JustSo

I've been eternally amused since my fellow comrades at r/CTH expressed surprise learning about a subset of Juggalos abandoning the March on Washington (to protest and eventually overturn the FBI gang designation of our family) to march with the Black Lives Matter protestors. If that was you, you shouldn't have been surprised.

But it's not your fault, we're for everybody down and out, against everybody rich and cruel. But we're for each other first, it makes it hard to see past the culture, the language and the undeniably problematic misogyny in much of the first half of ICP's body of work. Most of us were outcasts before we found each other so we embraced the abrasive and so we tend to embody the concept of "fuck your optics."

I've collected a few lil links here in case you don't remember or were never aware of the event I'm talking about. I recommend you read them and look for the inherent class consciousness in our subculture. Read the reportage of the testimony of a woman who had her children taken away by the state simply for being a fan of a band. Read about the difficulty in keeping our scene alive and appreciate the work that our people put in to keep us together. Juggalos practically have their own economy now, there are people who survive entirely off serving up fresh shit to each other within the culture. It might not be a classic dual power structure but it's pretty fucking nice.

• https://www.headcount.org/music-and-activism/juggalo-march-recap/
• https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-the-fuck-happened-at-the-juggalo-march-on-washington/
• https://itsgoingdown.org/our-antifa-crew-marched-with-juggalos-heres-what-happened/

Unfortunately, we've entered an era where all the old subcultures are picked over like corpses under vultures. There continue to be foul human beings passing themselves off as Juggalos and predators in the scene (like any music scene) with narcissistic and sociopathic tendancies to seek and find small pockets of power for themselves to predate within. Family remains the best analogy for what we are. You can probably relate, most families have creepy uncles and ignorant cousins and yes, sadly, narcissistic parent figures.

Younger Juggalo-identifying-people now (and forever, I suppose) are often "trying on the costume" while they figure out their identities. Where people used to phase in and out of a scene, often now people are picking and choosing pieces of their identities from the limited selection of organic subcultures that formed before we reached the later stages of capitalism, alienation goes further than just that of the worker and their labor's value.

The internet has been an accelerant poured on this situation, both driving us further away from organic human connection and making it easier to pick and choose what you take from each scene as a whole, equally it promotes self-promotion and the creation new "unique" personas often created like a patchwork quilt from the most convenient, low effort and high-vibe bits and pieces of something that used to promote solidarity and a degree of conformity that enabled a group to self-police.

A quote from the second article above, reminds me of this state of affairs:

I asked her why Juggalos shock people if they actually operate as a friendly community. She exhaled. “People don’t do that anymore,” she lamented. “There’s no human connection in people anymore.”

If you're a Juggalo reading this, hell even if you're not, let me politely remind you of the rant in Jumpsteady's track Mad Mad World, which I've just posted in the music community w/ lyrics:

Yo Juggalos

It's a mad, mad world out there, ya'll

We gotta stick together cause we family

You see a fellow juggalo out there about to throw down or fight or something?

That's you

That's your fight

Cause we like that, yo
We together

Unity means strength

We can handle anything in this fucked up world

Anything at all, ya'll

Squall

We Juggalos

I think we can all benefit from this message.

I suppose I wrote this because I'm not going to make excuses for the shitty behaviour from some people calling themselves juggalos. I don't claim them even if I recognise them.

And I posted it here because I've lost a lot of my juggalo fam connections due to some straight up snake behaviour in the spaces that helped keep me from offing myself. So instead you guys get to read about it. Thank you for your time.

And for the few of you juggalos, struggalos and thuggalos reading this, whoop whoop MMFWCL stay up. Stay fucking cool. Be ready. If you have a crew you have an affinity group: get to work.

Bit of a long shot, if you don't know anything about Nexus 7s or can't provide hints on things like system logging on android and how to force-reload drivers/modules, might as well just ignore this thread.

I'm back on my bullshit and working on old tablets. I love these old Nexus 7 devices. The 2012s had that basically irreparable issue with the flash storage incrementally shitting the bed with successive writes, but they BOTH ('12 & '13) have touchscreen problems. And I am dealing with all of them, across a couple of devices.

The issues are like, maybe you have a digitiser that goes completely unresponsive even on boot, or you'll have dead zones, or you have touchscreen functionality that works, but then after using the device for a random length of time, it'll either lock up completely or go intermittent.

Sometimes you'll have it in a locked up state, but it will come alive just enough to register a touch input on the power menu when you want to reboot. Sometimes you won't.

Then there's the phantom touch iteration of the problem. I have one 2012 that's going totally wild with that at the moment.

And there's the double/triple/quintuple registering on touches on the keyboard that you sometimes get making typing a real pain.

I had one yesterday that looked like it had suddenly decided to become completely unresponsive constantly, but came to life once I plugged it into a computer to do ADB stuff.

I have another one that had issues and seemed to have come good, but it's back to failing after a certain amount of time, but sleeping and waking it fixes it as though it were a software issue.

I've done the basic hardware mod of adding some additional foam over the ZIF connector so the backplate provides more pressure on the contacts. This seems to be only a partial solution. Maybe even total cargo cult stuff on the 2013 which uses a different type of cable connection using a proper socket on the end. (hm, on ONE end, I need to dig in and look at the other end.)

I haven't yet worked on shielding mods, which are supposed to help with phantom touches.

I've also been finding old news articles and forum posts from when these were brand new, where people had these problems fresh out of the box and on pre-retail promotional giveaway versions. Many of these articles mention that users were finding major issues using the device while resting it on a desk and using it with one hand, where the issues didn't occur if it was held in both hands.

In any case there's several suggestions that grounding issues were a big part of the problem.

As for this post, my questions:

Does anyone have arcane knowledge about these devices? About, say, cable decay or ways in which heat from use might cause the thing to behave badly then resolve rapidly when the processor drops frequency due to being slept?

And does anybody know where I would look for system logs that would collect any errors thrown by driver modules during entry into or out of failure states?

Any advice on force-reloading the drivers for the digitizer to see if I could write a script might help unfuck the device when it decides to play dead?

If you've got one of these old devices and it still works well, you might not be aware that ROMs are back on the menu. DivestOS, LineageOS, crDroid, all seem to have very recent builds available with pretty recent security patches applied. I've got one 2013 here running Android 13 at the moment. It's not even as bad as you'd expect. I'm not sure I'll keep it on 13, but it's wild that it works as well as it does at stock clock speeds.