04/11/2025

this part of the website is now immeasurably based

by popular demand (and by that i mean i absolutely should've had this when i made the last post), you can now click on the titles to get the posts in isolation. now my posts are shareable on le interwebz so that people don't have to sift through a billion blog posts to get to the one you wanted to share

to celebrate this milestone in my website's history, here's another mediocre post

The market isn't made for me

consumer-wise, i am a freakishly boring person. i'm not a fan of eating out, and i don't touch michelin star restaurants with a 10-foot pole. my most distinctive pieces of clothing are my hoodie and my all-terrain shoes. my computer is a grey box, and i mangled the led drivers on my "gamer" mechanical keyboard and mouse. my favourite non-steam games are minecraft and windows 7 solitaire. the weirdest parts of my living quarters are the flags and the foam acoustic panels in my office. finally, i have an iphone 12 mini, but only because it's the best value for my money, not because i'm an apple fanboy

on the surface, it sounds like my net living costs are nil, and you'd be mostly right. however, you may also immediately see how restrictive this whole lifestyle is, and how much money i might need to spend just to look boring. indeed, this post is intended to highlight just how poorly-suited i am towards the consumer market, and it's also a rant about the state of technology

western society today puts a heavy emphasis on being unique. every billboard in a dense part of town, every lifestyle video on youtube, nearly every advertisement in nearly every media ever: they will promote (or more accurately, sell you) products that make you "stand out from the crowd". in fact, every non-essential product that exists today is with the express purpose of making you "special". i'm not just talking about the 2020's either, this phenomenon is at least a century old

as a result, businesses prioritize form over function, and the forms they go with are embarrassing to own. in the 1990's, you had copious amounts of transparent plastic on every device, a practice continued today by prisons all over the world. between that and today, flip phones, bluetooth earpieces and ripped jeans came and went. in the 2020's, we have humongous phones with bullshit functionality, as well as insipid rgb lighting and the current citroën line-up. that's not to mention how few games you can just pick up and play, without any ads, without any story

bonus thing to be angry about: this goes hand-in-hand with rising living costs. if you threaten the functional stuff with extinction, you can keep charging a premium for "fancy" products that you manipulate people into wanting. by and by, expenses turn into debts, and then you've got an infinite money glitch, sustained by the perception that you ought to be "special". even if you're naturally and abundantly weird and quirky, everyone loses in this market

that last paragraph implies the whole reason why things are the way they are: money, and money alone. the whole principle of not standing out is a seriously difficult pitch to make to a board of executives, because our economic system runs on things standing out. in turn, this idea can be reinforced and exploited through aggressive marketing. this naturally extends itself to planned obsolescence: things that stay the same and do what they need to do are bad for business

and that is a shame. i'm not (usually) affected by marketing, and so the whole scheme falls apart if i want to buy stuff. that's why i've taken to making my own cars in minecraft, and why i approached it the way i did. dalette is the car brand that the world needs and deserves, and it's the kind of car that i would happily have as my daily driver (although my peugeot is pretty high up too). for now, though, that remains a fantasy, and i'm stuck in an ecosystem where i have to be special

the long and short of it is that there is a niche for boring, functional stuff, without any of the faff of modern trends, that our current economy outright refuses to tap into. as a result, i'm sticking to my old stuff, and i don't think there's anything new on sale that's worth buying. every purchase is a compromise, where the most i can do is mangle it to get rid of all the stuff i don't want or need

finally, if you're anything like me at all, the least you can do is install adblock. it's a good idea anyway, but it also helps you detox from this shitty culture