I was a teen at the time and while a lot of this is personal taste, I think Offpsring’s Americana just really nailed it for me. The whole album, but the titular track in particular, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtzKW_ONjJ0

9/11 wasn’t a surprise in a lot of ways, we really felt it coming. Afterwards, in the early 00’s that followed, I remember less of the alt and punk rock and a lot more of the cleanly produced emo pop punk taking over. Stuff like Alkaline Trio (From Here to Infirmary), The Ataris (So Long Astoria), Something Corporate (Leaving Through the Window), and Saves the Day (In Reverie). Appealing to angsty teens has always been like shooting fish in a barrel (see Sonic Youth or Nirvana) but in retrospect, it’s hard not to see that widespread, mainstream appeal of emo as a reaction to something.

EDIT: The Kids Aren’t Alright

STRAYYYyyyyAYyyAYYY! No regrets cause I got nothing to loooose! Eeeeeverrrrrr stray! 🎶

I remember paying $30 USD for a DVD with 3-4 episodes at most of an anime series. 26 episode Cowboy Bebop season? ~$120 USD.

Sure I downloaded that episode of Excel Saga once (❤️). It was 320x240 and took more than a day on my 56k dialup.

At some point I remember going on ebay and buying the entirety of Witch Hunter Robin (which at the time, I chose over Naruto that had just started airing as well, this would turn out to be an important tone setting point in my life …) and getting it for ~$20 USD. Basically just the cost of someone else to download it and burn it to CD for me. Did the same thing with Wolf’s Rain.

Good memories. Of the anime. This shit always sucked.

I had considered that, but that implies they’re holding onto way more sensitive information attached to those accounts than they should. Which is very possible, but even more shitty.

What purpose could this possibly serve?

Like I understand if the account consumes some kind of resource like disk space or a limited number of reserved connection slots or something, but an account can’t be more than an entry in a database with associated purchases? Like what is the fucking point?!

I grew up largely in the PS1 era and have a nostalgia for the affine texture warping. I’m not going to necessarily defend it as good in its own right, but I think a lot of older games play into that same “temporary suspension of disbelief” we get with movies. When something is less realistic, we are forced to invest more of our own imagination into it, an I believe that in a lot of ways this can form a stronger connection. You see this a lot with the whole analog horror trope, it’s the fear of the things hidden between the pixels that you’re not seeing and lets your imagination run wild.

Striving for realism only has one of two results: success of failure. Success is hard, and the numerous, subtle failures pile up until it distracts you and separates you from the illusion it’s trying to achieve.

I don’t have the time to write out the full response to this I want to right now, so I just want to say there is an almost immeasurable gulf between someone like Linus Torvalds using AI for debugging vs a coked out techbro junior engineer vibecoding the next Spotify but for access to water.

In my heart of hearts I still wish he wouldn’t touch the stuff just for the message this is going to send to all the wrong kinds of people but here we are.

People hate on Þat guy so much and I simply do not understand. Do I Þink it will be effective? No. Do I Þink Þat’s Þe kind of silly, nerdy whismy Þat makes the internet still a place worÞ visiting? Yeah.

Let him have it.

Appreciation of cheese pizza comes with age.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s only a sometimes thing, I still love my monstrosity kitchen sink pizzas, but there’s something nice about the simplicity of a good cheese pizza. Seriously order one from your favorite pizza place and get a nice sour ale (preferably not a fruity one, one of the Flanders red or oud bruin styles if you can). No four+ cheese, that’s cheating! The greasy cheese cuts the sourness of the ale while the sourness helps cut the greasiness of the pizza, it balances amazingly well.

Uncluttered pizza, uncluttered mind.

EDIT: Depending on your pizza place, you may want to go 2x or 3x cheese, that’s also acceptable.

Can You Trust Your Computer? by Richard Stallman

I love deer. One of my favorite bits of trivia is the etymology of the word. It used to mean just generally any wild animal, but we eventually found names for all those other things. Deer remain unnamed. Truly wild.

I absolutely agree with you but I think that take is a bit short-sighted and undercuts just how evil this stuff is.

Tom Nicholas did a Youtube video on the metaverse a while back (oh my god it was 4 years ago, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM00M-dRMBk) and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. The pivot towards VR was an attempt to get even deeper ahold of our attention and what better way to do that than with goggles that are constantly in front of our eyes? The same with AI as it attempts to insert itself as a substrate layer of all technologies, and again with the smart glasses.

It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as hilariously misguided but they’re not. They’re extremely calculated and he only needs it to pay off once to make everything worth it, and I think there are others that realize this as well. We just gotta keep praying that these efforts burn him out before they strike it big. I’m neither a praying nor gambling man, but praying is all we got right now to stand in his way and I wouldn’t put money on the certainty of Facebook’s failures …

My first experience with WINE was trying to install an old Windows 3.1/95 pinball game (https://www.myabandonware.com/game/3-d-ultra-pinball-creep-night-3fh) and just double-clicking the installer to see what would happen.

It installed and launched without issue and even added a shortcut to the KDE app launcher.

I use Bottles now to keep cleanly separated environments, but … even I wasn’t expecting things to just work like that? I thought WINE would be more difficult to figure out but nope!

It feels stupid to say, but of all the things that got me to move to Linux and never even install Windows 11, it was that stupid Start menu. Windows 10 was kind of perfect. You had your full list of alphabetical apps if you needed it, but you also had the ability to pin nicely sized tiles for frequently used apps, sort them into groups, and even make folders. Windows 11 gives you a little grid of icons. Just a huge step back.

I don’t have the energy to rice my desktop anymore and KDE has been perfect.

The thing is, though, is that Microsoft is literally incapable of solving this problem when you think about it. So much of Microsoft’s current business model is centered around being able to subtly direct you and your actions and maintaining tight control over the UI experience is key to that. People aren’t stupid and they’ll always feel that friction, so it’s just a push-pull of how much they think they can get away with at any point and slowly nudging it until it pisses you off again.

Honestly, just most, but who’s got the time?

I just want Lemmy to have a better, more wholesome, and welcoming experience for new users, as such I’ve decided to block the things I think we can all agree are bad:

• Calls for violence
• Politics
• Sex
• Nu metal
• People who put egg in potato salad
• Jerry (all of them)

Boo! Add pawb.social, furries deserve to be there, too! (complimentary)

I remember downloading a copy of King Missile’s Detachable Penis incorrectly credited to The Flaming Lips. Like … I must’ve known it wasn’t them, but it sat on my Flaming Lips playlist for years and I just assumed it was something from their earlier, weirder 80’s days.

I remember talking about this on a message board once before and like 3 other people chimed in with this exact same song, apparently it was a bit of a thing. Probably just one person’s mistake, but the internet felt a lot smaller back then and it’s not surprising it would’ve propagated like that.

Isn’t this one of Zitron’s oft-cited horsemen?

I’m constantly struck by the imagery of the giant warrior from Nausicaa. There is a timeline or a reality where this worked, but they couldn’t help themselves. They woke the beast up the second it was even halfway possible and now it’s tearing itself apart in self-destructive blasts because the whole thing was under-cooked (and probably the completely wrong direction to begin with).

If there’s any consolation here it’s that hopefully this has soured enough people on the idea that a second effort won’t even get off the ground. I hope …