RoabeArt [he/him]

Any time I talk about my hobbies, I get told that I have too much free time on my hands, and/or that I should turn said hobbies into a job/business.

It’s like people are so capitalism-brained that they can’t fathom someone having a passion for the sake of the passion itself, and not making a commodity out of it.

Also the phrase “you have too much free time on your hands” as a backhanded insult. People seem to abhor the idea of someone spending their time doing things for themselves instead of working. Or am I reading too much into that?

Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.

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I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.

But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.

While I wouldn’t argue it saves the planet, sequestering garbage in far off, centralized, contained locations is a little better for public health than simply tossing it in the streets like we used to do. Cholera outbreaks happened on the regular before organized waste collection became a thing.

Every time a new apartment or condo development gets built here, there are people in the local community forums who rabble about “15 minute cities” and how they are trying to force us get rid of cars and control our travel. In spite of the fact these buildings are built with parking lots and garages that are as big as, if not bigger than the buildings themselves.

It’s like when chuds try to take credit for civil rights, or 5 day work weeks (Henry Ford willed the concept into existence, not years of direct action by the labor movement).

Lenin talked about how the ruling class will actively oppose a revolutionary figure, but once society at large accepts them, the ruling class will switch face and pretend like it always supported said figure.

I could be dead wrong on this (and I’m too lazy to google) but I’ve read that the term “ham radio” comes from the fact that early versions of amateur radio sets were cobbled together from other radio parts, in a hamfisted way.

“Punishable by fine” is just another way of saying “it’s legal if you can afford it.”

Are we talking first computer in your household, or first computer you ever bought yourself?

Our first family PC was a hand me down from my uncle that we got when I was 12 or 13. 486DX2 66MHz processor, a couple MBs of RAM, 700-ish megabyte hard drive, Windows 3.1 and DOS. AOL install disks didn’t work on it because they needed at least Windows 95, and I was still clueless on how to set up a modem connection in 3.1. So it was entirely for games installed via disc only. We ended up getting a Windows 98 machine a year or two down the line.

First PC I bought for myself was a custom built machine from a computer shop that has long since gone out of business. I think I paid around $200 for it, so it was a fairly basic PC for 2004. Athlon 1.5 GHz CPU (with a loud as fuck cooler fan), 512 MB RAM, a video card that I forgot the make and model of, Windows XP. Lasted me about 3 years until I built one myself.

That being said I don’t have memories of everything being snappy 20 years ago - there were messy scripts and gigantic images that made Geocities and Angelfire sites near unusable back then as well.

Pages with dozens of embedded JPEG files that are larger than your monitor’s resolution and are compressed at highest quality. Easily a quarter to half of a megabyte each and take several minutes to load on dialup, then the webserver times out the connection because you’re taking too long to download all these giant files at once.

I don’t miss those days. Not to say things are better now, but they necessarily weren’t back then either.

Oh, and RealPlayer. Fuck RealPlayer.

“Owning a car = freedom”

Unfortunately in a country where the infrastructure is so hostile to public transit or even pedestrian/biking amenities that it’s nearly impossible to live, work or function without a car unless you’re lucky enough to live in a dense urban community, I can see how people might believe this.

Even worse is when the source is hidden behind a paywall.

Same with coconuts. They are associated with Hawaiian and Caribbean cultures when in fact they’re native to South Asia and the Austronesian islands.

The fact that calcium is a metal is the reason why bones can be detected in X-rays.

(I’m pulling this out of my ass and I’m too lazy to look it up to see if it’s actually true.)

never gonna give you up never gonna let you down?

I think the earliest instance of “brain worms” I remember was from an episode of Invader Zim in 2001. Zim is offended at the concept of paying to ride a filthy, poorly maintained bus and shouts at the driver “Have you the brain worms?!”

Edit: found the video https://youtu.be/BiqTTozWNhA?si=bxNeTnreb77vdd00

Yes, and?

Him at 59 looks like me at 33. 😞