Monopolies.

I've been thinking a lot lately about what exactly had changed between me and the wide world of computing lately. I’ve been on a tear for months now against Tim Cook’s Apple. Told a lot of people the problem remains that there is nothing better out there. Which has had me looking around quite a bit. I played with Linux on a Raspberry Pi and on an older desktop PC, and it’s interesting, but it’s not better than Mac, even going back a few systems. I’d rather use Snow Leopard than Ventura, especially if I could run it on some off the newer hardware. This 16” MacBook Pro is a beast, I love the hardware, but I can’t help but feel like it is definitely held back by the software.  The OS itself seems to have move ALL power strictly to the terminal, leaving just the most basic stuff in the OS accessible by a GUI. I feel like everything that I can do with the Mac ends up being very generic. Like I can do web stuff, sure. I can surf the hell out of the interwebz and consume content like nobodies business. But what I want to do is create, and doing that has become such a hassle I don’t want to bother. I can do a lot of really neat stuff with the Photos app, I guess, but it feels so... corporate to do so. It feels like I could get the exact same result on my gaming computer. There’s nothing special about using the Mac anymore, it feels like a tool,  not a friend anymore.

So I started watching videos about retro computing systems. It reminded me of my youth and how there used to be choices. Quite a few as I recall; At one point you could choose between Macintosh, Windows, Atari and Amiga. They each had their own uses, things they specialized in. I spent a little time playing with Atari’s (Both GUI and not). I remember a friendship falling apart after a guy I knew showed me Bars And Pipes on his Amiga. It was crap, but there was so much potential. Listening to some of the tapes I made when I first started playing around with making music. It was so exciting, there was so much to learn and challenging. I just wanted to spend all day every day playing with these devices. Recording anything and everything to see what I could do to it.

There’s no difference between MaciPadOS and windows now, they both produce the same bland experience because they have to sell to everybody and it has just all become the lowest common denominator.

It reminds me in a weird way of the other thing I have been thinking about a lot lately. I play this space sim called star citizen periodically, and I watch a lot of videos on YouTube about it because I’m an idiot. There’s an awful lot of opinions on this game ranging from it’s a scam to it’s development as a service. I kind of lean towards the latter on this one. I think they are selling the opportunity to watch a game being developed in not quite real-time. It’s a bit slower than it should be if it were real time. Ten years seems an awful long time to develop a frame of a game if you’re not selling the development. Most companies would go bankrupt by now, this one is doing better than ever because PVP kind of works now. Sort of. 

The thing that most of these YouTubers seem to be missing, though, is that this game is not being developed to be enjoyable, or a game even. This is meant as an alternate reality that you can jack into. The developer had to switch gears so that they could make enough money to stay afloat, so they started developing game loops that would sell ships. So PVP was a focus for a bit, until it kind of overtook everything and then they changed directions and now it is all about racing. Everything must come back to racing. Until we get Pyro, then it will be moving all the unlawful players to that system so they can blow each other up without mods being needed...There was an event recently where a PVP player pirated a Carrick but the pilot had set his spawn point to the medley and he wasn’t going to give up his ship. CIG was informed and they gave a warning to the pirate and the pirate’s friends are whining all over the internet about getting a warning (or maybe they were banned, not sure on that) but in any case, one of the YouTubers I follow was taking up the cause saying CIG had never clarified what was grieving and what wasn’t so it was entirely the fault of the Carrick Karen and CIG shouldn’t punish the pirate who struck me as a bit of a dick.

We make the mistake of thinking companies are developing for us as individuals, when really they are developing for dollars and whatever compromises they have to make so they don’t have to get a job doing something else. Apple has gotten so huge it has to develop for every tom, dick and harry with more money than sense that will buy into this heavily patrolled ecosystem. Windows has always been a tool, so no love lost there. And Linux has more gatekeepers than desire to succeed. Linux has been on the cusp of being important as long as I have been using computers, the gate keepers are keeping the riff-raff out so they don’t end up like Apple. Google just found a new way to make Linux almost useful. But I don’t know if I would call it a success. It works, sometimes. More often then not in my experience, but I think I was trained to reject non-apple systems if they don’t wow me.