I stopped basically all discretionary spending in 2025, particularly when Trump was threatening to invade my country (with most of these companies being American) while all the shitty billionaires were smiling pleasantly and cheerfully glazing him. Amazon Prime cancelled, Netflix cancelled. My policy is: fuck these turbocunts from now on and steal everything that isn't nailed down. From now on, I only support real human people, and corporations are certainly not people, they are the opposite of people, and the real human people they employ are being exploited, and I don't support that either. I am going to start opting out of this shitty economy to the fully extent humanly possible. I'll find real humans to build a resilient, supportive, sustainable community with, people's whose backs I will have, and who will have mine, and I will of course freely share all my pirate booty with them.

They might get some of us, but they'll never get all of us. That's how we save the world, my friends. You don't have to rescue everyone from this dystopia, you just have to rescue your friends and family and neighbors, which enables them to rescue more, and pretty soon the dystopia starts to look more like a block party, and it doesn't need anyone's permission. We have more than enough essentials on this planet for all of us to survive on our own, they're just distributed unfairly and hoarded, and for all the non-essentials that we have become addicted to, we'll figure out how to substitute or perhaps even improve on. They're non-essential by definition, and we can do better, and we should do better. I don't need all this plastic shit in my life to survive, and neither do you. We should keep some of it though, it's sort of fun.

Let's not forget about video games. Valve, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all feeling like gamers don't spend enough, let's milk them for all they're worth so they can buy more yachts.

You know what? As an Apple guy, go ahead and add Apple and all their investors to the list. As one of the world's wealthiest companies, Apple could absorb the increased hardware costs and still make a profit, but it wasn't enough, so they jacked up prices like everyone else did. To be absolutely fair, they warned everyone twice. The first time when they announced the new CEO a month or two ago. So you know if they're gonna pull some shady shit, they're gonna do it on Cook's watch so Ternus ends up looking good (or better). The second time when they actually told you they were gonna raise prices, like 2-3 weeks ago. Then they actually did it. So you had a chance to get a $500 computer with 16GB of DDR5. Or a laptop with 8GB (the Neo). $100 more if you can't get an education discount (not that hard to do).

I've been saying for a decade, take some of the money you give to billionaires for goods and services, and try to spend it locally. Now I'm saying spend all of it locally. Movies still pay for themselves, and even when one flops ("oh no Masters of the Universe ONLY made like $105 million (but it cost $170 million) according to IMDb. So what though? 70s babies got their cool movie, all the superhero movies will more than make up for it. Or I should say the "other" superhero movies, He-Man is totally a superhero. I do think you should pay for what you love, which is why I went out to see Masters of the Universe. I never watched He-Man and the Masters of the Universe as a kid, but, I did watch ThunderCats (same thing with a better story) and though I know the rights are all tied up so an adaptation is almost impossible... I still hope to see it get similar treatment in my lifetime. I pay for music. I stream via Apple, but I also have offline copies of all my favourite music, stored on my Mac, and stored on my Android phone (backup, no cell service on it, but it has a memory card slot and a headphone jack, and it works fine on WiFi).