Omegle’s Downfall: From Chatroom Ideal to Internet Scourge
I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV
Believe it or not (I didn’t), Omegle started out as an innocent friendly idea before it became what we remember it for. This is another chapter in the “the death of the free internet” story. RIP, Omelgle.
Happy Thanksgiving from NYC, everyone!
We’ll have a vegan day, and I’m already drooling. My sister’s a magician, and my mom has unbeatable home recipes. Hope you enjoy yours, if you celebrate 🙂
I fell into an alternative Stable Diffusion hole and I can’t have enough.
AI image generation software that is open source, with hundreds of users creating models for it. Comes with enough options to require a whole new chapter in my wiki. Oh, and it’s free.
I created this in under a minute:
Today, I (re?)learned the value of breaking down tasks, even after I do them. Progress throughout the day is immediately apparent, even though I’ve been doing the same thing for over two hours now, in chunks.
Week 46
This was the week of the analog journal 📓, and I discovered two unexpected benefits.
First, writing by hand is much slower than typing, and if I want my handwriting to be decipherable, I need to slow down even more. This means writing much less. Because I write only a few paragraphs, they need to mean more. This is a good exercise for my hyper-brain, forcing it to slow down and think about what I have to say.
Second, There’s no editing, no spellchecking, no revising. This means that when I close the journal, I’m done. No going back to it to add stuff or edit later. This is a sense of closure that is missing from a digital journal.
On the wiki, I updated my Micro.blog page . It includes more of the philosophy of Micro.blog (the way I see it) with an illustration.
I wanted to create a short video for Lillihub, a new Micro.blog client, but it didn’t come out as good as I wanted. I’ll probably make a page in the wiki for it.
Another exciting addition is computer games 🎮 reviews on my blog. For this, I use Backlogg. The games page is broken for now; I need to improve my knowledge of Backlogg and get all the parts working. Nevertheless, I’m excited to include these reviews. I spend plenty of time on games, and reviewing them as I review movies makes sense.
Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive a Century Later
If you want to look at her manuscripts, you have to sign a liability waiver at France’s Bibliotheque Nationale, and then you can access the notes sealed in a lead-lined box.
Your Sunday random cool fact 🤓
I found my first digital camera 📷 burried in my trunk of memories. I left the batteries inside so it’s probably not to be used again…
Why do you need a technical writer?
A sysadmin or an engineer may know what this means: “When users log on to Domain joined computers, they are automatically mapped to the X: Drive based on the Organizational Unit they are member of,” but the users will not.
Sorry for littering… I found a video game review site, backloggd (inspired by letterboxd), which allows RSS feed. This means I can use it to review games and post to my blog. Still working out some of the issues.
World of Warships (2015) - ★★½
On my Gaming PC, I renamed World of Warship’s desktop shortcut to Sad Addiction. That’s a good summary of what I think about this game.
It is a solid, tactical, and balanced game for the most part. Each ship class you choose plays differently, and there are differences between different ships of the same class. You can upgrade and add special weapons and tactical bonuses to your ships, choose different captains, and more. Technically, the game is stable, the servers rarely lag, and the graphics are excellent. And, being a Wargaming game, it’s also free to pick up and play.
Here comes the but.
Being a multiplayer online game, your fun from it depends mostly on who you play with. Unfortunately, this usually means bad experiences are more common than good ones, at a ratio of about 3:1. What’s worse, the developers understand most of their gamers are teenage hornballs (or at least they act like ones) and target that constantly. Game updates are explained in video clips presented by sexualized women. Avatars are anime and even hentai-oriented characters. Many in-game events emphasize stuff from Megadeath to Transformers. So yes bro, there’s no surprise that the gaming experience often feels like a bad high school reunion.
On the technical side, the game includes huge patches every month or so, with 70% of things you won’t care about (Sailor Moon captains anyone?) or won’t affect your gameplay directly (a ship that costs 60 US dollars). There are also other questionable practices, like an annoying Windows system notification that warns you if you switch away from the game to a different program for a minute or a broken reporting system that colors your name in the game pink (Oh no! Not pink! What would friends say?!) for the most idiotic things, like choosing to play a plane carrier, since some players hate this class of ship so much they report you if you play them.
Since I already commented on the price of some of the ships: the game is free, yes, but that means Wargaming will do whatever it can to get you to buy stuff. A premium account, a season pass, a ship with an advantage in the game, etc. In fact, if you play this game long enough and get to high-tier ships, it becomes nearly impossible to progress without spending at least a little bit of money to move up.
So, if this review reads more like a vent, it’s because it is. I love the game, and I hate the game.
World of Warships (2015) - ★★½
On my Gaming PC, I renamed World of Warship’s desktop shortcut to Sad Addiction. That’s a good summary of what I think about this game.
It is a solid, tactical, and balanced game for the most part. Each ship class you choose plays differently, and there are differences between different ships of the same class. You can upgrade and add special weapons and tactical bonuses to your ships, choose different captains, and more. Technically, the game is stable, the servers rarely lag, and the graphics are excellent. And, being a Wargaming game, it’s also free to pick up and play.
Here comes the but.
Being a multiplayer online game, your fun from it depends mostly on who you play with. Unfortunately, this usually means bad experiences are more common than good ones, at a ratio of about 3:1. What’s worse, the developers understand most of their gamers are teenage hornballs (or at least they act like ones) and target that constantly. Game updates are explained in video clips presented by sexualized women. Avatars are anime and even hentai-oriented characters. Many in-game events emphasize stuff from Megadeath to Transformers. So yes bro, there’s no surprise that the gaming experience often feels like a bad high school reunion.
On the technical side, the game includes huge patches every month or so, with 70% of things you won’t care about (Sailor Moon captains anyone?) or won’t affect your gameplay directly (a ship that costs 60 US dollars). There are also other questionable practices, like an annoying Windows system notification that warns you if you switch away from the game to a different program for a minute or a broken reporting system that colors your name in the game pink (Oh no! Not pink! What would friends say?!) for the most idiotic things, like choosing to play a plane carrier, since some players hate this class of ship so much they report you if you play them.
Since I already commented on the price of some of the ships: the game is free, yes, but that means Wargaming will do whatever it can to get you to buy stuff. A premium account, a season pass, a ship with an advantage in the game, etc. In fact, if you play this game long enough and get to high-tier ships, it becomes nearly impossible to progress without spending at least a little bit of money to move up.
So, if this review reads more like a vent, it’s because it is. I love the game, and I hate the game.
I’m rewriting some parts about Micro.blog in the wiki now that I have a better idea of how it stands out conceptually.
I’ve had a weird Stage Manager problem on the Mac for a while. When I switch from a full-screen app (like my browser) to the left to a stage in Stage Manager (using ctrl + arrow ) Stage Manager switches one stage further.
Does Stage Manager has a “command + tab” for stages?
Why doctors in America earn so much
TLDR: the article claims it’s a closed market geared at profiting a small group of surviving insiders.
More than 100 million people today live in an area without enough primary-care doctors (the problem is particularly bad in rural areas)
And:
Nurse practitioners and physician assistants have been given responsibilities typically reserved for doctors, such as writing prescriptions. Foreign-trained doctors have filled some of the gap too.
Yet, the length of training and the cost of becoming a licensed doctor in the US makes it impossible for many.
Another Manhattan sticker-covered manhole. Lafayette Street. 📷
Microsoft keeps me busy - working on technical documentation. In the picture, my personal notes.
I forget sometimes how expensive NYC can be. Coffee and sandwich cost close to $20 with 15% tip…
Porto Rico Importing has been my go-to for coffee beans 🫘 for about a year. They’ve been around for a couple of generations and have three locations in lower Manhattan. Recommended if you’re in the area and need some beans or a cup of coffee ☕️
Anatomy of a Fall, 2023 - ★★★½
I made a mistake. I went in thinking "murder mystery," but the real death in this movie is the fairy tale of a perfect marriage. And it's brutal.
The acting in the film is so authentic and so close to home, this movie feels more like a documentary to me than fiction. Many families go through the same thing, perhaps not to the extreme that is required from a movie to attract an audience, but the drama and intensity are all there. As a matter of fact, I could argue that in a way it's worse since it lasts and continues into your teenage years and adulthood. These things shape you and your opinions of relationships forever.
As someone who grew up with parents fighting constantly to the point of a divorce, this was an odd healing experience. "Someone had the same life I had, but it ended up even worse," I told myself. And I don't even need to feel guilty since this is fiction; yet, it is so real I know the writers of this movie must have gone through the same things I did.
There is a point in this movie where one of the characters explains how deep desperation looks like, the kind that leads to a bottomless depression. I nodded in my seat and thought, I wish I could explain it this well. Thankfully, someone made this movie.
Be warned, if you have a past or familiarity with intense fighting and/or divorce (I want to say, who doesn't these days?), this movie will rip you apart. For me, this proved to be a healing experience, a confirmation of the choices my family made, and later I did, as an adult. The friend who watched it with me was not OK after this movie ended and needed to recover.
Week 45
This was a challenging week. My mind and soul were at odds with each other constantly, most of which is now documented in my handwritten journal.
I haven’t said much on the topic publicly, and I’m not ready to do so yet: the situation in Israel has affected me greatly. It stands in harsh contrast to my quiet life in the US. I have family in Israel, and I’ve experienced the overall fear during the Gulf War firsthand when I lived there, among other experiences. I’ve come to discover this “soul pressure,” for lack of a better term, has started to shape into something else, something that might be positive in a way I never thought about in a long time.
As I said, I am not ready to talk much more about this further at this point, and being able to say the above words is a lot as is. A step in - I hope - the right direction.
Self-care and reflection took a big part of my personal time this week. I started documenting some of my methods in my wiki last week, and I’m in the process of looking over my old notes, and selecting what to combine with my current notes. There’s a new (but in terms of practice, also very old) Elements section on the wiki.
On the blog, the new search function (built with search space for Micro.blog) indexes conversations and comments; the links at the top changed along with the about section, which in turn led me to look into my Ko-Fi page.
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking about how to be able to get some financial backing from my blog, my pictures, and my wiki. I never liked subscriptions and ads. The idea of charging money for something that should be free, like information and opinions, is even more absurd to me today than it was before. This conflict has kept me in an infinite thinking loop, and I think I’m finally able to put it behind me now. In turn, this will lead to more of “me” on the blog and the wiki and less of my “brand,” which, in a word, is bullshit. I am a human being to talk to, not a brand to rent or purchase.
I feel I should apologize for this vague summary. It doesn’t explain what I did this week as much as it explains what I felt. But I think that’s OK. This is important, and writing it down is progress.