I love these types of articles. I feel like there should be a community for these, but I don’t know what it’d be called

Barns are red because of exploding stars - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/barns-are-painted-red-because-of-the-physics-of-dying-stars-58185724/

Hot dang, I never heard of that mod, I’ll have to check it out! lol

Quake itself was ok. The multiplayer version was fun. But the real fun started when people began modding the game. The original Team Fortress was actually a free mod for Quake which I’m pretty sure quickly became the most popular instance of the game for online play.

Funny random tidbit, I actually remember playing the game with one dude who specifically had to brag about having a high powered 1ghz processor as his username in the game (something like 1gigahertz or something cheesy like that). Pretty sure back then I was still rocking a 700mhz AMD Athlon Thunderbird processor.

I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.

Back in the mid 90’s, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft’s Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don’t miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don’t miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).

Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn’t a thing for quite a while.

I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I’ve used ever since in various careers over the decades.

What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That’s when I noticed a big shift in online communities.

For sure. I have a micro homestead with a lot of chickens (dozens upon dozens lol) - we raise them for eggs, meat, and the manure (which we use to make awesome soil for the garden). We keep the coop extremely clean (like multiple times a month we clean it out), and we keep our chickens healthy (constantly treating for parasites, mites, worms, etc) so they live a happy healthy life.

Those eggs come out clean in the nests because we keep them clean as well. I personally would probably rinse it off right before cracking open just because it’s me, but yeah there’s no salmonella in our coop because we maintain sanitary conditions (probably way more than the average backyard chicken owner).

20 years ago, I had an insurance plan with AT&T. For $30 I could “replace” my phone under the insurance policy (once per year). Then the plan changed it was a refurbished phone not new… then eventually the insurance plan went to a surcharge of $200 to replace with a refurbished phone.

Back in the old days I simply upgraded every one or two years under the insurance plan. But that was the days before smartphones really took off.

These days I don’t have that insurance plan, and simply hold onto my phones as long as possible. I don’t get it either.

I have a Galaxy S9 that I’ve had for five years and it just won’t die on me. Not that I’m complaining, I honestly have no clue what I’ll buy next. But I don’t get the need to upgrade annually.

Wasn’t there a huge deal when they skipped from Win8.1 to Win10 - and they pinky promised that Windows10 was the last version of Windows, and they’d simply release major updates every so often? Pepperidge farm remembers.

I’m already tired of my buggy Windows10. I have no desire for Win11 or Win12. I’m installing dual boot with Linux Mint on a few different machines and never looking back haha

More simple than that - I’ll likely use AutoItScript for windows - literally automate clicking links or simulating keystrokes (like the tab key) until it reaches the desired link then clicking the edit function, revising text, tab to the save button, saving change, and repeat over and over.

It’s crude and inefficient, but I have over twenty years experience using the code for various small tasks so I’m sure I’ll get the job done.

Just not sure when I want to start - I feel like they are still playing tricks un-deleting content and such for people using automated API code. So for now I’ve simply blocked reddit at the router level for another month or two before I go back and start writing my code to automate the deletion of 10+ years worth of content.

So I’m not a traditional programmer - I don’t use a lot of the common software and such. I have a lot of prior experience using AutoItScript automated software so I’ll probably use that to mimic keystrokes and clicks on my computer screen once I have programmed exact positions for things - it’ll likely be a very specific set of code for my computer.

But I may create an account on github and share if there’s enough interest lol

I don’t trust those snakes. I’m working on code to use reddit’s website and edit comments one at a time (one per minute so they don’t think it’s bot activity) and I’m going to deploy the code a month or two from now after the API is gone - because I want them to think they’ve “won” before I over-write and then erase a decade’s worth of content

In my experience, most people outgrow the secret clubs phase eventually. But I’m sure not everyone does. Who doesn’t like feeling special, no matter how unjustified it is?

** looks around at the Free Masons, Skull and Bones, and Illuminati **

Getting old sucks, but everyone’s doing it.

Phew I feel old remembering webrings lol. Crazy to think how much the internet has changed since those early days thirty years ago.

Anyone else remember Infoseek? It was my favorite search engine because you could select to search within results to refine your search down to a single page of relevant results.

I’m writing a program and going to wait several months before I overwrite my content - slowly one post per minute. Then after finishing that (over several months), I plan to set the code to slowly delete the posts, one by one.

I spent years writing content for reddit to share with the world. If they won’t share with the world, they won’t get a copy either.

Reddit wasn’t all that amazing either when they first started - it took a while for things to get ironed out. Then they had to go and ruin a good thing