people are always like "Oh a vampire wouldn't get horny while drinking someone's blood, that's like getting horny while eating a sandwich" and like man have you never had a really good fucking sandwich?
The sandwich i had for lunch didnt moan and scream and squirm against my body and then become limp and pliable when i was done now did it
(Via @morganpdf )
Ahh Jaysus lads here we go again. No Irish need apply to the Ivies or something.
God forbid a Slav do anything near a land-grant school.
Also this is going to be used in antisemitic ways because of course it is.
A lot of people who thought their whiteness was objective reality are about to learn it’s conditional huh
one of the lovely ladies I’ve been seeing got covid & she’s like “maybe you didn’t catch it?” Girl I was not a ‘didnt catch it’ amount of space away when we were- wheres that tweet about the vaxxed guy. you know the one
Question for someone who literally grew up on the old internet: how were you supposed to find websites before the general search engine?
(With reference to this post here.)
In the very early days, the public-facing Internet was small enough that you could just, like, remember where everything was. Contrary to the modern Internet's rapid content churn and walled-garden siloing, early websites tended to have deep, statically preserved content archives and dense cross-site linking, so it wasn't uncommon to set about finding previously visited sites simply by retracing one's path from memory. Even simple bookmarking was sometimes derided as a crutch for people who were too lazy to learn how to navigate the Internet "properly"; indeed, once web browsers added built-in support for bookmark lists, some people refused to use them as a matter of principle!
Once the Internet grew to the point where this approach was no longer feasible, there was a period of a few years where various parties tried to construct human-curated, hierarchical directories of the entire Internet. This was, of course, doomed to fail, as the Internet was growing faster than it could be manually catalogued, but they gave it the old college try. Some popular search engines such as Yahoo actually started out as directories of this type, and only later added search functionality. Meanwhile, communities of interest adopted a more targeted approach, with dedicated "links" pages containing curated recommendations for other, similar sites becoming ubiquitous on personal websites, while users who lacked the time or expertise to offer curated links could participate in webrings and other volunteer-operated directory services.
(The idea of cataloguing the whole Internet according to a topical hierarchy led to some fascinating taxonomic decisions. At one point, Yahoo's directory had a subcategory specifically for sexually explicit Dungeons & Dragons resources, or "netbooks", as they were called at the time.)
This is all very interesting, but my main takeaway is that people tried gatekeeping surfing the web!
The more things change etc...
Basically all of online culture between 1985 and 2000 was founded in the idea that Internet users were a different and fundamentally better class of human being from normal people.
...yeah, that tracks. Wouldn't say that stopped in the 2000s, either. That was probably the height of "nerd" as a distinct (and "superior") identity.
Standard sword and sorcery fantasy film periodically interrupted by cutaways to an in-universe historian from a notional period hundreds of years after the depicted events explaining the film's various historical inaccuracies. There's a recurring tangent about how the film's protagonist is a conflation of three different guys, all of them much weirder than the end product of that conflation.
I enjoy when people give me a hard time about using the term "sequential art" because they think it's just a pretentious way of saying "comics", because when I point out that "comics" and "sequential art" are overlapping but non-identical mediums, they invariably demand an example of sequential art that isn't comics, and I get to hit them with "PowerPoint presentations".
@urlocallesbiab replied:
i like how you said "overlapping" instead of "one being a wider category than the other" do you have any examples of comics that don't count as sequential art? (this isn't a gotcha question, this is me engaging in good-natured, sportsmanlike pedantry, along with expressing my curiosity)
To inject more pedantry: Wouldn't that be called a "cartoon"?
Also... aren't movies, TV shows, and so on technically sequential art,since it's just a bunch of pictures shown in very quick succession?
Today's aesthetic: fic that spends several thousand words establishing Kink World, the world structured entirely around the author's excruciatingly specific kink, does one sex scene in like chapter two, then spends the next thirty chapters interrogating the sociopolitical implications of Kink World.
I understand why video games that introduce a sudden gameplay swerve typically go with the most entry-level version of that swerve, but just once I'd like to see one drop the player right into the deep end. You expected the random shoot-'em-up segment in your turn-based RPG to be a Galaga clone? Fuck you, we're playing Hellsinker.
You pick up a collectathon platformer and its obligatory driving minigame is based on Euro Truck Simulator 2.
I'm curious how many folks didn't get the pun in Adam Smasher's name until reading this post because we typically don't call particle accelerators "atom smashers" anymore.
Being real i didnt think it was a pun i just thought he was called that because it was The 80s
The two coincide more often than you might think – a lot of obnoxiously edgy 1980s villain names are also goofy wordplay.
At first I thought "who doesn't know particle accelerators are sometimes called 'atom smashers'" and then I realized 1) that most people are only broadly aware of the existence of particle accelerators and that's the nerdiest thought I've ever had, and 2) even I primarily know particle accelerators are sometimes called atom smashers because of the DC Comics superhero of the same name, who fucking no one else knows
In my experience, your average layperson is possibly aware of individual particle accelerators from having seen them name-checked in news article headlines, but doesn't know the term "particle accelerator", and isn't aware that, for example, the Large Hadron Collider is part of a specific class of devices and not just a weird one-of-a-kind contraption. Heck, they probably couldn't even tell you whether the "large" in LHC refers to the hadrons, or to the collider.
Well now I need to google if the L in LHC refers to the H or the C
Okay, it's called the Large Hadron Collider cause the Collider is Large (27km circumference)
Some quick research suggests that hadrons are generally pretty small
Question for someone who literally grew up on the old internet: how were you supposed to find websites before the general search engine?
(With reference to this post here.)
In the very early days, the public-facing Internet was small enough that you could just, like, remember where everything was. Contrary to the modern Internet's rapid content churn and walled-garden siloing, early websites tended to have deep, statically preserved content archives and dense cross-site linking, so it wasn't uncommon to set about finding previously visited sites simply by retracing one's path from memory. Even simple bookmarking was sometimes derided as a crutch for people who were too lazy to learn how to navigate the Internet "properly"; indeed, once web browsers added built-in support for bookmark lists, some people refused to use them as a matter of principle!
Once the Internet grew to the point where this approach was no longer feasible, there was a period of a few years where various parties tried to construct human-curated, hierarchical directories of the entire Internet. This was, of course, doomed to fail, as the Internet was growing faster than it could be manually catalogued, but they gave it the old college try. Some popular search engines such as Yahoo actually started out as directories of this type, and only later added search functionality. Meanwhile, communities of interest adopted a more targeted approach, with dedicated "links" pages containing curated recommendations for other, similar sites becoming ubiquitous on personal websites, while users who lacked the time or expertise to offer curated links could participate in webrings and other volunteer-operated directory services.
(The idea of cataloguing the whole Internet according to a topical hierarchy led to some fascinating taxonomic decisions. At one point, Yahoo's directory had a subcategory specifically for sexually explicit Dungeons & Dragons resources, or "netbooks", as they were called at the time.)
This is all very interesting, but my main takeaway is that people tried gatekeeping surfing the web!
The more things change etc...
It's actually kind of striking how rapidly the ads on ostensibly respectable platforms have changed in the last 12–18 months. I've been getting penis enlargement scams and pyramid schemes that don't even bother to pretend to be otherwise on YouTube – it's like every platform is now running the kinds of ads that even three years ago would have been restricted to porn sites, and I'm not gonna lie, the fact that everyone seems to be getting desperate all at once ain't an encouraging sign!
I just saw full frontal erect penis on a weather app. It's not the sign of the impending tech-bubble implosion I expected, but apparently it's the sign we're getting.
Let me tell you a story.
I am an archeologist. I specialize in a somewhat obscure but by no means boring or meaningless Neolithic culture in Germany.
It has a Wikipedia page. A well curated, surprisingly extensive Wiki page that encapsulates all the important information about the culture, including literature references for further research.
One day, we asked Chat GPT about this culture. W were curious which details it would get wrong.
ALL OF THEM, except for the fact that it's a culture in present day Germany.
It didn't even get the chronological time frame wrong and called it a celtic culture.
When we told it it's wrong, it came at us with made up literature sources. Literally made up. It took two well known German archeologist who weren't even active at the same time, added a year - both were already dead - and sold that as source.
And it LITERALLY would only have had to quote Wikipedia to get everything right.
THAT is how unbelievably shitty and wrong all those AIs are.
They are making shit up. They are not sourcing information, they're just slapping words together by their most like relative occurance.
Do not trust ChatGPT or any other so-called AI ever.