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)

Study also suggests that water is wet.

(gestures at headline)

Too late.

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.

Homestar Runner’s website still works through the use of Ruffle, an open-source and secure Flash reimplementation. The loss of the easter eggs is a big drawback, but on the other hand it does mean that you focus more on the content than constantly looking for things to click on.

What really should be preserved is the entirety of Homestar Runner.

If you want to have fun with an internet newbie tell them to watch to the end, it gets really good.

Oh, and the Earthworm Jim cartoon was really funny! It kind of rests these days in the shadow of the much more popular Freakazoid and The Tick, but it deserves to be rewatched now.

The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin had surprisingly good animation and writing.

In the early 80s there was a weird cartoon called Pandamonium, about three pandas who could merge together to make some kind of superpanda. They traveled the world with a couple of humans trying to protect it from an evil alien called Montragor. It was an early production of Marvel Animation and little of it survives online now.

Saturday Supercade adapted arcade games (and also Pitfall) into short cartoon episodes. It featured the first cartoon version of Mario and Donkey Kong, long before any others. Pitfall’s supporting characters Rhonda and Quickclaw made appearances in the Pitfall II: Lost Caverns game.

The Real Ghostbusters wasn’t really obscure, but J. Michael Straczynski wrote for it, and he wrote an episode involving Cthulhu. (He also was story editor on He-Man, and penned the episode it was revealed that Teela was The Sorceress’s daughter.)

There are a number of cartoons that Cartoon Network hyped up then just kind of forgot about: Mike, Lu and Og, Sheep in the Big City and Whatever Happened to Robot Jones are three in particular.

Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings

A rule of thumb I use is how desperate the software is to tell you the weather even when you never asked for it or even set it up to report it.

I have an acquaintance (not sure if qualifies as a friend) who made news for getting fired for, when they were ill, asking an AI to get a quote out of an article for them, which it just out-and-out made up and got them fired. They aren’t stupid, but maybe a bit too trusting. The world lambasted them, which is a huge shame because they do really good work. One strike, you’re out.

So I am not unsympathetic to people who get, in essence, betrayed by AI. (not literally so, because AI is not a person) But yes I think people should be very careful, more careful they they’re being now certainly.

They also should be ready for if it all falls apart, as training costs increase and becomes harder. Already websites like IMDB are putting CAPTCHAs on their site just to browse it. It used to be an accommodating site to scripts that used it to gather information automatically, but those days seem to be over now. Expect to see that more and more, and in the process, the web becomes that much more annoying to use for plain old human readers too.

I could be really cruel right now, I could point out to people how this is chickens coming home to roost, how it’s always been grossly subsidized and underpriced, how the game was always getting users, companies, the country, the whole damn world hooked on these slop machines and then once they’re reliant on them to jack up the price hugely. I could be really mean about this, I could lord it over people, I could point out how they’ve been dupes this whole time and in the process traitors to all of humanity.

I could. i think I will.

Project Gutenberg predates the internet. I still remember how their goal was to give away one trillion ebooks.

Project Gutenberg is still around, so I won’t say this is an example of the internet getting worse. But I loathe how it’s come to focus on damnable social media like there’s nothing else of worth out there. Social media, among other things, filled the air with noise that starved many worthwhile projects of attention.

On of Eyezmaze made the Grow games, which are currently still playable here: https://www.eyezmaze.com/

Ferry Halim made Orisinal, a website full of simple and relaxing Flash games that lives again now through various means, I think a combination of HTML5 conversion and Ruffle: https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

26-year-old image blog Everlasting Blort: https://blort.meepzorp.com/

The venerable and unexplainable Superbad: https://www.superbad.com/

Ancient wiki-style writing site Everything, older than Wikipedia: https://everything2.com/

The “Earth Edition” of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: https://h2g2.com/