I vaguely remember some quote from the 1990s along the lines of “if cars had had the same technological growth rate as computers, by now, they’d go bazillion kilometers with a drop of gasoline, had engines the size of sugar cubes, and would cost a penny and a half.”

My own weird fantasy worldbuilding thing:

Common people usually picture the vampires the usual way, as aristocracy living in seclusion in spooky fancy castles. But in actuality, most of them come from lower classes. Vampires had a whole little communist revolution because they had no civil rights (on the account of them being deceased), and set up their own little autonomous grand duchy. Vampires elsewhere get mildly tolerated as long as they behave themselves but still have to work crappy factory jobs… in the Night Shift. (title drop)

“…and [turtles and other shelled animals] are, at the same time, the caravan and the caravaneer, the lodge and the lodger.” - Markus Kajo (a Finnish comedian).

Sorry, I don’t currently have the book at hand to have the exact citation but will probably edit this.

It’s one of those things that make me say “OK my parents MAY have a few of those in their garden. Gotta see them to be sure, maybe. But it was a thing in that ill defined era maybe, so, you know, maybe.”

I remember when one of our local publications asked their readers “what kind of old appliances you still have around at home that you use regularly?” and the article was flooded with photos of 1970s kitchen appliances. Well duh, of course those still work, if you take them out of the cupboard once a year to bake a cake or whatever.

My personal opinion as a trans girl? We need to stop pretending that social networks are THE solution. We need a balance between social networks and anti-social networks. And by “anti-social networks”, I mean traditional blogs.

Funny thing is, Fediverse is actually very well equipped to deal with Blogosphere. The fact that you can easily ignore the other side is a feature, not a bug.

You can tell this is an ancient meme because you somehow expect “non-full-time job” position to be worthwhile in any shape or form. If it’s not a full-time position, my personal belief is that either 1) they’re probably going to screw you over somehow, or 2) the government regulations are going to screw you over. (I’m in Finland. The government’s going to screw you over if you do anything besides staring at the phone and accept the first full-time position that miraculously comes your way. In recent years, they invented a new activity: SPAM JOB APPLICATIONS. This has not worked as well the government thinks it did.)

Oh good. I was just thinking “Hmm, I haven’t tried Fortnite in a long while, maybe I should check it out again.” …Yeah. …No.

In-person admission costs between $649 and around $1,300.

I was mildly confused by the headline when I read this. Oh, it’s a conference. Maybe not emphasise the “job fair” part? It’s clearly meant for people who are already employed. They even have a “convince your boss” flyer on the website.

…Yeah, that’s how some people get to keep going in the industry, don’t they? …As an unemployed dev gal who just got done sending a bunch of applications that likely won’t lead anywhere I probably shouldn’t keep mulling about, you know, everything going on in this article, and just go to sleep.

I want 1990s Internet back. Except for background MIDIs, which should be banned elsewhere but which should be made legally mandatory on music-related pages. Forcing record companies to share literal performance instructions for their music would annoy them gloriously.

Flash was a solution for a real problem that web creators were having at the time. Unfortunately, it was a stopgap solution that ended up being incredibly popular and nobody was concerned about building a smooth transition to a standardised way of doing things.

In the 1990s the web browsers didn’t really have any real interactive multimedia capabilities. Browser makers said “eh, that’s the plugin makers’ responsibility”, and so someone made a plugin all right, and the creators said “eh, that’s good enough”.

In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say that browser makers and the web standards folks should have just gone for the sort of stuff we now have in HTML5. But that’s because we nowadays see the standards as a good thing. This was taking place in the late 1990s, and the browser makers, Macromedia and the creators were not really all that concerned about standardisation and interoperability. Which, of course, ended up hurting everyone when it all collapsed on its own.

Things might have been different if Adobe had actually turned Flash into a genuine open format (like PDF, which is still very much a living and useful format despite the fact that you shouldn’t touch Adobe’s own PDF software with a ten foot pole) and it had become part of the landscape of web standards, but that’s for the alternate history buffs to debate.