a communal infrastructure of mp3-sharing - so much friction in the experience that for the vast majority of people, they are never going to even try to get started. current conditions mean that to start making a habit out of this you kind of have to swim against the current and brave unfamiliar territory. I do this, and i love doing it, but i could not recommend it to most of my friends in a way that would convince them it is worth the time investment.

ANECDOTAL ZONE: i have been writing and releasing and sharing and talking about music online for a long time. i used to only distribute music by download. when i did this people would say - that's awesome! i'll listen to it. and they wouldn't. or they would download, listen once, and never again. (once i saw, in 2014, an EP i'd released in 2012, zipped, on the desktop of the pc of a friend. i asked if he ever listened and he said it keeps slipping his mind. never even got to unzipping it. (he liked it a lot when he finally listened though. thanks man)) when i finally bit the bullet and used a distro service and uploaded everything to youtube in, like, 2015 or 16, suddenly everyone listened. and people listened more than once, and bothered sharing it. i'm not thrilled about that.

i am not sure what conclusion to come to from this other than: most people who are not "into music" do not want to or are not able to curate a collection of files on their own machine, and even if they would like it in the abstract they do not want it hard enough to get over the learning curve and the initial friction of switching over. i do not know what to tell people to do instead of that, though.

yeah... after a few years of doing a soft boycott of uploading my work to streaming services, it feels like i'm just fighting a battle that was lost before i started fighting :/

“At SSC, we strongly condemn the systemic anti-Black racism that leads to such immigration policies. We believe that implementing the above recommendations constitutes one concrete way for the Canadian government to address and combat systemic anti-Black racism, provide safety and security for those fleeing conflict, and set an example for the world on supporting the Sudanese people.”

Direct link to letter

Direct link to sign the letter

You might've been hearing about Yuzu, the switch emulator, coming under fire. As part of the settlement, citra, basically the only 3DS emulator, was taken down with it. The github is gone, and I'm sure the website will be gone soon too.

https://github.com/citra-emu/citra
https://citra-emu.org/

This is serious. You were worried about the precedent, it's already happening. Nintendo will have this case to draw on for future litigation against any emulator it wants (see first comment, it was settled out of court; a quick search will yield many articles, take your pick). This effectively took down two emulators with just bullying alone (not rom sites like in the past); this still sets a bad precedent in my book.

I really want to drive this home: citra was the only playable 3DS emulator. 3DS emulation is currently dead, until someone picks it back up. The discord was nuked today, there is currently no organized community. Yuzu was not the only switch emulator, but there is no other 3DS emulator.

Edit: The final post on the citra discord:

Please don't pester the Yuzu/citra devs, this isn't their fault and their lives are probably ruined owing 2 million dollars in damages to a company worth 66 billion

For a long time I didn't really understand what the word "Mandate" meant in British Palestinian Mandate and then recently I encountered it again while reading about Cameroon and there being a "French Cameroon Mandate" and "British Cameroon Mandate" and so I got curious and looked into it. Apparently after WWI all the old German colonies and territories were relinquished to the League of Nations, who decided that some territories could self-govern while others were too "uncivilized" to self-govern and needed to be "guided" and stewarded by a "large developed nation" (which just so happened to always be one of the empires that won WWI). The "mandates" weren't technically colonies that belonged to the empire "caretaking" them... but they functionally were just colonies won in war.

In theory, they were supposed to be building the mandates towards the ability to self-sufficiently independent, but instead they actively intertwined the economies of the mandates with their "caretaker" empire as much as possible. After WWII, the UN grandfathered in the mandates as "trust territories" and was like, no really you guys, you need to build these colonies up to being independent nations you can't keep them. And, eventually, they did all become independent nations... but their economies had been deeply intertwined with their own "caretakers" and so neocolonialism continued after colonialism had ended.

IDK. Just thinking about this puts some sorts of things into perspective for me. It gives some insight into the mentality and ideology used to justify colonialism and how, again, clearly nobody genuinely believed what they were saying. They weren't setting up these mandates to be self-sufficient at all. They set them up to be inherently dependent without needing to be forced via the military to comply. It was simply a transition from military occupation to economic coercion. The countries they produced from these efforts even speak the languages of their "caretakers" as official languages. Yeah it's "totally not Colonialism" that Cameroon is a Francophone nation even though France was never her "colonizer" but her "caretaker."

The goal was to "civilize" the "uncivilized" mandate territories, so they could flourish without being a colony. And "civilizing" the people of Cameroon meant making them speak French? Dress like French people? Eat French foods? It says something about what is meant by "civilized."