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I actually, at one point, possessed and used an ancient “wooden console” type television, I actually even have a picture of me in front of it somewhere at age 6 or something, anyways, it had this style of remote, it really was a Space Age wonder, even as the television looked like your typical ugly chest of drawers.
I found that I had to use gluestick for PETG on my bedslinger - without it the print wouldn’t even stay in place for more than maybe a 60 minute print. I have heard about PETG fusing to glass beds also, though I have had the opposite problem, and I would just clean it off with some alcohol, but there didn’t seem to be much of any kind of residue.
Now, the gluestick, on the other hand, that is a nightmare, until I found the method: spray it with windex or water, let it soak in for thirty seconds or so, then scrape with any spatula-like object. I often take two passes, but wetting the glue turns it into a looser sorta paste that comes right off. Once all the glue is off, go over it with alcohol to dry it all up, clean as a whistle.
Folks, don’t worry, just sharpen up your pitchforks.
Here’s the bit that doesn’t get talked about much: For thirty years, money has been effectively free for these people, and they’ve been spending it all to build up this big Orwellian house of cards on the idea that people would never be able to do this without big corporate money. This was a deliberate action on the part of government and capital to “make the internet happen”.
Now the thing is, the internet was already happening. It just didn’t have video. In 1995, you still mostly got video on physical media or via cable/sat. MP3s weren’t there yet, so there also wasn’t really audio, to speak of, just little .wav clips that we swapped on irc for amusement.
But there were vibrant communities on usenet talking about every type of interest (EVERY type), there was trolling and DOS attacks on irc and even a bit of friendly chatting, and the good thing that we get from all this - more easily connecting to people we can relate to - was 100% already present for anyone who bothered to get a PC and modem. Believe me because I was there, we already had The Internet in full swing, while we played our CDs and VHS (DVDs if you were affluent).
Got that whetstone wet?
So what did they bring to the internet? Well, not music - MP3s showed up around 1998, and the music industry was taken entirely by surprise. It took them three years to figure out what was going on, by which time Napster had introduced the world to peer-to-peer file trading.
Back in the 8-bit days, we had to have swap meets, people would gather in large rooms, bring their 64s and 1541 drives and a box or two of fresh (or culled from your existing collection and freshly-formatted) 5.25" floppy disks which we had cut a notch out of so we could use both sides, and get a fresh supply of games, demos, sid files, useful software, etc, to mess around with for the next month or so. Napster and Bittorrent, however, represented a far more easy and accessible version of piracy: no need to carry 10-40lbs (cause CRT monitors, remember) of gear to a different place, just load up the program, choose your own adventure.
There was a lost opportunity to humanity around this time, because at some point around 1998, each entertainment industry conglomerate’s board of directors, either in groups or individually, had someone (probably from IT, but possibly a child in their family) sit them down and demonstrate downloading and listening to music on Napster.
If only, each time that happened, they had thought to point a video camera at the face of the executive or shareholder or CEO.
These would have been, these SHOULD have been, the world’s introduction to reaction videos.
Instead we have a bunch of video of people watching women eat poo.
Anyways the thing is they saw this happen and they found their most badass but cooperative front men to sit on their horses while they sicced the hounds on the uppity peasantry who think they are entitled to have joy in their lives without paying.
They ended up making Metallica look like landed gentry, basically, and nothing stopped, and that’s been the dynamic ever since: They have been focusing all this money, which the Federal Reserve was good enough to make available at zero interest (ie. free) on creating the infrastructure for a paid version of the internet where they control it entirely, just like they used to control access to music and movies by doling it out one disc/tape/record/cylinder/music sheet at a time, and just trusting (i’m loling as i type) that people really do want to pay what they used to charge for a single record, and we are all just waiting patiently for them to decide how much our lives they need to cut away from us, and we’ll be happy with whatever dregs they leave us, just like that vauntedly docile peasantry of old.
I hope the tines of your pitchforks are shiny like chrome now.
Cause again, we already had the internet working before they got here, 100% functional in all the ways it needed to be, before they got here. We don’t actually need them at all. I mean sure, some people can’t even pump their own gas, let alone change their own oil, so yes, some people will just need crayon-level functionality delivered with big bright icons, but most of us can figure out how to launch a desktop application and browse a discussion board, we’re all doing it right now on Lemmy.
The bottom line is that we don’t need them to manage distribution anymore - we actually never did, all we need is bandwidth for all. They are desperately trying to make us not see that.
And meanwhile, since covid, the Federal Reserve has been calling in the bill, and everyone who has a mortgage knows it’s gonna cost you more for the next few years at least, if you weren’t lucky enough to renew right before covid. But we were already paying interest and used to the idea; we are honest people trying to have a nice place to live. Those without mortgages, please, laugh at us right now because our problems don’t even approach the magnitude of the problems faced by rent-payers right now. You have a scumbag trying to skim their life off the top of yours.
I KNOW your pitchforks are ready, and you might even have a few torches in the shed out back.
But, imagine how it must feel for someone who has been pulling free money out of a bag for thirty years, and has now been told that not only is there no more money in the bag, that in fact, they must start putting money back IN the bag now?
That’s Netflix, That’s Google, That’s Elon Musk, That is Zuckerberg and the Metaverse [edit: and let’s not forget our very favorite here on Lemmy, u/Spez…].
I’m a little old for pitchfork crew, but I’ll be sitting here with my popcorn watching these bastards burn, very soon.
When the first NES came out I was over there with my C64 and my shoebox full of disks with games I hadn’t tried yet like, lol suckers.
I wish I had seen this, there might have been a moment when we could’ve shifted some parental money from Nintendo to Commodore with the right campaign, and kept the Amiga going…
I don’t actually agree with my government, I’m just amused that that - a tax - was all it took to make them cede the territory. We found the news just fine before FB and google, we will find it again without them. It’s a net win for us, IMO.
Not so much the E2E, that is a disaster - I just see the question of corporate capitulation to authoritarianism as a question of “when” rather than “if” so I don’t much care what shithead politicians do, the more obnoxious the better at this point, and I have zero faith that a corporation will lead the fight that saves us from their fuckery.
This is ultimately symbolic of how much electric transport is actually going to bring to the Solutions side of the board. The whole thing is a collective self-reassurance that no, we will never have to give up our personal cars. Cause unlike 10,000 years of ice age-surviving ancestors, we would perish under any such arrangement.
These techsters are showing their whole ass these days.
The only claim they’ve got to being in any way necessary to our society is the illusion that people need to be on their platforms/devices. Their gambit here indicates that they have been eating way too much of their own dogfood. Humans got along just fine without so much as a pocket watch for millenia, we can handle losing Apple.
edit: I know nothing about the law this is responding to and I don’t really care to bother understanding it; this is Brexit UK and there is nobody at the wheel, everyone is aware of this, so I’m sure the bill is just as toxic and ultimately self-destructive as their reaction to it.
Meta and Google are ceding the territory of serving news here in Canada based on a similar protest, and I am SO here for it.
The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.
All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”
And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.