ALostInquirer

Recently I've been catching up on tv and some of the more mature/adult shows, which I've been...Enjoying? Seems like the wrong word, but they've all generally been cynical or dark.

For reference, I've just finished Better Call Saul, which got me to finally get around to finishing Breaking Bad, and I've also been doing a rewatch of the anime Monster as it's been years since I last watched it.

So basically back to back dark shows.

I've already watched The Good Place, which nails what I'm describing, but it's a little blunt with the sweetness, while I've watched some of Bee and Puppycat which seems like it's closer to a nice middleground of sweet and real.

What are some of your go-to shows for this kinda vibe?

I'm talking like instead of metaphors or analogies, buildings and entire cities are in fact their own sort of constructed organisms and colonies of organisms.

By this I mean, organize around some single person for leadership, or in other contexts focus on a popular figure. Even societies that tend to be described as more collectively-organized/oriented tend to do this.

People are people and are as flawed as one another, so this pervasive tendency to elevate others is odd to me. It can be fun and goofy as a game, but as a more serious organizing or focal principle, it just seems extremely fragile and prone to failure (e.g. numerous groups falling into disarray at the loss of a leader/leader & their family, corruption via nepotism and the like, etc.).

Supposing you could switch their state of matter back to what they were without losing parts of your body in the process.

Any organism that you can think of, microscopic or macroscopic, and yes including those somewhere in-between that we're not sure how to classify as alive or not (i.e. viruses).

Which would you most like to conduct an interview with, and what might some of your questions be?

Community of any sort, btw, online or offline, deep space or inner earth, so on or so forth.

Not that I'm complaining, I just find it kinda interesting given how so much stuff demands you sign up & register to do much of anything on a service or site.

Is it simply a cool cultural element that's persisted since IRC's been around? Also shoutout to all the old hat IRC folks out there maintaining their servers and enabling drop-in questions this way, much appreciated!

It's easy to doom and gloom about big businesses building their big data scraping AI to consolidate even more control and wealth, given that the odds are unfortunately in their favor.

However, AI presents yet another technological turning point for the public in a similar way to mass mechanical automation, and so, how might one imagine communities building their own to help themselves? How might communities use these tools to retain and make more use of their own accumulated data rather than continue to give it up to big businesses?

Looked around and can find plenty of tech news related communities and several tech communities for learning/discussing specific tech subjects (programming, programming languages, etc.), but can't seem to find a more open-ended, all levels tech questions community.

Closest I found to what I'm looking for was [email protected], but that's more aimed at beginners (which is a great idea tbh).

Have I overlooked where one of the tech communities is more open to questions alongside news? Will admit I was skimming after awhile of searching, so I may have!

I'm sure this will vary for many people depending on their schools, where/when they were taught, and the like, so I'm interested to see what others' experiences have been with this.

I'm also curious about what resources some have used to learn better research skills & media literacy (and found useful) if their school didn't adequately teach either (or they may have whiffed on it at the time).

Would you bother preparing something to help prove your reincarnation, or would you simply take advantage of whatever you retained (and prepared for yourself) from your past life?

How might you use this ability to help yourself and others?

Edit:
To clarify, suppose you have some vague memory of your past life in your reincarnated self that helps you along and allows you to take advantage of whatever your past self prepared for you.

Suppose the internet was still a major success and was sustainable without compromising for commercial interests. How do you think societies around the world may have changed, or not?

Consider the optimistic angles of such an unencumbered space extended out from the internet's earlier days to the present. What if some of those possibilities had been realized?