deadryn.

😭😭😭

Back in high school, I bore witness to the events of Snyderville, the unbelievable saga of a small-town fascist power grab that briefly turned a half square mile in northern Indiana into a two-person autocracy.

(A disclaimer: There aren't a lot of primary sources about this that are easy to access anymore. Many of the specific details in this article, including all the images, come from a student documentary that's still on YouTube. The rest are drawn from local news reports and my own memories of what went down. I may get some details wrong or I may have embellished some things in memory, but otherwise, the story you are about to hear is true.)

so Linux got power-leveled by Valve in recent years to now be an entirely viable platform for gaming, which is certainly an interesting future to be living in after the main thing you'd hear about it in the late naughts and early 2010's was "oh yeah sure Photoshop and Office may work well in WINE, but i'm a gamer and barely any games work besides WoW"

but now i'm feeling pretty bad for creatives (visual artists, authors, journalists, programmers, anything) who are going to imminently be forced to reckon with the dissonance resulting from the combination of:

• angry about everything they do already being fed into GPT models without their consent, and Microsoft getting exponentially more forceful about baking that and other cybercrud into Windows on every level
• annoyed at people telling them to switch to Linux (perhaps they've even tried before, but, say, their tablet didn't have pressure sensitivity when they ran their ClipStudioPaintToolSai CS6 on wine, and Krita and GNU IMP didn't work for them)
• staying on Windows 10 without becoming a ransomware/etc. liability isn't an option past its EoL in 2025
• trying to rough it on Windows 11+ will mean playing whack-a-mole with opt-out settings and whatever new de-bloat scripts appear (and fixing whatever they break) for the rest of time
• getting a Mac would be all the cost of overpriced hardware and the pain of migration (if their tools even exist there) just to push the rot of capital into a different corner for a while

(for whatever it's worth, my professional opinion for anyone who wants to try Linux but is feeling lost at sea amid all this is to imagine an edited version of that Verge article about buying whatever Brother printer is on sale, but it's about putting whatever the latest Fedora Plasma Desktop is on a flash drive and booting it. i don't even use Fedora any more or like RedHat much at all; it's just the pragmatic choice for newcomers in current year. yes, moreso than Debian derivatives. a discussion of why would be far too exhausting and miss the point of this post. but if you (and the nerdiest person you know that's gonna be helping you with it) have a strong preference, then as Debians/Ubuntus go, you could do much worse than Mint -- which apparently even includes a built-in tutorial nowadays.)

This is the reason why I pivoted my entire workflow recently to Krita and why I'd slowly shifted the rest of it to open source over the last four or so years.

I'm on Linux Mint full time now sure, but I did have to sacrifice CSP and a bunch of smaller convenience art tools to do so. Being a full time artist that makes games and not a "gamer" per-say has this dissonance to it, in which things are the best they ever have been on Linux atm, but are still far less convenient or UX friendly than fighting Windows.

As an Artist at the moment options are insanely limited.

• Linux
  • Has a learning curve no matter what evangelists will say
  • Has a huge elitism culture that doesn't take critique well, making it hard to trouble shoot the more esoteric issues artists will encounter (as creative things just aren't as platform mature)
  • Genuinely lacks a lot of tools that professionals need (though folks are trying to fix this)
  • May have solutions to most problems, but offers up some of the worst user experience out there
  • [Edit] I get that the last two of these are a massive funding issue mostly, but that doesn't mean they aren't an issue
• MacOS
  • Has an expensive and locked eco system starting point
  • Consistently kills support for old software and hardware you may be reliant on
    • (I literally can't use my graphics tablet because it's too old and Wacom doesn't maintain up to date drivers for Mac, which Apple killed support for)
  • Despite the huge strives in efficiency and performance that have been gained through their own silicon, still falls well behind a similarly priced device from anyone else
• Windows
  • Is constantly pushing more advertising in platform (for it's $100 OS)
  • Doesn't believe you deserve a shred of privacy
  • Is so "AI pilled" that it's going to destroy itself or radically change for the worst due to copilot
  • Just allows kernel level execution from installed programs and other security nightmares

Shits rough and whilst I have seen a lot of improvement in recent years towards being more industry ready for artists from many open source projects (Godot and Blender in particular!) many desperately need documentation and user experience teams overhauling entire programs.

I have a whole additional post I want to write about my full time switch from Windows to Linux, plus the far more dramatic shift in my workflow from CSP to Krita, but I need to get my thoughts better together on such things first.

In the first setback of its ambitious campaign to unionize 150,000 autoworkers, the UAW lost its effort to unionize an Alabama Mercedes-Benz plant on Friday. This was despite two-thirds of workers at the plant signing union cards.

The proximate cause of failure here is obviously union busting. As noted previously, the union campaign here was subject to such significant union busting that both unfair labor practices and a complaint against Mercedes-Benz in Germany were filed by the UAW. These charges are currently in the process of being litigated. But there were other major sources of interference during the campaign, including a letter spearheaded by Alabama governor Kay Ivey (and signed by a number of other Southern Republican governors) that called on workers to reject the UAW. There is also some evidence that the anti-union campaign severely outworked the UAW's on-the-ground campaign in the final weeks and flipped votes in doing so.

But: unionization in the South, partially because of factors like this and partially for other social reasons, has always been incredibly difficult. Even the win at Volkswagen earlier this year was the culmination of a decade of efforts at the plant and required three previous failed votes before breaking through. Previous big unionization efforts in the South have also tended to lose by two-to-one or worse margins, such as a UAW thumping of that margin at Nissan in 2017. All things equal, the 56-44 result here is certainly disappointing—particularly given the amount of support expressed for UAW in terms of union cards—but not unexpected by any means. The UAW certainly is not giving up on its efforts to unionize here, nor on its efforts to continue unionizing other plants. It's also possible (although not immediately likely) that the union busting campaign here actually results in Mercedes being ordered to bargain with the UAW anyways under the Cemex bargaining order standard.

Labor Notes also has a good piece out today with some quick goods and bads of the campaign and what to learn from it; definitely worth a look if you are aspiring to form a union for things to do and things to avoid.