I think this is a vital insight.

Online culture for the past ~8 years has been basically -- what if a bunch of roller coaster fans have been, simultaneously, punched in the face by a roller coaster?

https://twitter.com/fireh9lly/status/1445705541813035009

People test their own boundaries of discomfort constantly. It's a component of many forms of media (heavy metal, horror, comedy) but also other cultural expression (like food -- spicy/bitter/sour, alcohol, many drugs). It's been drafted into hustle culture.

On the one hand, some nerds definitely already knew this. (Like, chaos magick was all over usenet. ESR used to be a fluffybunny wiccan.) Bitcoin taught it to other kinds of nerds (the kind who normally 'believe' in money), and changed the existing community members too.

https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/1444758632478949377

As somebody who has been socially adjacent to the cryptocurrency scene since before bitcoin was invented: these guys were mostly good-faith political radicals of a right-libertarian persuasion -- i.e., the kind of person who'd be a mutualist without anti-soviet propaganda

I'm always suspicious of "young people don't understand X" narratives because frequently they're overstated & even when they're not, it's often a matter of pure exposure & telling them about something once is enough to solve the problem.

https://twitter.com/jason_a_w/status/1440658745193762829

That said, our sense of the adjacent possible matters, and tools have moved away from directory structures (and names in general) often without actually providing a good alternative. GUIs were the first phase of this, but mobile interfaces are worse.

Last Drive In drastically increases the ratio of Joe Bob footage to movie footage vs Monstervision, & it really improves the enjoyment factor. I hope we get more Elvira too. We didn't on 13 Nights Of Halloween, but that still was sort of working on TV logic. Horror hosts were originally sugar to help the medicine go down -- to make people willing to watch the crappy movies that the network already had the rights to due to package deals. (Same deal as MST3K)

Discordianism has already become 'historically important', because of its impact on major geopolitical events.

As pope, I declare: discordians have a sacred duty to create 'textual chaos', and extend the 'textual chaos' present in the variations of the PD. Future historians, being servants of the season of bureaucracy, are our comrades and we must operate in solidarity with them by ensuring that they have plenty of employment. This happily coincides with our own desires: archive fever and confusion of tongues.

Why are pop culture zombies so strongly associated with communication & communications technologies? Like:
There are several apparently-independent books/movies where cell phones turn people into zombies (and, as far as I am aware, none where cell phones turn people into vampires or werewolves).

Project Gutenberg english-language plain text files archived on SSB lord-enki.net/ipfs-gutenberg… I could use some help with this!

Currently, my IPFS daemon is taking literally 60% of my CPU because people are browsing it. So, please pin some (or all) of these hashes!

The Action Button review of Tokimeki Memorial caused me to go back to True Love, a hentai game I had fond memories of from my teen years -- and one clearly influenced by TokiMemo. True Love was very popular on abandonware & warez sites in the late 90s and early naughts, but I haven't played it in many years, because (while I kept my copy) it or its crack couldn't run on versions of Windows past 98SE (nor would it run on WINE).

How much is accusations of 'cultural relativism' actually about personal fears of metacognition -- i.e., knowing at some level that your revealed preferences are at odds with your expressed preferences, & that allowing yourself to consider reevaluating either will result in total personality collapse?

Hot take: artistic skill is not related to the ability to clearly and memorably express ideas through artworks, but instead the effectiveness by which one invites viewers to perceive meaning in artworks (which, being material, are inherently meaningless). Consider The Matrix, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Lord of the Flies... all unambiguously pieces of Art, widely interpreted, whose dominant interpretation is not at all what the creators intended. (Throw in Fight Club and A Clockwork Orange too)

So, survellance capitalism doesn't trade in actually good predictions. You know, first hand, that ad-tech is (on average) bullshit. You are not an outlier: ad models don't work much better on anybody else. They trade on the statistical illusion of ad targeting. This illusion is tenuous. Click-through rates fall as users become more canny, & click-throughs are the best metric anybody has for ad success (even though most clicks don't turn into sales & most sales are not the results of ad clicks).

Why to actually use ZSH:

Shells have always been the black sheep of programming, basically because compatibility reasons have made it difficult to adopt useful ideas from language design. If you break borne compat in meaningful ways, nobody will use your shell. At the same time, shell design has always been pretty organic and ad-hoc. So a shell designer is trying to let the user command the computer in a rich way while maintaining compatibility with a bunch of features individual dudes in the 70s and 80s thought were worth coding.

Once every ten or fifteen years, everybody gets really excited about a deeply-flawed reimplementation of like one eighth of the core Xanadu concepts by somebody who doesn't have access to documentation on the other seven eighths of them. The hype migrates out. By the time the normies on HN hear about it, early adopters are already in backlash mode.

@RealtimeAI @Outsideness I'm not trying to produce sophistry here. There's a huge difference in the level of novelty of original research in computing tech during the span 1940-1980 and the level of novelty in the same after 1980, & it relates directly to economics. @RealtimeAI @Outsideness From 1940 to 1980, computer science was being done by folks with doctorates & experience in other disciplines, funded by government money to do pure research & moonshot shit -- especially ARPA funding starting in the wake of Sputnik for ed-tech.

@mykola TBH, NTs don't *know* social rules because they learned to follow them in a pre-conscious state. When you ask an NT to explain social rules, they explain them *wrong*. @mykola Case in point: NTs think that people who are talking look each other in the eye.

If you actually do that, you come off as a creep.

Cognitive scientists used video & eye-tracking to figure out what *actually* happens. It's a complicated pattern related to turn-taking.

An article I'm considering writing: the (explicit) political use of ghost stories.

The idea of the 'confederate soldier ghost' was explicitly promoted to keep former slaves in line & this is the origin of the KKK's sheets, as described in Colin Dickey's Ghostland. Decades later, in Vietnam, US military intelligence used the same basic technique against the north vietnamese by broadcasting traditional funereal songs from airplanes along with a wailing voice describing the tortures of hell.