rwhitisissle

rwhitisissle, 14 days ago

There’s a lot of “older” rappers that aren’t really with the times and you’ll see them releasing music that is explicitly complaining about “cancel culture,” even though they’re not victims of it and are still very successful. I used to be a pretty big Run the Jewels/Killer Mike fan, but the track “Talk’n That Shit!” from his 2023 album, Michael, is just generically mean and kinda hateful, with lyrics like

***** talk to me about that woke-ass shit (yeah)

Same ***** walkin’ on some broke-ass shit

You see, your words ain’t worth no money, I ain’t spoke back, bitch

All of you ***** hang together on some Brokeback shit

I’ll let you fill in the blanks or look up the lyrics yourself, because I’m not looking to catch a ban from posting rap lyrics, but needless to say it’s just “fuck you woke people, you’re all gay.” Like, there’s very little artistic merit to a song like that.

Dude used to write music that punched up, but then he went on NRA TV and talked about how he would kick his kids out of the house if they ever protested in favor of gun control legislation (he’s a huge 2nd Amendment advocate) and now he’s suddenly “anti-woke” because a bunch of people on Twitter told him he was out of touch and closed-minded and that if he really wanted to deliver this particular message, he probably could have selected a platform less comically heinous than one almost exclusively watched by alt-right lunatics. So he decided to prove them wrong by being even more out of touch and closed-minded.

rwhitisissle, 14 days ago

He’s telling them they better “cut the malarkey” or else he’ll say something else that makes him sound comically old.

rwhitisissle, 17 days ago

I would imagine IP bans would be useful. Although the issue with this is that you run into the problem other websites are having: people who are valid users that are on VPNs get caught in the filter of IP bans because botnets also use the same VPNs.

rwhitisissle, 21 days ago

Morgan Spurlock was not a great person (history of sexual misconduct) and his documentaries are deeply flawed, but Super Size Me is how I first learned about the federal corn subsidy, which contributed to the process by which fast food gradually became a calorie drenched bizzarro version of itself. So that’s something.

rwhitisissle, 27 days ago

From a historical or intellectual archaeological perspective, no one in 2000 BC Babylon thought their pottery would be of historical significance, but 4000 years later, it is. These websites, particularly ones independently created and maintained by hobbyists, are snapshots of the ideas of the time and people that created them. These websites may not have been intensely popular, but they were in many ways a foundational part of the inchoate tapestry of the internet that would eventually become the “modern web.”

rwhitisissle, 26 days ago

Dead Internet Theory is one of the few “conspiracy” theories I sort of buy, in the sense that it’s probably not descriptive of the nature of the current internet, but rather predictive of what it’s becoming: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

And also with less of the whole “they’re doing this to manipulate people into believing…things” and more “people want quick and superficial information so that’s all that’s being produced and since it’s easier for machines to produce it than humans, humans will automatically get outcompeted and eventually that’s all the internet will be.” The internet is becoming a dead mall, filled with the corpses of long abandoned Hot Topics.

rwhitisissle, 26 days ago

This is true. Right now the OG internet is sort of kept alive by oral history, but we have the technology to save these websites in perpetuity as historical artifacts. That might be a good coding project - a robust archiving system that lets you point a URL at a webpage and scrape everything under its domain and keep a static collection of its contents. The issue, though, is that this doesn’t actually truly “capture” many web pages. A lot of the backend data that might have been served dynamically from a database isn’t retrievable, so the experience of using the page itself is potentially non-archivable.

rwhitisissle, 28 days ago

Deadlock sounds like the name of a no-budget indie horror game that would release on Steam for a dollar. Not a big budget Apexwatch or Overlegends or…whatever you call this style of game.

rwhitisissle, 27 days ago

Wikipedia says that Overwatch and Apex Legends are each part of the “Hero Shooter” genre (boy does that sound like an uninteresting genre). I’m guessing there are greater subdivisions of play structure that matches what you’re describing, but it all sounds like an uninteresting blend of character based FPS, like multiplayer Borderlands. I guess that’s where modern gaming is, though, since these really took off after 2016, which is solidly after my “hardcore gaming” days were mostly over.

rwhitisissle, 28 days ago

Maven is a yiddish word for understanding, or something similar. There’s a few things that have been named after it, but as it’s in the tech space for this social non-network, it definitely has the potential to be confusing.