Why is Oldhammer community focused on Instagram?

Like for some reason it seems to be the place with most Oldhammer content. And Instagram is getting worse and worse. They were hiding some posts in "recent" tagsearch and now they removed the "recent" option altogether. Sort of ironic that fans of dystopian sci-fi converged on a literal dystopian site ran by a dystopian cyberpunk corporation.
Anyway, I find it super depressing.
 
never used it and reading this subject title, i was a bit suprised cause i thought it had already died out.. Instagram still a thing?
oh and you can't hav a cyberpunk corporation. Punk by it's nature is choatic. to be a Corporation is order. I know you get alot of idiots in the 60s claiming to be 'punk music' like the sex pistols, yet stuff was written down, they had order, they had contracts etc, but misuse of term doesn't make it right...

it's the old war gaming problem with Chaos.. how you have you 'ranks' and units in chaos? it's not chaos ^_^

also doesn't 'dystopian' mean a society? a corporation can be a society? mm.. yes.. they can be.. but i can't tell how much suffing the employee's have as I am not one nor know of one.. as I was unaware they place was still running.. probebly should pay more attention..

guess I partly depends on if you are a follower of plato's philosphy, or Aristotle.. basically, Plato belived in the abstract and there fore things like 'Life after death', 'the soul' etc, where as Aristotle was basicaly what you have is what you got, your make your own life. the standard image being Plato holding his work up to the heavens, and Aristotle holding it to the earth.

of course, then you start to get into grounds of Theology.. while i had some knowledge and do stuff related to such things.. my knowledge is limited.. I know some people here have theological training way more then me.. and a close friend of mine is a trained and practicing minister.. but I'm Agnostic (Don't have any real views for or against) where as atheists have a religous view against (and yes, there view is as equally religous and any believer in anything) and well, others have a strong belief.

okay.. I think i'm getting off topic..

No clue, I don't go there and didn't know it was still a thing.. Is friendster still around too?
 
Instagram is a visual platform so for people posting largely just photos it suits. It also doesn't lose content in the same way as facebook so you can scroll back through and see stuff from ages ago (if you're patient enough).
It's not as good as it used to be. Since TikTok's 5-second attention span Instagram prioritises people who post 'reels' and 'stories' on a regular basis so it's harder to get seen and means the feed gets easily clogged with the same usual suspects. Nevertheless, second to a blog and forum I prefer Instagram for keeping a pictorial diary of my work. The big downside with the forum of course is no image hosting so unless you link to pictures on a blog the image content tends to disappear after a few years.
 
Fimm McCool":2lngykwe said:
Instagram is a visual platform so for people posting largely just photos it suits. It also doesn't lose content in the same way as facebook so you can scroll back through and see stuff from ages ago (if you're patient enough).
It's not as good as it used to be. Since TikTok's 5-second attention span Instagram prioritises people who post 'reels' and 'stories' on a regular basis so it's harder to get seen and means the feed gets easily clogged with the same usual suspects. Nevertheless, second to a blog and forum I prefer Instagram for keeping a pictorial diary of my work. The big downside with the forum of course is no image hosting so unless you link to pictures on a blog the image content tends to disappear after a few years.
Tumblr is much better than Instagram, though. Just the fact Instagram is owned by Facebook should keep counterculture people away but somehow it doesn't. I basically exclusively use "following" and "tagsearch" when using Instagram and tagsearch just got broken. To me removal of the ability to display recent in tags and before that secret filtering of recent posts shows that Instagram has entered the terminal phase of enshittification cycle where they don't even pretend that platform is there to serve users.

I was recently thinking about experimenting with putting my art on Internet Archive since it's a non-profit so it's probably most entshititfication resistant.
GodKnightofMarsII.png

https://archive.org/details/god-knightof-mars-ii
 
I'm not really sure I'd call Oldhammer countercultural. Maybe a little? I'd say it's mostly a bunch of us still playing the nerdy games of our youth in one form or another. Even by the time I first got in I bought some of the stuff, including my first box of beakies, in mall bookstores like Walden Book and B. Dalton, which were sort of the 80s counterparts of Barnes and Noble. (There were no GW stores in the US at the time, so your options were book stores and hobby shops of various sorts. And when I was a teenager stuck in the suburbs, so the mall was easy.) There was certainly a countercultural elements to it at its origin, much as there was to D&D, but I think it was really more kids being kids than anything genuinely anarchist. Most of my gamer friends were literally boy scouts. Deeply countercultural there, swearing oaths to help your neighbor and uphold the law right before you roll the dice to see who kills the goblin.

Which is to say while GW might have been countercultural when they conned Gary Gygax into letting them license his game, by the time they released Rogue Trader they had grown into their sharp suits running a company that was shipping millions of units on multiple continents. And the punk aesthetic was just a gloss. (Which is probably mostly all it ever is. And all it really needs to be. Art is its own justification.)

As to Cyberpunk corporations (or megacorps, if you will) they're very much a staple of the genre. The fiction is dominated by computers, hackers, and a staggering gap between the wealthy and everyone else, with the wealthy generally living and working in walled fortresses isolated from the masses. Silicon Valley looks more and more like that all the time. Meta is absolutely the epitome of the sort of corporation envisioned as the engine of the dystopian future predicted in most of the Cyberpunk I've read and seen. The megacorps aren't punk, really. They're the suits that make everyone else poor, leading the poorest of the poor to go punk and try to break the system. Which . . . kind of sounds like the world we live in now. Some of those campuses, including Meta's if I'm not mistaken, are literally walled compounds. The people running them live in gated neighborhoods protected by armed guards. Maybe "punk corporation" is an oxymoron, but "Cyberpunk corporation" summons a pretty complete and fully formed image of . . . Meta. Or Alphabet, Microsoft, Bayer, Boeing, J. P. Morgan Chase, even Anheuser-Busch . . . take your pick. Even things as punk as liquor, guns, and ammunition are owned by the suits at the megacorps now. There's no escaping AB InBev, Colt CZ, and the Olin Corporation. You could buy a different round (of either kind), but it'll be just as corporate. The suits will have their due.

Anyway, don't mind me. Don't know much about Insta as I've never been there, but it makes sense that a site dedicated to photos would be popular. And I can't imagine any other site would be any less controlled by some Silicon Valley oligarch or other. All of this stuff settles into a few big players and a bunch of small, specialized stuff slowly living, dying, and being bought out by the big players eventually. That's just the nature of capitalism. Even games have gone that way. (GW just happens to be one of the big players. They and Hasbro/WotC are probably the two biggest, with a bunch of smaller companies dancing around the edges.)
 
Instagram didn't use to be Facebook/Meta. Since they took it over it's been crapper, but that's not necessarily a reason to ditch the following I have spent years building up there. Like Facebook I mostly use it to advertise my business so there ya go. Seems I'm as capitalist as the best of them. ;)
 
mm.. techinally, a capitalist is just a a person who uses there own wealth to drive an industery/bussiness for profit.. So the question is does Oakbound make profit?
 
Exactly. And no, definitely not! Well, actually we did one year, but then I had to pay tax so I decided not to make a profit any more! :grin:
True capitalism isn't about wealth, it's about using what you have (your 'capital') to give you the means of survival. Unfortunately it didn't take long for non-monetary forms of capital to be viewed as less worthy than having pots of cash at your disposal so capitalism now really means 'using money to make more money'. It's my big concern with the AI field since when someone with money can just buy a programme which does away with the need for skilled people (skills are about the only form of non-monetary capital that can hold a little bit of their own since they're currently needed) the only two things that will be seen as viable to generate wealth are already having wealth and being a programmer. And the programmer should watch out as soon as someone writes and AI that can code! :grin:
 
^_^

no chance of 'ai' which can code anytime soon. apart from that fact that most of the so-called 'ai' systems are stolen (and i'm not just talking about inspired by stuff etc.. I'm talking about theft in content nature. for 'training', you are meant to only use data you have permission to use. alot of the code writing ones take code which isn't given permission to be used. the system then works as a basic copy-paste system where they take a function from here, another from there and put it together and claim 'I'm an amazing coding AI cause i can make a paste job'.. it's also way the 'art' ones are pretty ropey when you look at details.. and the writing ones.. they all output crap which they pretend is AI amazing... true AI has yet to be created. They need to have intelligence and that isn't knowledge.. but sadly too much of human history has had people saying "Intelligence is rated by what you can remember' more then a mixture of abilities.. aparently you are stupid if you don't know who won the FA World Cup in 2004 ¬_¬

but yeah.. A good friend of mine is a capitaist doing pretty well as she is a very talented artist (I'm pretty bias cause i'm a friend and she is a very nice person and has helped me alot in the past..) who makes money to produce work and make money from that. would love to visit her in person some time but .. well, Norway is pretty far for me to go.
 
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