The thing about that era that nobody seems to remember for some reason is that 4Loko made everyone crazy because there was pseudoephedrine in it. It’s an upper that’s used as a decongestant, but it also makes people feel like they can do 100 pushups easy when they can barely do 5.

The stuff was in everything. It’s WHY “Red Bull gives you wings” and Red Bull has never been the same since it killed some kid who wouldn’t stop chugging Red Bulls at a rave, and they had to take it out. The stuff was legal enough to serve in cans at the gas station, you could buy the hell out of pseudoephedrine products of every kind, even if you weren’t old enough to drink alcohol in the US, it wasn’t really controlled at all, so it was the secret engine behind the Scene Kids, as well.

It was in EVERYTHING. I have a story about being at work with a miserable flu, dragging complete ass and wishing for death, but then lunch came, and I took some TheraFlu that I had, only to spend the rest of the day gacked out of my mind like “let’s get these fuckin NUMBERS bro!” Ridiculous.

Dumb old caffeine doesn’t hold a candle to it. The real reason pseudo was taken away was because all the tweakers were doing kitchen sink bullshit with stolen cough medicine to make crank and then selling that shit to Indiana truckers, it was crack for people who couldn’t get crack. You could already fly off a can of Red Bull, but they had to have more. It was bigger than 4Loko, it was a hell of an era. Motherfuckers were crawling on the roof. Everyone’s mom was flipping off of stuff at the drug store that she innocently enough bought for a cold. It explains a lot about the 1995-2005ish era.

There were a lot of different options on the booze racks next to 4Loko, I’m not sure why people latched onto that one brand so hard, probably because it was cheap, or maybe it was the first of its kind. Red Bull doesn’t have booze in it. But that’s why Red Bull and vodka became a thing, as well, but that drink was a bit too classy to earn the ghetto legend status. For me and my crew, it was Dragon Jooz, which my roommate had to ban from the house. Same shit, though, it was a 4Loko copycat, there were a bunch of them. House parties were nutty for a little while. It was a real obnoxious era for the party people who only smoked weed and had to put up with it.

But the era came to an end. They took the pseudo away from the public. 4Loko and Red Bull both got severe downgrades to “just a bunch of caffeine and maybe booze.” A lot of the 4loko copycats vanished forever without their real star ingredient. TheraFlu is probably just aspirin and dust now, or discontinued. Party’s over. Thank fuck.

The strange part is how the pseudo wiped everyone’s memory somehow. To this day, I still hear people talk about this era like the energy drinks just had a lot of caffeine in them and that’s why things were all crazy. No, bro. No. You are missing the most important Horseman in this apocalypse, come on. I think a lot of people weren’t all that aware of the ingredients in the can of cheap swill they were pounding, so that’s probably why.

Resident Evil 5 x The Internet

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

This type of relationship is pretty common in war. You and the squad end up “in the shit” and now you have all crossed the boundaries of what civilians call “manliness”. You are free, unimpeachable, the manliest thing, a real warrior, a soldier in battle. The things you do now define manliness, you are writing the rules. They can call you whatever, you will reply with the sort of laughter that silences fools.

People die around you. The sound of another man’s voice becomes poetry to you. How much longer will you hear his voice? Who knows, tell him a shitty joke. Sit on his lap for a gag, do whatever. Drink in his presence, press his flesh against yours, be alive together, try to keep him in your memory, tomorrow we all may die. Has anybody seen those pictures of soldiers from the American Civil War all hanging out and mugging for the camera? Acting all “gay” with each other? That’s what war does to men, sometimes, probably not that often, I fear.

Somebody online with a military background once remarked about the safest he’s ever felt, including in civilian life, was when he was in some tent in a war zone with the rest of the platoon, everyone in their sleeping bags, crammed in the tent together like a litter of kittens in a box. Sure, they were in the death zone, for real, but he was warm and snug, surrounded by armed badasses who would come to his aid at once if anything nasty went down. He said he slept like a baby, that he’s never felt that sense of security since, not even safe in bed as a civilian, later.

It means a lot to me that this book, TLOR, was pretty much written by the Great War. Tolkien went to that war, against his own will, compelled by shame campaigns, not even the law, in spite of his own convictions, and he did not have some safe posting at the base, no, he was at the Somme. He saw the worst of it, probably missed death by inches several times, saw mud and blood, was deafened and battered, only to survive at last, coming home as changed as Frodo.

He watched men charge into machine guns like mice into a blender, watched them die of trench foot and the stupid ways war kills you without even glory or honor to show for it, saw that sometimes courage is just hiding in your little hole and not screaming when the tanks roll over. He saw Mordor in person. No man’s land.

Then he came home, and did he write some edgy darkness? No. He wrote this thing, this fantasy, with its message of hope that evil can be vanquished, and that men can be good, yes, even when they seem utterly lost to goodness. This is somehow the lesson that the War to End All Wars had taught him. He had nothing left to prove, so he made a pretty, frivolous thing, for children, but couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help making something bigger than that. He knew how intimate men become with each other under fire, and it ended up in the book.

That is the only thing he wanted to remember, that unexpected love when suffering and death are right on top of you. I wonder who Legolas was to him? Somebody young and beautiful, who deserved to live a thousand years, but didn’t, probably. They shall not grow old.

We shouldn’t need the machine guns coming at us to hug our friends, that’s probably what he wanted the world to know.

I wonder if it works like IRC. The “plague” this entire time has been servers. As soon as the idea only works because somebody, somewhere, is maintaining a server, cloud or hardware, then you’re kinda sunk. The server is the bottleneck. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a AAA game launch only for the servers to be inadequate. It happens again and again and again, so I assume the business considerations push them toward having just enough server and maybe a little less, never extra, which costs money and cuts margins.

Somewhere there are a bunch of servers howling away in a room that are actually Discord, and Discord spends money to make them howl, so there’s never as much server as you want, which is why things start bogging down with too many people in the chat room at once.

Most importantly to a corporation, if you have to interact with their servers in order to do anything, then they can own the platform by owning the servers. So there’s always going to be a server, even if it’s not strictly needed. The same consideration goes through the head of the streamer who always wants to launch a Discord because it’s “free” but they can sell it to you and then have top level control of an entire community as an asset that can be sold to others. There’s always a server. There will be a server if the actual application doesn’t really need it.

The reason IRC works fine with 1500 people in a chat is because IRC uses the user’s machine for any sort of computation power it needs, and then everything else it is doing is just sending data across wires. There is no central server farm. I haven’t used IRC in a really, really long time, but if it hasn’t changed, then it also doesn’t support lots of picture posting, which helps. Most of the memory usage on my machine at idle is just too many Discord channels all needing to use my local RAM memory to store the umpteen thousand photos everyone has uploaded, all the memes and etc. The IRC I remember was text, and text uses so little data that it can be treated like zero data.

Lots of pictures are probably non-negotiable in the modern era. Heck, they’re pretty important for serious work tasks, like putting up a shot of the broken gadget, so the engineering team can get an eyeball on the failure, that means pictures are in, text-only isn’t viable. I don’t know if modern IRC supports this or not, it probably does if people are still using it at all.

But IRC is a piece of open-source software that you install on your machine, free to the user. It’s not a web app, it doesn’t live in a browser. The data of you interacting with others is being sent out to them and also back to you, where it shows up in your IRC client and the chat room. If 1500 people are using it, then 1500 people have each added some of their machine power to making it all work, so it scales, it always has as much hardware as it needs. Again, there’s no server in the middle to run out of capacity, so that problem is just bypassed.

Everything used to work like this, circa the late 1990s and early 2010s. Everyone was assumed to be on a PC of their own, and the only problem was how to connect them together to do stuff, like have deranged fan wars about shows. BBSs were already kind of old hat, and there’s that damn server again, every BBS has one. All the most clever apps of the 90s, even the web, managed to jump through hoops to avoid the necessity of a central server to get things done because then somebody has to pay for it, run it, maintain it and own it. We just want the wires, the lovely, lovely cables dragged across the sea at somebody else’s unthinkable expense. If you can eliminate the server somehow, then you win. And they did. Things like IRC and ICQ blew the hell up from using that model.

We really need to dig that entire concept back up and brush the dust off of it. I wonder if that’s what Matrix is.

Now if you’ll excuse me I need to go prune some pointless Discord channels. Oh, by the by, fucking nobody uses Slack, or knows what it is. Dudes on the internet all think it’s normal because tech offices seem to use it a lot, the rest of the world has never used Slack. Up until right now I was assuming that Discord and Slack are the same thing, owned by the same company, and Slack is just the “business casual” version of Discord. This doesn’t seem to be true, but that’s how unfamiliar I am with Slack, while being chronically online. There are probably more people around who still remember ICQ than have ever used Slack in their lives.

I love the Church of the Subgenius reference built into Slack’s name. From what I can tell, nobody who uses that thing actually gets any slack, it actively removes slack from your life and makes boss surveillance really, really easy for the boss, but you must always act as though Big Brother can hear, or you’re fucked. Good work Bob, nice joke. Anyway, I shut up now.

Sir the rest of us were ignoring the mission trying to see how many cops could chase us at once and also how many of them we could murder when we let them catch up. Then they went online with it and people started wearing the game like a suit.

That may explain things.

I just want to say that I appreciate the truly fractal nature of these memes

I really don’t have a passionate stance about it, I just know I called it Twitter for ages, X is shitty branding and isn’t going to work, and I stopped using the platform well before Musk took over, so I’m not doing any sort of mental labor trying to make myself use the crap name he chose.

It’s a dead website to me, and it’s everyone else’s problem that they trapped themselves on Twitter, having no career without it. I’m not doing a single thing on behalf of anybody who is still there, those are ghosts, let them howl in the attic, I don’t work here.

It’s not a human person. It’s a website full of assholes. I would make an effort for a transitioning person, but not for Elon Musk and his ham-fisted stupidity, for the folly of some wealthy prick.

It’s Twitter until I forget what it’s called.

Sharks have flooded Shark Infested Waters with shark asshole stink but this time the asshole stink is AI generated and Taylor Swift has a billion dollars for lawyers.

Please tell me you made it talk to a bot.

And then she made a bunch of Jade eggs for your puss puss and sold them.

Hobbits walking past the hobbit hole in the pic like motherfuckin gentrification buildings brah, this rent is already too high, I gotta use my gun more

I feel like it’s two separate markets that are forced to share the same big tent known as “gaming”.

I never play AAA games. I’m not on some moral crusade, they just don’t appeal. I do not have the twitch reflexes for FPS, but smaller devs tend to make the sort of gameplay I like.

Right now the only indy game I can think of that’s truly competitive is Battlebit, and that’s only because everyone hates what became of Battlefield. Otherwise it’s just me and what feels like a half dozen other weirdos out here trying to build a bakery so we can feed pie to harpies, while 90% of the world is playing COD like it’s their job. It’s two vastly different people who do not have the same needs, is what I’m saying.

So maybe people need to deal with that and stop honking the “play indy” horn so much. If that was the solution, people would already be on it.

If there was just some obnoxious little T-notch I had to line up on the connector, then I would fumble with it once and after that I could probably get it done in the dark, but apparently it doesn’t matter how many times I use a USB, I’ll never learn to use it on the first try, with the lights on and a flashlight pointed at the situation.

I like that getting it wrong and forcing it also destroys the port, so if it’s a crucial connection, and you’re in a hurry in poor light it’s a great way to kill the whole show trying to insist on that USB going in first try.

Great design, Crowley, you really are a professional. I think it’s better than that awful motorway, this one has touched the world, I can see why that angel loves you so much, what an artist.

Sorry wrong fandom

Oh so sorry we misplaced your paperwork very badly for you Mr Navalny, I cannot say that we have a death certificate for you but I’m sure we could find one if necessary.

That guy’s red jacket was truly something.

Sir, they all have a Nazi problem. It would appear that it comes free with your having an internet.

Gotta love running that bag full of money to the bank at the end of the night. They know you’ve got it, too. They know exactly when to expect the manager to leave for the bank. Late at night, after close, in some shit neighborhood.

That’s how you get this door.

God he was bad at being inconspicuous. Too king to grey man properly or something.

Oh well, guess I’m still happy about this magic bag i got for going places I don’t want Google knowing about.