Kit Sunny @roadriverrail@signs.codes

@neauoire That quote alone describes the downfall that I and my friends saw in our respective Occupy groups.

@tty Hard agree, though the network effect of a status quo is very, very powerful. It sucks me back in all the time, no matter my dreams or projects.

@dielan Indeed, Star Wars was an intentional pastiche from a director who enjoys making pastiches. The audience at the time knew it was a pastiche. Indeed, they'd have seen, or at least known of, Flash Gordon serials, Sergio Leone westerns, and samurai movies. And when it stays in the shallow end of the pool, it's great. It exhausted its depth in the original trilogy, and it's the need for fans to wring more depth out of it that pushes it to failure.

@neauoire He also kicked off a chain of historical events that ultimately undermined his goal of logically proving and closing arithmetic. But the undermining of that position ended up producing some of the most critical and profound discoveries of the history of mathematics. The chain of events is captured in "From Frege To Godel", a book I cannot recommend highly enough.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674324497

@rozina @sophia @neauoire @ritualdust Tumblr is still around. There was a whole hullabaloo about them banning sexual content a year or two ago, IIRC. Incidentally, I'm so of-the-90s that I never even properly learned CSS.

@neauoire My Japanese is pretty fractured and rusty, and I've become very forgetful as of late, so... 😂

@neauoire Am I crazy, or is "sa" not actually listed there?

@neauoire @rozina @ritualdust Likely the equivalent of a personal Geocities page today would be something like about.me or Squarespace. Or just having a Twitter feed. A Twitter feed and an early Geocities page actually have a lot in common.

@neauoire @rozina @ritualdust 16 y/o me used Tripod and there was definitely a lot of editing HTML by hand. But even moreso, there was also the challenge of finding a local ISP (I learned one existed through the BBS community, which required technical skill to navigate), getting set up with them, etc, and getting Windows 3.1 and later Win95 rigged up for dial-up networking. I don't think we can use ourselves as measures of ease of access in technology.

@rozina @ritualdust A little bit, yes. There's a super valid criticism that "the capitalist Web" has fundamentally gone the wrong way and that "browser as an applications platform" has sacrificed openness, community, accessibility, and many other things. We should want to take those things back. But we should also remember that the 90s Web required technological skill to be a part of, which was itself also undemocratic, and that bloat always scales to what technology will endure.

@absturztaube Also HP.

@rozina @ritualdust I was around for the late 90s web and I think it's really easy to think too fondly on it. Things could feel pretty bloated then, too, because most average users didn't have high-speed access. Sites had less interactivity, but there were plenty of web 'zines (Gothic.net was my favorite then). Digital cameras didn't exist, so even a picture of yourself was a bit of a feat. Probably the nicest part was that lynx worked with everything.

@apetresc I mean the hardware device, ideally. Keyboard, screen, and serial line. I suppose I'd accept a computer with a native text mode that did this, though.

I really wish there was such a thing as a dumb terminal that could handle UTF-8 and emoji. I really don't want to build one myself.

@neauoire Looks like the DawnOS link is now dead.

@grumpy My house has one that was likely installed prior to air conditioning being installed. It's been very poorly maintained and mostly just makes an awful noise. I would definitely like to get it replaced one day, though. Here in the south, we often need AC as much to control humidity as temperature, but on dry days of a reasonable temperature...

@syrinx That record is absolutely legendary for its role in legitimizing synthesizers as serious instruments. Great find!

@tty Given that I had friends, during the fashionable Peak Oil craze of the early-mid 2000s, literally perform funerals for the modern world with their small children, I have limited patience for Peak Oil tales that don't have the courage to name a year, especially when. We have all the fossil fuels we need to make the planet uninhabitable in a few decades.