Same. I learned this was a thing just the other day.

I don’t use them often but do find them nicer for parenthetical remarks sometimes.

I’ve never been called out as AI for using them; but if I ever am, I have the strategy of knowing the alt code for them (0151). I even know the shortcut in word to insert one — pressing alt-X with your cursor at the end of “2014”. I also have a vscode macro set up that is just an emdash, just in case I’m in a situation where there’s not a way I know to insert one.

I just got into them and I’ll be damned if I’ll let some toaster ruin a perfectly beautiful bit of punctuation

I miss when it was just goofy proof of concept s*** like seth bling teaching a neural network to play Super Mario Bros.

Or there was this site called “Thisgirldoesnotexist” with several sister sites like this cat does not exist and so on and it would pretty much just generate a headshot of a character. Extremely primitive versions of the image generation technology seen today. But now it’s basically just used to s*** out copious amounts of image files with no purpose and no soul.

Soon it will be Lemmy

lmao about the /ss

I hate that 4chan losers have somehow become the face of nihilism.

ffs moopet, why did you let your internet get this bad

Good God, this one hits home for me. “He’s always in his room on his cuhpyooter.” “He’s a hacker, he’s a nerd.” Ummm, no. I’m just pretending to be a girl and swapping tit pics with other dudes who are pretending to be girls and playing video games. Y’all living in the stone age with your magazines and your Nintendo. I’m in my room with every Nintendo game ever made and a new pair of tits to look at anytime I want.

Now half of those people are fumbling around and giving scammers 200 dollars, constantly glued to their little 30 dollar smart phones and “playing on Facebook”. And of course, they be calling me to ask how to find an app they got from the play store. “It used to just go on the screen I swear.”

Feels bad man

Ive learned a bit off a on about crypto, but never got “into it”. When I first started learning it looked like a really interesting concept with a lot of potential uses.

I can’t remember the details at this point, but when looking at bitcoin I remember seeing so many problems. There was the transaction price, speed, and complexity. There was the insanity of all the wasted energy to “mine” bitcoin. Most importantly, it didn’t make sense to me as a currency. Currency needs to be stable, easy to exchange, and easy to use to buy things. Bitcoin always seemed like a really cool prototype that needed a successor or major revisions.

Then the masses (and braindead hype bros and “visionary” corporate types) jumped on it and turned it into the shit show it is today. When people would get excited about it (“price is going up! Gotta buy now!”), it was clear they either didn’t really know what it was or were trying to hype it to get more money pumped into it. When friends or family brought it up, I’d point out that it didn’t really have any use except as speculation. I’d tell them they if they wanted to gamble, go for it, but they should realize that it doesn’t have intrinsic value (just like all the other currencies) and, as it stands, it’s a really shitty currency. Know that people aren’t buying it because it works well. People are buying it because the price is going up.

People have made a lot of money (or theoretical money if they’re still holding), but it still doesn’t seem like it actually gets used for anything but speculation. The $2+ trillion USD market cap for bitcoin makes my head spin. I’ve always thought that bitcoin was a dead end and would eventually be dethroned by something more viable, but here we still are.

I haven’t looked at cryptocurrencies in a while. Any notable progress in the last 5 or so years toward it being more than a money making gamble?

No shit, that’s back?

I loved it when I watched it in my youth. The theme song still pops up on my playlist once in a while. I did try to rewatch it like 5-10 years ago but it didn’t connect like it did when I was young. Still, lots of fond memories from it and how much it inspired me.

I’ve been wondering when it would come around again.

I watched the first ep of that a week ago. Its a beautiful show, but to me its kind of ruined because instead of experiencing it as something new and experimental i experience it as an already established pop culture. I’ll still watch it but i probably wont lainmaxx like most of the nerds who watched it in their formative years.

Shit man i bought that on dvd centuries ago

Since 2011 for me too. I sometimes step away for half a year at a time, but I always end up back.

As much as the modern image of Minecraft might be obnoxiously shouty youtube shorts, that’s not all there is to it.

You have the groups of talented builders recreating the Lord of the Rings world of Middle Earth at 1:1 scale, and then the crazy redstoners building fully working computers inside the game.

Minecraft has always been for everyone, and I hope it always will be.

God yes. I was one of the first people to buy it. Back when you had to send Notch himself five bucks to play it. I was interested in the concept, but frankly didn’t think it would have much appeal beyond people who enjoy completely self-guided experiences with no set goals.

How wrong I was.

It’s been wild seeing it rise to the top of the pop culture heap, become popular with 12 year olds and eventually result in me seeing a movie starring Jack Black based on it.

It’s wild that it started with me and a handful of guys sending Notch a fiver.

I got my copy back in May 2011. I think the only thing that pisses me off that’s related to its popularity was it being sold and sold again, and so when I wanted to start playing with my children, I had to re-buy the game. I transferred from minecraft to Mojang, but didn’t do Mojang to Microsoft, and so that was that.

Beyond that, I’m 37 and have two kids and I don’t really know if it’s popular and what the community is like, I just play with my kids, and they’re scared of endermen, so it’s fun.

I feel with you but I think it also brought some benefits. Finding time to meet up with my friends has become harder and harder with everyone growing up, studying, getting jobs.

The influx of people during covid catapulted the virtual tabletop solutions ahead and now we regularly play again using foundry vtt since everyone can just sit at home.

But yeah, online everyone just talks about DnD or Critical Roll it feels like and unless you’re on reddit there’s very few communities left.

Ah yes, computer games, I almost forgot it ever existed!

Yes. Man.

I miss when you could look forward to new games at all times.

Now I just play old games over and over. I’ve beat Super Metroid like 8 times this year.

All of the more recent Star Wars slop has made me realize that the original films aren’t really that good either.

Yup. Was a huge fan of the EU books and lore. Wanted to give Disney a chance, so I saw the first few movies. It was like seeing your ex at the club but she’d gone through massive amounts of plastic surgery and they’d removed all the unique features that attracted you originally. Haven’t watched anything Star Wars since the second movie in the new trilogy, literally 0 desire to see the conclusion or any new Star wars content.

Old school Star Wars fans harassed the actor who played jar jar to the point that he considered suicide…

I’ll be honest here; anime has always been a large sea of mediocrity, with the few sprinklings of stuff that is occasionally actually good, and some incredibly rare few things that are consistently good.

That’s like saying too many people listen to music and it’s flooded with mediocrity, there’s a lot of really unrelated genres and time periods, and trends that come and go continually, like everything there’s a big amount of meh tier work.

Now they don’t even bother with localization anymore… which would be a good thing except now we have screens full of untranslated onscreeb Kanji that the story demands you be able to read and overly long and literal titles like “The Time I Gained The Power To Turn My Sister’s Panties Into Angelic Guns By Meeting God On The Planet Golbacky While Drinking My Juice In The Hood That Tuesday Night.” Which aren’t even what people in Japan call the show since even in the tongue of Nippon that’d take too dang long.

Hell you’re lucky if there’s even a dub at all. Let alone one that hasn’t been beaten to the ground by politics

eh it hasn’t declined in popularity to the point people think you’re talking about some ancient thing when you mention it

I got into anime when you had to go to shitty distributor conventions, in shitty city limits hotels, and walk through a big room filled with smoke, rifling through boxes of tapes, while greasy guys in cheap suits tried to talk you into buying shit. The other option were shoddily scanned, black and white, prints of distro catalogues you could order from. They would always be companies you never heard of, from buildings in weird places, and you could never know if you were actually going to get something, or just lose that money. The Sci Fi channel would have saturday morning anime, which would play, uncensored, stuff, but generally only the biggest hits. So it would cycle through Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Bubble Gum Crises, and about a dozen others.

It started to get a better at the end of the 90s, when you had a couple larger distros that came on to the scene, and you could reliably get what you paid for. They would also always have previews of other anime they were selling before the movie started, and it was likely set to some KMFDM track. Then in the 2000s is when it sorts hit a sweet spot, it was easy to get, there were multiple options on TV, and it hadn’t quite yet become totally mainstream. Haven’t really bothered with it much since then. Sometimes I will get recommendations from people I know I can trust to not be suggest the millionth iteration of watered down Fist of the North Star, fan service vehicles, or things that are just collages of bad anime tropes turned into a show.