Gyokuyoutama

It really is a far cry from the days of being taught in school "be careful what you post online - it's there forever!".
 
There's many solo amateur websites over the years I've seen that just don't exist anymore, and their pages were not put on the web archive. There's also so many youtube videos I adored lost to channels being deleted or intentional privating. I should really youtube-dl more than I do.

This LinkedIn spambot is crazy because it seems like it got the short end of the stick: https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/sarmad-mayo-444258171?trk=public_profile_see-all-articles
 
Here's my favorite.
 
"Come and see what all the fuss is about with my beautiful feet..." Knocked that out of the park, LLM buddy!

Yep, I'd believe that these designs are from 2014:
 
 

The only people I see using untranslated "what the fuck" are teens that spend too much time on the internet.
 
We already have like 3 expressions that mean the same thing: "Mas que merda" (What the shit), "Mas que porra" (What the fuck), "Mas que droga" (What the damn).
"Porra" actually means cum, but expresses the same sentiment on that line. "Foda" would be our fuck word, "Foda-se" being basically our "Fuck you".
"Droga" means drug, but also shares the same sentiment as damn.
 
My personal favorite is "Vai para a puta que te pariu", which basically means "Go back to the whore that birth you".

This is the only Disney Movie I own.  Because it's Don Bluth's first animation credit, see, and I have stuff from throughout his career.  Definitely not for any other reason.
 
I guess on that topic if you want to watch actual Don Bluth movies, the ones that hold up the best are Secret of NIMH, The Land Before Time and Anastasia.  An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven are enjoyable but definitely a step down.  Titan AE would be top tier if all the dialogue wasn't generic Joss Whedonisms.
 
But the real thing I wanted to talk about was this scene from Fargo:
 
 
 
Most of the "Minnesotan accents" in this movie are somewhat based in reality, but taken to an absurd level.  Kind of like saying "I've got a real Southern accent" and then sounding like Foghorn Leghorn.  But the guy this cop talks to is 100% legit.  There were many people in my grandfather's generation who talked and acted exactly like that, and you still run into people like that in rural areas.
 
To get things out of the way, yeah, they are wearing way too much for what is obviously a mild winter day.  But you can't control the weather when shooting a movie.  This was done by a second unit in a warm spell, and the rest of the movie was supposed to be very cold, so they made do.
 
What makes this great? First of all the accent is dead on.  Kinda singsong-y but not absurdly so.  The "th" sound reliably changed into "d."  Perhaps the only natural "ja" in the whole movie.  And listen to how he says "Moose."
 
In terms of phrasing we have the "so I says", "so he says" way of quickly talking about a previous conversation.  About half of my Grandpa's anecdotes went that way.  There's an improper use of verb conjugation vs. the subject (ex. "so I says" instead of "so I say",  "that don't sound..." instead of "that doesn't sound...", "he don't use" instead of "he doesn't use") I don't know the exact rule for how this works, since it's not like rural Minnesotans don't conjugate things incorrectly every time, but those specific examples are common.
 
Lack of profanity even though Steve Buscemi's character obviously swore.  Profanity is pretty common now in Minnesota, but in that generation people did avoid it.  Note too the way that he treats the situation.  It's not like he's offended or is bewildered by the thought of profanity.  If anything he's kind of acting like it's funny that anyone would talk like that.
 
"So I called it in" long pause "end of story."  One thing that this hints at is the long pauses common to Minnesotan conversation.  In "How to Talk Minnesotan" Howard Mohr suggests that most Minnesotan phone conversations consist of as much silence as speech, and even today I would believe it.  Now for such an incidental conversation in the movie they couldn't stretch this scene into five minutes, but I do like this hint at the end.
 
"He says... the last guy who thought he's a jerk is dead now... what do you think about that? I says, well that don't sound like too good of deal for him then."  The end of this phrase is perhaps the most Minnesotan response ever.  To begin with it's understated and mildly passive aggressive.  It's a negation rather than affirming something directly.  A true Minnesotan will never say "that sounds good" when he can instead say "that doesn't sound too bad."  He talks about it in terms of "deals."  This too is a common Minnesota phrasing, with phrases like "no big deal", "not too bad of a deal", "heck of a deal" all being common.
 
The sudden shift from talking about police business to the weather with no hesitation might seem like a movie contrivance, but no that's also accurate.  This is known as the "Minnesotan Non-Sequitur" and it happens when a conversation suddenly changes topic (often to something about the weather, food or cars.)  Having a non-sequitur right before the end of the conversation is common when the people involved are not related or close friends.  (If they were, the conversation would have had 15 minutes of small talk before it could end.)  Note too how they don't say goodbye.  They just make an observation and mutually decide to walk away from each other.  This too, is accurate.

As the kids say, this is a mood:
 
 

As the kids say, this is a mood:
 
 

On his way to get his salad for the day
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJQ4vCu-S0U
 
Youtube forbids embedding of this video.  They don't want you to know!

This is such concentrated 00's energy that it reads as a modern parody of the decade, but no, it's actually from 2008:
 
 
As a side note, if you want proof of how much culture has stalled out about half of the comments are from this year from people saying "this video is so ahead of its time!!!"

McDonnell Douglas's website pre-Boeing merger is so 90's I could cry.
 
https://web.archive.org/web/19970706184231/http://www.mdc.com/
 
 
 

Pompeii graffiti vibes:
https://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acspc/acspc_rpc12.htm
 
From another question:

I think that the animated Disney movies that still hold up today are:
- Robin Hood
- Aladdin
- Goofy Movie
- Mulan, for the most part
- Emperor's New Groove
- Atlantis
- Lilo & Stitch
- Incredibles
- WALL-E
- Toy Story 2
 
I did enjoy others like Toy Story 1, Brother Bear, Treasure Planet, Monsters Inc., but these are not something I would sit to rewatch.
 
The Nightmare Before Christmas and Book of Life are also good, but these aren't Disney (yet)

Just had a feature length movie one.
 
Immigrant family of mother and son* move to a new country with nothing and fall on hard times, inciting incident is eventually having to commit murder just to survive (doesn't really show it but implied it was a corrupt landlord). Somehow, though this kinda shows dream logic jumps, the two eventually join the military to change their fortunes, though there's several issue where their documents aren't clean and they are guilty of a murder, though the case is obviously cold by now. They have moments of tension where they have to mess with records before being sent to their commanding officers, keep their lies straight, etc. While life abroad in the military isn't great, they obviously like it more than abject poverty, and near the end of their tour of duty abroad there's a moment where someone asks the younger boy if they'd have a smoke and gamble with them after all is said and done and they're back in the country. I remember the scene gets really intense as the line comes up.
 
And that was the exact moment that the movie cut for me, right before the boy gave an answer, and I remember seeing threads being made complaining "SO WAS THAT THE FUCKING DEVIL TEMPTING HIM OR SOMETHING WHAT" and there was this whole wild raging debate about whether the end was artistic genius or a complete anticlimax, and/or some kind of weird religious grandstanding by the director. I remember thinking the power went out in my house for a moment.
 
*I think in hindsight it makes more sense if they're sister and brother, considering how their ages would have to be similar to join the military, but I remember they were originally mother and son. Just another dream gap I guess.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=X3sQHWRgwfw

One of my favorite things to think about with stuff like gambling (unboxing crates or IRL) is that both players and the corporations will only share the big wins, thus making it seem like people win often.
 
But like, unusuals in TF2 are 1 in 150 (wiki said 1/100 for many many years). Strange knifes in CS:GO are 1 in 1500. CS2 and TF2 don't even announce to people what you unbox unless you're in a server doing the unboxxing (though valve did take the "advertise big wins" with the golden frying pan).
 
I kinda wish it was a rule for forums and stuff to say how many attempts it took to get their epic heirlooms or australium drop to help dissuade people from wasting money. But as is, people will unbox an unusual and go OMG MY FIRST UNUSUAL and post a phone picture of their screen. Which is fine, it's exciting being lucky! But many times people will reveal "yeah I'd unbox once per paycheck".

I am playing on my own map, all I changed was increasing stamina, exp and health regen on Palbox.
 
I'm ok with the hunger mechanic and the feed bag, I just feel it drains a bit too fast on attacks. Just a few attacks from my Bushi shouldn't drain half of their hunger meter, and he doesn't has any bad traits to make it so.
Meanwhile, Pals that attack passively like my Dazzi don't drain hunger.
 
The thing about repairing weapons is more because I had uncommon ones that require ancient parts (also because getting ore is a bitch since you can't automate that). After using my crossbow for a while, I try to repair it when it reaches 50% durability, and that alone costs 2 ancient parts.
Also, I am probably handcapping myself because I have no idea if the Fire/Poison variations of the bow and crossbow do more flat damage, since I had that uncommon. Why do you even have to research a new crossbow to fire the same arrow but on fire anyway?
 
It took me a while to learn that shields meant "equipable recharging FPS shields" and not "placeable shield domes"

This site has done more for my understanding of past culture than any history book:
 
https://www.myretrotvs.com/

This site has done more for my understanding of past culture than any history book:
 
https://www.myretrotvs.com/

Gentleman, behold: I have discovered a new source of licensable music!
 
 

I swear to god people need to start tapping into fucking ANTS already. There are so many fucking different species of ants and they're all wildly diverse and unique. There is so much you could do.
Deterministic ant roguelike with upgrades and trees based on the abilities of real ant species. Ant strategy game or RTS with various unique factions of ants and caste unit classes. Ant RPG with a myriad of different ant species. Utilize their different strengths to build your party. Simultaneous mass-co-op ant puzzle platformer. Cooperate as ants to reach your goal using your combined might. They write themselves.

Sometimes I think I'm just getting overly cynical as I get older and that the internet wasn't any better than it is now.
 
Then I go on Gopher and find some guy's personal webpage and I legitimately feel happy just browsing through it.  Can't chalk it down to nostalgia either, since my first experiences with the internet were on the world wide web.  I can get a similar experience browsing sites off of Curlie or Wiby.
 
I think there's a few reasons for the distinction:
 
1.) Personalization - In most modern sites, like Twitter or Reddit or Youtube, 90% of the design is already done for you.  Beyond that, there is a strong centralized culture pushing you to post certain things in a certain way.  The chase after "the algorithm."  As a result even when people are being passionate, they all end up sounding pretty similar.  On an actual personal website way off the mainstream you can literally find anything.  The layout, topics, files available, etc. are a whole new experience every time you find something new.  Even on Gopher, which is basically text only (you can post images, but only on links) you see a lot of variation.  Some people put ASCII art, some people litter pages with quotes, others just have things as no-nonsense as possible.  This leads into:
 
2.) Lack of Bots - Yeah, a bot could make any of these pages.  But there is so little benefit in doing so that they do not.  The webpages they make are more along the lines of "How to fix **** causing high CPU" with the same 8 suggestions and links to sketchy "anti-malware" scans.  If you find some guy's homepage from 2009 talking about Sailor Moon or playing D&D solo or cataloging Finnish folktales or whatever, the chances of it not being made by a human are pretty slim.  But beyond that, on modern social media there's always the threat of getting a bunch of bot replies, even when you are initially interacting with real people.  This is always annoying to me because it's just a reminder of how dead the internet currently is.  You don't get that on classic homepages.
 
3.) Exploration - There's actually a sense of finding something new and cool.  It's hard to feel that on a centralized site when everything looks 90% the same, since even if you do actually find something neat it will look nearly identical to everything else you've seen.  There's also the limited tools for exploring sites.  Search engines are pretty borked as a rule, to the point that even if you search for the exact title of a video or the exact quote occurring in a post it still might not come up.  General topic searches are even more useless.  And you usually don't have much in the way of tools outside of those things, other than relying on "the algorithm" allowing you to see something.  When it comes to classic homepages you also often don't have search; they're either too old or too small to implement such things.  But because people were aware of this being an issue, you'll find a lot more links to other pages, which allows you to actually go exploring.  On top of that, when you actually do follow a link it could go literally anywhere, not just to a single post or video that was sort of interesting.
 
Webrings are the best for this, but unfortunately most classic homepages ended up using external webring services which have since went under.  Let this be a lesson to anyone making a webring now: just do hardcoded HTML linked lists, because these are more likely to last through time.

I think I've mentioned once that I accidentally complimented a novice/indie music maker back in my CS:GO days when I complimented the person's music on their Tumblr page (they were like "i made that ty so much").
 
But another similar story is that when they first added the emotes to steam, I saw and joined the "emote art" steam group where people were making art with emotes on their profiles. I saw this thread (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/emoticonart/discussions/0/666827974867330650/) and I had to get those guncraft emotes for myself.
 
I've had this Mario on my page since the week it was posted, 2013

 
I know a lotta people here were victim to my "hey can I send u a Link" and then I'd post an Emote-Link (from legend of zelda) afterward.
 
Anyways, come 2019 I find a thread of some person making a bunch of fixes for L4D2 maps using pretty advanced techniques with the hope that one day Valve will add them to the game (https://steamcommunity.com/app/550/discussions/1/1651043320659915818/?tscn=1598588468). 2020 hits and The Last Stand update gets announced for L4D2 and I was like "wow those map changes listed on the announcement video... I bet I know who did those!"
So I added him after making a post.

 
It was then that he complimented my Mario ascii art on my profile... then we both realized that he had made that same pixel art 7 years earlier. A shame he didn't know I did L4D2 mapping stuff cuz I would've been on the community update team and had my name on the update page/in the game (and I would've been able to work on the update - damn!)...
 
At least I'm on that same community update team now, but even we must abide by Valve time. Most of the map-related bullet points on this update: https://steamcommunity.com/games/L4D2/announcements/detail/3646280012042428637?snr=2___ were done by me!!!

Hopefully we get a new community update, at some point.

This is the part of the 90's that you'll never see in "90's nostalgia" media: