Random shit from a random guy.

Hello! and yes i do remember you and your step-dad! I really enjoyed our last conversation a while back and Im so sorry for all the pressure your step-dad must be under right now. Im a massive fan of his work and I hope he's doing OK

Zenimax has so many incredible artists and developers, your step-dad foremost among them.

I hope he is able to still find joy thru art and that all his laid off coworkers and friends are able to quickly find jobs with companies that appreciate and respect them.

I only say this as I've privately chatted with a few other professional concept artists on here, but If there is anything your step-dad or any of his former coworkers would like to communicate to the TES community (perhaps anonymously), I would be more than happy to post it here or signal boost it if they've written it elsewhere.

so much cheap generic medication. reverse engineering compounds would be even more financially profitable.

fewer people dead of vaccine preventable illnesses in the global south bc the greatest barrier to distributing some vaccines like hpv is their ip

plant seeds and grafts that come from the plants instead of licensing them. don't invest so much in preventing cross contamination. more localised experimental breeding.

library of the world: every book and journal article in the world could be digitised and be searchable for every person in the world to read regardless of where they live. cheap reprint runs and local translations everywhere.

an online interface where every citation could actually lead to the text in question

freedom from the hell that is DRM software

everytime someone reverse engineered your shitty proprietary software we would all be freed from it instead of them getting DMCA'd

so much hardware would be opened up & therefore made so much cooler.

so many more songs that riff off and sample and interpolate shit from this decade instead of like 70 years ago and more analysis of music that didn't keep getting nuked off the internet

preserving movies and tv shows and games as long as someone, somewhere has the desire to host them

just go publish your fanfic/art/vid as is instead of all us pretending it isn't fanwork or begging the corporation for mercy / licensing

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.

When I was four or five, my dad and uncles dug out the basement of the cabin to add more bedrooms, and they cut a hole for where the new stairs into the basement would go. Where was this hole? UNDER MY BED. Did I know about it? NO. Not until they randomly pulled my bed back one day to reveal a Pit Of Darkness (no lights or stairs had been installed yet) under where I'd been sleeping. And then I just. Kept sleeping there until my new room in the basement was finished.

CORRUPTED BLOOD...

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.