You know what I love? When characters are almost unconscious, but not quite.
Slumped over, a complete ragdoll in the others’ hands, but alert enough to groan softly at different sensations, eyes hooded and glazed, just wide enough to gather a blurry image of their surroundings. Though they’re dizzy and their limbs feel like lead, they gain comfort in the others’ touch, unconsciously leaning into them, eyelids fluttering in hazy relief at the soothing, concerned gestures.
Something I need y’all youngins to understand growing up in the age of crypto and streaming is that digital ownership is not ownership. Digital ownership is renting.
If you have, say, House (2022) on Netflix. That new stop motion movie. You don’t own that movie. You pay to have access, to that movie, but you don’t physically own it. It isn’t yours to take with you or put in a blu ray player. You’re paying to maybe watch it.
The movie is something you can access so long as Netflix is active and you pay for access. If one of those things changes you no longer can see that movie. If the movie goes to a different streaming service it is gone. (You should buy any movie you want to see again or would be sad if it left streaming).
Same with digital video games. Silent Hills PT is a playable trailer that, because of the Kojima/Konami dispute, was pulled from PSN. You cannot download it anymore. A physical disc cannot be taken from you, it can always be put in your console and played. Having the physical game is owning it having the downloaded game is renting it.
You’re promised these things forever but you only have access to rented digital goods for as long as the site supports it. And eventually that will change. You can pop in a Mario 64 cartridge into your N64 anytime you want and play. You cannot download a digital copy of Halo 2 to an original xbox because that support has been shut down (and modern consoles don’t let you carry your entire library on your system storage). If you have a disc of Horizon Zero Dawn you can always play it. If you have a digital copy that will go away given enough time.
Same with digital card games. Magic the Gathering has had multiple online formats. When they close one to make another your entire collection is gone. They offer you the idea of collecting but it only means anything if the servers are active. Physical cards can always be used and can even be used in inventive ways like horde mode. That’s how commander/EDH got its start.
Spotify is great for music exploration but download music you like. Go to the library and check out cd’s to put on your computer or go to bandcamp and get albums DRM free. My family switched itunes email accounts in 2011 and its junked up 3 years of purchases requiring us to rebuy them.
As much as NFT bros want you to believe it digital ownership is NOT ownership. The concept of digital ownership relies on false scarcity (minting a limited number of NFT’s when more could have been made) and a few clever words to make you think the netflix library is YOUR movie library. Its really fucking convenient for big businesses who can squeeze every drop of money out of you without giving anything tangible in return.
Digital ownership is NOT ownership.
I think the next big cool trend should be everybody gets a VCR again and everybody pirates all the digital media to vhs tapes. that’s what I think ought. The video games we can figure out different.
Digital ownership is a perfectly acceptable form of ownership when you have a file in your actual file directory that you can manipulate normally and not i.e. access only through one specific proprietary app, and at least one backup copy in a non-networked device. You own that. You do.
You don’t own a film you’re accessing on Netflix any more than you owned a video rental, but Netflix isn’t claiming you do, they’re just trying to persuade you that’s fine, and you don’t need to own things anyway.
(E-book companies that sell you a book and then take it away when it’s pulled or remotely edit the copy in your device and things like that are misrepresenting your ownership status, and that’s a whole problem, but for all Netflix’s crimes I don’t think it ever says you’re buying the content, just access.)
It’s not an object per se, but the thumb drive full of movies is a data recording in your possession, just as much as a VHS tape is. And it’s easier to make copies, so if I’m really hung up on a particular film I can own it 11 times with fairly little effort and potentially no extra cost, if I had the extra storage devices around anyway.
It’s not the digital nature of the thing that’s the problem, it’s the arbitrary constructs capitalism keeps constructing to maintain control over access to their IP.
It’s the copyright holders whose ability to securely ‘own’ digital media in a meaningful way is slippery. So they’re doing their best to make sure no one else ever actually has a copy of their own.
I am a (very good! shockingly good!) coffee company that donates all its profit to charity. But it turns out “I” functions oddly in that sentence, because corporate social media presences are not actually sentient; instead, companies are made of people, even if capitalism attempts to elide the essential humanity of coffee and other products humans consume.
Anyway, companies are made out of people, and this company’s tumblr is made out of author and vlogbrother John Green. It’s simple, really: I am a company who is a person who is me who does the marketing for the awesome coffee club, which provides you with the world’s best coffee and donates all its profit to reduce maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone.
p.s. Occasionally I am not a coffee company. Occasionally I am a person who answers questions about my books or other work. Other times, I am a sock company. Like the rest of us, I contain multitudes.
its so cool watching the modern internet actively strangle itself in the name of squeezing out another percent of profits i love obtaining an intimate understanding of the looming dread a roman citizen during the rapid decline of the empire must’ve felt. it sucks and isn’t good by the way
somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
if you guys thought you had a weird middle school experience my whole grade was convinced I was an actual literal werewolf for 3 years to the point where people were afraid of me so come 8th grade the popular girl had a huge Halloween party on her farm that everyone went to that just happened to coincide with the full moon so I staged a whole elaborate ‘transformation’ at the end of the night and scared the shit out of all of them. I don’t think I’ll ever top that
the prisoner of azkaban had just come out. we were a bunch of bored idiot kids in the boonies. everyone thought they could identify a werewolf and I just happened to have illnesses that often took me out of school around the time of the full moon every month. it didn’t help that I had been the ‘wolf kid’ since elementary. and I’m not saying I didn’t play into it when I found out the rumor — teen wolf (1985) was one of my favorite movies so of course I wanted to pretend I was living it.
but this went on for years. I had kids showing up behind my house on the full moon hoping to catch me changing. people were afraid to invite me to sleepovers. so when I finally got invited to a party, on that full moon no less, I went all out. I waited for the moon to rise. I hid a costume werewolf head and clawed gloves in the woods, snuck out there mid-party while 30-something kids were gathered around a bonfire, changed, ripped my clothes and started howling from the trees. some brave souls started to investigate and that’s when I started to chase them. pandemonium broke out. and oh, did I have the time of my life, because I hated most of these kids. revenge of the nerds, and all that. they’d teased me for years for things I couldn’t help like being sickly or having too much hair on my body.
I made my getaway with a friend at the end, and left the rest to wonder. most of them realized the prank and later laughed it off with me. but there was one kid who, senior year of high school, admitted I intimidated him because he still believed I was a werewolf. I put my arm around his shoulder, told him, “Between you and me, I am,” and gave him a wink. even after graduation, that guy looked at me like I would eat him alive.
I gotta say, there are worse things to be than a teenage werewolf
All your favorite things that you’ve been watching for years, and you know those actors that you go, “Oh, there’s that guy on that show.” You may not necessarily know their names—you may see me on a show, you may not know my name, but you’ve seen me on a lot of things. Those actors, those actors are working-class actors. We’re literally working paycheck-to-paycheck.
It takes $26,000 to qualify for your health insurance for SAG-AFTRA. A guest star on a show, producers will do top-of-show—this is a verbiage that they created, it’s not in our contracts, it’s what they created—so they’re not gonna budge above whatever their top-of-show is. Top-of-show, generally, could be anywhere from $5,000 to $7 or $8,000 an episode. Maybe that sounds great. So say I cobble together 2 or 3 guest stars during a year. People, our audiences, sees me on 3 or 4 different shows, and they’re like, “Wow, that actress is working, she’s doing all this stuff.” I still, by doing that with top-of-show, I have still not qualified for my health insurance. We literally are going paycheck to paycheck.
Back in the day, we used to have quotes. That once you’ve been working for a certain amount of time, you’re working really hard to get your quote up, to get your salary up. They decided to get rid of that, so they no longer acknowledge or respect that. This industry is one of the few industries that seniority, that being in this industry for a long time, that gathering up an amazing resume, doesn’t mean anything to them.
Yes, there is some very wealthy actors. Absolutely. There’s 160,000 members in our union. 160,000. 1% are the top grossers. 1%. And of that, maybe 2% are the ones that literally support and uplift our union, and keep the insurance going. Everybody else is below the line.
People don’t realize that SAG-AFTRA is not just actors. We’re broadcasters, we’re stunt coordinators, stunt workers. We’re dancers and singers and voiceover artists. There’s a huge umbrella that we encompass, and 98% of those people are below the line? Are struggling to make a living? In an industry that we all know is making billions?
I think about this all the time, we talk about this in our caucuses. Back in the day, we used to talk about millions, everybody wanted to make millions, and oh wouldn’t that be amazing. These people are making billions, and yet they don’t have money to give us just a scooch more? To contribute to our pension and health? To allow us to qualify for our health insurance?
We have actors that you all will recognize. You will know us from that guy on that show that have lost their insurance, no longer qualify, and are hustling just to get a day on a job to just pay their rent. Not even their insurance, their rent.
This is a serious, crucial moment. This sounds hyperbolic or whatever, but it is a life-or-death situation. Because we’re talking about, you know, taking care of our families. Taking care of our loved ones, you know, our parents, if they’re getting older. You always, as a child, you want to be able to contribute. Should I be at this age, still asking my parents for money? No. I should be taking care of my parents. It’s painful.
If the company’s TEAMSTERS strike, the PILOTS will strike??
YESSSS!!!
…Lemme put this in context. Airlines are HURTING FOR PILOTS. Flying is a very expensive hobby, and it’s very expensive to get a pilot’s license.
It used to be just about anybody could do that, but *gestures at minimum wage vs inflation* (federal minimum wage is around $8, yet we now need $28 to survive, folks, it’s gotten that bad) so of COURSE people aren’t able to become pilots!
And the Air Force, et al, aren’t flying as many planes because they’re investing more in drones than in pilots, so you can’t go into the military hoping to become a pilot that way, getting the military to pay for your training… (Plus there are hundreds and hundreds of people serving groundcrew for every single pilot, so the odds were always low to begin with.)
So combine all of that with the fact 3,300 pilots are saying they will also go on strike…
There aren’t enough spare pilots to fully scab their strike.
