You know, I don’t know if that’s what “a Western audience” wants. I know that Youtube has made its service steadily worse over time, and also much more resource intensive. Checking Firefox’s Process Manager, it currently lists four Youtube tabs loaded in memory that total up to 1.4GB. And I know a lot of that isn’t the video: when I load a new Youtube tab, it shows the “placeholder” content, gray lines where text will go, for several seconds before anything really displays.

I mean, Bilibili sucks too? I get popups before videos I watch with anime characters, whee. There’s also the whole currently-is-in-Chinese thing, kind of a drawback for an English-speaker, But it does seem to load a bit faster.

ssh and scp (secure connection and file transfer)

grep (the standard command-line search tool)

sed (Stream EDitor, good for find-replaces once you learn how to use it)

awk (can operate on text files or command output that’s organized in columns)

sc (terminal-based spreadsheet)

trash (safer replacement for rm that moves things to your desktop’s trash directory instead of deleting immediately)

I just installed Windows 11 in a virtual machine for software development purposes.

• This machine has a valid Windows 11 Pro license, but it didn’t recognize it because it’s running in a VM.
• It installed a bunch of stuff I didn’t need and had to uninstall, because Microsoft assumed my use case.
• I had to log into a Microsoft account that I use for nothing else, using my phone’s two-factor authentication.
• I had to flip a bunch of switches NO to opt (as far as possible) out of Microsoft’s tracking.
• I had to do the updates overnight.
• When it was done, I then began the process of clearing all the crap off the computer and out of the taskbar. That’s ongoing.

Simple!

There are all these people who think it’s only a video game if it involves big fightymen killing things. That’s hyperbole (they could be big sportsmen doing sports), but not by much.

These are the people who view graphics as the be-and-end-all of a game’s quality. There are more kinds of games than anyone could count, but you wouldn’t know it by asking those people.

Yoot Saito also directed the wonder feudal japanese wargame/pinball simulation with microphone support Odama. I still have my copy and mic!

Kirby Air Riders!

Study also suggests that water is wet.

Yes, but in the US servers get paid much less than minimum wage with the presumption that tips will make up the difference.

Businesses are supposed to make up any difference between what servers fail to earn as tips up to minimum wage, but:

• It gives businesses an opportunity to fail to do this,
• It means that minimum wage is what some servers effectively get, and
• It effectively means the amount of tips servers get per hour is lessened by the difference between their hourly pay and the minimum wage rate; it’s a way for businesses to reach into server tips and get some of it for themselves.

Not true, there is no Springfield, Hawaii, for example.

Athena for NES. Now THAT’S some jank!

(gestures at headline)

On the other hand, my six letter Gmail address now constantly gets messages from people who mistyped their email addresses when signing up for things.

Too late.

The good internet still exists, and is pretty damn good even now. The problem is social media and a handful of bad-but-popular sites.

I tell people this every so often, but in terms of percentage of the world population, there are far more people on the good internet than there were back then. The problem is, with the advent of smartphones, social media use exploded, and Facebook and Twitter became gigantic, far exceeding the size of the good web. Your aunts and uncles with little net savvy and a bucket of bad opinions swamped Facebook, and never really changed. The popular tech media, which tends to follow the biggest crowds to the exclusion of all else, began treating Facebook as if it were THE internet. It’s the tyranny of crowds.

Once it became evident that you could be successful by doing it, everyone started chasing the favor of those largely clueless users. Google began to prioritize a handful of websites like Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and their own Youtube, and largely gave up the fight against SEO abusers like Fandom. Sites that had been considered internet utilities decided to cash in.

There are still fun web games being made, if you know where to look for them (some places to look: Vole.wtf, Neal.fun, Ferry Halim’s long-running Orisinal and hey Newgrounds is still around). There are great free web hosts still, like Neocities and Nekoweb. (Although note, I just learned that Angelfire shut down in April.) A version of the old good Google still exists through the Web search option, a.k.a. udm14, but now there’s multiple other search engines that aren’t so bad. There is the Fediverse, of course. And if you look around you might find out about these awesome things called tildes, free Linux machines you can apply for a shell account on just to mess around, often with internal chat, bulletin boards, web space, community games and even weirder things like Gopher and Gemini (not Google Gemini) sites.

All these things exist. You just gotta know where to find them, amidst all the suck out there. They CAN be hard to find, but that’s one reason why I linked to some of them above. Seek out sources of links! Metafilter, the venerable community weblog, is one of them. A few other places to look: Andy Baio’s Waxy, Rusty Foster’s Today In Tabs and even Mozilla’s own Ten Tabs. You can also find a good RSS reader to keep up with many websites at once.

It takes work to find things now, it is true, it takes the realization that you can’t be passive about finding the good things out there. But, truly, it’s always been like that. The good days of Google were an aberration. The natural order of the internet is, the great stuff has never been, and will never be mainstream.

The term came from Usenet, after AOL opened up internet access to its users.

There was one great thing about Rotten.com and that wad the Rotten Library, which was a treasure trove of suppressed information. A lot of people first found out about MKULTRA there.

Spotted a typo, it refers to “Apache Foundation’s OnlyOffice,” when that product is OpenOffice (as one can discover by following the link). This is different from the OnlyOffice mentioned earlier in the paragraph.

Nethack is very different, I expect, but great. You can even play it on public servers like alt.org and Hardfought

The image reminded me of this monstrosity.

I verify this, some years ago when my laptop’s hard drive died, I installed Ubuntu Linux from a USB drive (with a live image on it) to a USB drive. It took a while for it to boot but it worked and I used it as my main machine for a couple of months.

But beyond that, there are Linux distros made specifically for running off of external media, Puppy Linux is an example.