The internet in it’s heyday, when it was a genuinely thrilling place to find information, and quite a lot of weirdness, and before it was swamped by corporate interests.
I remember starting out with gopher and a paper print out of ‘The big dummies guide to the internet’ which was a directory of almost every gopher and ftp site (pre web) along with a description of what you’d find there. Then the web came along and things got really good for a while. Once big corporations got involved it all went down hill.
Do you use this? I’ve been thinking that there has to an underground “internet” that mimics the old web. I was thinking that it would be BBS or something. I haven’t gone down any rabbit hole yet because lemmy has been scratching the itch alright.
No I used Gemini for a bit which is a newer protocol trying to deliver that old school way of internet
I would limit it to the “web” in it’s heyday. The internet as a whole is more wild than ever. And there’s a chance that the fediverse could be just as thrilling in 10 years as the web was 20 years ago (and could be swamped by corporate interests).
I don’t think the internet is getting less thrilling and weird, if anything it’s downright scary at this point, it’s just really easy to enter a walled garden, never leave, and never find the interesting stuff.
If you like gopher, you’re gonna love Gemini: https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini
Not having all the silly teenager / young adult bits of their lives documented in videos for all to see.
I said/did/wrote (in my personal journal) so much cringe shit as a teen. I am GLAD it’s not out there on permanent record. I got my Facebook account when I was like 17. Well after all the other kids my age did (I’m 31 now). I stopped using it by 23. I usually just made witty quips about life in general on Facebook, never aired my dirty laundry or spilled my guts or called a girl a bitch for not wanting to go out with me. I did go through a tough breakup during this time in my life, but the most I ever did was quote Cee-Lo’s “Fuck You.”
Facebook being problematic for kids is nothing new, but now many adults are intimately aware of how bad it is because we were those kids.
I really feel for kids these days.
Back in the day personal blogs were pretty popular. Most of my friends had one, and we pretty much all treated it like a personal journal. So we aired our dirty laundry, for all to see, and it’s still in the internet archive to cringe at there too. We were blogger people, but LiveJournal was hugely popular for the same purpose.
Setting up your computer before you go to bed to download a demo for a game that’s… 20 MB large! Waking up in the morning to inevitably discover the download failed part way through.
Getright was my choice for years, until it decided to scrap an entire 600MB iso I had downloaded over 56k, and start over. Getright pissing me off was thebmain reason why I got pretty good at perl 25 years ago - I decided to write my own download manager.
I remember using a program called Go!Zilla to accellerate and manage my downloads, you could even pause downloads!
sometimes I still have to do this, sure not for something that’s only 20mb but a 1gb file can take a whole night to download in my uni accommodation. The landlord doesn’t seem to give a shit though because they’re still advertising that the building has “up to 100mb/s” wifi speeds.
Not as extreme, but I still remember downloading GTA 5 for 16h, that was some shit internet
Bugs hitting the front windshield in extraordinary numbers.
It’s two things, one personal vehicles are designed to bend air around them rather than slice through or just brute force through air resistance. This means that more bugs are pushed out of the way with newer vehicles now, compared to older vehicles which just had the bug hit the windshield. The second and much more impactful reason is because the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
the insect population has dropped significantly in the last 25 years.
Why has that happened?
fluid dynamics simulated on computers helped air-bending, that’s cool. i knew about the bees disappearing, but bugs in general too?
We managed to kill off a third of the entire bug population during the last 25 years or so.
Huh, I think they all flew to Mexico, I did a road trip from Mexico to Austin TX recently and I do recall having not many bugs in my windshield in the USA… But back home to Mexico they all started to appear LMAO.
Car design change? I’d assume that more aerodynamic cars airflow that sweeps more bugs away rather than smacking them into the glass. I can assure you that they still hit motorcycle visors.
Home ownership
