Perfectly Peculiar Pixels #9

Cinema Therapy taught me the phrase “It’s not your fault, but it is your responbility”. Jonathan referred to not cowering behind just letting trauma or mental conditions define you without you stepping up and doing something about it. Using machines to remove ourselves from a process, has made products repeatable, interchangeable, more precise, and more available to many. None of those improvements however, delegate the essence of our humanity to the machine.

Natural curiosity, is actively being substituted with the deus algorithmus. Its scientific origin and the dopamine express line give it unwarranted crediblity, and the ease of access is making people less curious, and less self reliable. I am not a ludite, and don’t even own any clogs to throw into servers. I think cars are a wonderful form of transporation, but an overreliance on cars has produced unwalkable cities. Releiving our inquisitiveness into machine tentacles is already highlighting the intellectual rot, and decay we can all strive to weed out.

Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist and media ecologist exploring the effects of new media on human interaction^[1]. A long time ago, before the dark times, before the A.I. and TikTok, the web was a very hopeful place. A lot of us refer to it as if it was the old Wild West, and in ways relating to it being brought about by people working together as opposed to machines doing all the work, it was. It serves as a stark contrast to the dead internet theory, the disparity between which, to me, reads as an indicator of how far we strayed.

If you’re anything like me, you might consume about 10 short-form videos after the one you actually clicked to see, before noticing you did. While there is no substitute for discipline, one would hardly be thought of as undisciplined for knowing not to step into traffic. Since Google’s effort of ‘redesigning’ YouTube gave us circular profile images, instead of e.g. folders for your subscriptions, Blocktube might be a tool you’d like to employ. Among a slew of other things, it can block short-form videos from ever being visible in your profile feed.

Justine Haupt’s creation is the physical manifestation of the fight against what people are identifying as a screen addiction. You may have run into e-ink screen phones with limited functionality, but the distance they go to, pales in comparison to the Rotary Un-Smartphone. Sadly, the unavailability of the original webpage, and comments on her YoutubeChannel, suggest that such a distance might have been a trek too far, when trying to produce it in-(her literal-)house.

Garden story reads tome like (more than) a good college try of mashing a lot of simple mechanics together under a charming pixel art veneer. From what I was able to gather, it seems like it’s a solo developer gme. As such, I think it might be a perfect case study for anyone into working their way up to sprawling, feature-laden RPGs.

Possibly THE Most Important Video You’ll See. [37:51]