#INTERNET!

[catoperated]

After you hit a certain age you notice the paradox of how the internet is forever yet also things on it can very easily be lost. It’s why there’s a thriving Lost Media community trying to dig up the most obscure shit no one ever thought about backing up, and copies may still be in storage units somewhere.

Whenever there’s an abandoned unit auction you never know if someone’s gonna find something lost for decades, and you’ll also never know how much was destroyed because the buyer didn’t consider it valuable enough to resell.

And then communication. For a while you had your old standards of BBS and IRC and then the dot com bubble happened and there was an explosion of different competing services. Few people remembers John McAfee’s racist Wigwam app (he fetishized First Nations people and also called people who partook in his mini plane hobby “sky g*psies). We wouldn’t know how deeply disturbed he was for a while, and McAfee Virus Scan was bundled as part of Windows bloatware for years.

Mumble, Teamspeak, ICQ, IRC, Skype… there were more, but it already sounds like Bart’s chant in Little Treehouse of Horror III.

We traded ftps for the cloud, which still leaves you relying on someone else’s computer to keep your files safe. I don’t want to think about how much data I’ve lost over the years. After Douglas Adam’s death, they found he owned every type of Apple computer released until his death, all of them full of fragments of unfinished stories. I’ll always have mixed feelings on preserving works when creators specifically asked for them to be burned upon their passing.

So there’s my bit of middle-aged navel gazing for now.

tl;dr: make multiple copies of shit you wanna preserve, and at least one better be physical.

…this was supposed to be me lamenting how many de rigueur platforms have come and gone and now there’s multiple vying to replace our current crumbling haunts.

[charrfie]

Chimera

Acrylic on canvas, August 2024

[ayeforscotland]

This is absolutely catastrophic.

[lesbian-moon-gf]

surviving the current age of internet means saying no to subscriptions and premiums for basic features. you must endure the inconvenience of not being able to use every server emoji in discord. you must build the patience to find alternatives like NewPipe so you can listen to music on youtube while your phone screen sleeps. do Not give these corporations your limited disposable income. tiktok not letting me view videos on my phone without downloading the app? i will outlast tiktok and the execs will be remembered as dull,disgusting capitalists. listen to me, listen to me. if you do not know how to pirate shows from hulu, learn. if you can't pirate it, it is not worth the money to rent it. please i'm on my hands and knees. do not accept this form of internet.

[kenapiece-main]

Can you believe I'm having to make this meme even after successfully finishing up taxes and applying to job

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[amaros-system]

reblog to pet prev

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

as an aroace person with limited sexual experience, no interest in watching porn, and poor sex ed as a teen, there IS something simultaneously funny and vaguely tragic about being 28 adult years old and realising how extremely tiny your frame of reference is for genitalia and deciding you should expand this to better understand bodies (yours and others). and then you're just there like "okay so what the fuck do I even google right now, anyway"

[andhumanslovedstories]

look I'm not gonna pretend I know anything about electronics, but sometimes a plug is so big it blocks another socket, and I'm always like "who the fuck do you think you are"

[rotzaprachim]

not only are there no bad languages there are also no bad or annoying dialects

[unsung-idiot]

don't show him modern technology; it won't end well

bonus under the cut:

[pumpkinhrat]

[animentality]

[sunbentshadows]

Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

[silverslipstream]

worst part about the Internet is knowing that there are finally people who both match and complement your freak. the nearest one is 2,318.4 miles away and your time zones are awkward