Currently listening to Tool at max volume at 2am to spite my upstairs neighbours who have been keeping/waking me up at night for over a year despite me nicely asking them to stop over and over. If I can't sleep, neither can they.
Don't worry. There are no innocent bystanders around who will get caught in the spite.
UPDATE: They just phoned me to ask me to turn it down.
im a bit of a touhou fan (understatement) so i picked my current username based on a character i like (wriggle nightbug) + i was in the middle of my "2000s anime is so cool i want that style" phase so i made it sound like the username of someone who would post adorably crusty anime drawings on deviantart the username i had been using was also based on touhou (patchyb4k4) so i just kept up the trend of me having 2hu usernames
It's been a long time since I saw "1337" anywhere. I used to have it in my hotmail account
It took a lot of thought, but I think the best thing I ever bought myself is my Beastie Boys coffee mug. I was going to say my computer or my phone, but I know those will eventually be obsolete and replaced. I use my mug almost every day and, as long as I don't drop it, it'll last my lifetime.
My favourite gift is the Ninja Turtles sewer/doll house my mom made and gave to me for Christmas along with the action figures when I was really young. She did an amazing job. She also built my sister's Barbie house and we used to play where the Ninja Turtles moved in next door to Barbie, and they'd sometimes swap houses. I still have the sewer, even though it's a little banged up.
this is really interesting! i didn't expect everyone's definition of the term to be so different from mine. to me, the line between influencer and non-influencer has little to do with the goal of the thing being posted (whether that be seeing number of views/likes/etc go up, or influencing people's actions), and everything to do with money. if the person in question has endorsement or product placement deals with companies*, they're an influencer.
influencing people for money is a marketing job; influencing people for free is a hobby. with this definition, recommending that people play a certain game on your website doesn't make you an influencer (no matter how much reach you may have), unless you are getting paid to promote it. so my answer to the initial question is no.
i do think the points everyone else has brought up are great though! thinking about the motivations and goals of sharing things online is important, both for deciding what you want to share and for deciding how to interact with the things other people are sharing.
*the deals with companies point is important to me. i don't that think artists promoting their work (with the goal of selling things and making money) counts as being an influencer, for example. i'm sure there may be some grey areas here, though.
I pretty much agree fully with this. "Influencer", to me, is a corporate job description. People use social media, gain popularity, and then are sought out for brand deals and paid to produce content as advertising.
I think of it as mostly an Instagram and TikTok thing, where attractive people feed their own vanity and manage to make a living by doing it. I don't think of someone with tens of thousands of followers on Twitter as an "influencer" because, at least from the popular people I have followed on there, they're usually popular for their wit and wit doesn't sell Vitamin Water to the masses like a pretty woman in yoga pants does.
Chasing the Al Gore rhythm is certainly part of it, but I'm not sure how integral it is. It's basically a feedback loop where influencers need to stay relevant by producing whatever will get them seen, and the algorithm gets tweaked to better highlight content that brands have paid both the platform and the influencers to promote.
If an Instagram influencer moved all of their content to their personal website, and they could somehow maintain the same level of visibility as they would have on a social media platform, I'd still consider them an influencer. So I guess that is the most direct answer I'd give to the original question. But social media is the new content aggregator, which caught on because you can go to one place to meet many needs. It'd be impossible for a single person to create a personal platform and get the same visibility as they would get by playing to a corporate algorithm that will put them in the content feed of a website that most people in the world are already looking at. So in that sense, yes, hypothetically you could become an influencer by running a personal website, but in reality you're never going to get the same reach on your own.
It's really up to you since you're in control of whether you leave it up or change it. You could leave your existing site as it is and start a new one if you don't want to trash it completely. I also remember some old sites would have an archive section of old designs and content that people could check out. If you can use templates instead of static HTML files with your host, you could even slot new content into those old designs as long as the content model doesn't change along with your template.
But you could also look at websites as dynamic, evolving forms of art instead of either static or fleeting. I still have copies of all my old website designs stored on a backup drive and like to go back and look at them, both to satisfy my nostalgia and also to see how different designs for the same site evolved over time.
Sad. The MP3 players long gone now from the daily lives of most young people.
Times have changed. Freedom and "obligation" to look after your own music collection. A double-edged sword. Is it really that big of a pain to look after 1000 MP3 files? Stick that whale sized USB drive in the USB port? And put all the files there?
Nowadays, you don't "own" your collection. You just rent these songs for now. The next copyright change is on the doorstep. Having to go through advertising... disaster.
Just know some Audacity and VLC, and you're able to go to convert music files, if necessary. And then nobody bothers you and you can listen to whatever you want and nobody impeeds that music experience. But that freedom probably wasn't worth it.
That's why an MP3 player makes me deeply sad.
I like old devices and keep all of mine around as a sort of mini museum on my shelf, but I wouldn't give up the convenience of having a phone that does everything.
I don't use Spotify or anything like it for music because I hate how everything is becoming a subscription, especially when they start pushing ads on something I'm already paying for, and I don't want to lose access to my favourite things when the service decides to stop paying for the license. I kept buying CDs and ripping them until I no longer had a computer with a disk drive. Now I buy songs individually on iTunes and use the radio and YouTube to find new music.
But I also use OneDrive to store all of my music so I can access it on any device and don't have to worry about losing it due to a disk failure. Space is an issue, but that has only come up for me once when I tried using OneDrive to store backups of project files. Now it's pretty much exclusively for music.
I'm the same, there are movies and games I can't help but love that nobody else around me does. I strangely enjoy Bubsy 3D, and films like "Santa Who?" and Batman & Robin.
I really need to watch the old Super Mario movie, it looks right up my alley!
If you like Batman & Robin, I have a feeling you'll like Super Mario. They're very similar in tone. Kinda dark and grimy but not in a serious way, and everyone involved in making it was embarrassed by it later
I love Batman & Robin too. I think of it more as a continuation of the series from the '60s rather than the Tim Burton films. George Clooney would have been a great successor to Adam West's Batman.
The only mp3 player I ever owned besides my phone is the 5th gen U2 ipod. I like U2 but am not a huge fan. I mostly got it because of the black and red colour scheme.
(Photo isn't mine, but it looks exactly like that).
I don't use it anymore, but it got me through college. It's still in great physical condition, but I doubt the battery will hold a charge anymore.
My family isn't big on traditions other than the usual decorations, presents and dinner. But I personally like to binge horror movies set during winter or in snowy places, like The Thing or 30 Days of Night, and also cheesy holiday movies like Noelle and Elf. It's a fun combination.
2019 was great, I got myself an Atari and my old VHS player which mostly worked sometimes! We watched old VHS movies like the Dark Crystal; it was nice to have the old TV loved as the centre of media after it was unused for so many years. I guess I have a very strong emotional connection with objects
It's December which means rum and eggnog while supplies last. I'd learn how to make my own eggnog for the rest of the year, but I don't wanna turn into a round butterball.
Imagination - when real life gets lame, it's nice to be able to retreat to a place where you have complete control. I'm a huge introvert who would rather be alone most of the time, so it's important to be able to keep good company with myself instead of always dwelling on what's going on outside.
Animation and Puppets - this is possibly a weird one, but I'm really passionate about traditional, hand drawn and stop motion animation (and even CG animation that emulates the look of those styles), and Jim Henson or Stan Winston style puppetry and practical effects. Every time I see a new film made like that, it makes me feel a little better inside.
I have a reputation for liking things everyone else hates. Usually movies.
I think the old Super Mario movie is great. I don't like most of the Mario games and hadn't ever played one before I saw the movie, so I had no expectations or source material to compare it to. On its own, it's a fun, cheesy scifi movie that gets way too much hate.
I also fully believe that The Phantom Menace is a mostly great film. Anakin's acting isn't great (but it's still awful how much Jake Lloyd and Ahmed Best were bullied for their roles in the film), but even as a young kid I didn't find the political plot boring and I've never hated Jar Jar. But even if those things were all as bad as people say, the pod racing scene and fight with Darth Maul at the end would still make up for it.
Recently I've been watching live performances of the bands I grew up with back in their prime and comparing them to their recent live performances. It's really interesting seeing how they've aged and changed so I thought I'd share some and encourage you all to do the same.
The one that inspired this topic is Blink 182's performance of "I Miss You" for the Chester Bennington tribute concert a few years ago.
Here they are in 2004 vs 2017:
I can't really say their vocals hold up today, but the song obviously hits a bit heavier now, especially in this context.
The big one for me, though, is Pearl Jam. I don't go to a lot of concerts, but I really hope to be able to see them live someday. Watching videos of them in their heyday, and seeing the way Eddie Vedder somehow manages to effortlessly strain his voice, really is amazing.
Here's their song "Black" in 1992 and again in 2018:
In the more recent video, the vocals are less refined but also sound more natural. The older video almost sounds rehearsed and performative while the newer one is more like a person singing off the cuff and earnestly. I love both, though, and wouldn't be able to choose which I prefer.
As a bit of a bonus, here's an interesting analysis of the MTV Unplugged performance by a vocal coach/opera singer.
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