a rooster’s crow

The space princes never looked so good.

“How am I the most sensible pilot in this household?” Kiem said. “How did that happen?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Jainan said mildly. “I’m sensible.”

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.

How many things do I suffer though because of the greed of European “explorers” and American imperialism.

I leave the ‘āina. I leave my ‘ohana. I leave my heart. And I suffer at a job I hate. And I spent years wearing a fakey costume and smiling for tourists and pretending I felt anything other than empty.

I colonized myself. Made myself palatable for tourists. Made myself palatable for tips and a paycheck. And I ate popcorn for dinner bc that’s what we could afford and I spent my extra money making sure my siblings didn’t feel the crushing weight of poverty. And every extra cent was spent trying to save them from how I felt.

Humiliated. Colonized. A joke.

And now I live on the mainland because we cannot afford to live on sacred land. Because haoles move there for paradise, and they kill us as they buy up beautiful houses and pave the road for resorts. Our land. Our ‘āina. And I’m now a walking attraction. And I can do the hula style smile and I can make my eyes shine like diamonds. And people ask me if I picked coconuts from trees and I think about my elders who live in concrete apartments and I miss my grandfather and his warm smile. And I never know if I will see them again.

I used to stare at the statue of Kamehameha. His arm stretched out in a loving greeting. His other hand holding a spear to defend his people. But he leads with the hand. He leads with aloha.

Because that’s what we do. It is what we are born to do. We are born to aloha. To love. To compassion. Even now, even after everything, all I want to do is be kind.

I need everyone to understand this is how it feels to be Kānaka Maoli in this day and age.

We are hanging on here, but everyday it feels harder. And cultural revitalization has made huge steps, and we have come so far.

But they still pave roads for hotels. And most Kānaka are homeless. And we work so hard but the economy is in shambles. And they bulldoze my people for a telescope. And the Navy poisons the water again and again and again and then dumps it into the ocean.

And we try and we try and we try and we try. And I am so tired.

America has perfectly trapped us in an eternal hell.

Tomorrow marks the annexation of The Hawaiian Kingdom. The turning point.