Common People

Inspiration, and taking inspiration, turns risky when ones reality turns transactional. The act of creation does require inspiration though. There is a lot of literature in public domain and I think rightly so especially when there is no way the original writers of the literature, and intellectual properties related to them, would benefit from them seventy years after death. Things can get really shitty in life sometimes, and when you enter a hell that is purely transactional even the things you end up seeing through your eyes has copyright. What I write, unless I state otherwise, is supposed to be totally public domain. I write for my pleasure and that's about it. I make sure to state often that anyone who read what I have written doesn't have to bother to even be thankful to me. I try to write useful things, things that educate or entertain or at least give the person reading a perspective. Inspiration is not easy to come by especially if you have kind of lofty goals for your literature as me. They are not very lofty on their own, but when we see the reality we live in they end up seeming lofty. I peesonally liked the time when one could buy the media to own it. Like when one could buy audio cassettes, video cassettes, CDs, DVDs and own that media. Now one listens their music form a cloud, streams from a cloud, download and plays their games from a cloud. I don't own my copy of music, I don't own my copy of movies (which is kind of okay as I don't really watch many movies anymore), I don't own the digital copies of video games I buy online and, this one hurts, I don't own the books I buy on my kindle. It's all just licenses to consume the media. Just today I read that one wouldn't need to have a gaming rig to play pc games because in the future games would be streamed to your devices, which is already happening but it would be turned into a subscription model. There are very few apps and softwares that have one time purchase on the internet and app stores, and I personally, if I have money, make sure to purchase those apps and softwares just to support the idea and intent behind. We are living in times where everything is turning into subscription, and it makes me remember the Black Mirror episode where a woman gets brain tumour surgery and ends up speaking advertisements because they can't afford the subscription agreed upon before the brain surgery to supplement her lost cognitive abilities. If one is aware, one realises that Black Mirror is not future but now it's just that the future is insidious. Once you see the transactional side of the life you realise that it is not even a transaction, as transaction implies exchange, it actually works on the basis of "what is mine is only mine and what is yours is also mine." Once you discover the deeper side of the rabbit hole you realise that transaction is just a smokescreen just like, unfortunately, God is. I was lucky to see this side of the reality and that's why I promote open source projects, I donate to Wikipedia, I use Linux as operating system when I can and I support community based projects. In the past decade I have lived a reality where I had to pay, and that too heavily, for consuming the media that was in public domain, and the little media that I downloaded through torrents during college. I have subscription of all major streaming services and I don't really watch them much, just sometimes my family watches them. It's about consumption and nothing more. Once you know the reality of institutional gatekeeping and extractive exploitation and how insidious and intimate it all is, entertainment loses its value and you end up finding pleasure in nature and universe, only things that are not taxed at least not unless politics and economics got invented. I don't watch many movies anymore except superhero and comic book movies which I make sure that I experience in the theatres and I listen to classical music. I have seen the absolute limit extractive exploitation can be employed on human beings and made up shit doesn't really attract me anymore and only exception to this are comic book worlds. My writing is majorly motivated towards creating worlds, worlds that can inhabit the homeless, the marginalised and I won't charge them a penny from them for inhabiting my worlds and for giving them glimpse of the real truth. I write for my own pleasure, because it is only me who can write what I want to read without charging a subscription fee.