mindbleach
@mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Anon disrespects their elders 1 hour ago:
- Comment on Anon is a PC gamer 1 day ago:
“The ole days” meaning 1963 to 1976. Anywhere after that, if you had a monitor and a modem, you might as well buy a microcomputer. Uncontested access, total control, boots into an environment to write your own programs. Only the French made a networked alternative worthwhile - and frankly even Minitel machines should’ve had homebrew for poker or whatever.
Trends over the last decade are general inflation not being matched by any serious growth in wages. Trends over the last year are just grifters with an infinite money glitch buying literally all hardware so the robot can stare at pirated movies. I’m not the sort of person to insist capitalism never works, but this is definitely capitalism not working.
- Comment on Anon is a PC gamer 1 day ago:
Cloud gaming isn’t real.
Remote computing almost never makes sense. Budgeting for access inevitably costs enough to buy something local - less powerful, but powerful enough. One year university supercomputers could run multiplayer first-person dungeon crawlers. The next year, so could an Apple II. (Christ, $1300 at launch? It did not do much more than the $600 TRS-80 and C64. The Apple I was only $666.) Meanwhile a $150 Atari was better at action titles anyway.
When networks advance faster than computing, there’s glimpses of viability. Maybe there was a brief window where machines that struggled with Doom could have streamed Quake over dial-up… at 28.8 kbps… in RealPlayer quality… while paying by the minute for the phone call. Or maybe your first cable modem could have delivered Far Cry in standard-def MPEG2, right between Halo 2 and the $300 launch of the 360, while Half-Life 2 ran on any damn thing.
Nowadays your phone runs Unreal 5 games. What else were you gonna stream games on? If you have a desktop, it’s probably for gaming. Set-top boxes keep Ouya-ing themselves, trying to become “mini-consoles” that cost too much, run poorly, and stop getting updates. Minimalist laptops like Chromebook find themselves abandoned, even though the entire fucking pitch was an everlasting dumb terminal for the internet. The only place cloud gaming almost works is for laptops, and really only work laptops, because otherwise-- buy a Steam Deck. You’re better off carrying a keyboard for normal desk use than a controller for gaming on the subway.
- Comment on Anon is a PC gamer 1 day ago:
Alternately, a glut of secondhand god-tier GPUs, which only smell a little toasty.
- Comment on Vibecon invite 2 days ago:
Arguable.
- Comment on All US Social Security numbers may need to be changed following a massive breach that is already being investigated as a national threat 2 days ago:
Or: strenuously avoiding a national ID system, because of how obviously that could be abused. And probably still hacked anyway.
It is possible to do such an ID system sensibly, fairly, and for considerable net good. But we wouldn’t.
- Comment on Annon punches a Nazi 3 days ago:
“Don’t feed the trolls” has never fucking worked.
They just escalate.
… but maybe remember the bigot’s face, and wait for him to stop filming.
- Comment on Annon punches a Nazi 3 days ago:
Ehhh.
- Comment on How Japan’s Leader Rescued Her Party from the Abyss 1 week ago:
Is it shallow populism?
Again?
- Comment on To be fair Ukraine got a lot.. 2 weeks ago:
“I came to rob your house and you fought me so I shot your dog. What did you gain from this?”
- Comment on Probably helps that I'm happy to listen to whatever genre 2 weeks ago:
My perspective’s always skewed when people say ‘you just hate new stuff,’ because I hated plenty of the old stuff at the time. We can say pop is generic, and I mean, as opposed to when?
Relying on the radio music just plain suuucks. There’s a cycle of alternating decades where the most popular stuff tends to be worth keeping, versus the big hits being unfortunate relics, but even the highest highs are rarely experimental or subversive. The idea of a cultural phenomenon being countercultural feels self-contradictory.
So yes, The Beatles were a big fucking deal for a variety of reasons, but their early career was all teeny-bopper relationship fluff. As late as Revolver they were writing two-minute AM-friendly hits like “And Your Bird Can Sing.” Meanwhile the Silver Apples were using homemade synths to sound years ahead of their time. If you went by radio play you’d think very little was happening.
Conversely, Depeche Mode blew everybody’s dicks off with Violator, but it’s just stripping back all the spacey industrial shit they’d been doing for a decade. “Personal Jesus” is a minimalist and twangy version of Martin Gore being horny on main. Their raucous live album 101 came out right before that and to my ears is the better experience. Was any of that on the Billboard 100? Was it fuck. Women crooning about love outsold them ten to one. (Okay, shout out to Phil Collins getting “Another Day In Paradise” to #7, because talk about atypical confrontational subject matter.)
Some of my favorite albums are from around 2000. Stuff from Kingston Wall, Meshuggah, Neutral Milk Hotel, ~Dragonforce~, Blind Guardian, Slayer - was that what I listened to, most days, at the time? Nope. I was subjected to “Last Kiss” for the thousandth time, having hated it since the first. I heard so much country that I developed opinions about it. At the lowest point, I could tell boy bands apart. Admittedly: this deluge of crud was sprinkled with Third Eye Blind’s love letter to meth, Filter tricking people into buying Title Of Record, Chumbwamba making anarchist agitprop dancy as a complicated joke, and quite a lot of genuinely good pop. But sometimes you’d spin the dial for a solid minute and prefer to leave it on static. When I finally found out how to pirate shit, I just grabbed stuff they’d already played, because I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Nowadays - is there a mainstream? I only heard “Your New Love” when I was in a dentist’s office. I found “Good Luck, Babe” on Youtube after some screenshots of tweeted jokes. For two decades, it has been dead easy to filter and cultivate your own tastes. You don’t have to hear about a band, visit a store, and plunk down negotiable currency to receive a physical album, unheard. You can go from “Who?” to an informed opinion in like twenty minutes. Elsewhere in this thread someone linked Igorrr, so there must be some newly-minted industrial polka fans, and you can readily say ‘don’t miss Gogol Bordello.’
- Comment on Probably helps that I'm happy to listen to whatever genre 2 weeks ago:
That really ignores the subgenres so bizarre they were considered jokes. Nightcore, dubstep, vaporwave, witch house, et cetera. All of those influenced popular culture and popular music. In terms of mainstream experimentation - Radiohead alone, come on. The Flaming Lips careened through popularity and back into weird shit like a hyperbolic comet. A Deftones fan in the 90s would listen to “Spell Of Mathematics” and ask if it sounds like that on purpose. Chappel Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe” would not have been made the same, a decade prior; what she’d be guide toward is more like Adele’s “Your New Love.”
Rick Rubin is still alive and working. Artists give him their latest tracks for a vibe check and he consistently steers them toward success. And he tells says, he doesn’t give a shit what’s popular, because people have no idea what they want next.
- Comment on Probably helps that I'm happy to listen to whatever genre 2 weeks ago:
musical categories hardened
That seems like nonsense, given how genres slimed together by the late 90s. Everybody was stealing from everybody else and the best we could do was throw around labels like “alternative.” ClearChannel made every genre pull toward country while country became R&B for hwhite people. Meanwhile the electronica scene had discovered computers - a development that took longer than you’d think - and a bunch of dorks styling themselves as DJ [noun] had MP3s all over piracy services. This is right before Youtube, SoundCloud, and MySpace let truly independent artists reach arbitrarily large audiences.
If we really want to start an argument - there’s people who say anything generated literally is not music. Kids these days are growing up with the ability to drop a diss track on their friend for a faux pas that happened five minutes ago. Formulaic, yes, but immediately distinct from everyone listening to the same ten conventionally-attractive pop artists.
- Comment on Gonna be here a while 3 weeks ago:
This is probably generated.
- Comment on Gehheie88f3nj3-i-odk3j4y8-fff-jej 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Gehheie88f3nj3-i-odk3j4y8-fff-jej 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Gehheie88f3nj3-i-odk3j4y8-fff-jej 3 weeks ago:
P4X-639.
- Comment on A matter of patience 3 weeks ago:
We’re trying, okay? It’s not our fault they have all their preferences set to DNI.
- Comment on Anon is an astronaut 4 weeks ago:
Different premise, similar outcome, it’s fairly close to The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. Aliens invade medieval England and get shanked, ultimately leading to the British empire spanning the galaxy.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Stolen valor tweet.
- Comment on Sullen Winter Stop 4 weeks ago:
It’s always fascinating how these models can merge complex concepts in specific and congruent ways, and then reliably misalign the roof and seats in public transit.
- Comment on Annon was an oracle 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on Anon wants to be fit 4 weeks ago:
pictures for sad children.
- Comment on F.B.I. Inquiry Into ICE Shooting Is Examining Victim’s Possible Ties to Activist Groups 5 weeks ago:
She could somehow be the queen of Antifa, and if you’re only learning that now, it cannot be why you shot her in the face.
- Comment on >Shit just works >Never works 5 weeks ago:
“Subscribed” works, but “Local” and “All” are thoroughly fucked. Even oldsh.itjust.works shows “unable to retrieve site” as soon as you show up.
- Comment on >Shit just works >Never works 5 weeks ago:
The second page has not worked for like a month.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
When everyone tells you this turd is not a crabcake, you are not obligated to take a bite for yourself.
- Comment on Alchemy is so hot right now. 5 weeks ago:
Singularity Sky is not the torment nexus I expected.
- Comment on Alchemy is so hot right now. 5 weeks ago:
Can we not spam neutrons at hydrogen?
There’s a lot of hydrogen.
- Comment on I dunno 1 month ago:
There’s no sense in which it does refer to the result you mean.
“a X b is written ab.” Modern Algebra: Structure And Method, page 36.
Go ahead and try it out and let me know how you go.
