Now I’m realizing, I don’t pronounce the L in those words… Maybe they pronounce it liked mulled?

Ugh, why did I immediately jump to working with pigs? I’m still scarred.

I watched a fairly recent youtube video podcast with a traditional porn actor and an onlyfans performer. The actor (cherie deville) talked about all the control she had, regular testing, and overall safety. The OF performer had none of that and basically described her last on camera act that devolved into SA and extortion. From that, I got the impression there is still some ethical porn out there and a lot that’s not since just anyone can create and push content now.

I dropped a Wheel of Time hardcover on my chest, about knocked the breath out of me. Nice way to wake up

Devil’s Food cake/cookies. Originally they were Nabisco: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/9b/a0/af/9ba0af2803a08d55bdc523ad21648559.jpg The red and yellow box. These were a wonderful memory from my childhood. Then you could only find Snackwell’s version. They were like 95% of what I remembered, not exact but so close they were still good. The last box I got (in the before times) tasted absolutely terrible and nothing like they used to. Tasted like dryness and absence of sweetness with no chocolate flavor. Texture wrong, everything wrong. Amazon would not accept my review of the new recipe. I may have compared them to the Devil’s butthole. Evidently those are discontinued now. I guess they went the route of making the new recipe so hateful we would celebrate the end of the production.

I’d love to be able to have something that tastes like the original ones though.

Your friend’s situation brings up the question of ownership. Do you actually own a persistent thing if you can’t later sell it and pass ownership to someone else?

I think media companies want to ideally have us think of their products as candy bars, we buy it and consume it. If we want that experience again, we have to buy another. They want us to buy the opportunity to read, look, listen every single time, or buy a pass that gives access for a limited time.

But a lot of us consider media like a personal, well loved library or museum. We buy books and things in order to revisit again and again. We replace or repair if worn out. If it’s one of a kind, we take actions to safeguard it. We search for rare and unique things and acquire from other private collectors if it’s no longer publicly available. The value of our collections increase if the media stops being published and goes out of circulation.

But these entities would rather see everyone’s personally owned copy spontaneously combust just because they didn’t want to sell it anymore. And it’s what they have done to digitally sold and DRM’d media, or by deleting from streaming services while also cutting the creators off from being able distribute independently.

We are at a major crossroads as to what ownership and ongoing availability and access means. Piracy is currently a failsafe until property can be safely bought and protected - for the purchasers.

I’m here and on Mastodon. I really like Mastodon. (I still have my old twitter account, but have not posted or commented for years. I never really used it anyway. Now I use it to see the occasional newsworthy linked tweet since they require a login now to view anything. I’m purposely ignoring its attempt to rebrand)

I still go to old.reddit and lurk on slow news days. But my feed isn’t as robust or interesting as it was before the exodus. It’s still good for historical help on certain topic. So I will keep checking it probably.

But to me it looks like Lemmy and Mastodon are getting slow, steady, but high quality growth overall. I think the fediverse in general may be the saving grace of the internet. It looks to me like the “main stream” internet is becoming one voice, much like Clear Channel taking over and homogenizing the eclectic voices of regional radio.