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i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Israel is killing thousands of civilians in Lebanon. Israel wants the US to keep killing civilians and school children in Iran.

If you don't like drawing figures and poses because they're frustrating, draw figures and poses and get frustrated! Draw them! With anger! Swear and curse at them!

If you don't like drawing traditionally because there's too much room to make mistakes, draw traditionally and make mistakes! Scream while doing it! Put on scary music! Make it silly!

This goes for any kind of craft or skill

And there was a woman there who was some form of disability advocate (it was the 90s so her existence in the company was a minor miracle) and apparently she completely blew his mind on that project.

See, he'd imagined that this service was exclusively gonna be for deaf people. Obviously very useful for the very small number of people who couldn't hear their phone, but why would you even own a mobile phone if you couldn't hear?

But she described to him all the times he might want to read a message instead of listen to it. Maybe he was in a loud football crowd. Maybe there was important info that he needed to copy down that was spoken too fast. Maybe he was holding his sleeping newborn (me) and didn't want his phone to be loud and wake them up.

This doesn't feel as revolutionary as all that to those of us that have only ever known phones with the ability 'send text message', but given the timing and placement of this conversation I wonder if this woman and this project is *part of the reason text messaging exists*. The first text (SMS) message was sent by Vodafone UK in 1992 - where + when this conversation was happening - and then for a long time it was supported exclusively for 'messages from the carrier', and this project was an early potential extra use of the SMS protocol.

Sun Streams

Watercolor On Black Cotton Paper

2023, 30"x 40"