Hello everyone. I should be getting ready for bed right now, but something's been eating at me that I wanted to write a blog post about for a long while, and I never really had the excuse to until now.
As some of you may know if you're "chronically online" like I am, the indie-animation show 'The Amazing Digital Circus' is getting it's final episode released in theaters across the US soon. This announcement has gotten... mixed reception from the public, to put it lightly, and this whole thing baffles me to no end to the point where I need to say something about it, despite it being incredibly inconsequential.
Just a warning, this whole blog post is more of a mindless rant than anything else. It's lowkey incoherent and probably stupid LOL.
For those not in the know, 'The Amazing Digital Circus', which I will shorted to TADC from here on out for ease, is a show created by someone online who goes by the name of Gooseworx. The series was released for free on YouTube through an indie production company called Glitch Productions, and eventually got picked up by Netflix. The show continued to premier it's episodes on both Netflix and YouTube simoutaneously, with YouTube being free and Netflix being a paid alternative. It was intended to be an adult animated show, but thanks to it's aesthetics, a lot of children have latched on to the property (in a similar vein to Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss, if you know you know) and the fanbase is, to put it lightly, a bit of a cesspit. Of course, not everyone who enjoys TADC is a bad person by any stretch fo the imagination, a lot of my friends love the series, howeve, thanks to fandom etiquette being a frankly non-discussed topic anymore, plus the influx of folks joining fandom spaces over the course of the Covid lockdown, paired with the move of fandom discussion from sites like Tumblr onto sites like Twitter, a lot of fandom has turned into a toxic environment. I intend to cover this more in depth later, but for now, let's focus on TADC.
As of this week, TADC's final episode, which is going to be a feature-lenght wrap-up for the series, was announced to be aired in select theaters throughout the US and US only, with it's release on YouTube dropping 2 weeks after the episode's run in theaters. I'll add here, TADC is a show that was created and produced within the US. To most, I'd imagine, this sounds like a win for indie animation. Feel however you'd like about the quality of the series, I genuinely don't care, but the fact that an indie animated project is becoming so widespread and shown in theaters is an amazing feat, especially in our current era of AI generated bullshit and fearmongering. I love the arts, I actually went to college for animation and illustration, and I think this is truly a win, in the same way I feel about Hazbin Hotel being picked up by Amazon Prime.
However, a lot of folks online are upset by this. I've seen arguments like "People are used to episodes being free! They're alienating their fanbase who can't go!", or "No one's gonna go anyways since they can just see it for free!", or "This is classist against poor fans!", and "This is a bad business decision!", and I can't help but feel like this mindset is not only extremely reductive and naive, but also shows a glaring issue within fandom as a whole.
If you love film like I do, or hell even if you don't, it's common knowledge that movie theaters have been suffering since Covid-19. With the rise of streaming, movie theaters have been bleeding money. Out of curiosity, my boyfriend and I looked up TADC screenings near us, and all of them have been completely sold out. Not only is this a win for movie theaters, who will rake in a ton of well deserved cash, this is a win for the indie animation team behind TADC, who deserve to be paid well for creating a feature-length finale. Plus, the fucking finale is gonna be free 2 weeks later anyways. I genuinely cannot wrap my head around why people would have an issue with both theaters and artists being paid other than plain selfishness, and I believe that's gotta be the thesis to my blog post: selfishness is running fandom instead of enjoyment.
I've been in online fandom spaces my whole life and have watched the stark decline of fandom as I grow older. Fandoms always have and always will have bad apples, as will any group of people, that's normal, and it's foolish to think that a few bad actors should dictate a whole fandom's perception, however, I've noticed some poor behavior becoming normalized by a lot of "new-gen" fandoms, to the point where it's weirding me out a bit and making me feel old LOL.
Keep in mind, this is all coming from a Homestuck fan who was on Tumblr during the sharpie bath and bucket incident days (again, if you know you know) so I know a thing or two about bad apples in fandom, I've just never seen this kind of behavior so widespread before. Maybe it just seems this way because of how modern social media tends to feed negative content to it's users to keep people hooked, but I also feel like this factors in to younger people subscribing to these negative mindsets. Nowadays, so many fans feel entitled to media they like. This does not mean you cannot critique media you enjoy, I just feel like, to an extent, certain fanbases will literally draw and quarter not just the creators of their fav media, but also their fellow fans, if they don't do things exactly correct in every inconceivable way. We're in an era where witch hunting is normalized, where creating 200+ page Google Docs on people for shipping two characters who can be slightly mean to eachother is just another Twitter post to scroll past, and where harrassment of show creators can be justified under the guise of critique. Again, I am completely aware this has been an issue for a long time (looking at you needle cookie and glass cupcake incidents), it just feels so much more common in a weirdly parasocial way.
People's, mostly kids', whole lives are becoming dictated by what they like, how they like it, if they like it enough or more than their friends, and if they enjoy it in the right way, and this snakey mentality just causes fandom to be more scary to interact with than joyful. If you aknowledge Jimmy from Mouthwashing is a well written character, you're a S/A apologist. If you buy the Anya nendroid, you're supporting the death of S/A victims. These are all things I've genuinely heard be spread around and widely agreed to last year. I feel like half of the issue is children engaging with content they literally are unable to completely understand. A lot of children can't understand the deeper themes of Mouthwashing because they don't have jobs. A lot of children can't understand why the TADC movie is happening because they've never had jobs.
I really don't want this post to become a hating on kids thing, because I don't think children being in fandom is bad at all. Hell, I was one of those kids. It just feels like, with social media becoming so addicting, and children owning phones and having twitter accounts becoming so normalized, the loudest people are the most incorrect ones, and their voices get amplified. Maybe the thesis of this is how modern social media is a plague, who knows? I don't even know! This is just my word vomit.
I hope everyone has a good night!
So, last night I installed Linux Mint on my main PC! Woooah. First time using Linux... kinda nervous.
But in all serious, I thought it'd be fun to write a thought out blog post regarding Linux Mint: the why, how, and what. The "why" being, why did I move to Linux, the "how" being... well, how, and "what" being what I think of it!
On an off topic note, I'm thinking of rearraging some of my blog in the future to separate my IRL ramblings and my tech ramblings, but until then, enjoy it all here for now heh.
So, why did I move over to Linux? For myself, it's both a simple and loaded question. TLDR: I hate Windows. I think that's reasonable enough. But if you wanna know, I'll tell you more.
I've had a passing interest in installing Linux on my main system for about 2 years now, but it was an interest I was really quiet about. Linux has grown this reputation outside of tech spaces as being an OS that is confusing, difficult to understand and use, and plain out not viable for anyone who isn't into tech. At the time, I wasn't running in the type of web circles I am now, but after my exposure over the last year to a lot of different tech subject, I began to learn that Linux isn't really this untamable beast only the smarted of software engineers can handle. It's actually pretty damn simple.
HUGE asteriks there, of course. I know for a fact there's a lot of distros that are NOT friendly AT ALL to beginners, but this at the same time, there is extremely accessible distros as well. I went with mint for now, since I'm obviously a huge noobie and I knew Mint was one of the best distros for starters. There's aslo a ton of resources out there for mint. I'm sure it's the same for other distros, but for mint, it's very noobie-friendly and everyone on the mint forums are extremely thorough and nice when it comes to lending a hand to guys like me.
The driving point that made me seriously debate installing mint was when I realized OneDrive had secretly been leeching off of my PC in the background for years. It was shitty and really upsetting for me, as someone who got my PC secondhand a long time ago. I went through a whole song and dance to finally get it off my system, which genuinely took hours and was way more difficult than it needed to be, and it was almost like a come to Jesus moment for me. I kept falling down rabbit holes about Windows bloat, things that were essentially spyware, and how much it dragged down my PC, so this weekend, I finally took the leap into Mint.
Okay, I'm not gonna go into installation here, mostly because it's way out of my area of expertise, and there's already a super in-depth installation guide on the mint website, but long story short: bootable flashdrive. That's it.
Now, I'm not just gonna leave this section here. I wanted to cover my gaming experience with Linux. As we all know, not every game is Linux friendly, especially FPS. I'm really into Overwatch, and have been for years. Ideally, one could just run Overwatch off Steam(/Proton) and move on with their life, but I'm a person who has a lot of friends I play with on Battle.Net and wanna be able to use their launcher and chat system. Okay, issue number one. How did I troubleshoot?
Well, Reddit and Google are literally godsends. I went through a couple options, like adding the .exe for the Battle.Net launcher to Steam, but that didn't work. So, I moved onto Lutris, which handled the Battle.Net launcher perfectly. I've been playing Overwatch seamlessly on it for a combined ~4 hours and have not once ran into issues. Yay! I know some folks say they can play WoW seamlessly through Lutris as well, but I don't play WoW so I wouldn't know, but I still think that's really cool!
I also played some Roblox with buddied today using Sober. I kid you not it was just one Google search, looking up Sober in my software manager, then boom. Log in. I was able to play Roblox within like 5 minutes, and it ran great!
It's funny, 'cause I used to believe my PC sucked. I thought it was slow and super bogged down, but since installing mint, I've genuinely seen a difference in boot speeds, in performance, everything. It's kind of asinine how much Windows bogs down your PC.
So, after 24 hours in mint, what do I think of it? Well, the only regret I have was not jumping on the bandwagon sooner!!
I've had 0 issues (except for one of my monitors not being detected, which is a hardware issue and not a linux issue) and am genuinely enjoying myself to the max. I've customized my theme, added applets and desklets (which I may make another blog post about at some point), and I'm able to easily play games with my friends, work on my site, and everything I did before on Windows but quicker, easier, and more efficiently.
I know this probably reads as super corny and goofy to some, but genuinely I never knew how capable my PC was until installing Linux. I can't wait to explore Mint more and share my experience here, and maybe dip my toes into other distros at some point in the future. This is super exciting for me, especially as someone who's hoping to learn more about computers.