(no subject)

[kradeelav]

i've been thinking about different kinds of literacy.

financial, technology literacy mostly.

this all got started because i'm signing a lot of legal papers lately - and without getting into it there was one that had a slight bit of text missing on one that  drastically changed the amount of rights i had and i very thankfully caught it on a reread and was obnoxious about getting it fixed despite comments of 'no they should be the same.... oh shit. they're not'. i do truly think it was accidental, but recently playing through the whole pelleas-accidentally-signed-the-blood-contract side plot in radiant dawn only a few weeks later sure had a new flavor there lol.

and....  god the freedom that tech literacy alone can give you is insane.  it's allowed me to live in multiple worlds of a kind for decades in peace in ways i don't think anyone else fully understands - to seamlessly slip between those despite being housebound. to have total intellectual independence in evesdropping politely in different circles, to wander around and learn and sympathize with a far wider slice of humanity than otherwise. all because "i'm good with technology", on a pretty average-to-me level; it's not like i'm a sysadmin. additionally - despite the recent NSFW/kink art crackdowns, i've been able to operate mostly unaffected from an infrastructure level because i've already anticipated and built it smartly like my site (complete with rss blog and the like), giving me the runway to continue to build and draw at my own pace.

contrast this with a certian flavor of social media personas where it's very clear they don't have the willpower or desire to even learn how to do that; and how then, they're effectively stuck to the arbitrary rules of whatever platform they're on.

many, many types of coercion exists and will always exist, but having just a basic level of that literacy protects you from so much of it.

Comments

[karel]

>> a certian flavor of social media personas where it's very clear they don't have the willpower or desire to even learn how to do that

legitimately something I have always wanted to badly to avoid slipping into, even with the everything going on that does make reskilling (including the influx of ai-slop how-to articles... but if nobody else has me, +"reddit" has me) trickier, I feel, than it was somewhat recently, while still easier than it was in, say, the 90s. weird sweet spot, there, I think, in the late 00s/early 10s, with the abundance of free knowledge. to be able to learn things is to have a degree of fluidity that's really protective.

good catch on them papers. holding attention there can be daunting, depending on how high the page count goes...

[kradeelav]

honestly it's one of the reasons i'm so proud of you and delighted you stuck it out with tegalog - figuring out the backend in Japanese is not the easiest thing ever but it's that kind of hands on knowladge that pays itself in quiet dividends later.... heck, i'm sure you've noticed the thing where learning about something in one area (eg, lighting physics in gamedev for me) is so useful completely elsewhere (doing irl photoshop work).

[karel]

⁄⁠(⁠⁄⁠ ⁠⁄⁠•⁠⁄⁠-⁠⁄⁠•⁠⁄⁠ ⁠⁄⁠)⁠⁄ thanks, I was a little proud of me too, web dev beyond html/css has always been a bit daunting, because it falls into that area where so many things can cause the same general error type...so tracking it down requires a bit more comfort in reading error logs than I've generally cultivated...

But, in that way, yes, definitely found some transfers here and there, learning a bit of SQL making me more proficient in various other database logic and vice versa, for example. So, I'm always glad to pick up knowledge like that where I can.

[ellerean]

This is such a huge issue now. We're blessed to have grown up in the "old days of the Internet," where you had to learn HTML if you wanted to express yourself. Or learn Photoshop if you wanted to make a graphic. I love that you still have a proper website (and use it... unlike mine...) and take two seconds to properly read things. That literacy is sorely lacking overall, in a lot of things. (Today's cars, for instance, are a little too "self driving" for my liking...).

[kradeelav]

oh gosh the CARS.... mom's "entertainment screen" went bust a week ago and it's so unnerving to drive around in an actively blue-screen-of-death-ing car lol. feeling you.

always thought it was so cool myspace (and then later on, custom tumblr themes) accidentally taught half a generation to code, much like your site mention. i'm optimistic there'll be eventually something similar that comes along -- teenagers find the weirdest ways to build things if it's away from parents x)