December 15st, 2017 – 1:06am PST
Yeah, it’s, uh… it’s been awhile! Sorry about that! Holidays and all that, ya know? I may need to cut down the frequency of updates to Monday and Friday for the time being, but we’ll see how it goes.
The midnight showing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi is wrapping up right about now for a lot of diehard fans. I wanted to check some facts earlier about the movie before posting this comic, and when I did, I found the IMDB homepage was plastered with banners advertising some sort of glowing Star Wars spoons.
Spoons.
…
Disney is using Star Wars to sell… spoons.
Also bottled water.
I don’t know if George Lucas cries himself to sleep, or if seeing the intellectual property he created whored away to sell spoons and bottled water even registers. I get it though, money talks.
*sigh* That actually brings me to another point.
It was sad to see the decision to kill Net Neutrality this week. People may try to tell you it won’t have an impact, or worse, that it’s going to help this country. Those people are wrong. I believe in democracy, but business shouldn’t be prioritized above a free and open internet.
This is a pivotal age we live in, to be sure. The gates are closing. Not all at once, of course… but just wait. There’s a lot of people out there who don’t understand the ramifications of this week’s ruling. Not at all. This is a topic I feel quite strongly about. That being said, you’re certainly welcome to skip the next paragraph, unless it interests you to some degree.
Like many others, I’ve learned plenty from the internet. I’ve watched videos about laying the foundation of a house, driving a stick shift, and building a water turbine out of an old washer. On more than one occasion I’ve had to reference a set of instructions for tying a tie. That information is readily available, which is a great thing! However, without Net Neutrality, there’s nothing to stop my ISP from deciding I need to pay more to access that information. Worse still, there’s nothing to stop them from deciding to block that content and forcing me to seek it out elsewhere. It’d be a STRANGE coincidence if “elsewhere” was simply another company paying my ISP to prioritize their content over everyone else’s. Definitely sounds like a system where the business with the most money wins outright, ya know? No room for the little guy. That’s what I find so frustrating about all this. There’s so much knowledge out there, and there SHOULD be mandates in place to ensure that knowledge is available to anyone with internet access.
The gates are closing.
Those gates that remain, you ask? Well, if you have to pay to enter, then it’s not a gate… it’s a tollbooth.