#internet old person

[neurosismancer]

So, let me put on my Internet Old Person hat and tell you kids about the the way we committed music piracy in the long long ago of 2001, and the fragility of those music collections in those days.

You might know Napster. You might know Limewire. But there was a music piracy tool in between those. A little remembered program called AudioGalaxy, and it worked a little like Napster and a little like BitTorrent. The exact details of how it worked are immaterial, but one thing it did was when you searched for an artist, the songs were sorted, in essence, by popularity (e.g. how many people had that specific song file shared.)

Now, I can’t understand why this was a thing, but there was a strange phenomenon in the early days of file sharing and music piracy where people would share songs with the wrong artist name or song title. Certain bands and artists got a lot of stuff attributed to them that they never recorded. “Weird” Al Yankovic may be the most infamous victim of this, with nearly every novelty song and song parody released attributed to him regardless of quality or subject matter.

The confluence of these two phenomena are how I discovered one of my favorite bands of all time.

So, in my late teens, I found a new favorite band. A quickly little one-hit wonder known as DEVO. Y’know, the band that dd “Whip It.” They had the funny red hats that looked like flowerpots. Those guys.

Anyway, I had become obsessed with this band to the point of autistic hyperfixation, and I wanted to hear everything they’d ever put out. At that point, they’d released nine studio albums, a couple live albums, and two collections of early demos, and I wanted them all. So I would find myself crawling in the bottom pages of the AudioGalaxy search results looking for those obscure tracks—b-sides, songs on soundtracks and compilations, the occasional bootleg, They’d pop up between songs that were obviously not by DEVO, and much like our poor friend Alfred Yankovic, any sort of vaguely quirky 80s song got assigned to DEVO.

That was how I found it. A song called, simply, “Detachable Penis.”

Now, I had never heard of such as song, but I knew on the face of it, it wasn’t a DEVO song.

But with a title like that, I knew I had to find out just what in the name of fuck a song called “Detachable Penis” sounded like.

It sounded, dear reader, like this:

(CWs: blurry images of a dildo, the word penis, spoken word poetry)

And I immediately went to Google, because this song somehow tickled an itch in my brain, and I had to go and find out the real band that recorded this song, because how the hell else was I going to get every song I could of theirs I could get my grubby little hands on. The band was called King Missile, and I was hooked.

I’d like to see any music discovery algorithm beat that.

I eventually acquired their entire major discography along with a few EPs and B-Sides. I eventually burned those to a CD, which I could listen to with my MP3 CD Player.

And I realize, upon writing that, for you youth “MP3 CD Player” is a noun phrase that needs explaining. See, while the iPod had been released at that point, and similar devices were also on the market, they were all prohibitively expensive. The economical way to listen to pirated music files was to burn them to CD, but some CD players had software that allows you to burn those song as as _data_. Suddenly, you could have a single CD with 700 megabytes of MP3 files—room for an artist’s entire discography, if not multiple artists.

Since I was download a whole lot of MP3s with my high speed DSL connection, I was taking up an awful lot of space on my hard drive that needed to be offloaded somehow. CD-Rs and an MP3 CD Player were the optimal solution. And it worked…

…until it didn’t.

In the summer of 2002, my parents took me on a vacation to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. It was in the latter city where someone got into our rental car and swiped my MP3 CD player and a binder of CDs—both pressed CDs I’d acquired and CD-Rs of illicitly acquired MP3s, along them a CD-R I’d burned containing the nearly complete King Missile discography.

Songs I had only on that one CD-R.

It took me a decade—ten fucking years—before I’d recovered all the music that was on that disc.

This is the sort of discovery and the sort of loss that kids will never experience again in this day of Spotify and the all-you-can-eat buffet of music on demand we have now.

[nuggets-wurld]

a few pngs I made of some vintage aquamice, I did NOT know how many companies made these just to be promotional material! Wish companies did this more still, this is like 10x better than getting an okay pen

free to use ofc, credit if you wanna :3

[hallowshumour]

Another Bandit redesign. ⭐️🔥

[spitblaze]

"okay but even though these characters are thirty they have SUCH old man energy"

"well if they've been endured enough trauma by their 30s it deserves to be called old man yaoi"

"does it count as old man yaoi if one of them is 20"

[catboythanatos]

the tiktok trend thats like "making our parent read brainrot phrases" but its streamer robotnik making stone read them ok thank you

[rabbitlantern]

If you could also add your age range in the tags that would be helpful (no other personal info plz). I’m using the results to help bulk up a research page I need for a uni art project (the brief sucks but it must be done)

[imweepin]

sad cat irl

[okaydays22]

[canon-gabriel-quotes]

I always respect your rule about suggestive posts, and I am 100% on board with it.

However please keep in mind that at least on mobile if there are many tags on a post some of these will be hidden! And some people might not notice the tag! Even I sometimes caught myself almost liking/reblogging something because I zoned out and didn't notice (I'm also a dummy and might not register that something is suggestive, especially that english isn't my first language.) When tagging questionable posts, please put the #suggestive tag first. Or not, I'm not gonna order you how to tag your posts, but please concider.

Thank you for reading and have a good weekend!

Sincerely, a 16yo ULTRAKILL fan

I’ll try to remember to put that tag at the front. I schedule all the posts when I’m at work so I’m usually more preoccupied with making sure no one is standing behind me while I’m doing that so the tags are an afterthought. But like I said I’ll try to fix that for future posts.

But anyway I reblogged that warning cause I had to block 2 accounts that followed and blatantly said they were 14. Meaning they couldn’t bother to read the short af blog description I have there. It’s right there as soon as you open the account. I can’t make it any more obvious. And I know they scrolled through the account because they were liking old posts that were tagged as well. They didn’t just follow from their dashboard. Not slick.

Like. Come on. I too was on tumblr from the age of 13 but I had the common sense to not do that. Stay out of trouble. Don’t cross people’s boundaries. 10 years from now you’ll realize how uncomfortable it’d be to have a 14 year old thirst posting in your replies.

If you’re going to do it anyway. Do that in your private discord or whatever with your friends that are (hopefully) around your age, I can’t stop you. But doing it out in the open with 0 respect is an auto block from me. Not only because it’s weird, but it opens themselves up to being creeped on.

[angelfiresworld]

hi here's another emotes set

[nuggets-wurld]

Some stamp PNGs I made based on stamps I’ve seen for sale before! Free to use ofc :3

[awwfulsounds]

Commodore Amiga 3000 1990 (x)

[animation-by-jam]

[Vent]. My thoughts. I'm not indigenous, so I can not relay the experience as if I could, and their voices matter more than mine. My heart goes out to the people of the letter. I'm writing as a fan who wants to just let out my feelings.

I don't know if it's just me. But I don't know if I can watch another rtvs stream with the whole crew until the rest of them issued their apologies over what happened or actually do something about the hurt they caused. It's obvious by the fan reaction that they're not just friends on the internet anymore and can't just shield themselves to be awful with criticism. Especially over fucking racial discrimination critique.

Especially Mike. Like everyone's initial responses and apologies at the time were bad, but man, that one was just REALLY BAD. Like if it wasn't limited to a discord server, the average rtvs viewer would have just been appalled by the comment and done worse reputation wise level bad. Not even the most dedicated sweep under the rug fans could argue that wasn't good. (Though I did scroll to read the entire situation, and few people tried). But, nope. It was bad. I still don't understand how he could go immediately to a 100 with that. I could give him the benefit of the doubt and say he probably had a shitty day (gamer moment level of exuse. I can't defend that), or idk he was just too aggressive with wanting to defend his friends. But, at the end of the day, that's an excuse, and the words were still typed and caused hurt. The action was still taken, and unfortunately, even *if* he feels terrible over it, he can't take it back. What's done is done, and just make up for it now.

But like I said, even with other mods and members doing the work behind the scenes. And I really hope to god that they do actually address this shit publicly. The longer it could go on, the more people will feel so betrayed (rightfully), and the more fans it will reach to demand something. Like this isn't the hlvrai days anymore rtvs, they have fans that can donate thousands to charity and sell out merchandise within hours. They want to unify the brand together? so they have to GET IT TOGETHER. Act maturely next time. If they aren't able to properly rectify a situation with a problematic sponsor or collaboration in time, then just apologize and listen to people's suggestions. God damn. How hard was it to read a letter that wasn't attacking them. And if anything, they tried really hard to give them so much benefit since it was from Fans. And even if not from fans, still don't treat indigenous people like this (common sense, no?). I know some of the crew are white and, or at this point, privileged to do what they can and probably never had to deal with the unique oppression indigenous people do as most humans never will. But, still. They have to get over it. Read the letter and understand it, and stop trying to act like any criticism is the end of your world/jobs. It will be if most of them don't learn from this incident.

[thekenobee]

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE + Text Posts (Part 3)

[vonstarlight]

my current blinkie/stamp collection ^_^ b

[mrs-gauche]

IT'S OCTOBER!!!!

I have no idea what's happening out there, I'm living in this isolated semi offline bubble to avoid spoilers and it's killing me, but WE'LL BE PLAYING THE NEXT DRAGON AGE *THIS* MONTH. AFTER TEN. WHOLE. YEARS. HOW FUCKING CRAZY IS THAT. IT STILL DOESN'T FEEL REEEAL.