People say "well don't use an adblocker, sites need to run ads to exist", and it's not just a thing of not wanting to see any ads, it's just that the ways they are served are horrifically ugly a lot of the time. Many, many websites seen without an adblocker are just a gibbering mess.
Ads in old physical media were omnipresent but not so unrelentingly awful. You could read a magazine with ads in and it wouldn't be jarringly ugly, you could flip past ads, you could live with it.
to keep the sheep flowing here's an ancient pic with someone I don't think anyone here has seen before - Ginger, the mum of Jerry and Spotty Ears, poking me with a hoof for more attention.
It's the tiny things, like watching (streaming) telly and the bloody adverts always have a higher volume than whatever you're actually watching. Just making the experience a bit less pleasant so that somebody, somewhere has a bit more money.
Enshittification. I've moaned about it before but Doctorow's word describes it perfectly, the way that capitalism inevitably pushes things further and further in a smeg direction so that maximal money can be extracted.
Dear all websites throwing up cookie requests. It.s ACCEPT or REJECT. Not ACCEPT or <some other deliberately more complicated option so that people will just click ACCEPT>.
I hate all the dark-pattern underhandedness that is just the norm these days. Can't people just be honest? No, because money.
I like to use notepad++ as a second memory, particularly now I am getting to be old and shit. I have a bunch of tabs open on there, with stuff like notes about the current bit of code, Welsh vocab that I add to as I do my lessons, notes on how to use the sequencer I designed a while ago but have done a zillion things since so when I do come back to actually using it to make some music I'll need those notes, sort of thing. Random shit I need from time to time.
does anyone remember Morrisons' vapour sneezeguards? Appeared all of a sudden some years ago and made the veg section look all sci-fi with constant flowing vapour. Disappeared completely a month or so later.
Hardware progress in the early days was just bonkers. You just expected giant strides all the time because that's what routinely happened. Just brain-smashing chunks of increase in capability inevitably, endlessly, for years. One year you're on a ZX80. A blip of time and it's a C64. A couple of Christmases and it's an Amiga and the distance back to that ZX80 seems like a gulf even though you're not even that much older.
Another cool thing that happily coincides with my getting the E Ink tablet - just recently I went to cancel my decades long sub to New Scientist, largely because I tend to read on tabs/pads now and a physical copy seemed wasteful. Checking how much a digital sub was, it was still £230 a year odd.
Then I came across a digital magazine subscription app that had NS and was only £10/mo, a lot cheaper.
Someone posted a not-very-blurred image with a list of pornhub categories on it, you can still easily read the top of the list. Amused to see that one of the categories is "British".
What even is British porn? Cup of tea on the table next to the rutting-pit? Creative ingestion of battered haddock? Cage-locked biscuit barrel? Thatcher fetish?
Giles told me we were low on wine so when the wine dude rang I ordered more wine. WHILE I was in the process of ordering Giles looked upstairs and found that actually no we had PLENTY of wine.
It seems to me that lamborghinis, particularly that squashed looking one that people seem to get when they've had a load of money for no good reason, are pretty much the signature car of the smeghead.
Those computer shows were important to us, not so much as opportunities to sell stuff (although we did sell games while we were there), but more as social events - in those pre-internet days they were an opportunity to hang out with the people who actually played the games, chat with them, just to be accessible, that was important to me. Good times.
It was lovely at Zzap! Live to meet again people who were there, and who still remember fondly what we did back then.
I absolutely loved what Digital Eclipse did with the Atari 50 archive, so to have them give the same treatment to me, to Llamasoft, has been absolutely incredible. I've had a bunch of archive stuff knocking around for years and had thought one day it'd be cool to maybe make a website or something with some of that stuff on, but to have it presented like this, with so much playable stuff and so beautifully put together is more than I could have ever hoped for.
I hope I'm not heading for some kind of low-key burnout.
Not from work pressure, that's all fine and going well. Just from the erosion of things I used to take for granted, that has left me in a position where I seldom get a significant break from being in this place, this room, this chair, for years at a stretch.
That, and the incessant rain, and staring down the barrel of a finite, enumerable number of years left in my life, is getting to me somewhat.
Oh for fuck's sake. My heart sinks when someone posts a link to an article, you go to read it and after a few lines the text starts to fade out. You just know a "sign up to read the rest of this article" thing is going to scroll into view.
