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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • (It has been funny watching some of my coworkers learn a new coding technique and finding it to be so cool that they apply it everywhere regardless of whether it fits or not while I think to myself, “Ah, I remember when I went through that phase as a teenager!”)

    I’m not a programmer (although suggestions on a language to start learning with - with no project in mind - would be welcome!), but I’ve found similar things with my old musical projects. I look back some old project files and see that I used various techniques all the time that I don’t necessarily use nowadays. Sometimes, I think I probably should use them more than I do now, but I definitely overused them back then when I first discovered them.

    I guess it’s just exciting when you learn something and it opens up a bunch of possibilities for you!


  • “Landed gentry” was a social class of people who owned estates and, well, land. They didn’t have to work; they made their income by profiting off the work of the farm hands, merchants, etc, who worked on their land. The estates these landed gentry owned, along with their wealth, would be passed down to their children when they died. It meant the gentry did very little to earn their station in life, but still had a fair amount of power and wealth.

    How spez thinks it applies to Reddit mods, I’m not entirely sure. But he definitely meant it as an insult. His full quote was:

    And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

    So I guess he was upset that mod teams get to select who else is a good fit to join the mod team? Of course, the issue is that he is the landed gentry - users didn’t vote for him, nor can they remove him; and he’s profiting off the work of the people who post content and the people who spend their time moderating.




  • Well I’m just glad Harry Mack managed to release his 100th episode of “Omegle Bars” this week. He decided to take a break from doing Omegle-based content at the right time, it seems.

    For anyone who doesn’t know, Harry Mack’s a freestyle rapper. He has (had) a series where he’d ask strangers on Omegle to give him a handful of words and then create a full song out of them on the fly. And not just saying those words then immediately moving on like most freestyle rappers do; he actually creates entire verses on the topics he’s given and really raps around them. Plus he’d be calling out things the people were doing as they react to him, responding to things they say, mentioning things he can see in the room, etc, as he raps.

    Here’s one of his freestyles that’s really stuck with me ever since I first saw it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehcA4zCeaPI

    He takes what are some fairly negative, “cry for help” words from the girls and turns them into a really beautiful, positive rap overall. He’s a very positive guy in general, and I’ve watched him consistently since I discovered him. Binging his videos got me through a breakup, in fact.


    My own experiences with Omegle have either been penises or just bland, and it’s not something I’ve used for many years as a result. But videos like Harry Mack’s show what wonderful things could come from it and I do think it’s a huge shame it’s gone. It feels like another part of the old internet’s gone, and that we’re moving even closer to the sanitised, heavily-monetised internet run by megacorporations. I hate that.






  • It’d make for a good anti-spam measure if there was a limit to the number of DMs users could send to other people who don’t follow them back. It’d mean people can still use Twitter DMs like a normal messaging service (which isn’t something I care for, but I know some people use it like that).

    As it is, it just feels similar to the whole “rate limiting the number of tweets people can view per day” thing, where they’re taking the most obvious route to reducing bandwidth usage by restricting users.