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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • | and they’re also easier on the eyes

    This is my main reason for preferring to read on e-readers. A book is a long-ass journey, and to be staring at a regular screen for that long can be painful business.

    I also like that there’s at least the suggestion of old-school physical connection to the book. It’s a device that does just one thing (and is very good at it as a result), and you find yourself treating it the way you used to treat a paper book. I guess it’s the same sort of “positive friction” you get when you listen to vinyl or something like that. Makes the experience a bit nicer. Like, yeah, you could open notepad on a smartphone and read the complete works of Shakespeare for free in Courier New font, having to scroll every 2 paragraphs, but who the fuck wants to do that?

    The basic form factor of the book has been perfected over centuries, and e-readers emulate it to a fair degree.

    I think most e-readers are waterproof, too 🤔 One would hope so, at least! Reading in the tub or on a beach is one of the benefits of its portability.









  • Currently reading Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser

    The thesis of the book is basically that environmental pollution, particularly lead, might be the thing that caused so many serial killers to pop up during the period of the late '60s to the late '70s. Only half way through it so far, and not quite convinced by the theory yet. Although it’s indisputable that such pollution can damage brains to a severe degree, I’m just not sure how you get from “damaged” to “I’d better serial kill some women”. Random violence and anger management issues, sure. But the highly specific and MO-driven criminality of serials killers seems like something else entirely. We’ll see what evidence comes in later chapters!

    EDIT: Finished. Yeah, sounds like complete bullshit to me. She was even attributing the existence of the Bloods and the Crips to smog, for fuck’s sake. It’s as though she’s genuinely unable to imagine any reason for any violence other than pollution-induced brain damage.



  • I think I blocked a couple of accounts years ago that were just reposting ancient memes from reddit in bot-like numbers. But it seems like the majority of content here falls under that category, so blocking seems futile. Can’t even use downvoting to correct the issue because our votes aren’t private/anonymous here and I don’t need a large account seeing that I downvote their content every time I come across it. It would have to feel personal at that point 😆

    I don’t mind big accounts in principle, I just don’t want to see memes from 2018 being reposted every day with the same titles, and for there to be no other content from those accounts.





  • Whatever replaces Tenor needs to allow for more specificity in searching. If I search “lemur” and I see 3 orangutans, a chimp and a 12 gibbons, and maybe 1 actual lemur, I’m still happy to have simians, but I really needed a lemur, man. I was quite fucking specific in my search term. Had I written “monkey” but it showed me a series of apes, I wouldn’t mind that so much.

    Also, “cat on skateboard” has fuck all to do with a poorly staged video of a dog playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater with a set of gaming bongos. Again, glad to see it, but where’s my skateboarding cat??




  • I had a hilarious dream just last night! Remember recently when Quentin Tarantino was talking shit about the acting skills of Paul Dano? I dreamt that Paul was in a new movie, and was acting hard, like, really giving it insane levels of energy, and after every line he delivered he’d glance at the camera with an expression of exasperation on his face, as if to say “is THAT good enough for you, ya cunt??” directly to Tarantino.


  • Some early shock/gore site discussion below, spoilered in case you don’t wanna read about such things.

    spoiler

    rotten.com - nasty website hosting bizarre and violent tableaus of human suffering, pretty tame by today’s standards though.

    steakandcheese.com - another shock site, it hosted a clip that became quite infamous, showing a Russian soldier having his throat stabbed and cut by a Chechen rebel. I feel like that clip was a rubicon for the internet; after that, things got darker and more extreme, and now you can literally find clips of people being skinned alive. But that clip for sure ruined many a childhood.

    When the internet was first introduced to me in around '97 or so, in IT class in high school, the only thing I really did was look for URLs on products around the class or in my pockets. For example, Pepsi had a website, Peperami had one too. I also created an email account on Hotmail.com, and I believe we did some chat room stuff in IRC or ICQ or one of those things.

    One day during a lunch break at the same school, I looked up porn and actually found some, although I have no memory of what the site was called. I got scared though, and closed the browser as soon as I saw nudey ladies. I’m sure the teacher checked the browsing history (something I had no idea about back then) and saw what I was looking at, but he never said anything to me about it. Legend 🫡



  • CMF Phone 1. Pretty basic in 2026, but it does everything I need it to. I’d like to get a Fairphone in the future (or maybe a Linux one), but hopefully this phone will keep me going for another few years.

    The phone I have plays Balatro perfectly, which is about as intensive an app/game as I ever use on mobile. I’m glued to my PC all day every day so the only time I need my phone is when I’m taking a dump or going to bed.

    My brother is a gadget-head, the phone he has now is one of those crazy folding ones that can become phone-sized or spread out to be a small tablet. There’s no ballsack seam at the fold point, unlike with earlier models. Pretty kewl. Nothing I’d ever need, though.



  • I’m sure the obvious picks are already mentioned, so I’ll try to think of some stuff that might not be well-known:

    Shane Meadows has produced 2 TV series worth watching. One is the This is England collection. It starts with This is England (2006), which is a film, then 3 miniseries (This is England '86, This is England '88 and This is England '90) that continue the story. All of it together is about as good as TV gets. Might wanna check for triggers before watching on something like doesthedogdie.com.

    He made a second miniseries called The Virtues. It’s a difficult watch at times, but it’s a masterpiece. And it’s another one you might wanna look into before watching.

    There’s a show that was very popular in the UK and Ireland back in the '90s called Cracker. It stars the late great Robbie Coltrane (you probably know him better as Hagrid from Harry Potter). He plays a psychologist who works with the police to find and interrogate various kinds of pathological killers and sex offenders. It’s really, really good. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s ever been released on anything but DVD, so you’ll be stuck with SD quality.

    Say Nothing is a recent show that does a really nice job of dealing with ‘the troubles’ in N. Ireland. It’s based on real events, the most central of which is the abduction, murder and ‘disappearing’ of a widowed mother of 10 children by the IRA. Jean McConville is one of 17 people who were disappeared in this way, and is by far the most notorious given her circumstances. The story - based on the book by Patrick Radden Keef - follows Dolours Price, a female IRA member who was a significant figure in the conflict and who was involved in Jean McConville’s abduction. One of the better shows I’ve seen generally, and probably the best bit of media on the N. Irish troubles (there’s so much junk about this place, it’s refreshing to see something half-decent for once). If you need a palate cleanser after watching it, Derry Girls should do the trick!