Worlds #1 Elgyem fan

Look at me.

Look me directly in the eyes while I say this.

You can just make things.

You can simply create something and put it into the world.

That's allowed.

People have been doing it for centuries.

They sell blank VHS tapes. They sell blank DVDs. Blank CDs. You can buy flash drives by the bucketful if you really want to. If you create a movie, an album, a game, a documentary, or a four-hour video essay about the mating habits of fictional space goblins, you are entirely permitted to put that thing on physical media and sell it.

That is not piracy.

Piracy is taking something that belongs to someone else and reproducing or distributing it without permission.

If I buy a DVD of a movie, I own that copy of the movie. I do not own the movie itself. I didn't acquire the rights to duplicate it, press a thousand copies, and start selling them out of my garage like I've become the regional distributor for Warner Bros.

The copyright, distribution rights, and intellectual property still belong to whoever created it or whoever legally acquired those rights.

If I start burning copies of Iron Lung and selling them myself without Markiplier's permission, that's piracy.

If Markiplier, who made and owns the rights to Iron Lung, burns copies and sells them himself, that's just distribution.

He's the rights holder.

He's distributing his own work.

If you made it, if it came from your own mind, your own work, your own time, your own resources, then congratulations. You own the thing. You don't need a corporation to bless it with legitimacy.

The corporation is not what makes it real.

The fact that it exists is what makes it real.

I think we've accidentally spent so many years living inside a world dominated by mass-produced media that some people have developed the strange assumption that all media emerges from a factory somewhere. As if films naturally occur in shrink-wrapped plastic cases and descend from the heavens aboard a pallet truck.

But independent artists have been burning discs, dubbing tapes, printing books, pressing records, and mailing things directly to people for longer than many of us have been alive.

That's not a bootleg.

That's just a product.

It's not "bootleg."

It's just... leg.

The normal kind.

If you buy Iron Lung digitally and burn it on multiple discs and sell them, that's piracy. And illegal.

If you download Iron Lung without paying for it and burn it on a disc just for you to use, that's piracy. Illegal but personal use only.

If you download Iron Lung without paying for it and burn it on multiple discs and sell them, that's bootleg piracy copies and theft. Also illegal.

Person on screen: needs a couple pats of butter, a splash of olive oil, simmered on low with a bay leaf and a cinnamon stick. What?! You never seen a boy who knows his way around the kitchen? 

Yeah my mom always wanted a little girl but she got stuck with me instead. That wasn’t gonna stop her though so all my friends were opening up nerf guns and bmx bikes on their birthday, I was getting crockpots. 

(scene changes to the person dressed in a nice black suit jacket, bright pink dress shirt, and black tie) Yeah laugh it up! Take a picture while you’re at it 'cause this is the last time you’ll ever see me in a suit! How do boys wear these things??

And there's a thought rattling around in my head over the fact that a lot of the issues with AI are not brand new to the technology era--a source of chronic and easy misinformation; a technology that causes people to withdraw and isolate and often self-harm; an environmental scourge; an absolute machete to critical thinking, disciplined learning, and meaningful study because why bother with hard and long tasks when you can get fast and easy dopamine hits--all of these can be applied to social media as well.

But something makes AI so foot-to-the-gas-pedal worse in such a festering and pervasive and sudden way, and I think my conclusion for that lies in this emergent technology debuting to the public already under the control of big tech mega-conglomerates who--and this part is critical--were absolutely panickingly desperate at the exact moment ChatGPT hit the scene.

And I'm going to bother you with graphs about this. Because I think it will help explain a lot of the Full-Shove-Down-Throatedness you've no doubt noticed with AI.

And like to back up a second--modern social media is controlled by these exact same mega-conglomerates. But the social media platforms didn't start that way. They were a lot of guy-in-his-basement style inventions--tumblr included--which developed to serve an organic and natural niche people wanted. No throat-shoving yet. Most of us (tumblr demographic) were probably sparkle-dogging on deviantart and--yeah whatever--superwholocking over here. And that was by no means perfect or necessarily even good but there was opportunity to ease in and learn the good and bad.

THEN the mega-conglomerates got it and Facebook is a festering cesspit and Twitter is Like That. But there was a bit of a gradual enshittification there, and I imagine most people following my blog are old enough such that you were able to recognize what enshitted itself and disengage appropriately.

AI--for all the way its ills mirror social media--was born a fully formed fucking asshole directly into the cradles of big tech. And it's weird to consider the technology behind LLMs is not, inherently, evil. And that feels weird because it never really had the chance to exist in the public eye in any capacity before it was the throat-shoved and desperate weapon of big tech downright begging you to rot your brain out your ears and steal your work and pollute the earth and stop thinking and stop trying and stop learning.

Which maybe then begs the question, WHY the crazy desperation? Why the complete disregard for sense, law, legal ownership, and customer voices? Why does 'fetch' need to happen and why do Tech CEO's talk about it like they're gonna bite the cyanide pill in their molars if you don't buy a fucking gemini subscription.

Well I promised you graphs.

Here's your first graph. And here's a little fun fact for those following at home: ChatGPT came out Dec 20, 2022.

This graph shows the stock price for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta (nee Facebook) between August 2016 (10 years ago) and Dec 20, 2022.

Now see that peak right before the start of 2022? Cover the downward side of it with your finger. Go on. Don't you see a beautiful exponential future of infinite growth? Don't you love when exponential growth is forever? Some of those returns were 400% in just 5 years. Sure, Covid caused a blip but what's a global pandemic in the face of a bullish stock run?

Okay now uncover the right side. That side is the screaming crying sobbing coaster of rich people feelings. And they were so very in their feels.

I'm zooming in on the graph for you. Welcome to November 2021 to Dec 20, 2022.

If you bought Amazon at peak? You were down 50%. Meta at peak? Down 60%. And every rich person investor is a money genius until the market turns, at which point it's panic to right the ship.

There were whispers of recession all throughout 2022 and it made the tech market crumble, because tech stock prices are highly speculative, and they ride market whiplash with more aggressive slingshotting than companies grounded in material value.

And then something happened on Dec 20, 2022. Obviously you know, I've said it 3 times. ChatGPT released. And oh boy.

Companies started promising AI. Investors started listening. The stock prices got happy.

Welcome to the graph 2022 to current day

And if the dance is working, they don't fucking stop dancing.

Do you WANT AI? Do you NEED AI? Will it actually help you? Might it in fact harm you? Will it harm the planet? Will it harm learning, and discipline, and the vulnerable, in the exact ways big tech companies are shoving it down people's throats?

Who give a shit! Whogiveasshitwhogiveasshitwhogiveahit. Money up! Desperate crying tech company HAPPY now. Money happy now!

Now the entire 10 year graph looks like this

And that scary scary scary scary drop off in 2022 that course corrected itself nigh exactly on December 20, 2022?

And I got hit with, “oh, I take a bath magnesium when that happens to me—“

If something has a big fandom, publishers and studios know they can make money off it. This is why we see publishers openly acquiring and selling things that were originally posted as fanfic, like Alchemised, Heated Rivalry, etc. It’s why the horrid wizard woman considers people participating in her fandom to be supporting her political causes.

Like in the ultra games theres little islands for your pokemon and in swsh you can send them on jobs but for everything else, do they just.. go unconsious?

(in your opinion ofc!)

Yeah it's cryosleep and you're legally not allowed to keep your pokemon like that for [amount of time], the PC system keeps track and will alert you, and then the Rangers if you failed to heed the warning