Weekly Wrap Up has been posted! This week I bought music, a ton of e-books.
1 Like
People send me links, I get mad reading them and then I write. Thatâs basically my entire MO lately lol: The EU vs US iPhone debate â Manu
1 Like
I bashed this out while waiting for party finder to fill up in Final Fantasy XIV. (This is what I get for being a tank main and helping newbies clear stuff.)
3 Likes
Iâve been thinking about this topic a lot recently, and Iâm honestly not sure what a good solution would be:
- Sell your soul to devil and sell ads/user data = extremely unethical.
- Take money from investors = willingly work against your customers in order to milk as much money as possible from them until everything implodes.
- Ask people to pay for your app = 90% of devs would ask for the same fee regardless of which country the customer comes from. It may be reasonable to ask $10/month from an American, but it isnât reasonable to ask it from someone who earns $200/month. This would hurt people in third world countries immensely.
- Ask for donations = youâll always be at a risk of running out of money. This also implies youâre popular enough for anyone to donate to you.
- Implement a law where youâre paid based on the number of customers you have = good luck getting this to work in a world where sanctions and censorship exist.
- Universal basic income = this would help but only the people who live in countries lucky enough to get that, i.e. only a few of them at best. For the rest of the world, this will be the same as solution 2.
Things donât look good for the software industry to me regardless of how you approach it.
4 Likes
I suspect the only viable option not only isnât on your list, but isnât all that viable under capitalism as currently practiced:
- Have a day job, and write Free Software on nights and weekends.
This is what a lot of artists, writers, and musicians end up doing. How well it works for them depends on how demanding their day job is.
(Software developement is a bad day job for writers. Ask me how I know.)
Also, I forgot I had this in my drafts from over the weekend.
2 Likes
A couple words about the LEGO exhibition I checked out with my family while in Auckland recently.
3 Likes
I think the best solution is 3 but with parity pricing so adjusted based on your location.
As for the option 7 proposed by @starbreaker it can work in some contexts but not in others. Some software demand constant work and so itâs unreasonable imo to expect people to work on it in their spare time.
I think the problem is that a lot of devs just assume everything is worth a high recurring monthly price. Iâve seen simple utility apps that are finished products worth a one time 5$ fee been sold as 7/month subscriptions and that is just insane.
Way too many devs go down the subscriptions route simply because they can.
Your assumption about the two reasons why someone would only provide their socials (twitter / masto) as a form of contact definitely made me think more about what Iâm possibly implying by limiting my methods of contact as well as why I strongly prefer people contact me via public means over email.
While I provide a moderated guestbook for folks to contact me aside from mastodon, I debate removing my guestbook (and frankly my whole site) constantly because of the few anonymous users who abuse it to harass me. I strongly prefer people contact me via public forums like mastodon or the Neocities public feed because I havenât yet received harassment or hate messages in online spaces where people have actual accounts attached to their usernames.
4 Likes
That hasnât been my experience; Iâve found that if I want to bag my limit while hunting sealions, reply guys, and pedantic scolds, public forums tend to be target-rich environments. The people who email me tend to be chill. But we have different experiences and threat models, so you should do what works best for you.
1 Like
i (j) took part in a 48-hour performing arts challenge, where the participants were given a brief, split into small teams, and tasked with creating a stage-ready performance in only two days.
hereâs my journal post where i talk about what we did and how all of it went!
2 Likes
Just griping about First World Problems, at least one of them self-inflicted.
not exactly a post, but my short article was published in the latest issue of the mini-magazine ^Z
1 Like
Not the worst of the problems to face in life but still, quite annoying: Discovering new blogs is stupid hard â Manu
3 Likes
And I get it, having a blog is a bit of a techie thing and techies usually are also devs and they write about dev stuff but itâs overwhelming.
I plainly need to spend more time writing about non-techical shit.
It might not be exactly what youâre looking for, but with the demise of Cohost a bunch of artists, game devs, and other folks are making blogs for the first time or brushing off old ones. Someone I know is compiling a list of blogs.
Iâm back to blogging and working on my website after some other projects (and surgery). Sadly itâs one of those navel-gazing tech ones about developing my website, but Iâm okay with that. 
2 Likes
Even though your website explains âwhy itâs so uglyâ, I donât find it ugly at all. The muted purple minimalism is elegant in its own way.
2 Likes
I have a cohost account, but I only posted twice. The last time was when I had learned that cohost was still allowing lolicon and shotacon material; I didnât want to be anywhere near that sort of stuff so I noped out. (I know itâs legal in Japan, but I donât live in Japan.)
I know some people will miss cohost, but I wonât be one of them.
for the record, there was a period of only four months between the launch of the site and its rules in june 2022 and their âtemporaryâ banning of lolicon&shotacon content in october 2022 (which they made permanent in june 2023)! fair enough if you bounced off the site in that time; just wanted to clarify the timeframe on that, since âstill allowingâ implies that this is currently true or was recently true.
3 Likes
OK.
I had noped out just after they had updated the rules, and I had not heard about the rule change. I wasnât really vibing there, anyway, but that might have been mostly me. Whether a social platform works well for me depends on how much effort I put into it, and after Google+ I just canât be bothered with most social platforms most of the time.
(Itâs only a matter of time before I quit the Fediverse again, for example.)
1 Like
More Lego shows with the kids: Wellington Brick Show 2024
1 Like