2004 would be a bit late but it kind of reminds me of MPlayer.com. Here’s a video. The interface kind of looked like a radio, it also featured the first voice-chat I ever used, but everyone was on modem so it was unusably terrible.

There’s actually enough channels like this that I think it qualifies as a genre. They kind of give me “tradwife” vibes so I don’t really watch them, but it seems like quite a few are in France for some reason (maybe some government program where you can get these properties cheaply).

If you aren’t aware already, you might like the work of Simon Stålenhag.

If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.

I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.

At first I thought she meant ‘fantastic’ in its literal sense and I was optimistic. No, of course the former CFO of Morgan Stanley is a ghoul.

“Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported ‘the climate extremist agenda,’ which he defined as the idea that ‘a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.’ Burgum added: ‘I’ve always been a little offended by that.’”

Well it’s like 3 or 4 degrees at this point, which is civilization-ending. Real, “we’re all going to die anyway” energy here. Glad we’re doing this to hallucinate the next Amazon show and not slow down the approaching catastophe or at least give poor people food or some shit. Is that a little offensive?

I think Stephenson is a genius but honestly I slog through large parts of his books. He always creates a dozen threads, over hundreds and hundreds of pages, and on the last three pages they tie together beautifully and you end the book with an ache in your heart because of how beautiful it was. Even when I know that’s coming I sometimes can’t make it. He’s like the anti-Stephen King: the middle drags but the ending is wonderful.

Anathem is the exception. I couldn’t put it down. It’s one of those books that infected the way I think and little things remind me of it all the time.

If jacking off constantly at age 14 doomed a person we would never have left the Miocene epoch.

It seems like a perpetual panic, sustained because it creates a lever of exploitation to control the gullible. Like you can read complaints about “oversexed youth” from time periods when pornography was totally banned and women were essentially chattel. And hey, Boomers didn’t have internet porn and they are fucked.

It would peel off a few for about a year but then they’d be back. The core would just joke that the child was a democrat.

This happened to a friend of mine in the 90s. He was checking his email with pine. The lady who ran the school computer lab called the terminal “the black program with the blinking thing.”

Python is actually pretty baller with string operations too since so much of the C has been heavily optimized.

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

You paid for something and never got it. Initiate chargeback with your bank. Amazon may close your account for this, but fuck them.

The Naked Lunch. I was probably 10 years old? I didn’t understand any of the plot, I was weirded the fuck out and the giant bugs made me sick to my stomach.

Like this: https://forgejo.org/faq/#where-does-the-name-come-from

Their high falsetto voices are like salty broken glass in my eyes. I’ve never been able to watch more than 10 seconds of a “vtuber”.

The collection sounds like “The Dark Descent” but I’m not familiar with the waif story.