As critical as I get about any government, I still find some aspects interesting, like how the law that prevents living people from being featured on legal tender in the United States came about. Apparently in 1866, congressman Martin Russell Thayer led a motion in response to Treasury members putting themselves on banknotes in a probable act of vanity, and this would become law, one that’s generally been upheld outside of commemorative coins that I don’t think have reached wide circulation and were more for collectors. It took that long to actually make it law even though it generally seems that it was previously done from precedent, similar to how presidential term limits were self-imposed until it became law. It’s in contrast to currencies from other countries that display current office holders as well as monarchs where applicable on newly produced currency.
Under similar circumstances, in how several popular emotes on that increasing hellsite Twitch have been removed for various reasons, most of which being photographs of someone’s face, I would only wonder how long until the site decides to ban depictions, or at least photographs, of recognizably living people on emotes, even if it’s someone’s own channel emotes. They’ve already made a whole lot of strange decisions, such as their obsession with preventing people from using the site if they even have an ad blocker installed. If I mess with emotes, I more go for the animal or cartoon ones typically. I always thought the idea of putting some random guy’s face in a message was weird anyway, not even like a cartoon smiley thing.
Twitch itself is also no better than the typical news outlet that looks to profit from the collapse of civilization as most major streams seem to focus on the “just chatting” category to report on how many people died that day for whatever reason, and probably also to add to that number by telling anyone trapped in an affected country to commit suicide to end their suffering. The latter part is more of an assumption from typical online behavior and may come more frequently from viewers than broadcasters, but the implication is still there.
My usual distaste of social media and humans on average mainly comes from people not knowing when to shut up. I even wonder the same of myself, but if I don’t try to clear up what it is that I’m thinking in some form, it only tends to get worse. I’m just trying to not be obnoxious about it, so I refrain from posting it all over social channels and just keep it to a personal log, though this one has been public as well. Just not infused with those like and share buttons, aside from my bot-run Twitter that I haven’t touched in almost a year that parrots this site’s RSS feed. Also the core of Neocities itself does have aspects of following and liking updates, but I’ve just mostly been ignoring that, though if someone does “follow” that part of my site then I at least take a look at their own site to see how much we might align in interests or site design. People keep defying Twitter’s design for shorter messages with those rant threads that start with (1/385) or whatever. It’s something really more suited for Tumblr if they want to stick to the usual blue-accented social media channels. I’ve just chosen differently.
Whenever I would end up getting a streaming site all to myself, I’d probably make the emotes, if I even bother with them, all some kind of pixelated cartoons or animals. It’ll be done for fun, consistency, and not having to worry about what humans are recently revealed to be the worst of the humans as well.