Mediocrity Is Destroying Everything...Including Our Software

So this morning I'm making my second cup of coffee. I'm about to eat one of my Zinger cupcakes to go with my black coffee, right? I need a little sugar with my coffee. And I was thinking of how mediocre so much of the world has become. Mediocrity is everywhere. It's in our sports. It's in our music. It's in our movies. It's in our culture. It's in our software. Right? Everything is mediocre now. where when I was a kid, it seemed like we had higher quality standards for everything. I I know it's going to sound like I'm a boomer, and maybe I am a bit of a boomer because, you know, when people complain, hey, modern music sucks compared to music from, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago. Modern movies suck compared to movies, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And people think, ah, you're just a old fddy duddy. You know, there's nothing wrong with all of these movies that are all computergenerated. CGI graphics with hardly any dialogue and in some cases CGI generated actors. There's nothing wrong with that DT. You're just a boomer. And maybe maybe you guys have a point, but I do think that we don't hold ourselves to the same standards these days as we did in years past. An obvious example of this is sports. I'm a big sports fan or I was a big sports fan when I was a kid. I watched a lot of Major League Baseball. I've been watching NFL football. I've been a New Orleans Saints fan since I was like four years old. Watch every game, right? I watch a lot of NBA. I watch a lot of college basketball, a lot of college football, a lot of boxing back in the day when boxing was much more popular than it is now. And then with the rise of MMA, mixed martial arts, the UFC, I was a big fan of that. And nowadays, I hardly watch any of that stuff. Why? It's because I can't stand what sports have become. Sports back in the day when I was a kid, so we're talking, you know, when I was little, 40 some odd years ago, right? It was a very different landscape because athletes didn't make hardly any money. They didn't make the millions of dollars they make now. You've got people in the NFL and the NBA now that are making 50, 60, $70 million per year on some contracts, right? just insane amounts of money. And when you're making that kind of money, do you really care if you win? Do you care if your team wins? Do you care at the end of the year if you win the championship or not? Right? It's no longer uh about winning. Right? When people were playing NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball decades ago, they didn't really make that kind of money. They didn't make life-changing amounts of money. They were playing that game. They were playing that sport because they loved it and they wanted to prove to everyone that they were the best, right? It was all about that striving for excellence, that will to power, right? They wanted to be the best in the world at what they did. That's what athletes did back then. Now they don't do that. It it's basketball. NBA basketball has become practically unwatchable. The NBA season is 82 games. And I remember back in the 1980s, the 1990s, when you saw people like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan and and those guys, they played practically every game of the season. They played all 82 games. Maybe they missed one or two games, right? But they they were going to play 80 games that year without the playoffs, right? And then they play, of course, every game in the playoffs as well. These athletes now, they sometimes will only play 50 games of the regular season out of 82. That's normal now, right? Because they take games off. They purposely take games off now, right? They they do what is called load management, right? Because they got to take care of their bodies. They want to make sure they have longer careers. That way they get more paychecks. Basically, it's not about what's best for that team, for that season, what's best in order to win that championship for that year. It's all about what's best for my pocketbook. And I can't stand that. And of course, I don't want to just make this into a sports argument, but you know, getting back to things like music and movies and just cultural topics in general, everywhere, everywhere you look, it's just mediocre rules the day. And when I think about movies, especially when I think about older movies, I'm one of these people, you know, I was born in the 1970s, but I can watch movies that are older than I am. I can watch movies that were made in the 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, and appreciate those films because in many ways, those films are better than the films being made today just from some of what they were doing with cinematography. Just the camera and the film they were using sometimes just looks better, right? [laughter] Uh and of course those films because there weren't all of these effects and CGI generated visual effects and all it was much more dialogue driven right it was there was much more artistic flavor to these films and I can appreciate films older than me but that is not the case with the new generation. I've noticed that younger people today typically can't appreciate things that are older than them. They don't go back and appreciate older films or older music, right? They they assume anything that's older than them, there's nothing worth seeing there, right? That's uh that's that's old. That's dead. You know, we've already turned the page on that chapter. There's nothing worth going and looking back on. And I I feel sad for those kinds of people that don't go back and explore the previous generation's work because when you don't explore what people were doing before you, you don't really have anything to compare, you know, modern times to because if you really examined music from the 1980s, 1990s, and then music today, right, it's a night and day difference, right? It doesn't even sound remotely the same. Most of the music, a lot of it is soundtracks, you know, digital drums, you know, synthesized strings and guitars and things. It's not even real human beings playing it. Uh, a lot of the singers, even though there are real singers singing in modern music, it's all been autotuned, which is terrible, right? If if you actually want to hear somebody sing with expression, with emotion, the worst thing you can do is to run that track through autotuning because it takes away a lot of the imperfections of the voice or the instrument. If you're autotuning an instrument as well, right? Sometimes you don't want to be perfectly in tuned when you're singing or playing an instrument. You purposely want to be a little high or a little low on a pitch just for effect. and people that have real musicianship, you know, people back in, you know, in the 1960s, '7s, '8s, when you heard those people sing or play the guitar or whatever, you know, that was something special. And you can when you hear those people, you're like, damn, that is a true musician. That's a true artist. They have a knack that they can bring emotion out in somebody in the listener that modern music just doesn't do because they lack that soul. You know, they've taken all the soul out of the music by running it through these computer filters. And I can't help notice the same thing with software. You know, software has become mediocre. When I was a kid, I remember, you know, software just being fantastic. I was thrilled. You know, it was a a joy to play on a computer and discover new pieces of software because everything was new, fresh, exciting. And now software in general and especially free and open- source software, you know, like I run on Linux. Software these days has become bad, right? There's a lot of bad software. There's a lot of mediocre programs out there. When I first switched to Linux on the desktop about, you know, 16, 17 years ago, you know, it was a totally different time in Linux, like the distributions, the ones that were geared toward the desktop. The biggest one at the time was Auntu had just exploded on the scene and became very popular very quickly, you know, and that thing was a joy to use. It was so exciting, so refreshing. I loved the Gnome 2 desktop back then and the comp effects, you know, the wobbly windows and the exploding fire on the screen and the rain puddles and everything like that stuff was so good. And in just the programs, you know, the Firefox browser was the most amazing web browser ever. I would never use Internet Explorer, right? I loved things like and Open Office at the time, which is now Libre Office. you know, pieces of software like that were just so incredible and just opened up my eyes to the wonderful world of free and open- source software. And nowadays, when I see Linux distributions, and I've tried hundreds, right, a lot of these modern distributions, they're lacking. A lot of new open- source programs that come about, you know, even though they're not alpha or beta software, you know, they'll be a 1.0 release or later, a lot of times they're buggy. And it's because I think the world has gotten used to mediocrity. We didn't accept mediocrity decades ago, right? That was frowned upon, right? You got shunned if you were less than the best. But now mediocrity is acceptable. It's okay to be mediocre, right? Nobody nobody is held to a high standard anymore. And I think we've got to get back to having that mindset of trying to be the best we possibly can at everything we do in life because right now the world is suffering. And I think a lot of the pain and suffering and the heartache that you see out in the world, a lot of that is because of this mediocrity mindset so many people have. People don't even imagine that the world could be better than it is. You know, people are like, "Yeah, the world it's kind of a shitty place, but hey, that's all we can do, right? We we can't do better than that." Well, really, and I think people think the world can't be better than that. Is because secretly most people think they can't be better than that. I If I can't do better than mediocre, then the world can't be better than mediocre. And I think that is the wrong mindset. And you got to break free of thinking like that. Anyway, just some food for thought. Peace, guys.

I see nothing but mediocrity in the world. Mediocrity is in our music, movies, sports, culture, software, etc. And it frustrates the hell out of me. WANT TO SUPPORT THE CHANNEL? 💰 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/distrotube 💳 Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=MW3ZFGS8Q9JGW 🛍️ Amazon: https://amzn.to/2RotFFi 👕 Teespring: https://teespring.com/stores/distrotube DT ON THE WEB: 🕸️ Website: http://distro.tube 📁 GitLab: https://gitlab.com/dwt1 🗨️ Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@distrotube 👫 Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistroTube/ 📽️ Odysee: https://odysee.com/@DistroTube:2 FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE THAT I LIKE: 🌐 Brave Browser - https://brave.com/ 📽️ Open Broadcaster Software: https://obsproject.com/ 🎬 Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org 🎨 GIMP: https://www.gimp.org/ 💻 VirtualBox: https://www.virtualbox.org/ 🗒️ Doom Emacs: https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs Your support is very much appreciated. Thanks, guys!