There’s hardware made to emulate that too, should you go that route. Not free though.

These were no less atrocious than current Wojak format comics.

FWIW I liked that people scribbled out their shitty ideas, often with zero artfulness in MS Paint, giving it just enough effort to get the idea across. I’m seeing a lot of lazy AI images being passed around using the Twitter image generator and it’s like there’s no threshold for something to actually be funny before being posted.

I don’t like that I opened the comments to write this specifically.

Maybe there’s more to the hive mind than I thought.

Kids are smarter than we give them credit for. It’s like kids dreaming of being actors or singers or athletes.

Even if they think their teachers are good people, they clearly see that they don’t drive fancy cars. Even if their parents are middle income earners, they aren’t as famous or rich as the people babysitting them on screen. It may be more obnoxious and more piped straight into their eyeballs now but it’s hardly new.

Hell I’m a grown ass adult and I think about every once in a while.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately, especially after watching a video by an internet funny man I enjoy (Eddie Burback) about him locking his phone away for a month (not a feasible strategy for most people.)

I also enjoy pretty much anything online much more on the desktop. When things started pivoting to app-only it felt very weird at the time - the phone access was always the clunkier secondary backup nice-to-have.

That said, 80% of my browsing happens on my phone. It’s less fun and it’s more mindless, but that’s the truth. I think I’ll hit a point where I find my phone just too magnetic but as a dopamine crutch it’s cripplingly convenient.

I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.

You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.

It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.

I’ve been sticking to a job I’m not very happy with because the job hunt abyss looks like shit where I am. I’m actually struggling to rationalize some potential mental barriers I associate with higher paying alternatives, like what if I lose some security by being more vulnerable to layoffs, or what if I am even more unhappy after joining something I like less, despite the higher pay. Or what if I apply, and get far enough into the interview cycle that I feel inadequate/stupid when I don’t get to the end. I don’t know.

One thing that I’m finding a bit off-putting with this last year of “HR bad” memes is that they feel somewhat subtextually misogynistic to me? Even though this one nominally makes fun of very frustrating corporate and specifically HR attitudes and culture, I don’t know. It’s always women being presented as “catty bitches”. Which on one hand matches like 80% of my work experience, and on the other might be a sign of something.

Doesn’t help that for me I almost only see these being posted by someone at the fringes of my friend group who is properly Twitter brainrotted. You know what I mean.

It’s because the latest Reddit refugee wave have been exposed to uncensored news for more than five days, breaking a personal best.

When one side unironically complains that the other has kidnapped a soldier from his tank… We’ve been conditioned to ignore atrocities I think, as humans, because those of us who survive still have to live. And further out, people have no sympathy for people they’ve never been shown are people too. But the tank soldier kidnapping thing is just making fun of their own sympathizers to their face. I’m sure there’s a kind of person who picks up on these things and goes from being a “reasonable” “centrist” to looking at both sides and understanding what they’re really looking at. It’s really not complicated

Proud of you, new joiners, I see you.

Another big thing you might be missing: Amazon doesn’t exist in most places on earth. AliExpress does. And it has damn near everything when it comes to some categories. A lot of companies also sell directly on there, depending on your niche (coffee grinders, keyboard parts, 3D printing stuff, repair parts for whatever) straight from the source. For me a big one was metal models, the kind popularized by Metal Earth/Piececool.

The first time I received foreign packages of locally unavailable stuff from an online order in rural Lebanon was an almost magical experience. Even if it did spend two months rotting in customs.

Suddenly I went from having very few options for specific niche things, especially electronic parts, to being on the same playing field as everyone else on earth. I paid like 10 USD for an ATTINY85 from the local extortion shop, compared to like 20 USD for a pack of 10 from AliExpress. Quality? Please, the shop is buying them from there too. The ICs are fine.

I think AliExpress sells itself short, if you open the app it looks like they’re doing some sort of overwhelming and insufferable TEMU-style gamified slop-shopping “experience” on the front page. And sometimes you search for something and the one you want won’t show up, but will be in the sidebar of the page of one of the things you don’t want from that list. But it’s been a life changer for me after getting used to how it handles, I hear Amazon is much easier to use. Although you probably can’t ask the seller “hey can you paint this part differently” or “can you skip this accessory, I don’t need it” on Amazon.

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.

Gregorz Brzeczyszczykiewicz would like a word

For some time I was watching football streams in a discord server, and eventually the server got a firm message from the league (which was nice compared to just getting shut down).

It was really fun to live chat with everyone while everyone had the same stream with the same delay, in a weird way. It was goofier than a “serious” match night with the boys but on a weeknight alone it was great. It’s not the same to live chat with everyone on different streams, different delays, different folks have their streams drop at different times etc

Especially when the team you follow are legendarily inconsistent and the atmosphere around them is characterized by an implacable vibes roller coaster.

Part of what drew me to the old site in ye olde 2013 was that it was the largest platform that wasn’t shitty about this specific subject.

Funny to see this is now the standard expectation for that place. Look how they massacred my boy

Not to sound like a shill, but I was surprised when Americans on Reddit would say it was nothing special. I didn’t even think they’d have a separate American product chain.

Over here it’s not the cheapest or best chocolate but it’s probably the best chocolate you can reliably find in any grocery store.

Also. American chocolate isn’t bottom of the barrel for me. I’ll take a Hershey’s white chocolate cookie thing over no name Syrian “chocolate” with RGB bloom and a barely-perceptible gumminess not even a mother could love. When I was a kid, the shops were full of questionable cheap Syrian candy.

We’ve actually had it pretty good in Lebanon pre-2019 when it came to European chocolate and candy. And occasionally if you knew where to shop, American soft drinks. American candy isn’t it, but American liquid candy? I’d be 900 kilos if I didn’t have to pay extortion prices for American Dr. Pepper. The British stuff we sometimes get just isn’t the same.

Edit: I just noticed what community this was in. Oops, was just scrolling through All. Sorry if this is a bit out of place. Good luck Canadians!

Oh yeah. I had those on DVD as a kid - pirated, of course, this is Lebanon in the 2000s - and this episode was on the last disc. Somehow it got scratched up or something, and not all of the episodes played, or the DVD player would error out or something.

So the memories I had of this episode were hazy for the longest time, because I’d seen all the other episodes way more times.

Would you believe I revisited the show as an adult? Very budget-looking animation, but maybe I think of it as charming because of how familiar it is to me. Seriously, look at some of those scenes, they really build out a world with minimal lines and objects.

Now if you want to see catastrophe, you can look at the PS2 game they made of the animated series. Actual so-bad-it’s-good game that’s not too long.

Good lord, 1,400 comments, and the first quick scroll is exclusively downvote farming. That’s not even dedication, at this point it’s outright not understanding why people would want to communicate online

I’ve also wondered if there’s varieties. Maybe where I live, they’re different tasting and smelling? Broccoli has only ever been one of the vegetables to me. Nothing repulsive (or even noteworthy).

Even as a kid it was weird to see cartoon characters complain about specifically broccoli while I literally munched it while watching.

Now when it spoils, yes, it can get a little sulfury, as can cauliflower, its cousin. But fresh broccoli?

That’s really cool, I miss more things being outwardly interoperable. Very useful feature, I can’t wait until they deem it too usable and remove it.

I was explaining RSS to a friend (I follow their Substack blog via RSS, yes, I read it in the ugly Feedbro interface) and they were a bit weirded out by the idea until I went into how this was kind of a default option a few years ago.

One day I’ll have a home server setup that will keep the Web 2.0 dream alive for me.

The Flintstones was originally an adult-oriented cartoon, and became seen as family friendly as time went on and more things became available on TV.

Its role was closer to the Simpsons when that was new, which also became more acceptable for younger people to watch over time.

My country is being invaded illegally right now with zero consequences, I know what you are saying. But there should be zero way to profit from war, from an ethical standpoint these industries would ideally be nationalized and kept far far away from profiteers.

I know exactly what “peace” with the apartheid Nazis taking a fresh bite out of my homeland means, I’m not oblivious to that flavor of “pacifism” that gets promoted by the slimiest characters. You’re pushing back against a point I never made. I empathize with a lot of the sentiment supporting Ukraine specifically because I feel like that country’s relationship with Russia is in some ways analogous to our relationship with Hafez and Bashar’s Syria.

Arguably we need the weapons more. The countries controlling the world’s economic and social levers are more than willing to punish Russia, great, but then bend over backwards, and even spit in the face of their commitments to the ICJ, because we’re just in the way of a modern colonial project. I’ll take the guns in a heartbeat. I just believe it’s an unethical thing to privatize, monetize, and eventually promote to keep the numbers going up.