Replying to myself, for anyone reading this: don’t pass over novels either. Western was a written genre as well as a movie genre.

I mean, Western once was a highly popular literary genre and not just because they were easy reads.

Like with movies there was a lot of crap but there was also some true gems. Works that are still really relevant nowadays… and there is still the occasional new novel that is published that will have you wonder why there isn’t more like it.

To name just 1 old-ish (I’m almost the same age as this book so, no, it’s not old it’s just getting aged enough to deliver all its qualities to the amateur :p) and 2 recent-ish books:

• True Grit, Charles Portis. Yep, the story that inspired the 1960-something movie with John Wayne and, imvho, the much more interesting 2010 version… that made we run buy the novel ;)
• Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry.
• The Revenant, Michael Punke. The book that inspired the excellent 2015 movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

There are so much more, not forgetting short stories too, or essays and memoirs! All those books are waiting in many public libraries barely ever read, always willing to surprise the adventurous reader that will be daring enough to change their habits and pick them instead of what they usually read.

holy cow(boy)!

And that’s why AI will be our next screenwriter. And that’s also why most audience will demand even more of it.
Sad times we’re living in, that will cost us a lot more than loosing our ability to focus on a effing story with animated picture on the screen. Because it’s the exact same people with the attention span of a goldfish, unable to follow already simplified story-lines, that will be persuaded they know perfectly well what they do and need not to inform themselves before they elect this or that candidate. Democracy is officially on its way out.

Western are really underestimated, to say the least. Obviously, there is a lot of crap but also a lot of great (and daring) content.

I swear modern movies just have actors narrating and renarrating what they’re doing because they know you’re on your phone not really paying attention.

/me (sadly but) approvingly nodding. Either it is because the audience is not paying attention or because the audience is (quickly) losing its ability to follow a story-line and needs things to be constantly and heavily underlined for them?

can you elaborate?

Joined, purely out of curiosity I must say as I had no idea such a community existed (in that other place) ;)

100%.

They don’t give a crap that only large corps can ‘absorb the cost’ of checking age and/or ID, they just want to control/limit what we say and to whom, and what we can do online. And if that requires to kill small non-corporate-owned web (and make everything subscription-based, in the process), so be it.

When they’re not being dishonest, they’re incompetent and proud of it. The few that are not incompetent (and that are honest) they are not numerous enough to make a difference, which is sad. And not just in the UK. I mean, here in France it’s quite interesting too, we’re following steps to the UK, btw, and, what not a surprise, VPN usage has skyrocketed the second they introduced their own version of that stupid age-verification.

Next step seems obvious: make VPN use illegal for the average user (I mean people like us not, say, journalists, NGOs, lawyers and, obviously, politicians—and their families).

I wish that people would stop using kids for their own gain.

But what use are kids, then? /s

You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

That’s not true. I just need to click the ‘x’ next to the tab. Why should I be bothered with waiting for some JS to be able to read text?

They are one of several signs of LLM writing. That said if you’ve always used them then you do you

Not the person you replied to but allow me to chime in: I’ve been using em dashes for decades and I will not stop using them because AI has started playing with them—no more than I will stop writing because AI can write too ;)

You lost me at ‘Fuck’. As a potential new member, how could I be willing to engage in a community putting forward rudeness?

I would suggest you may want to consider to calmly explain the issue at hand (my Lemmy feed is tightly curated and I do not think I noticed much of what you mention), without insulting anyone and without using doubtful dirty tricks to grab people’s attention, maybe sharing some real world examples?

Wouldn’t be surprised if it has a flux capacitor somewhere in there too

Wasn’t the last (working) one destroyed in a train accident somewhere in the 80s? Not that I’m old enough to have first seen this movie back when it was released. Absolutely not.

You can also buy (excellent) point & shoot film cameras, btw. or a rangefinder camera for a decent price (non-Leica branded, because Leica is expensive no matter what ;)

I hope you wont mind me reminding this: film is not simpler. It’s as much work if not more as any other type of manual photography, digital or not. The difference, beside the lack of immediacy, being that you control the output and not some computer code… which means that you must assume the many mistakes that will happen too ;)

I learned photography on a film camera back in the late 70s. And to me B&W film have yet to be rivaled by anything digital. The real issue with film is that, depending where you live, it can be a pain to get it properly processed (of the few remaining places around here, too many simply can’t be bothered to do it right). One could certainly process B&W at home but it would still be a pain to learn to do it properly. And don’t even think about colors (a lot more complex and expensive) and then there would be the demanding task of scanning each negative or each print and then digitally clean it.

You say that most of what you write will end up digitally, do you do some sort of editing to improve the text or do you just copy it? (depending on what it is ofc)

I do. I consider all writing a draft and all re-writing an opportunity to edit it. And since I need to write drafts it’s not like I was wasting my time with fancy extra steps ;)

Note that as far as my notes are concerned, I don’t copy them digitally as I don’t need a digital copy at all. They serve as an inspiration or a reference that I don’t need to access on a computer at all, I access them through my (analog) setup.

It’s a Zettelkasten (a fancy German word to say ‘box of cards’ that is both a note-taking and management system). All my notes are simply and directly moved from my DIY notebook to my references archives. Hence, if you checked the link in my first post, my notebook being both A5 and A6 sized (which is the size of my index cards). No rewriting is ever required.

Nowadays, Zettelkasten is considered digital by most younger users but the concept was formalized many years ago as an analog system and has been in existence as an analog system… for as long as people were able to write on slips of papers. Personally, I see zero interest in having mine digital so it stays analog, it works really well ;)

But this has made me think, how much do I need to have digitally anyway?

Which is an excellent question, imho :)

What do you think would be a substantial use case you could separate from your phone?

I’ve been using smartphone since the first iPhone, btw. It’s just I quickly realized how toxic they were, the huge risks they were for our privacy too, and decided to I needed to maintain as much distance as possible and therefore quickly learned to barely rely on my phone at all, and only for what I have no choice, aka IDs, security and banking, taxis/Uber (those two not being strictly required but a real pain to not have with me for when I need to get one).

The idea for me being to only use for what’s required (in my case: ID, security, passwords, taxis/Uber) and leave all the rest to other tools.

• Social? I do Lemmy (an nothing else) only on the computer. No notification on the go (it’s never that urgent or important), no fomo (I can’t be bothered), no distraction.
• Messaging? Barely any, and only through SMS. People wanting to reach me know that there are better means to reach me than an app and they either accept it or they won’t reach me… which is perfectly fine with me too as they’re the ones wanting to get in touch, not I (and never that urgently either: I will use an email and whenever I can snail mail have my preference ;)
• Reading? I read printed books (out of privacy and ownership concerns and after almost 20 years mostly reading ebooks, if you want to know) and carry a pocket book with me.
• Writing? I take my notes with a pen on paper (I just created a post about that ;)
• Games? I play chess… irl (I even carry a small pocket chess set, just in case). I only play lichess or chess.com only at the computer.
• Music and podcasts? I still own my iPod classic (the one with the wheel and no Internet at all) but I seldom use it since I barely listen to music or podcasts when I’m out for my long daily walks.

Thx a lot for sharing.

I’m a 50+ non-geek Linux user myself, and selfhosting is the one computer ‘thing’ I would love to be able to setup one day but I’m too afraid to seriously start doing as I’m way too afraid of being that ‘low hanging fruit’ you mentioned in your post.

I said I was not a geek in the sense that, after almost 40 years using only Apple computers, I’ve switched to Linux to use it like I used… my Mac. Sure, I’ve learned to understand a little bit of Linux workings and I would not want to go back to the Mac, no way, I can also write simple bash scripts (with a lot of trials and errors) but that’s about the full extent of my computer ‘expertise’.

So, even though your post is well written and informative, it was still way beyond my limited skills, I’m afraid. I’m not saying that as downer, it was a really interesting read and very informative with all those useful links, but hopefully as away to let you know there are… extremely… odd users like myself that are very much interested in the idea but also are as clueless as an oyster comes the time to buy a pair of sneakers :)

In regards to self-hosting, my conclusion so far is that it’s a much safer choice for someone like me to not do it. The risk is too real to get into some serious issues. And that I’m better off using the few paid services I rely (all in the EU, many of them small companies I can have have direct/human discussion with) as I know by experience I can trust their expertise a lot more than I woudl ever trust my desire to ever become not completely in competent in those fields ;)

:)

Now I have automatic backups.

Nodding approvingly ;)

Nice :)

I bought a ready to assemble one myself (so it was just a matter of following the instructions to assemble it). It was not cheap but that was almost 10 years ago and it’s still working great. Imho, the second best money I ever spent—quality shoes being the first one.

I would encourage anyone to also spend money on a quality standing mat as it will help the legs, feet and back not getting tired too quickly.

I too am quite surprised so few people seem to have been reading that book. I’m not even American but I’ve read it.

So much of what has been happening recently is explained in it.