Welcome to Bad News World

There’s been a lot of bad news lately, from Rockstar trying to push the cost-of-a-game envelope even further, to Bandcamp firing most of their engineers only a few months after pledging to ban any and all music that even so much as hints at the existence of AI (whose got money on Bandcamp running AI internally as a replacement for their engineers?), and to Sony announcing that physical discs will be discontinued entirely… I find myself continually slipping into nostalgia for the early 2000s. Don’t get me wrong: I really like having a smartphone! And I think all these people below the age of thirty who pine for a dumb-phone that doesn’t do anything, are looking into a past they never lived with rose tinted glasses (I almost said sub-level 30). Going about your daily life, especially the slog of being forced to have a job, with no entertainment in your hand whenever you want is torture akin to waterboarding lite. Yeah, the 8020 looks great! …as a novelty item. But when I think of the…