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Comment by imaginationra | Hacker News Reader

I run an independent film/animation/music/interactive studio- I have never owned any mobile phone and don't use any social media except for youtube. Our studio is not on any social media platforms. We are the counterculture.

Our studio has released torrents of media over the past 15 years that I would classify as counterculture but you would never know because we aren't hustling on Zuckerbergian platforms or playing the "please look at me" game on Youtube etc.

Trailerjacked trailer for counterculture game that makes animations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrMEQPtMO4c

Scene from a counterculture animated feature film in progress made in a game engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgMeIaqjRvY

Counterculture is not dead, its just not playing in the sandboxes everyone else is playing in, because those sandboxes are lame as fuck.

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> We are the counterculture.

Isn't that a tad bit arrogant to stick a flag in all of it? See also: https://youtu.be/uEx5G-GOS1k

Youtube is "lame as fuck." Release everywhere to not be arbitrarily silenced because anything good is controversial, by definition.

Why abuse the word "counterculture" so many times? It comes across like you're trying too hard.

Good luck and I hope you find an audience rather than make at obscurity for the point of staying in obscurity.

"anything good is controversial, by definition."

No, it isn't.

Its not arrogance- it is confidence.

We've been doings like this for twenty years. We made Potato Phones in 2002 before a potato phone was a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo3StA3INws

Youtube is lame- our work is also archived on Internet Archive and other places- this is a 172 gb master of one of our films https://archive.org/details/heartstringmarionette

Flag? I don't see a flag. I see text.

The "try too hard" stuff usually comes from weak people who are wannabe creators but lack the guts to do it, let alone stick with it for several decades while remaining original and independent.

You literally had to link to YouTube to show us your work.. You don't see the irony in that?

We should be considered lucky he shares his work with us at all.

HN likes to hate youtube (rightfully) but there is no better platform for discovery, sharing, and analytics.

What you are describing is a subculture, not a counterculture.

YouTube is filled with so many interesting little channels. I wish the algorithms highlighted them more.

I remember one channel of an old guy just smoking a cigar for an hour. Said nothing, just sat there. There were thousands of videos of him doing this, going back years. I don’t remember the name of it, unfortunately.

Can you share a few?

YouTube always seems to stick me in a bubble and never recommends any worthwhile new channels.

I think you just have search for something, then go to the later pages of results.

Not sure I’d call it obscure, as Nick Knight is pretty well known as a photographer, but I really love the ShowStudio channel. They experiment with film and fashion in really interesting ways.

https://youtube.com/user/SHOWstudio

Kaztalek Eastory William Maranci 2SICH Syrmor

Shane O'Brien MacDonald. He makes videos on Japanese food from a Western prospective.

OrdinarySausage?

Try vimeo.com instead. Lots of artists, quality on average is much higher than youtube.

might you be thinking of Adolfo Mateo? https://www.youtube.com/user/SMOKERSOFCIGARSPIPES/videos

Yeah I think that was it! Thanks.

What the hell is he saying? Every video he mutters similar phrases as he exhales. Maybe he was speaking in code.

Sending messages to the youtubers of 2500 AD, most likely.

Good God I'd be puking if I ever smoked that heavily

That's a sex thing. People are jerking off to videos of people smoking. The more you know.

Man, why did you have to ruin it. Oh well...

Pretty sure some people do that to anything.

Doesn't mean the intent behind the video was that...

There used to be a televangelist that did something similar. He would light up his cigar and drink his whiskey, and yell at the audience he was not going to preach until a his audience called in with some donation threshold. He would then cut to footage of his/a horse running around in a field/pen.

Recommendation for those looking:

/r/artisanvideos

* pleasant guy talking for 45 minutes about his lifetime of experience using chains: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos/comments/lyvfzz/just_...

* man weaves a bed: https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/978s2c/man...

> its just not playing in the sandboxes everyone else is playing in

Where is it playing?

Youtube apparently.

(This was sarcasm)

And it was good sarcasm. The enemy isn't you tube. The enemy is the algorithm.

You are correct fine onion- This is youtube in 2084 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ3fOdorpCQ

Great sarcasm by the way- its going to inspire generations of smart asses with the smooth chill it was written with. Snarky and effortless.

Its like they were so confident in their sarcastic wit they had to include the parenthetical phrase- oh wait that was added out of fear of being misunderstood by the faceless crowd- quite the brave figure.

Build a 4k video platform and we'll use yours.

I too would like to know this. I realize there's a rule one of the internet issue, but it's worth asking all the same.

Not the OP but I'll bite -- I've seen some incredible counterculture emerging out of what I like to term the IRC revival, or Discord communities. Discord and Roblox have fueled the communities creating a ton of the more interesting music I've discovered over the past year.

Yeah, but discord is centralized and comes with all the related problems. IRC you can host yourself and it's not really dead, being a protocol.

What is a protocol, really? In a literal sense, you can say only something that's IRC compatible is IRC. But in a more figurative sense, aren't Discord communities merely using Discord the way folks use to use IRC? Isn't Discord just centralized IRC, then, because that's how people use it and what they're using it for?

Centralization poses censorship and control risks that IRC doesn't, for sure. But it also adds ubiquity. That's key for a community.

Special sandboxes with purple sand surrounded in velvet ropes only the cool kids know about. And with unlimited fresh lemonade, chocolate milk, and warm chocolate-chip cookies. You can almost see one during the winter solstice.

This is where the cool kids hang out- at this concert in Funland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Tk5REKdZso

> where the cool kids hang out- at this concert in Funland https://www.youtube.com/watch...

YouTube?

No own ground? Sovereign space?

This is the same sandbox everyone else is in.

Not OP, but I feel like I come across more and more art house style stuff thats only on Vimeo. Which to be fair is still pretty mainstream.

There are lots of unique, fun subcultures in out of the way places an even on Youtube. But that isn't the same as counterculture.

You have to pull to find it- we live in a push world now and that's why all you see is the same old crap- because people aren't searching new works out- they are just sitting around letting curators and algo's push it to them.

How do you "pull to find it"? If I search on DDG then an algorithm orders the results.

Do you expect me to type in random urls to see what comes up?

> I have never owned any mobile phone

Eschewing a mobile phone has been pretty counterculture these recent years, but I think we are close to a point where it will no longer be sustainable, at least for anyone wanting to cross borders – or depending on the country, even enter a restaurant or concert. Several governments have announced that their vaccine passports will exist as mobile phone apps, because paper certificates are too easily forged.

Wait till they see how easy it is to make a lookalike app :)

The apps are expected to generate limited-time QR codes with the respective country’s digital signature (just like the biometric data in your passport), so no, your suggestion won't work.

Unless they somehow figured out a flaw in thr crypto that allowed for spoofing countries in which case holy shit why are you using it to fake vaccine certificates?

Yup, because lowest-bid contractors are well known for producing bulletproof code, never copying bad samples from StackOverflow, and never rolling their own crypto instead of using proper libraries.

Yup

States’ already turned to contractors to design the system of digital signatures on their biometric passports, but these passports remain secure, so your sarcasm is unfounded.

And guess what... they have been hacked:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2006/aug/07/hacking.s...

https://www.news18.com/blogs/india/jaimon-joseph/your-biomet...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/19/passport.security/index.h...

https://www.google.com/search?q=biometric+passport+hacked

At that point, countercultural starts looking like the only game in town, at least that is worth playing.

I dont get why paper docs are still forgeable in this day and age.

Just put a qr code on it containing the same info plus a digital signature, and have verifiers scan it with an app. That sounds a lot more secure than the enduser having an app that the verifier just looks at with their eyes.

The apps being discussed will generate QR codes that the verifier will scan. But these codes are meant to be limited-time codes, so that if a new COVID strain appears and the old vaccines don’t protect against it (or it turns out that annual boosters are necessary), the person will no longer be able to report as vaccinated but will go back to the unvaccinated category.

Does limited time codes really get you anything that putting a date or which vaccine you got wouldn't? Besides, seems a bit overengineered for something that might happen in theory but hasn't yet.

Officers at passport control aren't trained health officials. It can be hard for them to make sense of certificates and understand what vaccinations are valid and which aren't, or which no longer are. That is why governments want to present an app where trained officials at the health ministry have already decided if the person is safe for travel or not, and just show border control officers a green check mark or no.

What is irrelevant again, because those officers will read the QR code with a computer. The computer can summarize to them how valid the vaccine still is.

There is no reason at all why a paper printed QR code can't tell exactly what vaccine you have taken, when you took it, who exactly are you, and what authority is authenticating the data. From there, any extra data is only needed at the time of reading.

We work just fine without mobiles. The plus is that we aren't enslaved to a handheld device ruled by rich guys.

how is youtube counterculture?

The fact that you can post pretty much any video you make for people to watch is totally counterculture the media studio TV programming culture that has lost viewers to platforms like YT. It has become so big itself that it is now pretty much the defacto culture.

It's just a platform and for now we can put things like this on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3SDNrxe-1M

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