Banned for not allowing anyone to go hollow. If I want to be beef jerky then that's my business.

Recently bought Nine Inch Nails' 'Fixed' a few days ago. It's a handful of remixes of their prior album, Broken. Has some pretty neat remixes of i say so myself. Been slowly chipping away at collecting the entire discography of NIN (also known as HALO releases) as well as the discography of Godspeed You! Black Emperor :)

I haven't listened to NIN since "The Slip". I got into them around the time "Year Zero" came out, and "Ghosts I-IV" is the only instrumental album I've ever fallen in love with. I'll have to check out their more recent stuff.

I've been working at the same job as a software engineer for the past 7.5 years. Thankfully I enjoy it, and most of the people I work with are good. The company I work for is also fully remote, so that's a huge bonus for me. Working from home is a dream come true.

But I have had to move around a lot in that time. Because of hyperacusis I have a lot of trouble living in apartments, so I tried moving to a small town but that was somehow worse. There are too many rednecks who love to rip around in their big trucks and snowmobiles, doing donuts on the street right across from my house in the middle of the night. So right now I'm trying to save up to put a small modular home on a bit of land out in the country near my parents. Having grown up in that area, I can be confident that noise won't be an issue anymore. It'll take a while, but hopefully I'll finally be able to settle in somewhere that won't keep me up every night or cause my heart to skip every time a door slams.

I haven't gone out much since COVID. Over the last few years, I have only seen my friends in real life a handful of times. I'm quite a loner, though, so it suits me fine. We still chat online and play games occasionally. Some of them have gotten into more of a party lifestyle which isn't my scene, so it's better that we only associate digitally these days.

That's it for me. Not a heckuva lot going on in my life at the moment. It might pick up in the next year or two.

Macbeth. I think I prefer Hamlet's story, but I saw Macbeth live when I was in high school and they updated it to be set during World War 2. I thought that was really cool.


Halloween or Christmas?

"I'm Commander Meat, and you are in direct violation of Space Treaty 109."

Hello there!

I'd like to be the first to say "General Kenobi!"

twan1's post in the weird videos topic reminded me of this one in a roundabout way (don't ask about my thought process :P).

This video is the reason I ended up trying out Dead Island and also why I fell in love with the French "Fist of the North Star" theme song.

I also dress way cooler now 

I have always thought that women have way better fashion options! It makes me really jealous. Men need better options than jeans and hoodies without getting too formal.

Oh, and congratulations again on coming out to your real life circle! I hope it all went well.

this site is 8 or so years ago but they're clearly trying to mimic the average geocity-kid you would find xD

According to Wikipedia, it was created in 2002.

Takes me waaaay back. Skimming through it, I'm surprised the humor and tone hold up today. A lot of similar joke sites of the time had much more offensive/insensitive content.

I don't usually make my characters look like myself. I have a friend who does, and when I asked him about it he said it was a conscious choice to build up his self esteem.

I tried that out once for myself when I made a new Red Dead Online character, but I found him to be really boring. I see that face (or one like it) every day, so I'd rather make someone more interesting.

I'll usually make a gruff older looking man or, if you can change the skin colour to something unnatural, I'll go for a Hellboy-esque look. In Elden Ring I found a guide to make your character look like a chimpanzee, so I modified that to make him the Red Monkey (I had just finished watching Marvel's "Hit-Monkey" animated series).

I'll sometimes play as a female character, but it usually depends on the voice actor. In Mass Effect I always chose FemShep because Jennifer Hale has been one of my favourites since Metroid Prime and the old Avengers cartoon.

i’d like to recommendgrand illusions! he’s a collector of old toys and he makes videos demonstrating his collection. the toys are always very fun to watch and he’s got such a sweet personality, too.

I love channels like this. I used to really like Digitiser 2000 back when it was mostly Biffo and Paul Gannon at a desk showing old toys and science kits. The Grumps had a bit of that too, but they always seem to turn into channels about trying different food flavours from other countries after a while. I guess that's what gets the views.

I used to be even worse than listening to a song on repeat. If there’s one bit of a song that I really love, I would always have that bit on repeat, and sometimes that’s only like 5 seconds of a song!

I'm just thankful someone already did this with Baker Street. I could listen to this loop for hours.

I used to have a bunch of videos like this bookmarked, but I must have lost them. These are the only two I can find now.

My impression is that the web revival space is more for free expression than any commercial purpose. I don't think many people are trying to monetize their Neocities pages or use them as portfolio pieces (even though some of y'all have made some stunning layouts). So self-promotion takes on a different role here. Instead of being about marketing, it's about taking pride in your accomplishments.

I'm really bad at self-promotion because it's hard to balance pride and humility, which I think is the most important quality a person can have. It's definitely possible to show off your work humbly, but I always think of the people who post their own art on the Top Talent subreddit. It seems really egotistical to me even if their art really is top tier. It's like trying to give yourself a cool nickname.

I grew up in an arts family, and something Iv felt all my life is the sense that the wider culture often does not understand artists; it doesn't really understand our needs or goals - so often artists are on the sidelines of a culture that was not built for them; but at the same time totally defines itself by their work 

...

I find theres often a mis-conseption that artists are selfish in some way? That our goal is to promote ourselves for our own benefit; when in reality I think most artists are the opposite. We love our work, we want our art to be seen and appreciated; and we want to be able to make it all the time; so we hope we can earn a living from it even if its just enough to get by.

The devaluation of the arts is a huge problem in western culture. STEM is absolutely important, but it always gets held up over arts and humanities as more valuable or "real". They're always saying art isn't as important as STEM in the same breath that they're calling artists elitist. It's really infuriating how they don't see their own hypocrisy.

People also are more respectful of experts in STEM than in arts and humanities. I got into an argument with a friend a few years ago because he was saying that an education in art criticism doesn't make anyone more skilled at understanding art. I studied art and critical writing at university for five years, so that was a real slap in the face. When I asked him why my education doesn't make me more qualified to give an analysis of a piece of art but his education makes him more qualified to give legal advice, he called me an elitist.

"There is a danger your become dependent on the briefer; the man who can package information in a way thats [short and] comprehensible [the risk is that the briefer will be more of an actor than a thinker]"

This reminds me of something I said in another thread about being succinct vs long-winded and how people tend to ignore you if your posts are too long. It's not necessarily a good or bad thing. The ability to present information in a way that can be understood by the layperson while not sacrificing its integrity is a skill of its own. It is performative to an extent, so I get the actor comparison, but it's not necessarily invalidating. It's like the quote about separating your thinkers and your fighters, so all your fighting is done by fools and all your thinking is done by cowards. If you separate your thinkers from your presenters, you have your thinking done by people who can't communicate their ideas and your presenting done by people who can't think (so, basically social media :P).

The most influential thinkers tend to be really good at presenting information in an easily digestible way. Think of people like Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Confucius, etc. Ignoring for the moment that some of the people I listed have egregious personal flaws, they're well known as much for their intelligence as their ability to express the information they have.

It's also worth noting that just because the format is longer doesn't mean it's more accurate. Fascists love to dress up their dogma in long manifestos that make adherents feel smart for reading them.

I think that if someone is truly interested in a topic, they're likely to search out longer articles. I like the rotating summaries of articles on Wikipedia's front page. It's good for getting quick bites of information from a (relatively) reliable source, and if something strikes your interest you can always dive deeper into it. However, I don't think that satisfies the same itch as the information people get from social media, which is basically gossip.

When you're scrolling through social media and see short, quippy factoids, even if it's not something you're particularly interested in it's easy to absorb and repeat them whether they're true or false or just the partial truth. Then when everyone thinks they know something about everything they start to devalue those comprehensive/long-winded authorities and consider them elitist, so it's important for experts to not alienate non-experts.

As to the main question of whether I feel overloaded with information, I don't think so. I'm always looking for something new online to digest, whether it's news, music, videos or conversation here in MelonLand. What tends to make me feel overwhelmed is a constant barrage of negative information, like when the world seems like it's coming undone. I still try to keep aware of the bad things so that I'm not ignorant of the hardships in the world, but I avoid being consumed by them. It's a hard balance to strike without seeming apathetic, but you're no good to anyone if you exhaust yourself with worrying.