And it’s getting deader by the day, if the deterioration of YouTube I’ve witnessed in the past six months is any indication.
How has my YT experience changed, you ask?
Yesterday I received the following email:
The occasion of that nuisance letter was the test stream I ran yesterday. Wanting to test my PS2 with the game capture rig used for my previous retro gaming series, I threw Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in the tray and took it for a spin on stream.
Live streaming video games is not a new concept I invented. Right this minute, you can find any number of gaming streams, many of which feature live gameplay footage of the GTA series, including Vice City.
During the stream, I offered criticism of several aspects of the game, particularly the music, and related that transformative content to current social commentary. The whole production was intended for entertainment, information, and education purposes, and was obviously fair use.
But that didn’t stop the same algorithms that mistakenly pushed a 25-year-old Dinosaur Jr. song to the top of the Billboard charts from blocking my stream in the US–along with Australia and New Zealand, where an extravagant censorship fetish is all the rage these days.
To make sure that nothing at all works as intended, YouTube’s algos demonetized my prior test stream on a channel that isn’t monetized anyway, just for good measure.
Instead of masochistic Aussies and Kiwis, this time the bots acted on behalf of Latin American licensees of midi John Williams music.
Total clusters like these are why I don’t rend my garments over the internet’s accelerating demise. Letting everyone on Earth stick their noses in everyone else’s business was always a dumb idea.
Nor do I foresee that the tech oligarchy’s consolidation of power will doom us all. Their blank slate anthropology and false theory of mind have left America’s defining invention in the hands of malfunctioning bots and helot laborers with terminal tunnel vision.
If the same forces in charge of policing the internet will be running the gulags, I think we’ll be OK.
While we wait for the camp guards to finish setting up the volleyball nets, be sure to check out the premiere of my new Retro-Spective series on Final Fantasy Tactics.
Tip: I’d make a point of watching live, tomorrow at 10 PM Central. You never know–some Azerbaijani might lodge a claim over the grass whistle song.
Can’t wait for the Tactics retrospective. Easily my favorite Final Fantasy game next to VI, especially for the storytelling and world-building.
Thanks. Tactics does slum it a bit with a Dan Brown-esque Evil Church of Evil plot, but I cut the Japanese a little slack.
More on that on-stream.
Playing the original translation or one of the updates?
“Don’t blame us. Blame yourself or God” was a bit narmy, but had its own charm over the War of the Lions version.
Breath of Fire II also stood out as a game that I really enjoyed, but went with a similar overarching evil church plot.
Good to cut the Japanese some slack on covering American religion in games. It was always odd to me back in the SNES games that original Japanese games often had crosses and churches that were censored when ported to the US market.
I’m playing the original PS1 version on my PS2.
Someday soon the web will collapse to such a point that the only interesting internet content will be on gopher.
You also aren’t allowed to have superchats on when you stream Rockstar games. Video game companies have put all kind of loopholes out there to fleece people who don’t want to spent $70 to watch their poorly plotted, hacky movies.
The old internet is over, and it’s not coming back. If it’s even around at all by the ’30s, I’ll be surprised.
J.D .
And all the more reason for regular people to take back society and to stuff the nerds into the lockers.
The nerds to know their place and stay in their lanes.
The biggest beef I have with the neurodiverse nerds is their overreliance on AI. They simply are unfit to understand the give and take of social communications. So they flatten it via computers.
They’ve really made the internet boring because the normies are too gauche for the net and need to be reined in… for their good of course.
xavier
They’ve also made the internet boring by making it seem essential, when it can only really be a window on real life. The best kinds of normie fun (hunting, fishing, team sports, amateur craftsmanship, etc) really have nothing at all to do with computers and everything to do with being out in the world, and either making or doing something. Even nerdy, indoor hobbies like reading, music, the fine arts, or amateur scholarship are only marginally more interesting when there is a computer involved, and much diminished if one lacks the discipline to put the phone away and enjoy them as they are. One might find an interesting museum on the internet, but if one has got one’s nose glued to one’s phone in the museum, one has missed the point entirely. The very best kinds of normie fun, such as the joys of being with family (or of trying to make one, let us say) should be kept as far from the Internet as possible.
Your comment also reminds me how fucked up IP law is. The spirit of the law is to prevent intellectual theft. In practice, it’s used as a tax on small entrepreneurs and a stick big companies can use to bludgeon competition.
Brian
And just trying to introduce modest reforms brings out the NPCs and lobbyists. They screech in outrage.
It’s similar with tech stuff. Where’s the harm to release Wordstar to the public domain? The property holder has done absolutely nothing with it for 40 years. so give it away.
xavier
The Amazon outage has got also to be a sign.
What really struck me about that episode is the coverage thereof. There is no apparent interest in whether it happened due to accident or malice, because of man or machine or algorithm. Nor is there interest in whether customers went to brick-and-mortar stores, or other online venues, or just sat tight for The Only Outlet to come back. The sole reader question they seem to have addressed seems to have been “when do I get my goodies back?” And I sincerely hope that’s a statement about them and not a statement about what people actually want to know.
Hmm. Meant to post that to the main thread.