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Technology is a Wonderful Thing On the march to technological singularity, technology gets better and better, and more and more integrated. It's awesome. Today, you can be out on the street, in a shop, and you see, I don't know, some batteries, but there are so many batteries that you don't know which to choose, or even which ones are the best. Five years ago, you'd have been stuck with simply guessing, or, horrifyingly, researching before you leave your house. Today, you can whip out your phone/PDA/iPhone/whatever, hop onto google, and get the information you need. I don't know about you, but that is really cool, and it's only going to get better. There is one issue with this though, the more technology gets involved in our lives, the more we rely on it, obviously. For some, it's almost like a part of their minds live outside their own head. What prompted this was the fact that my brother had his phone stolen a few hours ago. The saying "you don't know what you've got until its gone" comes to mind. My brother is a very social person (almost the direct opposite of me in many ways). His social life is practically revolves around his phone. When he realised he had his phone stolen. He was lost. Not lost as in 'upset', but lost as in, he didn't know what to do with himself, like someone had plucked a significant chunk of his identity from him. He relied on the phone so much that he hadn't even remembered his own girlfriend's phone number. He hadn't needed to of course, the number was on the phone, and the phone, obviously, has perfect memory. The phone had, in essence, become a fundamental part of his psyche. Part of what has been described as an 'Exo-Cortex'. Some may think he's a fool for relying on his phone. But then mostly all of us who are reading this probably do it to some degree or another. If I lost access to the internet, for example, I'd loose my primary means of communication and work. Some who know me, know that I am a strong believer of post-humanism, where our technology will become a fundamental part of us, where, in some cases, the line between human and machine doesn't exist. At least, that's at the most extreme end of post-humanism. To this end, it's going to get worse before it gets better. We talk of identity theft today as someone taking another persons credit card info, for example. In ten years time, identity theft could be a whole lot more literal than that. Before it gets better, we'll end up relying more and more on technology to do stuff for us, such as remember things, or to get information, or to give us pointers on what we should say, for example, that our brain may end up becoming just a processing node in the middle of a cacophony of information processing being made before it gets to our own heads. Take that information processing part from the person (in whatever form that is), and what are you left with? Somebody with vague memories to their identity. They are the same 'erson' in that their personality is obviously not dictated by the technology supporting the soft mushy thing between their ears, but they likely won't remember any one or thing. This is bad, of course, and anyone taking this out of context would think I am against this sort of progress. Of course, it gets better when that information processing becomes internalised (making it difficult to actually steal without invasive surgery :B). I guess, my point is that, technology is a good and bad thing. And as we continue on, I fully expect to see this sort of thing happen much more often.

I don't do this often I feel I should write a disclaimer before getting down to it. What I say here may not represent the views of deviantART, it's just what I think. Don't like it? Then tough. Make a comment in the complaints forum or something and blow it out of proportions like you probably will anyway.

Which makes me wonder why I bother with a disclaimer in the first place. But hey, better safe than sorry, I suppose.

FairExposure This site is awesome, right? more than 50 million deviations to choose from, from just about 6 million people.

If I had the time, I could look at one piece of art per second for the rest of my life, and I would not have even scratched the surface.

So, really, you need a way of stemming that tide, right? I mean, all those deviations aren't going to be to your tastes, and even if they are, only a certain level of quality (as nebulous a term as that is) will probably make the grade as something you'd really want to look at.

dA has really given you lots of options to do that, you can, for example, look only in specific categories, or you can only view daily deviations, or only search for specific search terms.

The easiest option though, is to just look at the popular section, since you're invariably going to find some top quality stuff to look at.

The thing is, of course, is that the old system was boring, Boring even. Same art, same artists, same subjects, same categories.

All just the same.

I thought the point of my pursuit in seeing everything was that everything that I was seeing was actually, you know, different, perhaps.

I know, that seems to be an alien concept among a lot of people around here, but it seems that difference and change isn't wanted here.

No, wait, it is actually wanted here. But when dA actually says 'all right, cool, we hear you, why don't you play with cool new toy that should be just what you asked for', you all get into a hissy fit that everything has changed and that the old system was better.

What's worse is that the people complaining about this, are the ones who are most effected by this, and, more crucially, the army of fantards who wait on the orders of the popular generals.

"Oh deviantART, how you have smite'd thee, with your requested developments, my minion army, attack at once and let's vanquish these foul demons"
Or something silly like that.

Frankly, this sort of stuff pisses me off.

Since the launch of FairExposure, I have found more fav worthy art in the first 120 images on the new popular page, than I have in all the years previously with the old popular page.

Rather skewed, you might say, since I have fairly broad likes, but I think that says a considerable amount to the improvement on that section.

To put it short, the popular section is now interesting again.
I can actually go there and, shock of shocks, find something new and good in there, unlike the previous system which showed good stuff, none of which was new.

And even with all that said, the most funny thing I find about this is that, the most popular of the old guard are still virtually guaranteed a place in the first few pages of the new popular system, because they still command their legions of rabid fantards who will fav quite literally anything that the old guard release.

The new popular page is awesome, and if you think any different, you clearly haven't really looked at it.

Collections Collections are really cool, probably one of the best features released in a very long time. In fact, it's such a good feature that it's almost a paradigm shift.

Fortunately, it seems as though there aren't mainly complaining about that (and if they are, they're certainly not as vocal as the FairExposure, err, 'crowd' (see, I can be diplomatic ).

The complaints that have shown up are the new ad placements that have popped up that coincide with the collections system.

"Oh noes, teh adminz going two spout about teh ads when he can't see the ads him self, he can't possibly understand our pain... oh woe is me "

I am sick of seeing these complaints too.
Yes, I can't see the ads (though I have the option to), so I am not really effected by this, so I have no real 'right' to try to counter complain.

What you don't seem to realise, however, is that you get technically infinite storage space and bandwidth...