Another Random Little Blog
20.08.2025: *Dusts off the place once again and collects some cobwebs* ...Hello there once again
It's been a while. I'm really not good at this whole regular blogging thing. I need to work on that I recon. >.>
Does kinda feel like the last year or so has had enough going on in the world for half a decade. Major disruptions in... almost everything, be that political, generational, technological. Does also not really help that a lot of those disruptions have gone into the direction of a cyberpunk dystopia, which I've really started to notice ever since I replayed Cyberpunk 2077 recently and Neuromancer is also still fresh in my brain.
Ginormous tech companies throwing unfathomable amounts of money into what is essentially an investment bet that hinges on stealing the entire trove of copyrighted creations of humanity plus as much data as possible, and all of it as fast as possible so that legislature and judicative couldn't possibly keep up, sounds like straight from a cyberpunk novel, but it is happening. And with Facebook basically poaching a top tier employee from Apple for $200Mio it does kinda feel like it's only a matter of time till they start abducting them with specialised private forces.
Not to mention the slow monopolisation and enshittification of everything, the forceful displacement of local businesses by corporations, because they can subsidise convenience at a loss, then jack up the prices when they're the only alternative to the point where it's just barely worth the convenience for the majority of people.
It also doesn't help that, while everyone seems so thirsty and eager to collect as much information, habits and data about as many people as possible, they also treat this precious, often sensitive information (especially with recent efforts to verify the indetities of people online as a means to "save the children," a very popular argument when it comes to invading privacy as of late unfortunately, see Apple wanting to scan every photo on every iPhone a few years ago to scan them for that kind of illegal imagery and TOTALLY not for gathering as much data from them as possible about every single iPhone user...) as anything BUT a honeypot for bad actors that is just waiting to be gobbled up and sold or used nefariously. I would LOVE to be able to trust companies to properly adhere to data safety guidelines and best practices, but so many of them have proven time and time again that they just won't care or will just outright use or sell it for profit and then later pay a slap-on-the-wrist fine that ends up as just cost of doing business, not as a punishment.
I have gone back to just buying the music I wanna hear, because I don't have to pay on a monthly basis and the quality is also much better if you download a lossless file or just copy it off a CD at lossless quality (yes, my PC still has a disk drive and I'm very happy it does). Not to mention that buying an album on Bandcamp and the likes even once will end up giving the artist a lot more money than streaming the album a few thousand, in some cases even tens of thousands of times.
Speaking of gobbling up data, data scraper bots are running rampant to a point where some websites report that close to 80% of their traffic is JUST BOTS, which is absolutely insane to me (some report even higher percentages). It kinda has killed my desire to upload art that I made to the internet, before I haven't tried out measures against it being used for generative AI training and data analysis, like Nightshade and Glaze (links below), though it will very likely end up amounting to an arms race between scrapers and artists. Not sure if I wanna fully dive into that, but I will definitely be more selective with uploading my artwork (once I get to scanning it and uploading some of it that is, since I work with traditional media).
Another thing I've noticed is that attention is one of the most valuable resources on the planet right now. YouTube made tens of billions of dollars by selling their user's attention (ads are essentially sold attention, because they are to bring attention to whatever product is advertised). With that in mind, seeing more and more fraudulent and AI slop ads does downright feel like an insult. Also, websites vying for your attention and to keep your attention for as long as possible has led to some optimisations that just feel exhausting and bad. It incentivises short form and sensationalised content to be promoted, because that gets more traffic. And with AI generated videos/voices/characters/chats/images getting better and better, this kinda stuff will flood any site with user uploaded content even more.
*flops on a comfy pile of pillows and deflates a little...*
Buuuut enough of the depressing crap that's going on. As large parts of the internet get more and more streamlined to suck you in as much and as deep as possible, trying to get you to outrage and depress you while squeezing every bit of data and money from you, just know that there is an entire world outside of algorithm driven feeds to explore. Value your own attention and consciously grant it to the things you enjoy and love. Cherish the friends you find, be that online or offline. Enjoy people's creations and create things and don't be discouraged if it doesn't turn out perfect the first time around. Nobody is perfect and the perfection you get blasted with online is either fabricated (be that by pretention, very high selectivity or filters) or the result of years, if not decades, of refining a craft.
The only one you have to compare yourself to is your old skill level and even then, don't be too harsh with yourself (even if it's a habit that is hard to break if you're used to doing it for years and years prior). Progress is slow and you may not notice it until you've done things for a while and look back on what you created. Be patient with yourself. Things taking time is okay and often worth it. Hell, sometimes it helps to put a work down for a week or even month and then get back at it with a fresh set of thoughts.
Try out new things that you haven't done in a while, or ever. It can be as simple as listening to a music genre you've never even heard of before or just swapping knife and fork hands to see if you can manage to eat like that. A little sillyness like that can't hurt. Or make a little website like this if you haven't already. It's fun. :3
...how does one end a blog like this? I dunno. I just needed to get a few things off my mind I guess. Don't fret. Things may suck, but you can choose how much you wanna engage with that suck and direct the rest of your care towards more enjoyable things. Spend your attention wisely and don't let it funnel money into big corporations' pockets without you getting some actual joy out of it. <3
Links to:
NIGHTSHADE A tool to poison an AI model by making tiny changes to an image.
GLAZE A tool to obfuscate your art style to generative AI by making tiny changes to an image.