JustSo

lol, lmao even.

you think mutual aid would buy me a bravia?

Bout to try update the firmware on my sampler. It's old(ish.) but still dope.

I had a beat going that I was gonna probably post but the machine locked up and I guess it's time to see if the latest JJOS does what I need.

I woke up in the middle of the night rebounding off a bunch of anxiolytics I'd taken the day before. I was pissed off and SELF PISSED cuz I had finally gone a day without adding drinking to the mix as well.

I'd made it through the last part of the day by pulling out one of my old samplers and was making a pretty sick dark beat on it cuz I'm warming up to start posting on the trans music prod community. Then my sampler locked up and I lost my work and I got mad and frustrated and sad, went to bed early, woke up 4 hours later.

I'd made it to midnight. I chilled, I re-listened to some podcasts a couple times. Might've posted I can't remember. Eventually I was like "technically I made it the 24 hours without drinking, and smashed two ciders back to back along with another dose to try and knock me the fuck out to try again another day.

But it didn't work.

I decided to ride to the local park and listen to some dark music on a bluetooth speaker and drink, out in the night with the clear skies and stars shining and maybe just cry. Or maybe meet fellow freaks of the night. I went armed because you never know.

I tried to take my dog but he hasn't run with me with the bike in ages and he only got so far before I realised he was not happy and I parked up, left my jacket, helmet and bike and got him home, made sure his paws weren't injured etc. Nah, he just wasn't feeling it. I get it lil bro.

But so I had to run back to the park to get to my bike cuz dawn was about to break and I didn't want my franken e-bike to get jacked, nor my expensive jacket etc. Made it back just in time, passed an elderly lady on the way there, gave her a gentle "behind you" as I was moving fast to get to my bike and didn't want to ninja up on her and give her a heart attack, so she turned and we exchanged quick pleasantries and I got to my bike. All good.

Anyway, she caught up while I was getting myself situated and I said Hi to her again and we chatted for a while. She had big S.C.U.M energy for a woman in her late 70s. I mean, I wasn't even the one who brought it up nahmean? She was a multiple-time survivor of men. Somehow it just came up and I patted my pocket and said "yeah there's a reason I have to keep a blade on me" and she held her chin up and placed a finger on her jugular, said "you just have to hit em here love."

We chatted for a while, opined on what a shame it is when people miss the opportunity for a neighborly chat etc, and we went our separate ways.

I'd nearly made it back to the road when I was like "nah" turned around and caught back up with her. I told her, "hey, I was in a really dark place when I left the house earlier. plans to go be stupid on top of stupid. you've made my morning and alleviated my night I just wanted to say a sincere thank you and let you know you've made my day a lot better"

She said "well, no shit, you've made my day a lot better too" so I was like "mind if we walk together?" and so we did, chatting while she detoured to feed the native birds etc. We bonded over a few different things, exchanged fairly wild opinions and found ourselves in perfect agreement in practice on a lot, if not the particulars of our principles.

Eventually I decided I wasn't gonna take up more of her time, said goodbye and that I hope we meet again. Zipped home. Megadosed and passed out for the rest of the sleep I needed.

Now this is just one oddball story of a particularly bad night. But I do this a lot. I live in an area with a lot of retirees. I make a point to say hello, etc. We're kinda country town like that even if it's big enough to be pretty anonymous if you need to be.

Mostly I find myself interacting more and more with the boomer generation and finding real fucken gems.

I joke about DotP once in a while. My own parents are "aight" but y'know, family's complicated. But I like a lot of these people, from a time before the internet, who grew up before a lot of tech and with interesting stories and an openness to just having a yarn.

I dunno why I'm posting this.

Sometimes I unblock the notification/inbox element to check if I've missed DMs. I keep it blocked so I can choose which discussions to disengage from without having to be reminded of my past cringe / generally live in blissful ign'ance .

This is only going to get worse the longer I post. I may have made a miscalculation in my coping strats.

We have the BEST FUCKING POSTERS.

Dril ain't got shit on you: the beautiful poster reading this post.

Hey, sorry Carcosa and others if this isn't the right place but I don't have the energy to get myself back on the matrix shit.

I have a very simple proposal which I believe will not stigmatise anyone nor stifle discussion etc, but would benefit a vulnerable segment of the hexbear community. I don't know if this is actually "simple" in practice because I don't know if the codebase supports this.

• confine all in-depth discussion about drugs and drug use to the c/drugs community
• remove c/drugs from the local/all feed
• link, clearly, to c/drugs from the sidebar so it is easy for people to find the community and the information or discussions they are interested in

Speaking as a trans person, this is hands down the best site for my people on the entire internet. We are a statistically vulnerable population, we need safe spaces for our discussions, we can rarely participate in the rest of the internet and/or real life without running into some fuckin bullshit that we shouldn't have to. Hexbear is different. Hexbear provides it all.

Speaking as an active drug addict, multiple-time relapser and veteran fuckup, I believe the recovery community is similarly statistically vulnerable, has to live in a world that normalises alcohol and other types of drug consumption, etc.

Speaking as somebody who was at one time a habitual methamphetamine user, I can attest to the fact that for some of us (and I've heard of this before I ever got that far down the path) the way, for example, news sites / tabloids etc, love to put a meth pipe on the cover or headline article whenever they have an excuse to attract attention- simply seeing those photos can be a relapse trigger.

A photo of a filthy pipe that I did not choose to look at but was right there on the cover of a fucking newspaper while I was in a shop, has in the past triggered me into recurring dreams of getting high, followed by days that feel like lost progress as I found myself fighting intrusive thoughts, impulses and romantic nostalgia trips that would have led nowhere good.

I've lost a lot of people to addiction, a variety of ways. My community, the trans community, notoriously loses a lot of our people to addiction.

I believe it would be wise for us to start posting with consideration about these topics and to be aware that there are users amongst us who are white-knuckling their way through a process of recovery that will take some of them years if not the rest of their lives.

I think it's worth the small burden of effort on the part of the drug using and drug agnostic segment of the community to post with an eye to harm minimisation and that includes protecting our recovering users from relapse triggers.

It should be on us, the posters, and on the site (if it's feasible) to put these discussions in a place which has to be actively sought out to be found.

We can provide the signposts in the sidebar, I don't think acknowledging that drugs exist is the problem here, it's the fact that c/all can throw a curve-ball at you at any time. We shouldn't expect recovering addicts to visit the drugs community and elect to block it, we should hold ourselves accountable and recognise that what might feel like a harmless discussion might be somebody else's trigger point.

I'm thinking very specifically of the ketamine discussion in c/cth yesterday. It's hard to talk about these things without potentially triggering that "romantic" connection some of us have with our drugs of choice. It would be better and more thoughtful to partition these discussions away from the most prominent and accessible feed.

Again, sorry for not visiting on matrix. I hope this post is appropriate. I'm just trying to be informative and I think I've recognised a pretty serious blindspot in our otherwise excellent site culture.

I hope the changes I propose are already supported by the software. I don't think I'm asking for much. I've probably written more on the topic than I needed to. But I don't think this is the sort of change that would or should upset the community.

Please.

Edit: If we have a recovery community it should probably be treated likewise. The post titles alone can be a trigger.

and I don't have a solution for how to treat alcohol in this. It's not a major issue that I've noticed but I just don't know. Alcoholism is one of the most destructive and the most pervasive. But THAT might be a bone of contention for some users so I elect to leave it out of this proposal.

I see your face smiling
in this dark place
deep in the shadows
by the trees I wait

you walk you swagger
not a care in the world
you move through the night
big balls, you're bold

reclaim the streets
my blade, your meat
your smile fades
so pleased to meet

your marrow, your screams
the shuddering heaves
as the blood leaves your
body

realise, its no surprise
your hubris led you here
it's nothing new
another body due

tonight
the S.C.U.M
are back
and we're cutting up dudes

ChapoStrapHouse

he's a boomer shooter youtube games reviewer and he finally snaps and starts offing AAA publisher executives for just making bad games.

Not even "muh woke games" coded.

He did it for the love of the game.

3D print a doohickey, call it the Civvie-12.

I've been casually following some of the leaks and whatnot. I've probably ranted in this community about how I used to want to be a game dev then I got older and learned about the working conditions in AAA and went into a different career. Now I'm old and the only way I'm likely to get to dev a game in my lifetime is to make one myself.

All of that is sort of besides the point.

I've also been away from gaming for a few years. I started to get this fucked up cPTSD response when I'd play games. I know where it comes from, but it boils down to this gnawing sensation that I'm fucking up when I'm gaming and I'm neglecting important shit.

Thing is I already neglect important shit, I'm a not-really-always-recovering repeat drug addict, my life is often a mess. The only thing I'm consistent on is making sure my pet is healthy and happy and exercised (saving my life, he's the hard carry fr) and that my partner, who is even worse than me in many respects, is also as healthy and happy and comfortable as she can be given her unique set of circumstances.

But I want to start gaming again. Not just gaming, but like I'm pretty sure I'm going back 2 crack - ie I'm gonna end up back playing CS:GO and the occasional interesting indie game and all the best 2D adventure games that come out. That's my shit.

But DAMNIT, I feel like I've just slept through the last years of AAA gaming before it turns into something unrecognisable and grotesque. The AI slop reveals and highlights I'm seeing, the job layoffs, the new job descriptions etc. It's very hellworld-coded from my perspective. Real dystopia vibes. Ugly inhuman creations keeping players hooked through tribalistic brand/franchise loyalty and psychological manipulation.

Like, I know that backlog of games is all there for me to enjoy if and when I return to gaming. I know indies are still gonna do the damn thing. I know it's not the end of the world if the AAA industry collapses completely. In fact it would be a good thing. Well, for competitive shooters maybe not so much, as servers shutter, often games are gone gone, in that genre.

But shiiiiiit. It just feels bad. If I wanted to pick a new main competitive shooter, maybe something a little less sweaty than CS:GO(2, I guess huh.) then it's starting to look like most of the big popular ones are going to be coming out of the anus-funnel of basically AI powered sweatshops.

Creative people, and I include programmers in that because I am one and I'm creative in other ways and I get the creative itch scratched when I'm gnawing on good coding problems or building new shit. People like that are driven by passion, not money- the money's been shit for years for engineers, compared to what we were expecting back in the daze before I went and studied and got degree'd up and stuff.

There's no creative soul on earth who's going to be happy polishing an AI generated turd every fucking day for 8+ hours just to afford to barely survive.

So it's going to be even more outsourced, offshored, automated, de-humanise, soulless. It's going to get worse and worse.

That's how I feel. I'm sad that the window for me to return to competitive gaming while human passion and creativity is still a prime motivator for the real workers putting the things together, that the window is closing fast.

I hate this shit. We need to EMP the proverbial Steel Mountain and the backups and the backups of the backups ad infinitum until we reach the core and unplug Bezos from the foul machines that keep fluids pumping through his withered husk.

Sorry for the semi-schizopost I'm aight. I'm just sad and angry. Mainly I'm possibly doing the stages of grief thing.

I'm thinking about the future, about an internet with no anonymity, where young people, like me when I was their age, won't get to explore their identities like I did, without leaving an indelible record of their experimentations with presentation and community and their mistakes and misplaced triumphs. It's already a lot harder right now than it was in my teenage years before the internet really got bigger, and then smaller with huge populations squeezed into a handful of platforms.

And I'm sad that the kids are going to grow up in slop world, drawn into franchise loyalty (as I was, as most of us are CS1.4 lanparty OG, OLD. 21 year steam veteran badge.) but without even a reference point for how soulless and shallow the skinnerboxes they're being sold have become.

Anyone else feeling the fear and loathing lately, around this stuff in particular? Especially people who aren't directly threatened by it like artists and writers and such?

Or are we mostly bloomers here, ready to embrace a new wave of authentic small creators making an honest living serving hand made art and digital creations to a smaller but sustainable and loyal group of supporters, like we already do have, as a bulwark against the rising power of the techno-oligarchical cultural hegemony?

I see like, three likely outcomes, for the next 5-10 years, not exhaustive:

• AI slop and continued belt-tightening ends up with AAA eating itself alive and the "industry" collapses. But the artform will survive in post-AAA indie bazaar of niche creations.
• AAA achieving insane domination of platforms, DRM + eFuses + walled garden devices making indie dev increasingly difficult further down the line, such that indie gaming becomes difficult to access and limits audience reach. Like trying to do unsanctioned homebrew indie on an uncracked console, but for every accessible and affordable platform. Those creators barely scrape by on their creative efforts.
• The new wave of indie games hits a rising tide of interest and effectively flips the chessboard, beautiful art and flourishing anarchy for a little while, before 20 years of industry re-consolidation in the repeating predictable patterns of capital, per Marx n them.

Whatchu think?

Share some rants of your own. Lets get mad and/or sad. Or, lets be hopeful. I really can't decide where I'm at on this grief spectrum right now lmao. I just want to promote thought and discussion around this shit.

I guess generative AI just makes capitalist exploitation way more streamlined and perhaps nothing has changed beyond the rate of change and perhaps my puny human meat-mind can't conceptualise it effectively

This one goes out to all of the hexbears who grew up not getting christmas gifts. Whose parents had to work on the day. To the ones who watched all the rich kids around them flexing their shiny new bike or latest game console.

Woop Woop. WE LOVE YOU.