Kiwi Self Improvement: Consoomerism edition

[DeadFish]

I eat out too much. Its costs too much and im getting a bit not skinny cause of it

 

[No One of Note]

Make soup and stews in a slow cooker. Do bulk meal prep instead of attempting to cook everyday

Anyone have any tips on bulk meal preps? I like to make English Muffins in bulk for breakfast and I want to know how that habit could be expanded into meals.

 

[Cup Noodle]

$600 or $700 is a fair cutoff. That can get you a Ryzen 7 5700G system, which is the fastest APU on the market, or something like an Intel Core i5-10400 + GTX 1660 Super. And those prices are in the currently fucked up PC market. You'll get 6-8 cores and acceptable 1080p gaming performance.

This time next year, AMD will switch to RDNA 2 graphics on their APUs, the systems with dedicated GPUs should be better and cheaper, and DIY PC building shouldn't be as much of a shitshow.

Cheapest buy it now 1660 on ebay is $498.99 and the cheapest on newegg is over $600 shipped from china. I5 10400 is 138 on ebay. That doesn't leave much room for the other components. I wish I could get 1660's near MSRP. I'd buy eight or ten of them. I've had a new saw and weed eater ordered from a local stihl dealer for two months now. I stopped by today and we were talking about how covid has fucked up supply chains and he mentioned that a local guy has two peterbuilts ordered and they are built, but peterbuilt cant get the computers and other modules to put in them to make them actually function. With the demand for chips from not only the pc market but the auto and industrial markets, I don't know that things will get better even in a year. I hope so though.

I'm consooming in a different way: I'm collecting stocks and other investment products. Over 4 years I've built a portfolio worth $13,000 and like $5000 is what I've gained from the stocks themselves so far.

I'm going give some advice a multi millionaire gave me even before the 2007 financial crisis. Don't put anything into the stock market that you can't stand to loose and definately don't put your retirement into it.

Anyone have any tips on bulk meal preps? I like to make English Muffins in bulk for breakfast and I want to know how that habit could be expanded into meals.

Borscht is a good one and one of Jersh's favorites. I make like five gallons at a time. The excess get put into wide mouth mason jars in the freezer. You can cook a week's worth of nearly anything if you don't mind eating the same thing for a whole week. I don't so that's what I do. Smoked meats also freeze well. I'll smoke a briquet and anything more than my family will need for the week I'll slice and put in freezer bags in the freezer. You can get whole rotisserie chickens for half off or sometimes more after like six at walmart. I'll buy four or five at a time and wrap them in cling wrap and freeze them. 20 minutes on 30% and then 5 minutes on full power in the microwave and they are nearly good as fresh. Most cooked meats and soups freeze well. Most side dishes don't. I tried to freeze potato salad once. That didn't turn out well. Baked beans do fine though.

 

[Android raptor]

I'm a womanchild so I like to consoom toys, but I guess I try to focus on specific stuff instead of just getting random crap. I also can't stand leaving shit in boxes, what I like most about toy collecting is taking them out, playing with them, taking fun pics, etc.

I've been trying to get back into customizing too. I think there's a difference between buying random crap and buying a specific toy and repainting it to be something special. Or making a custom doll and sewing an outfit, it's just so satisfying when you're finally finished and you can look at this cool shit you did yourself.

Idk I guess my take is it's ok to consoom a bit but try to do more than just collect shit and leave it in the box. Take it out and do something creative, even learn how to sew or paint to make the product unique and feel satisfied you made it your own.

 

[Cup Noodle]

I'm a womanchild so I like to consoom toys, but I guess I try to focus on specific stuff instead of just getting random crap. I also can't stand leaving shit in boxes, what I like most about toy collecting is taking them out, playing with them, taking fun pics, etc.

I've been trying to get back into customizing too. I think there's a difference between buying random crap and buying a specific toy and repainting it to be something special. Or making a custom doll and sewing an outfit, it's just so satisfying when you're finally finished and you can look at this cool shit you did yourself.

Idk I guess my take is it's ok to consoom a bit but try to do more than just collect shit and leave it in the box. Take it out and do something creative, even learn how to sew or paint to make the product unique and feel satisfied you made it your own.

I've heard a saying before that boys don't grow up they just get bigger toys. It's not in my normal line of work but today I operated an excavator a dump truck a mini excavator and several pickup trucks. Basically big boy versions of my childhood toys. I guess girls just don't grow up.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Games and gaming PCs seem to the go to debate point for several here. Unsurprising as they're both expensive and undeniably a luxury good that will be valued by some and not by others. If you enjoy the machine or the game for its own sake then that's not consoomerism. If your enjoyment comes from buying it or from telling other people you have it, then that's consooming. There's no obvious and universal line between the two, things can be a little of both. But deep in your heart you know what was the biggest factor and if three months down the line you're not getting more enjoyment from it than you did the last one, that will tell you all you really need to know.

Desktop PCs are commodities, gaming PCs add fluff and bad performance per dollar components to increase the profit margin. Arguably, nobody should be playing video games at all unless it's for training, like a flight simulator. Maybe justify multiplayer gaming as relaxation + networking to form useful *cough* connections.

Even if you splurge a little on a PC, you are getting a lot of bang for your buck. Holding out a year or two could let you get 50% more performance per dollar, even now that Moore's Law is being buried. Not many technologies are improving by double digits on regular basis. In general, PCs are millions of times better than what was available decades ago. It's cutting edge consumer nanotechnology that is useful for a myriad of tasks. A PC, big hard drive, and internet connection can facilitate massive amounts of piracy. The only thing more anti-consoomer than piracy is not consooming entertainment at all.

Tangentially related, why do people even care about computer graphics anymore, I feel like we hit a point about a decade ago that improvements in graphics became so small that most people will never notice. Does anyone notice these high-resolution textures when playing? Or that the models have five thousand more polygons? It seems like most people don't care about graphics anymore, maybe I'm not tapped into gaming culture like I used to be, but are there any new games people ogle like people used to with Crysis? There doesn't seem to be any, but people still keep spending hundreds on new graphics cards. Maybe game companies and computer parts manufacturers are in cahoots, make games more demanding so people need to keep upgrading to consoom.

On resolution, 4K is more than good enough. There will be a push to 8K displays but it will be half-hearted. There is an argument to push frame rates very high, as in 1000 FPS. For VR in particular, better-than-4K and stupidly high frame rates can be an improvement.

To reach true photorealism, or just plain good lighting effects, the industry will transition from rasterization to real time raytracing. This will happen over the next decade. At some point, Nvidia, AMD, and Intel will stop focusing on increasing rasterization performance and devote more of the silicon towards raytracing.

Techniques like Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution will lessen the need for more performance. On VR headsets, foveated rendering can track your eye movements and only render the parts you are looking at in full quality.

No matter what the target is, it should eventually be met on tiny, cheap, power efficient hardware. Like a $100 phone should eventually have better than RTX 3090 performance after chips start using 3D stacked layers. So you can expect companies to try to invent reasons to get faster hardware. Nvidia, AMD, and Intel can influence game studios to adopt new features. They can buy game studios outright if they feel the need to.

Anyone have any tips on bulk meal preps? I like to make English Muffins in bulk for breakfast and I want to know how that habit could be expanded into meals.

Get an instant pot. Even the 6-quart models can cook a lot of food, especially stews and soups, but more importantly you can set it and forget it for most recipes, saving lots of time. Like you could make several pounds of pulled pork with less than 10 minutes of work.

Figure out how to cook eggs in the microwave without them exploding, put those on the English muffins.

 

[Overly Serious]

The only thing more anti-consoomer than piracy is not consooming entertainment at all.

Great post but this part highlighted we are coming at this from a subtly different angle. In the above you are treating anti-consoomer as a push back against the companies producing the products. I think of this discussion purely in terms of personal benefit - not investing in transitory pleasure of avarice. Stealing instead of buying is, I suppose, a strike back against the companies. But it does nothing in terms of dealing with someones desire for things they don't benefit from. Which to me is the most important thing.

I think piracy just devalues what you pirate. I have a few things I don't need but which I like to have. For me it's old books. I could get the same text online in moments but I like having something printed in the 1800's. It's a pleasure which might be a pleasure of owning and might therefore count as consooming. But I have worked pretty hard in my life and there's a satisfaction in having earned those books independent of what they are. Ayn Rand said: "It doesn't matter how much money someone has, it matters how they got it." I think "consoom" has connotations of laziness, throwing money away. Which is why piracy for me still feels fairly consoomist. The main difference being that everyone can do it and it all relates to entertainment so there's less of the "keeping up with the Joneses" aspect to it.

Anyone have any tips on bulk meal preps? I like to make English Muffins in bulk for breakfast and I want to know how that habit could be expanded into meals.

I don't have a lot of experience but I am going through the same search and attempt myself. I had to buy a new fridge recently and specifically got one with a lot of freezer space. And if I had room for it in my house I would get a cabinet freezer. I think setting aside a morning to make lots of dishes - pasta, wholemeal pizza (oblong for easier storage) and whatever else you think of would be a good idea. I've only done that a couple of times but it meant that for the next few weeks I could just pull something from the freezer and east something passably healthy.

I'm also trying to get into the habit of making stuff for the slow cooker before I go to bed. It's really just chopping some vegetables and measuring out some stock and beans. Put it in a bowl in the fridge and then in the morning drop it in and turn it on. Evening meal is then ready for when you get home. There's something about making tomorrow's meals the night before that is easier to stick to. Also, always clean up your kitchen before you go to bed. It's easier to motivate yourself to cook something if you don't first have to wash up a bunch of plates in the sink.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Great post but this part highlighted we are coming at this from a subtly different angle. In the above you are treating anti-consoomer as a push back against the companies producing the products. I think of this discussion purely in terms of personal benefit - not investing in transitory pleasure of avarice. Stealing instead of buying is, I suppose, a strike back against the companies. But it does nothing in terms of dealing with someones desire for things they don't benefit from. Which to me is the most important thing.

I think piracy just devalues what you pirate. I have a few things I don't need but which I like to have. For me it's old books. I could get the same text online in moments but I like having something printed in the 1800's. It's a pleasure which might be a pleasure of owning and might therefore count as consooming. But I have worked pretty hard in my life and there's a satisfaction in having earned those books independent of what they are. Ayn Rand said: "It doesn't matter how much money someone has, it matters how they got it." I think "consoom" has connotations of laziness, throwing money away. Which is why piracy for me still feels fairly consoomist. The main difference being that everyone can do it and it all relates to entertainment so there's less of the "keeping up with the Joneses" aspect to it.

I'm not evaluating it as a push back, at least in that post. My view is: many people want to consume entertainment. If you pirate everything, you can save lots of money compared to normies who buy everything. That's an immediate benefit. You don't even need a large hard drive these days since most video piracy involves streaming sites, not filesharing or downloads. Then the next step up from that would be to not play video games or watch TV and movies in the first place, if you've concluded that those are a waste of your limited lifespan.

If you go to Library Genesis and download an epub copy of some classic book, or stream an episode of a TV show on some site based in Suriname, it's likely that nobody notices or cares. All of the meaning in that act comes from you. You, Overly Serious, feel satisfied by having something you can collect, even if you aren't showing it off or intending to sell it. I would instead put the value on the time spent seeking information out and absorbing it. I consider physical copies to be a hassle for the most part. I like that we can store a veritable Library of Alexandria on a cheap microsd card and toss it at someone.

I think the classic "push back" for Kiwis would be to reward "based" companies and avoid or pirate from "woke" companies. At least bayysed on my daily consoomption of A&H.

cons∞m™

 

[Sped Xing]

I eat out too much. Its costs too much and im getting a bit not skinny cause of it

Get a prescription for adderall.

 

[Billy Beer]

Pirate every digital piece of media you can.

Anybody who tells you pirating is bad, is both a shill and wrong. The pirate scare of the 00's and the Napster lawsuit was to stop the industry from going bankrupt. Take a look at how much money Marvel and Disney make, they aren't going bankrupt.

There is no moral or sensible reason to not pirating media. It is not stealing, because the original copy still exists. "You wouldn't steal a car", no but i would make an exact copy of someone else's ferrari, for free.

 

[Ugandan discussions]

Pirate every digital piece of media you can.

Anybody who tells you pirating is bad, is both a shill and wrong. The pirate scare of the 00's and the Napster lawsuit was to stop the industry from going bankrupt. Take a look at how much money Marvel and Disney make, they aren't going bankrupt.

There is no moral or sensible reason to not pirating media. It is not stealing, because the original copy still exists. "You wouldn't steal a car", no but i would make an exact copy of someone else's ferrari, for free.

Marvel and Disney may be making a lot, but many of the people involved in creative media are Joe Illustrator or Jackie animator making 2% of jack shit.

It's a personal judgement as to what you think matters. Whether you agree it is wrong or not, pirating stuff is undeniably consuming the intellectual output of others without paying for it, and if you value creative output then you should be prepared to pay for it.

 

[Billy Beer]

Marvel and Disney may be making a lot, but many of the people involved in creative media are Joe Illustrator or Jackie animator making 2% of jack shit.

It's a personal judgement as to what you think matters. Whether you agree it is wrong or not, pirating stuff is undeniably consuming the intellectual output of others without paying for it, and if you value creative output then you should be prepared to pay for it.

Sorry buddy but that's a load of old bollox.

Just like a waitress saying my tip helps pay her bills, I take zero responsibility for Joe illustrator getting paid well.

Have any of the staff that work for Disney been given huge pay rises over the last twenty years? No.

Have Disney et Al made a fuck ton of money over the last twenty years? Yes.

Has pirating had a negative effect on the bottom line of Disney, or the decision to pay their own staff shite wages? No.

So I won't be guilt tripped in to not pirating. and it isn't stealing. stealing is when I TAKE the property of someone else and they no longer have or own that property. Pirating isn't that. It's making a carbon copy so that everyone has one.

And, the reason I returned to pirating was shite like Netflix DNS blocking because big media distributors decided that a license should be paid for international distribution of content. Pure fucking greed.

Give me a sub that's £20 a month with all access to all content and I'll sign up for life. Try and piecemeal to death with 10 subs of £15 a time and I'm going to live in pirate Bay Land.

Apologies if this aspy spergy autistic rant came off as aggressive, I just get pissed off by piracy defending when those companies would happily watch me starve to death if it made them more money.

 

[Android raptor]

I've heard a saying before that boys don't grow up they just get bigger toys. It's not in my normal line of work but today I operated an excavator a dump truck a mini excavator and several pickup trucks. Basically big boy versions of my childhood toys. I guess girls just don't grow up.

Eh, I think it's more like girls "grow up" by being pressured to play with fashion or makeup or babies and I just rejected that because I'm not interested in that stuff.

In a way I do have big boy versions of toys I played with as a kid, since instead of just having toy animals I have real animals and volunteer helping care for other animals as well. That's also extremely rewarding, caring for actual animals and helping them grow and be healthy. I even have an actual, real life dinosaur now (cockatiel).

 

[Ugandan discussions]

Apologies if this aspy spergy autistic rant came off as aggressive, I just get pissed off by piracy defending when those companies would happily watch me starve to death if it made them more money.

I don't disagree that the IP regimes generally in the US and UK are a joke and far too easily exploited by big companies to shaft producers and consumers alike (fucking Apple/Samsung/Nokia - has that set of lolsuits died a death yet?). However, even if it is ostensibly big companies whose IP you're disregarding, it isn't a given that it is them that you're harming.

 

[AbyssStarer]

I like to wait about a week after getting an idea to buy something to see if I still want it. Saved me a few times.

Sorry buddy but that's a load of old bollox.

Just like a waitress saying my tip helps pay her bills, I take zero responsibility for Joe illustrator getting paid well.

Have any of the staff that work for Disney been given huge pay rises over the last twenty years? No.

Have Disney et Al made a fuck ton of money over the last twenty years? Yes.

Has pirating had a negative effect on the bottom line of Disney, or the decision to pay their own staff shite wages? No.

So I won't be guilt tripped in to not pirating. and it isn't stealing. stealing is when I TAKE the property of someone else and they no longer have or own that property. Pirating isn't that. It's making a carbon copy so that everyone has one.

And, the reason I returned to pirating was shite like Netflix DNS blocking because big media distributors decided that a license should be paid for international distribution of content. Pure fucking greed.

Give me a sub that's £20 a month with all access to all content and I'll sign up for life. Try and piecemeal to death with 10 subs of £15 a time and I'm going to live in pirate Bay Land.

Apologies if this aspy spergy autistic rant came off as aggressive, I just get pissed off by piracy defending when those companies would happily watch me starve to death if it made them more money.

You argument hinges on that you aren't damaging big businesses enough to really matter, but nobody only consumes big brand name products. Pirating from small, struggling companies isn't going to help anything.
I know pirates will make up any matter of arguments to reconcile what they do, but at the end of the day if somebody gets caught distributing media they have no right to distribute then they don't deserve the sympathy and I don't blame the owners of the media for going after them.

Go ahead and try to enact copyright reform instead of writing essays on the internet about it.

 

[Billy Beer]

I like to wait about a week after getting an idea to buy something to see if I still want it. Saved me a few times.

You argument hinges on that you aren't damaging big businesses enough to really matter, but nobody only consumes big brand name products. Pirating from small, struggling companies isn't going to help anything.
I know pirates will make up any matter of arguments to reconcile what they do, but at the end of the day if somebody gets caught distributing media they have no right to distribute then they don't deserve the sympathy and I don't blame the owners of the media for going after them.

You're muddying the waters here and trying to make it sound like some poor animator living in squallor has had to shoot his dog because he couldn't afford food, all because of that cunt on the farms downloaded something.

I download shit that i've bought on CD because it's easier/quicker to download it, than rip it
I've downloaded 80 year old films because like fuck am i paying for something that old, that has been on Tv a trillion times.
I don't download shit to distribute it. I watch it, then delete it.

Also, the main reason i've started pirating shows again is

1) no fucking way am i paying a single penny to any studio that tells me im a nasty, right-wing, problem causing, rapey white male. Even if there are some good jokes thrown in between.

2) Shit is getting changed and fucked with all the goddamn time. There are some films/shows that i keep on a storage drive so that i can enjoy them later in life, maybe 5 or 10 years down the line, knowing that it hasn't been wokerised.

Go ahead and try to enact copyright reform instead of writing essays on the internet about it.

Why? I'm not trying to change shit. I don't have the power to change shit and if those in power want to change shit, they would. They haven't, so they can suck it.

Let me be clear; I wouldn't steal a chocolate bar from a local shop. If i found a purse or wallet with money in, i would hand it all back to the owner. I don't care what words on a screen think of me pirating, I'm not a distributor, or someone who downloads everything that moves. I think of old TV shows or old films that i havent seen in a while, or haven't seen at all, and download it. I can't have physical media sitting around my home, the big companies said to embrace the all digital future, so i am doing.

 

[Ugandan discussions]

You're muddying the waters here and trying to make it sound like some poor animator living in squallor has had to shoot his dog because he couldn't afford food, all because of that cunt on the farms downloaded something.

Thing is, that sometimes does happen. The first run of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was 500 copies; although distributed by Bloomsbury, they'd have dropped JK Rowling like a stone if the book didn't sell well because it was shared as an DRM free ePub, and a single mother on state benefits might well now be a single grandparent subsisting on state aid rather than one of the worlds richest authors (and most the UK’s most notable philanthropists).

Let me be clear; I wouldn't steal a chocolate bar from a local shop. If i found a purse or wallet with money in, i would hand it all back to the owner. I don't care what words on a screen think of me pirating, I'm not a distributor, or someone who downloads everything that moves. I think of old TV shows or old films that i havent seen in a while, or haven't seen at all, and download it. I can't have physical media sitting around my home, the big companies said to embrace the all digital future, so i am doing.

You've rowed back quite a long way from the initial invocation! Old media that you haven't seen in a while is a fair bit different from 'every piece of digital media you can'.

It's undoubtedly a judgement, for all of us. I've copied CDs, downloaded old games, etc without any sense of guilt. But I don't disregard that a) IP is important, for creative industries and for the wider economy as a whole, and b) when I don't pay, its likely the person at the bottom of the chain who will lose out, not the big corporate that sits in the middle.

 

[Sped Xing]

Pirate every digital piece of media you can.

Don't spend your life consuming digital media, whether you paid for it or not.

 

[Overly Serious]

I'm not evaluating it as a push back, at least in that post. My view is: many people want to consume entertainment. If you pirate everything, you can save lots of money compared to normies who buy everything. That's an immediate benefit. You don't even need a large hard drive these days since most video piracy involves streaming sites, not filesharing or downloads. Then the next step up from that would be to not play video games or watch TV and movies in the first place, if you've concluded that those are a waste of your limited lifespan.

Then I'm going to reiterate my point. This has nothing to do with "consooming". We were talking about avarice, the need to have something you don't really benefit from. Consoomerism is pushed by companies to make money but the reaction to it on the consoomer side really has little to do with whether it was stolen or bought. Someone shoplifting a Gucci belt to show off to her friends is just as much a consoomer as the one who pays for it.

Now you could take a different angle and say that stealing it (and people who want to play semantics about copying can fucking cope) is anti-consoomer because it is a strike back against the companies offering it. But then take that up with Schlong song because they're passionately insisting that piracy doesn't harm these companies so they'd disagree with you on that angle. (Right? )

I think the classic "push back" for Kiwis would be to reward "based" companies and avoid or pirate from "woke" companies. At least bayysed on my daily consoomption of A&H.

Again, you don't really get what consooming is. It's not woke vs. non-woke or Right vs. Left. It's about consoomer culture, passive seeking of pleasure and meaning through the acquisition of things. It really doesn't matter if your funko-pop is of She-Ra or John Wick, you're still a consoomer.

There is no moral or sensible reason to not pirating media. It is not stealing, because the original copy still exists. "You wouldn't steal a car", no but i would make an exact copy of someone else's ferrari, for free.

I have so little respect for people who wont just admit they want something without contributing. Or pretend they don't understand that the cost of reproducing something isn't the sole cost of creating something. A lot of people get together and invest their money into producing something they want (customers buying the production run of a car, retro-actively paying for it after production through the magic of debt and credit). The cost of the car to each of them is divided by the number buying it. Then someone piggy backs on their investment by taking the rewards without contributing. Stealing.

I mean frankly, if you have to use the somewhat dodgy metaphor of a car in the first place to understand intellectual property instead of just discussing it directly, you probably shouldn't be discussing this anyway as you're either dishonest or a retard. So which is it? Dishonest or retard?

Cue the usual pirate-fag response to such counter-arguments of "I wouldn't have bought it anyway," "It's not worth paying for" and "If they weren't so greedy and asked for a fair amount I would buy it." Don't simultaneously try to argue that something doesn't have value but that you also want it. It makes you look like a tit.

Oh, what's the other popular one? The movie was already finished so everyone involved as already got paid and my piracy doesn't cost them anything. Tragedy of the Fucking Commons - movies are financed by investors and if they don't make a good investment back they don't invest as much in the next one. There're few things dumber than someone advocating piracy because the wages of people involved in producing the media are "shit". (Which you haven't bothered to look up or know before spouting off, I guarantee).

Just say it for me: "I steal stuff and justify it with retarded 90's semantics games". You'll feel a sense of liberation as self-awareness always brings, I promise.

Have any of the staff that work for Disney been given huge pay rises over the last twenty years? No.

Have many professions seen radical changes in pay relative to other professions? No. They all just trip along chasing inflation the same as everyone. Hey Mr. Baker - I'm just going to take this bread without paying because your profession hasn't seen a huge pay rise in the last twenty years. I mean, how exactly do you think the economy works? Also, bullshit can you tell me what the average pay for a grip on a big movie is today vs. 2001 without going and searching for it.

I download shit that i've bought on CD because it's easier/quicker to download it, than rip it
I've downloaded 80 year old films because like fuck am i paying for something that old, that has been on Tv a trillion times.

Yeah, we all do that. I grab things that I know simply aren't available in my country so I literally can't buy it. But here's the thing - nobody is criticizing you about that. Nor is it representative. You look on torrent sites and tell me whether the top 90% of downloads are obscure 80 year old films or the latest blockbusters. It's the latter. This is more of the retarded bullshit rationalisations that 90's kids used to use in arguments with the MPAA. Spoiler - nobody here is the MPAA going to be stunned by your brilliant fake implications that piracy is anything other than 99% about current media that is easily purchasable throughout the West. Once again - this bullshit logic of attacking the value of something to support taking it. If it doesn't have value to you then you wouldn't want it.

Don't spend your life consuming digital media, whether you paid for it or not.

And if you do spend your life consuming digital media, at least don't pretend it's somehow better because you don't pay for it. They™ don't care if you sit there masturbating over vidya that you paid for or if it's vidya that you didn't. They™ only care that you're sitting at home rather than out there doing something politically inconvenient. Payment or not isn't the point of Consooming. It's about the effect it has on you and about social conformity.

 

[Sped Xing]

And if you do spend your life consuming digital media, at least don't pretend it's somehow better because you don't pay for it. They™ don't care if you sit there masturbating over vidya that you paid for or if it's vidya that you didn't. They™ only care that you're sitting at home rather than out there doing something politically inconvenient. Payment or not isn't the point of Consooming. It's about the effect it has on you and about social conformity.

This is the irony of this thread. "How can I be not a consumerist drone?" it asks, and most of the answers are "here is how to be a consumerist drone more efficiently."