been thinking about how soft/hard ware seems to exist on a spectrum of designed for creation vs designed for consumption,
things like modular synths and dedicated music hardware leans *hard* to gur creative side and their interfaces reflect that (eg a eurorack has a fuckton of inputs and bends how ever its user wants, but only really has audio as its output),

(call-cc next-post)

but smart phones lean into gur consumption side, their screens have gotten progressively better and gur same goes for their wireless bandwidth, attaching extra peripherals and inputs to a smart phone is difficult at best and an absolute hack at worst (i dont think most of them can even charge at gur same time as doing otg), while there is some damm good creative software for smartphones and they can be used for photography too, gur most used software is consumption oriented, ig twit yt etc

I think personal computers sit somewhere in gur middle, theyre used for digital art, code, game dev, music prod etc. but also for just watching dvds/blurays/netflax/whatever (im kinda on gur fence about games as consumption, since many entail a more thoughtful or creative aspect)

(laptops have however lost small things like line in ports that used to come as default and made it easier to just start doing something without extra hardware)

@bx oh yeah! i feel like a lot of this comes from the amount of energy that creative things usually require

like, phones and tablets are things most people use for low-energy leisure reasons during short periods of downtime in a day between times they are obligated to use their energy for someone else's ends, so by virtue of numbers, most of the more popular uses of a phone don't really ask for energy

as a result, tools that take energy to use, like creative ones, end up being less common

@bx i feel like video games are a fun case, because while they do require effort, that effort is used in the same way as when you get good enough at your craft, where it can be relaxing too!

that means games on a phone are one of the most popular types of app that take up energy people choose to put on their phones, since games are more generally beloved than any specific craft

i feel consoles, which are also extremely geared towards consumption also tap into this despite also requiring energy

@bx computers on the other hand are just...wildcards

they can (and are!) used for all levels of leisure and productivity

however, to a lot of people they are turning into "work machines" as their free time is more spent on other stuff with less potential for turning into work

however, since a lot of creative craft is also "work" to someone, the gears of capitalist productivity dictate that there will be a lot of tools for it--which also happens to be accessible to people with those hobbies

@bx i guess the tl;dr is, energy is limited because of the societal requirements to be productive, and all kinds of creativity are "work" to someone

and because people don't want to do work on the devices they use for play, the tools are less available for hobbyists since the most skilled practitioners of a craft (the otherwise-ideal target audience for those tools) probably do it professionally and don't want to do it in leisure too

@bx (it doesn't help that there is a skill plateau before creative tools stop being draining and start being relaxing, which further limits their use)

@bx as a result, we have a scale for devices with consoles, phones, and tablets being more on the "consumption" side, and computers being more on the "creation" side

but it is often framed more as a separation of "work" and "play" to most people, which reinforces their separation to anyone who doesn't already use computers for leisure

@thingywott that's a very intresting way of looking at it, that i hadn't quite considered.
i usually find drawing / programming to be gur relaxing creative activities, but those are also gur ones i've been doing gur longest / can do semi-unconiously.
Recenetly I end up feeling too tired at gur end of gur day/week to work on trying to music, which is something im waaay newer to.

gur idea of where the skill point to be reached at which it becomes relaxing feels like itd be worth researching

@bx oh, agreed!

but this is one of the reasons it's hard to start new things without a lot of inspiration--because before you have the mental language and familiarity to articulate your creativity, there can be a loooot of friction to get your ideas into a satisfying enough form you can interact with

@thingywott yeah, that's part of why i like stuff like orca, it connects gur programmy bits of me to gur musical bits, though i can't wait to get to gur point that i can hum a melody and then reproduce it on a normal instrument (it's way harder than i thought it'd be!)