An artist I followed fell off the internet and it made me a data hoarder.

In the AOL era.

Okay, well, it doesn’t.

What? No, just via circumstances. As in, the situation will have consequences you failed to predict.

Comeuppance.

That time I had to teach math to Patrick Star.

Runner-up is trying to explain mathematics versus notation… to a math teacher.

I try to rewrite for an audience that’s unfamiliar with American idioms and will read any disagreement in a snotty tone of voice.

That’s how Peewee got cancelled.

My first admin finger-wag in fifteen years on reddit was after a long conversation with some antivax loon. I understand how “Okay, enjoy your dead kids, I guess” could sound like I’m the bad guy, in a vacuum. But we don’t live in a vacuum. Any site unwilling to acknowledge that ‘hey uh your mistakes might end a human life’ can be expressed glibly is not being moderated sensibly.

I used old.reddit.com exclusively, so the app thing never affected me personally. But when the admins started extorting those devs, and lying about it… I started looking for the exits. The day I wrote it off entirely was when they casually announced they’d reject and ignore the site-wide protest of moderators who do all their work, for free.

You can’t own a community.

You can enable them… or you can abuse them. Reddit chose abuse. The enshittification had been undeniable since 2016, when fascists choked the front page, and the admin response was ‘everybody play nice.’

The company doesn’t make anything. The site is an empty box. Every worthwhile conversation on some arcane niche, every thread pruned of idiot bastards, is something users made. It’s not even like Facebook or Youtube, where a significant chunk of (eugh) “content” is profit-driven. A forum is just people talking.

Moral disgust aside, I immediately knew - the quality was fucked. Posts would keep happening. Comments would abound. But the only reason Reddit worked was that voting filters the best stuff toward the top. The same filter does not work on crap mixed with crap. That’s all there’s going to be. Bots and fascists yapping at one another in approved tones of voice. r/Funny with five hundred names.

Dumb bastards tried to sell a recipe for stone soup.

Oh god, and the extra __MACOSX folders everywhere.

“I’ll ask Jeeves.”

“Phil Hartman guest stars in…”

“What format is that floppy?”

“I bought a Beanie Baby price book.”

It’s run by and for an absolute crank.

That guy is Poe’s law, embodied. Absolutely everyone thinks it’s a joke… at first.

Things I have been permanently banned for:

• Saying dragons aren’t real
• Referencing The Bee Movie
• Pointing out Kamala Harris was not the president
• Upvoting a comment

Admins and moderators of all stripes: you should be handing out three-day bans like candy. You can give people a month-long fuck-off time-out, and in the future, they will think twice. Even if it takes a few whacks. But all a one-step permanent ban does is chase people to new accounts. That’s why outright trolls do it - it’s not hard, and you don’t seem great at catching them. The experience for people who are merely wrong has to be better than for people who are actively malicious, or you will cease to see any difference between their behavior.

I think they’re generic knockoff Walkman headphones. That ultralight style was the default pack-in with any portable cassette player. Earbuds didn’t seem to catch on until the iPod. Anyway just get something minimalist with a metal band.

… wow, every article when you search for this might be pure AI slop.

Haitian Creole is always fun to see because the whole language is like that. It’s nearly French, but it’s spelled according to English spelling rules… unlike English.

fast moving segways

Believe it or not, “segues.”

I am reminded of the sheer optimism of a late-90s American search engine called Beaucoup, which assumed English speakers had any god-dang idea how to spell Beaucoup.

Anyway, yeah, it takes some railroading to make kids sit through Hamlet.

The original, or the CGI product?

“I think this water’s out of date.”

Rented this movie with my roommates in college. Fairly early on, the one from India blurts out, “What the fuck are we watching?!” So at least you’re not alone in Not Getting It.

I’d say it’s about horror-comedy. Tension that could become absurd or horrifying or both. Exemplified in abundance when Christian Bale leaps around a corner with nothing but tennis shoes and a running chainsaw. Message be damned - the film has your attention. And the payoff is watching that chainsaw tumble down a staircase, barely knowing what you want to happen.

That’s set against literally bloodless surprises, creating unease by allowing no solid ground. You’re watching a movie called Rich Prick Kills People and you’ve watched this rich prick kill people and you’re not one hundred percent sure whether this rich prick actually killed people. There’s no spoilery answer because it’s not about that.

‘Why is this film popular?’ is mostly a matter of good acting, good pace, and some extremely memorable bits. Unfortunately the shock value is steeply diminished if you know they’re coming… and the best parts became stock references for the 4chan generation.

‘Why is this film important?’ involves an admittedly shallow discussion of postmodernism. Patrick Bateman is trapped in hyperreality. It is so convincingly artificial that it has subsumed the real world. “Objects have won.” He is so deep in the fake-world economics of useless boardroom executive horseshit that even murdering his fellow vice presidents has no impact. The system folds right over it like it never happened. This impotence extends to the sex workers and service workers he tries to lash out at: it does not matter. His most vile and id-crazed fantasies cannot so much as stain a closet.

… and of course there’s a fandom of dipshits who think this useless maniac is the coolest guy evarrr.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.