Hemingways_Shotgun

  • 13 Posts
  • 308 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • It legitimately took me a second for my brain to un-break itself when I looked at the photo. First thinking…something’s not right here…and not for even a moment thinking it would be something as stupid as putting the heat-sink on the case fan… Then the realisation that yes…it really is something that stupid.




  • I was legitimately sad when LG left the market. It feels like nowadays, the only company left making “high-end phones at mid-range prices” is Motorola, while every other company is following the Apple/Samsung trend of charging literally whatever they can get away with.

    We used to live in a world where a company would make a product “X”, calculate how much it costs to manufacture, factor in a 30 percent profit margin to cover reinvestment into the company, and call that the “price”.

    Now, largely thanks to Apple, the “price” is whatever the marketing department can convince people to pay with advertising heavily on FOMO and “coolness”, regardless of the manufacturing cost. It’s a shitty way to do business (in my opinion). LG was one of the last of the good ones sticking to the old ways. Now it’s just Moto.





  • I’ll give my smart-ass answer first before deliving into my serious answer.

    Smart-ass: Yes…tangible literally means “possible to touch”. So yeah…digital stuff isn’t, by definition “tangible” in the way that records, cds, etc… are. You’ve never “touched” an mp3 file. You’ve never “touched” a streaming movie like you handle a DVD or a VHS tape.

    Now…to my serious answer: I’ve long been working on what started as an article, became a treatise, and is now morphing into a non-fiction book about that very concept. Still a very long way to go, and with my stop-and-start creative blocks, it may never get done, but I felt it was important to write it all down while I still have a functioning brain. (I’m not getting any younger)

    I’ve added to it for years every time a new thought about it comes to me, talking about what I call “Patina” (the tendency for mechanical things like typewriters and camera lenses to age individually, almost developing a personality as they age) and equating it with the Japanese concept of Tsukomogami (the idea that physical things gain a soul after 100 years)














  • I see what you’re saying. But to me it’s very much a “You can’t swim in the sewer without getting covered in shit” morality-play.

    The very act of providing a service that earns more than a billion dollars by necessity requires the cooperation of a number of different entities. As you described, Ticket Master, Publishers, Distributors, etc… So while they themselves might not be directly exploiting people, they have to interact and make use of partners that do if they want to play in that billionaire paddling pool.

    To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.

    But that’s me. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion.