Gyokuyoutama

"The United States" is generally too unwieldy to use in most contexts, especially when using a possessive like in "the United States' actions" - it just sounds gross. Think about the logical implications of replacing "America" with "(The) United States" and you'll see why nobody does it.
 
"The United States the Beautiful"
"United States citizen"
"Death to the United States!"
"The United States Revolution"
The Luftwaffe's hypothetical "Vereinigtestaatenbomber"
"United States' economy"
 
Every other country on the American continent has an unambiguous name it's referred to other than America so it's completely logical to use "America" to refer to the US because the US has no other way of referring to it outside of its disgusting word salad name. It's either "the United States" or "America" - we don't have the luxury of an easy and good-looking name like "Mexico" or "Columbia" or "Canada".

Fahrenheit: 0 = really cold, but commonly experienced, temperature.  100 = really hot, but commonly experienced, temperature.
 
Celsius: 0 = kind of cold but it gets colder than this in most places. 100 = お前はもう死んでいる (i.e. you ded.)
 
And yet Celsius apologists will defend their system on the basis of finding it easier to remember the temperature that water boils at, as if you wouldn't be able to tell if water was boiling without putting a thermometer in it.

Fahrenheit: 0 = really cold, but commonly experienced, temperature.  100 = really hot, but commonly experienced, temperature.
 
Celsius: 0 = kind of cold but it gets colder than this in most places. 100 = お前はもう死んでいる (i.e. you ded.)
 
And yet Celsius apologists will defend their system on the basis of finding it easier to remember the temperature that water boils at, as if you wouldn't be able to tell if water was boiling without putting a thermometer in it.

Fahrenheit: 0 = really cold, but commonly experienced, temperature.  100 = really hot, but commonly experienced, temperature.
 
Celsius: 0 = kind of cold but it gets colder than this in most places. 100 = お前はもう死んでいる (i.e. you ded.)
 
And yet Celsius apologists will defend their system on the basis of finding it easier to remember the temperature that water boils at, as if you wouldn't be able to tell if water was boiling without putting a thermometer in it.

Why did you ever leave

As long as we're doing blasts from the past.
 
 

This popped up in my recommendations and I was forcefully sent back in time to middle school.
 
 

Relatedly if you said our elites were pedophiles going to a secret island to fuck kids in like 2010 you'd be laughed out of the room and branded as an insane conspiracy theorist while after Epstein and all the media coverage everyone just kinda laughed and said "Yeah, those wacky elites!"

I know I should really be used to the pliability of people, but it always catches me off guard.
 
"Did you hear? An aircraft whistleblower said that the government has alien spacecraft are real! So we finally have proof that we are being visited by extraterrestrials?"
 
"What do you mean 'finally'? People have been saying this sort of stuff for a century now.  Even if you just want an aircraft whistleblower, Bob Lazar was saying this stuff in the 90's."
 
"Yeah, but that was all a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense. This new leak is real proof!"
 
"Why?"
 
"Because it was on the news!"
 
I swear, by 2030 they're going to say that Bigfoot is real and within a month the whole country is going to act like they never once doubted that there was a large hominid in the woods.
 
Personally I find the UFO evidence intriguing, though I follow Keel and Vallee in having extreme skepticism about whether actual aliens play any role.  But I find these recent "disclosures" to be fake as hell.  The quality of evidence is far below even some of the shoddy cases of the past.  But there is an obvious attempt to make it seem like this is unprecedented.  Regardless of whether aliens are actually visiting here or not, the new "disclosures" are a pretty obvious psy-op.

>going through old files
 
>remember this track exists
 
 

It's weird because it goes both ways.  TV definitely got more diverse as time went on.  In the 60's there were maybe 4 networks to watch, and since you wouldn't have a VCR if you wanted to see something you had to watch it at the same time as everyone else.  So if there was some big event the night before you could be pretty certain that a lot of people at work were watching at the same time as you.  But the VCR allowed "timeshifting," meaning that you might watch something later (and of course the VHS and later disc market greatly opened that up.)  At the same time cable and satellite expanded what was available to watch, requiring guides just for proper scheduling.  And the advent of streaming made things even more open.
 
But somehow we seem to have looped around to unity, at least in the mainstream.  How many times have you suddenly had people ask you if you just watched the new show that dropped on streaming (be that Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Velma, etc.)?  Often it's not even very good, and there's certainly no pressure to watch it immediately, yet millions of people do just that.
 
As for radio, it was actually pretty diverse in terms of the stations through the mid 90's.  Cable TV networks could pretty easily hit all the sets across America, but a radio station was necessarily bound by the range of its signal.  (Of course there were over the air TV stations, and in fact there still are, but they became less popular and were often saddled to a cable channel anyway.)  Now certainly you can buy up multiple stations in different markets and force them to all have the same programming, but this largely didn't happen through the 80's and early 90's.  This was due to restrictions against Radio monopolies which ended in 1996, and even by 1997 Clear Channel Communications had obtained almost every FM station in the country.  If you don't know who they are, it's because they go by iHeartRadio now; I guarantee you've heard that if you've turned on a radio in the last decade.  Payola (i.e. paying stations to play songs to put albums up the charts) had always been a thing, but with one company control over almost the airwaves it became trivial.  And the independent holdouts often did top 40 plays (which would be dominated by Clear Channel's choices) or took requests (which would be dominated by the Top 40, since that's all most people heard) meaning that past the mid 90's "popular radio" became far more unified than before.
 
Incidentally, this is probably why the music you here in stores is often 80% music up to the mid 90's, with most of the rest being recent and very occasionally a hit from 1997-2020.  Big hits before 1997 had a higher chance of being organically popular (not that there weren't propped up bands before that).  The charts after 1997 were largely decided by corporate decree.  So in that sense we have more unity on the airwaves too.
 
I don't know comics as well, but they got unified at about the same time.  Diamond Distribution gained a monopoly on comics distribution in 1997, and since that point has sold basically to specialty stores only.  In the early 90's it would be possible to get a weird "Scary Zombie Stories" comic or something in the supermarket, now comics are 90% capeshit that you must buy at a place with gross nerds.  This probably contributed to the manga explosion in the late 90's, early 00's (which continues to this day); if you wanted a comic and you only went to a bookstore, not a nerd store, you'd mainly see manga.
 
Similarly the unification of Hollywood should be obvious at a glance.  The "mid level" movie has basically vanished; everything is blockbuster spectaculars and weird no budget indie movies now.  Gone are the days when you might go to a movie made by some random studio that showed up in theaters for a couple of weeks.  Similar story for books, though the sea change event for them is the Thor Power Tools decision from 1979 (though there were a lot of mergers of big publishers starting around the turn of the millennium.)
 
So in theory everyone should be lockstep even now, culturally.  And with boomers you do kind of see this.  But the issue is that kids often don't follow the trends, or only do so halfheartedly.  And once you get outside the mainstream there is a huge amount available to you.  In the 60's a kid might rebel from his dad's old fashioned music and listen to some rock on the radio.  And unlike today he might find a radio with a legitimately independent DJ who was able to find some underground picks.  But this would be the same DJ that all the other rebels in his area would listen to, enforcing some conformity.  The situation with TV and movies would be even worse, since you would have to watch them at specific times with very little options.  The only thing that you really had wide access to was books (perhaps this is why nerds of that era were so well read, while modern nerds hardly read anything?) 
 
But I don't know how long this will last.  Most kids are firmly on the "normie-web."  They might not be aware that an internet exists beyond youtube, twitter, tiktok, discord, whatever the fad site of the week is, etc.  And as many of these centralized sits try to exert more and more control over their userbases, they might fall back into the situation of being able to "rebel" in only one approved way.  Now you might say that kids are more tech savvy and can get around these measures, but I don't know.  Tech savvy kids might have been an accident of being exposed to complicated UI from an early age, which was only true for people who grew up before 2010 or so.  You don't need to learn much to use a modern smartphone.

Decided to watch some cartoons. Man, how far these channels have fallen.
 
There are like 10 cartoon channels, 6 of them are for babies/toddlers. Disney is either live action sitcons or Loud House. Nickelodeon is either Spongebob, Patrick, Spongebob Babies or live action sitcom.
 
Cartoon Network is a shadow of its former self, I looked at the channel schedule and it was 3 hours of Teen Titans GO, followed by Bare Bears Babies, Total Drama Babies, Gumball and some shitty obligatory by law brazillian cartoons, followed by another 3 hours of Teen Titans Go. ITS ALL THEY SHOW, THE ENTIRE SCHEDULE WAS 70% TEEN TITANS GO. THIS SERIES HAS 400 EPISODES WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK
 
Dreamworks has an entire channel to "low quality shows of our animated movies".
 
The only channel worth watching is Tooncast because it only runs old cartoons (early 2000s ones), shame that the Boomerang channel that used to show really old cartoons changed into live action sitcoms then was nuked.
 
Its times like these that I really miss the old schedule, weird cartoons played early in the morning (I remember some show about Tripplets and a witch), at the start of the afternoon they started with shows like Shaolin Showdown, Toonami started at 17:00 with Pokemon, followed by Dragon Ball, Inuyasha and Zatch Bell. Followed by Cartoon Cartoons from 19:00 to 22:00, having a mix of Dexter, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel, Johnny Bravo, Megas XLR, Time Squad, Samurai Jack, Powerpuff Girls, Ed, Edd n Eddy, and several others. Then after that, it was Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck Show for one hour, ending with the Tex Avery Show.
Adult Swim wasn't from my time, but I remember stuff like Evangelion and other animes playing after midnight.
 
Was the Locomotion channel available in other countries? I remember it was mostly adult anime, I still remember stuff like Agent Aika, Burn Up Excess and Saber Marionette from there.

If I had to guess, I would say it was because the 80's was the last decade of truly "unified" culture where big organizations controlled most of the mass media. Which I recognize sounds conspiratorial, but it's actually not! "Cultural decades" as a thing are only possible in industrialized nations where technology is advanced enough to allow rapid and national change - but not advanced enough to allow self-segregation. Which is to say, the "idea" of having cultural decades is something that is now past us.
 
Before the 19th century there wasn't much of a "national" culture anywhere in the world. For example, Occitan was the everyday language of most people in Southern France, and Occitan is only somewhat intelligible with what we think of as "the" French language, so you couldn't really have a unified national culture - let alone national cultural shifts. And even if you could, introducing a new style of clothing, music, etc. simply couldn't happen that quickly in the pre-industrial age. In a way the United States was the perfect country for national cultures to emerge, as it came into being right before communications technology was advanced enough to facilitate national cultures, in addition to lacking any historical cultural baggage. Even still, regionalism was prominent throughout the 19th century and I would argue you didn't really get cultural decades until the 1920s with the proliferation of radio.
 
From the 20's onward the media landscape was comprised of a few large media companies (radio, then television) that produced nationwide content, those being the Big Three networks of NBC, CBS and ABC. This worked until about the 1990s, when the internet became popular enough to create distinct subcultures throughout the United States that could no longer be confined to specific regions. At first it was just nerds and freaks who abounded on the internet, so mass culture was still humming along, but once the smartphone became mainstream normies flooded the internet and started self-segregating as well.
 
One of the plainest examples is in news - in the "national culture" age, almost everyone trusted large news corporations or at the very least trusted the broadcasters themselves, like Walter Cronkite. You can debate whether or not media was more trustworthy back then but the fact is most people trusted it simply because that was what was there. Now, in 2023, the average person has to actively go out of their way to find news they disagree with. Ditto with popular culture - if you got home after work in 1965 and didn't want to go out you would have to watch whatever was on, which wasn't much. And music? You'd have a lot less choice back then than today as well. So of course most people would share memories of specific eras, which makes it easier to conceptualize and communicate the idea of a cultural decade.
 
Basically, The Breakfast Club couldn't happen in 2023, because all of the kids would be on their phones in their own niche communities, listening to their own micro-influencers that nobody else cares about. So in the future, when people think back to 2008 or 2010 or 2015 or 2023, it will be hard to see the difference because any cultural changes would be perceived within these isolated communities, and not the nation as a whole. Ironically enough, the only thing that affected just about every community equally - the pandemic - also drove people further into online bubbles.
 
On the "bright" side, maybe big tech will eventually become so consolidated we'll all be force-fed the same media soon.

As far as genres this is pretty much what I think, but you're missing ska (Reel Big Fish, Mighty Mighty Bosstones), big-beat techno (Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim; I mean it's your avatar!)
 
It was also a decade of "genres" which really meant specific bands that weren't that related.  For example "alternative rock" usually boiled down to Blues Traveler, Bare Naked Ladies, Faith No More or Red Hot Chili Peppers, while "grunge" meant Nirvana, Collective Soul, Soundgarden or Alice in Chains.  There's really not much connecting any of those bands, but record stores insisted on having subgenres to put them in (rather than just "rock") so that got lumped together.
 
At the end of the decade "nu metal" got big, which was largely another fake genre (especially when people would try to mix Rammstein in with that.)  I'm not denying that Linkin Park was huge, but that doesn't mean that we needed a genre just for vaguely similar bands.  But in any case that was definitely an end of the 90's thing, and feels more like how hair metal persisted throughout the beginning of the 90's but isn't really "90's music" and disco persisted through the beginning of the 80's but isn't really "80's music."
 
EDIT: I guess I overlooked Thrash metal, but I'm talking about stuff that was legitimately mainstream.  The only thrash metal band that really had any mainstream success was Metallica, and they suck, so who cares.

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blink 182, The Offspring, and trance music (although that blends into early 2000s). So basically a 90s flavor of pop-punk with Gen X angst (as opposed to 2000s pop punk which is millennial, post 9/11 angst).

Something I've been reminded of after working for 9 months is the things people just do without realizing it. I'm referring to myself in the sense of - when walking, I generally try to make as quiet of footsteps as possible. I've accidentally scared coworkers and to compensate I do loud stomps whenever I enter the lab or approach their office.
 
Another thing is that when walking, I generally have my vision angle pointing slightly downward, which I'm guessing is a habit I picked up as a kid when looking for coins or wanting to step in between the lines of tiles. I haven't really run into anyone (at work at least), but it explains why my shoes are cleaner than others since I try and avoid more spills or grossness I suppose.

This is pretty half-assed. Mainly done to convince myself that I can actually still parse Japanese sentences despite slacking off and to remind myself how to use the image software.
 

 
https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/108169378

This is pretty half-assed. Mainly done to convince myself that I can actually still parse Japanese sentences despite slacking off and to remind myself how to use the image software.
 

 
https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/108169378

One thing that's fun about digging into old games from about 1991-1996 is that they tend to have all assets uncompressed and unencrypted.  For example, with Myst you can look at the CD and load any animation into quicktime.  This is probably the easiest way to confirm the "Rush Limbaugh Understands" message (which is said in backwards speech): simply load the relevant file and select "loop forwards and backwards mode."
 
The Journeyman Project Turbo is even more extreme.  All animations are accessible in standard quicktime format, but that also includes all location backgrounds.  Locations are actually stored as frames in videos that go to each position in each area and look at everything from all four angles.  Another interesting animation is the biochip menu.  In the game you may notice that the chips are all dark with no letters on them until the menu is fully opened.  This is because the opening and closing is saved as a set animation, and they didn't want to have all possible combinations of chips show up (only the number of chips.) After the menu fully opens they draw bmp images over the dark chips.  The animation also confirms that you cannot fully fill your biochip menu; even if you get every chip in the game there will still be a blank spot at the end.
 
All sounds, including all music, are simply stored in WAV files.  All death screens and inventory elements are stored as bmp files.  So outside of the text and the game logic, you can easily access pretty much everything.
 
I kind of miss games doing this.  There's sort of a purity to simply allowing the user to see the component files.  And it often does raise interesting insights in terms of how the game was actually put together.  It also puts the sort of "cutting room floor" search for dummied out files within reach of the average user.
 
But I especially miss music being in the clear, since it's a very handy way to add soundtrack music to playlists.  I think developers were aware of this, because soundtracks in WAV, MP3 or OGG formats were pretty common until 2007 or so, but then they started hiding them in order to sell separate soundtrack DLC.  This also made soundtrack swapping in games more annoying.  (My WOG version of Heroes 3 has every single music file replaced, just because I can.)

Ho-lee shit. What a labor of love. They even got the original voiceactors.

Speaking of shitty parts lasting forever, I had my laptop just brick recently. That's basically fine, since I bought it for cheap off of ebay for shits and giggles. In fact I ordered another cheap office surplus laptop to replace it, so no harm really.
 
The thing is, I was trying to think if I had something that I could use in the interim to watch videos in bed or whatever, so I dug up my old surface RT tablet my brother gave to me ages ago. I knew it was a longshot, but oh man was windows 8.1RT the fucking worst thing ever. Honestly it's really a warning (threat?) of what Microsoft wanted to do before everyone so violently rejected Windows 8 as a whole that they had to put off their plans to make everything the worst and boil the frog rather than flash-fry it.
 
First of all, it didn't work at all when I retrieved it from the closet because the surface RT tablets did automatic back ups that could not be cleaned by the hard drive cleanup tool, and it literally filled up the entire storage available to the computer to the point where it didn't even have a page file. With 2gb of ram, that meant that apparently the tablet couldn't even restart consistently, because when I tried to do the factory reset from within the OS it would literally just fail and say "for some reason the tablet can't reboot!"
 
I found out a way to factory reset it using a recovery disk (that DEMANDED you put in the Surface's serial code before you got the files for the tablet, thanks microsoft I'm sure people really wanted to pirate or reverse engineer this trash fire of an OS) and eventually I was able to get the tablet in semi-working order. The issue was... The frontend "app store" for it no longer seems to load at all, so you can't get any new programs (or even updates) because windows 8.1rt can't even run .exe files. It's a weird walled garden OS thing that looks like windows and has a desktop like windows with microsoft office but can't actually run anything that's not from the windows store (which doesn't load up anymore).
 
But that's not really an issue, I just wanted to watch youtube on it mainly until a real device got in. Except because it's cut off from updates and also just getting a new browser off the internet, the thing only has Internet Explorer 10, which is deprecated and several websites (like youtube) just straight up say "lol no, get a real browser" and slam the door in your face. I even had found some adblocking lists for IE10 so I had something resembling one, even if they were likely well out of date.
 
Basically, at every turn the device failed to do anything. And that makes sense for nowadays since it's like ten years old, but the thing is, it barely did anything at launch. The only issue that I talked about above that wasn't a thing at launch was the internet explorer being deprecated part.
 
I want to put up a shrine to this piece of junk. It really feels like an embodiment of everything "tech" companies want to do. It's an underspecced, form-over-function device with a hamstringed OS with no future-proofing built in and no way for a user to fix the problems with it themselves. The best I can say is that the screen is nice and displays color well (but it's an ugly ~720p resolution instead of glorious 1080p).

I fell into a hhgregg YTPMV hole and found this.
 
 

Nobody's ever really gone.

Just two dudes in a cave:

 
I tried out a new paint-y, lineless style here, and I think it looks pretty good! I felt that drawing without clear lines forced me to understand light and shadow better to convey the shapes of things, so I think I learned a good bit, but it's something I still struggle with so I also got a lotta ways to go.
 
Bonus worldbuilding no one probably cares about:
 

The little dragon breathing fire over the silhouette really must have thrown everyone off the trail for a while. That's hilarious