(satire)
Just kidding, it’s ads for everyone except some CEO who is getting a BJ from two supermodels at once on a yacht.
It’s The Lottery for 2025.
Probably would go over about as well with people as it did in the story.
Beat me to it! Great story.
Modern day Hulu Jesus!
piracy has no ads
I thought that’s what this post was referring to? (the one person who downloads it from hulu originally had to watch the ads to get it before they uploaded it)
Stremio + Torrentio FTW. Everything is on there. It’s beautiful.
(It’s also so user-friendly that even my mom in her 60s can navigate it with ease.)
You say that, but every piracy site I’ve ever seen was plastered in ads.
literally just use an ad blocker? genuinely confused that not everyone does
not if you adblock.
You need a good private tracker
If you’re using websites to pirate videos, you’re doing it wrong. Give Stremio + Torrentio a try. It’s much better than a website or torrent client cause it looks and acts just like Netflix.
It works best with Real-Debrid but if you don’t feel like paying $3/mo for instant streams, you can always go without and wait for seeds the old fashioned way. But then you’ll need a VPN, depending on your OS.
I’m going to keep it 100%, I’m probably never going to pirate again. It was fine when I was young and broke and couldn’t think of anything better to do than watching stuff. But my free time and appetite for shows and movies have plummeted, and I have a decent income. I don’t mind paying a couple bucks to not have to worry about it on the extremely rare occasions I feel like watching something, and if I’m going to watch something it’s because it’s really good; I’d rather the creators get some kickback and streaming services have somewhat accurate metrics about content popularity so those creators are more likely to get to make future content.
Could you give more info on what those services are for newbies like me?
AdBlock + just torrent it lil bro
adpocalypses./
Firefox + uBlock origin = no Hulu ads
no hulu = no hulu ads
This feels like satire but isn’t
If you haven’t read “the ones who walk away from omelas” from LeGuin, I recommend doing so.
The funny thing about that story is that its not supposed to be some sort of moral quandary, the suffering child isn’t the point at all. And that’s not subtext, the author straight up speaks directly to the reader and says its not the point.
And yet its practically the only thing I’ve ever heard people mention about it.
What would you say is the point of the story?
The author speaks directly to the reader about this:
The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
She laments her inability to make Omelas seem like a real place, to convince the reader that such a society could actually exist, and invites the reader to try in her stead:
But I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all.
Finally, after some more description she again directly speaks to the reader to ask them if Omelas seems real:
Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing.
When the answer is “no” they add the detail of the suffering child, which is necessary for all good things that occur there. How exactly torturing a child results in the city’s scholars being smart or ensuring good harvest is not explained at all, and yet by some narrative alchemy the setting is transmuted from something meaningless into something interesting.
The non-subtextual point of the story is that we as a people cannot imagine even a fictional setting without injustice. The subtextual point of the story is that we cannot imagine a society without injustice, fictional or not. Just as the people of Omelas described in the last section convince themselves that the injustice of their society is necessary, inevitable, and futile to fight against, so to do we convince ourselves that the injustices of our society are the same way. And yet there is some hope offered in the titular ones who walk away:
The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
The author admits that she herself cannot imagine “the kind of place they’re going to”, in other words the kind of society that is not based on exploitation but is not an impossible utopia like the Omelas described in the first section, something that could exist in the real world (it seems the author failed to convince even herself). Nevertheless these people who are not her “seem to know where they are going”. This is an invitation to the reader to try to do what she couldn’t by herself: figure out how to structure such a society.
So, you can see what I mean when I say that its funny that this story that laments our inability to engage with anything but suffering and exploitation, is engaged with almost exclusively by talking about the mechanics and moral implications of the suffering that it uses as an example of this very tendency.
Thank you for this response. This was a surprisingly good analysis for a random post on the Internet.
I admit I myself have historical only really focused on the moral horror of it, and found myself wondering if I’d stay or leave the city if I found myself there. It easily maps onto real life- much of the comfort we enjoy is built on lightly hidden horrors like slave labor and other exploitation.
This second facet is also worth thinking about, though I don’t think it renders the other one moot.
Thank you for this; it made me think.
Maybe “Always Coming Home” was her vision of a just, yet believable society.
And while you’re at it read the rest of her stuff
The joke is that this is not one person, but 10% of their userbase. So you get an ad month every 10 months
“Ad-week”, “Ad-month”, “Ad-year”, that’s some brand new sentence material
My favorite part of this, is that to be worth it the person would have to watch the ads. So they’re like “arrrrrgh! Fine” and just sit there watching ads that month.
Streaming Service from Omelas
The torture child of hululas.
Ad Jesus, sacrificed his time for your media.