Need a proper public house

Jellyfin

I doubt anyone who used the site would use “love” and “4chan” in the same sentence lol. The point is if you used it during this time you witnessed something that people who didn’t can only morally condemn at a distance, they can’t talk about the real experience of using the site and meaningfully criticize it. Likewise being there for the true 00s internet wild west and seeing it turn from that into what it became was a blessing for understanding on a visceral level what we all witnessed in the 2010s with incels and maga etc.

Popular internet humor as we know it was basically all forged between the slur-stained walls of 4chan anons cursed basements, and people posted way worse things than slurs on there. You wouldn’t pick me out as a former /b/slur in real life cause you’d probably be envisioning a straight white male. Ironically there was something very accepting about the site I didn’t have in real life which is a sentiment shared by many users of the site from this era.

One of the mistakes I see otherwise accurate depictions of 4chan making, talking about the very good “Kill All Normies” book and some others, which really focus on 4chan from 2010-onward, is they gloss over the site before this decade and interpret it as a single userbase. I’m sure there’s some constant users between these decades but I don’t know anyone who used 4chan when I did who continued to use it even into the MLP era. I would point to Project Chanology as the turning point, the infamous 4chan protest against the Church of Scientology, which popularized the idea of “Anonymous,” often referred to as “teh cancer killing b” both genuinely and ironically.

I would argue this is also when the site began succumbing to irony poisioning as people began to sincerely post things the site became infamous for in the 2010s. The “lulz” of baiting corporate media with exploding vans and “Anonymous” had played out and the site now began to adopt an “identity,” whereas before these abhorrent things sort of just happened there and the userbase wasn’t considered this singular entity. This would have been about when I graduated HS, and when I met former 4chan users in college we mostly all derided the site for being garbage.

In recent years the nostalgia for what the internet was in this era has to include 4chan, but I don’t think anyone who was on the site then would say they were good people for using the site and likely the opposite, nor would we probably have assumed the site from this era would have become so influential.

Yeah it’s super weird how these internet cultures developed their own idiosyncrasies that show up in real life. Nerd culture kawaii humor around the turn of the decade is super recognizable as well, waffles being a meme (not the blue ones), and lolcats (debatably appropriated from 4chan), Natalie Dee comics. As these things were commodified during the 2010s into pop culture it all sort of washed away subculture connection. There’s a kids book series now called Narwhal and Jelly where the dialogue is basically all internet-speak from this era and I’m guessing most parents have no idea and just think its a quirky kids book.

Him, berries, and the rubber guy are probably all buds.

The early to late 2000s was definitely a special time on the internet. I logged on in the early-mid 90s but I think it peaked in the late 00s. Consolidation of services/monopolies and saturation of smartphones I think killed it. Internet used to be something you did actively, now it’s a thing in your pocket you distract yourself from shitting with that beeps at you all day.

I met a friend’s partner for the first time and she said something funny that had this unique quality I instantly recognized. She was in fact another rare woman /b/tard. We can crack each other up at any moment and our professional colleagues haven’t a clue about this weird online subculture with its twisted sense of humor. It’s not even just repeating memes its like a whole mindset you get infected with for life. You can almost instantly recognize when someone else has had their minds ruined by late 00s 4chan. That type of stuff just doesn’t happen now, it’s just like “hueheu look dis,” “euheuhue omg funny, look dis now hgurhehue.”

The only ones are really use are site: and -notthisstring and find they work. With granularity I mean adding things to the search string.

Google was really valuable before web services were so monopolized and consolidated like they are now. It’s almost more useful to use the specific websites search function for many things now. Before this, you could run searches and it would have all these personal and small websites indexed. Oh look, here’s a guy who lives his whole life as Peter Pan and has a website about it, cool… now it’s just a profile on some social media site same as anyone else.

I’ve found it still works for oddly specific requests, if you make your search string more granular. Generic searches are garbage now, especially images.

Understanding the historical circumstances I find myself in and devoting the majority of my effort in to things I can control.

I respect how provocative it is because that’s a very hard thing to try for intentionally. As a concept car it absolutely works.

Doesn’t look too bad in this light, it’s the even daylight where the idea of it doesn’t show. I think it’s ugly but can look cool in certain light like this, the top section bright and the lower shadowed. Should have been a concept car cause of obvious reasons producing it at scale.

Part of me respects a design that can be so provocative. It shows how people care about design, and reminds me how boring and “nothing” a lot of the objects we interact with on a daily basis are.

Well the one that keeps me needing a Windows machine for on… Ableton Live + VST plug-ins.

Musicbrains Picard is also the best metadata autotag app I’ve used.

“Reclaim Windows” type powershell scripts, feel like group policy and powershell are underutilized by average desktop users. A lot of the things people complain about with windows you can control with it. Primarily a debain user myself but I need Windows to run Ableton on custom hardware so it is what it is.

Some of the Soviet stuff is urban myth from movies like Enemy at the Gates, like shooting retreaters and stuff. They were mostly caught and reassigned, although some incidents did occur. The charge was desertion or not obeying commands. “No step back!” Was a rallying call and they did engage in strategic retreats. Most armies employ “barrier troops” in some fashion to charge deserters, US included. Speers as famously depicted in Band of Brothers is portrayed as a hero and actually shot a private for cowering in battle.

In some sectors the clocks don’t change for DST. For bulk energy the grid clock is out of sync with “people time” for half a year.

I think it’s more what happened under the cover of Trump, ie what Republicans do, which is where the damage was in Trump’s presidency. He was basically a smokescreen and scapegoat for all manner of interests, but as an individual almost completely vapid aside from his narcissistic drive for attention, which all mainstream politics was more than happy to provide him with.

The “good war” is always an alarm bell for me, the real losers are always civilians, and what America did in Afghanistan and Iraq dwarfs what’s going on in Gaza now.

I think Dubya hands down if we’re reducing to the presidency. To me Trump represents the absurd spectacle American politics has become, but the worst thing about Trump winning was that the Republicans were able to pass legislation. Trump as an individual wasn’t very successful as a politician once he was in power. Trump, Hillary, and Biden are so widely unpopular in general, and Trump barely losing to someone like Biden after one term really drives the point home how meaningless so much of these politics are right now apart from the spectacle they provide. Trump was the spectacle in a pure form, and when the mainstream liberal media was covering him as a frontrunner in early 2016 and reacting to every tweet, that was my first realization this presidency could potentially happen.

Bush and the post-9/11 world I view as the sort of last doubling-down towards the political situation we live in today, and Obama represented the best we can hope for within this system. While Obama was insanely likable as a personality and speaker I never really supported the politics he stood for. Adolph Reed Jr. had the best take on Obama in 1996, now an infamous article since it was really validated post-Obama:

“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

The decrepit political landscape today is a perfect fit for Trump but I don’t think he controls it, he’s just a mirror that reflects back on itself, it’s what goes on in his shadow that’s the real danger. I think progressives being so enraptured by Trump’s terribleness is another serious issue because of this. Just being “not Trump” has allowed the Democrats to be lax on anything that would upset their donor base. Biden was always a darling of the Israel lobby for instance (why Obama picked him as VP) and we’re seeing the effects of this right now. Bernie was a real mobilization and hope for the left and the attacks about him being soft on race etc from liberal progressives was basically an indication of where the Democrat party is. They want the “do-good” version of the same economic system the Republican’s want to hand to the barons, and there’s no political alternative to this system being offered, just the form it takes. Now there’s hope in the increasing labor actions and strikes, an encouraging trend as people are pushed further and further being offered nothing by mainstream politicians.

I think a lot of the worst presidents basically embodied the historical time they were in and were just the ones at the helm of the presidency. Other’s like Johnson, I’d say with the issue of reconstruction specifically, that was a true hinge point that just went to absolute shit and we’re still living with it.

Crohns? That’s what I have and “invisible disability” is an apt description.