RoabeArt [he/him]

1: Flatbread

2: Chill Sphinx

3: Sphinx

4: Loaf

5: Ball

I still remember the way my science teacher explained a hypothetical warp drive (like how it is in Star Trek). He took a black towel, representing space, and laid it flat on a table. He set down a miniature model of the Enterprise on one end of the towel, then accordion-folded the towel up so that the other end was close to the ship. He moved the Enterprise over to that end of the towel, and unfolded it so that it was flat again. The Enterprise was now on the other end of the table.

An overly simplified visualization, but it really illustrated the idea to my ten year old brain how space-time could hypothetically be bent to make fast interstellar travel a possibility. Also it made me realize that warp speed on the Enterprise wasn’t just a super powerful rocket or something.

Before Louis Pasteur’s disproving of spontaneous generation, most people believed that bacteria and putrefactive organisms like maggots etc. spontaneously poofed into existence, like a video game character spawning. Pasteur suggested that maggots came from flies laying their eggs on rotting meat etc, and that bacteria were everywhere and will multiply quickly under the right conditions. A lot of people at the time thought these were crackpot ideas.

Alternate headline: 39% of Americans support genocide.

The small business tyrants in my city like to threaten hiring freezes or say they will stop giving raises any time it looks like even the most milquetoast lib Democrat is ahead in the polls during election season.

Instead of telling them off for this retaliatory sore loser dogshit behavior, people applaud them for sticking it to the lefties or whatever.

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I wouldn’t say “completely fucked”, but for a few years I noticed YouTube on Firefox has this occasional quirk where videos will quit playing and infinitely buffer at the exact same timestamp. Like there’s no way around it except skipping about 30 seconds ahead with the seek bar, or doing a Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) and starting the whole video over. Opera GX doesn’t seem to have this problem at all.

But it’s still not a big enough deal to make me give up Firefox completely.

“You can drink it and not get sick.”

“OK, drink some.”

“You’re a jerk!” leaves

That being said I don’t have memories of everything being snappy 20 years ago - there were messy scripts and gigantic images that made Geocities and Angelfire sites near unusable back then as well.

Pages with dozens of embedded JPEG files that are larger than your monitor’s resolution and are compressed at highest quality. Easily a quarter to half of a megabyte each and take several minutes to load on dialup, then the webserver times out the connection because you’re taking too long to download all these giant files at once.

I don’t miss those days. Not to say things are better now, but they necessarily weren’t back then either.

Oh, and RealPlayer. Fuck RealPlayer.

Even worse is when the source is hidden behind a paywall.

I always use seconds as an allegory to dollars when I explain to people the difference between thousand, million and billion (I did the number crunching in my head and rushed it, so if I made any errors lemme know).

1000 seconds = 17 minutes

100,000 seconds = 27 hours

1 million seconds = 11 days

1 billion seconds = 31.70 years

148 billion seconds (Bezos’ net worth) = 4693 years

Same with coconuts. They are associated with Hawaiian and Caribbean cultures when in fact they’re native to South Asia and the Austronesian islands.

never gonna give you up never gonna let you down?

I think the earliest instance of “brain worms” I remember was from an episode of Invader Zim in 2001. Zim is offended at the concept of paying to ride a filthy, poorly maintained bus and shouts at the driver “Have you the brain worms?!”

Edit: found the video https://youtu.be/BiqTTozWNhA?si=bxNeTnreb77vdd00

Scotty also does this in Star Trek III…

Scotty: “If you don’t have eight weeks, I can do it for you in two.”

Kirk: “Mr. Scott, have you always multiplied your repair estimates by a factor of four?”

Scotty: “Certainly, sir. How else can I keep my reputation as a miracle worker?”

Mirror universe Musk was a proletarian hero who organized a mining industry revolution.

Him at 59 looks like me at 33. 😞