Yeah, there’s something about the physicality of a record player and records that changes the experience. At least for me it encourages more focus on the listening. Even if you just put something on while you do something else, you’re going to be interacting with again before super long.

The record, the part you interact with, has size and weight. It’s definitively a “thing”. And choosing a record is a choice. You can’t just press some buttons on a remote and change to whatever else (unless it’s a full music system setup).

Plus the beautiful art on the sleeves, and the time it takes to get the record out forces you to spend at least a little time with that art.

With a CRT TV, you’re using a remote and there’s a lot more abstraction and layers between the physical object holding the content and your actual consumption of it.

VHS tapes are physical, but the moving parts that make it all work are hidden away in the VCR and the magnetic tape isn’t really touchable. Playing one on most TVs required another device plugged into the TV and pressing some buttons on one or two remotes that could just as easily bring you other content without ever leaving your seat.

There is art on the VHS case, but it’s not like it takes time to get the tape in and out, so you’re not as likely to look at it for long.

Most importantly, people are still making new record players and records. There was a long while where it was a very niche thing, and there weren’t a lot of new records coming out, but there were still new players coming out. And the technology is simple enough that the average person could at least keep a player in working order or fix the most common issues themselves. Enthusiasts could even “fix” an old machine with modern parts that are readily available, as long as they function the same. It’s not like people are going to stop making electric motors anytime in the next century.

CRTs simply aren’t manufactured anymore. Depending on the issue they aren’t end user servicable for the average person, or even most enthusiasts. Maintenance is potentially dangerous to the person doing the work. The parts have limited lifespans with no replacements available for the main bits. If the electron guns start to go, you can potentially rejuvanate them with special equipment, or you can end up breaking a damaged one entirely (see 10:32 of this video about restoring an old arcade cabinet).

It’s the same (sans danger to the person doing the repair) for VCRs. No new stock, specialized parts that can’t be swapped for more readily availble modern components, you get the picture.

And that’s also not considering the fucking weight of a good size CRT compared to a record player.

Don’t get me wrong. I love CRTs. Pretty sure I still have my childhood one in my basement, complete with some discoloration from when my 8 year old self had some fun with magnets.

I was legitimately distraught when my wife talked me into only keeping one of the three CRT TVs we had gathering dust, and I think I still have one or two CRT monitors stashed away somewhere.

I spent multiple weekends years ago looking up and configuring the best CRT shader for emulators so it looked like an idealized version of that childhood TV.

But I entirely get why records and record players are such strong and well thought of “nostalgia bait” and CRTs and VHS tapes are not.

My cheapo one has a short gap where it will start spinning before the speakers catch up and I can listen that way guilt free. You can also just turn the volume of the speakers all the way down, but that’s not nearly as disorienting as hearing a half second of the audio all small and tiny and not coming from the right place.

I’ve been thinking for years now about picking up one again that can run RockBox. Used to live out of an iPod nano with that, and didn’t have to carry flash drives. Just plug the usb cable into a computer and use it as one. A lot of modern music apps still aren’t as fully featured when it comes to on the fly playlist creation.

I once binged IT Crowd using an old CRT monitor as my second screen. Definitely a vibe.

Similarly, Jerboa tries to make @indie-ver.se in the post body into a link to a user profile and also stops at the hyphen.

Toss some rooftop park/garden/green spaces up there as well and they’d be pretty damn great, as far as skyscrapers go.

Needs a nice thick vein, like a snicker’s bar.

What are you talking about? It wasn’t mandatory for any console. They packaged it in with some, so you’d get it in the same box, but you never had to plug it in.

And all the voice functionality worked with headsets as well. Definitely watched old roommates do Skyrim shouts that way for around 10 minutes until the novelty wore off.

As evidence: How the fuck is a company as big as Microsoft letting their CEO keep making such embarassing public statements? How the fuck has he not been forced into more public speaking training by the board?

This is like the 4th “gaffe” of his since the start of the year!

You don’t usually need “social permission” to do something good. Mentioning that is at best, publicly stating that you think you know what’s best for society (and they don’t). I think the more direct interpretation is that you’re openly admitting you’re doing the type of thing that you should have asked permission for, but didn’t.

This is past the point of open desperation.

Then you do, in fact, want to be here. So fuck off with the bullshit and accept that you’ve decided you’re here for the ride.

This isn’t tough and the tldr is my first post, but you’re clearly more interested in wallowing in it than moving past your disordered thinking.

Suicidal ideation isn’t a joke, fuckface.

We need shitposts, not shit posts.

Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with those thoughts.

Nice baseless assumption fuckboy.

For those unfamiliar, those are anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds. Mine.

I’ve already spouted my personal psychological issues across other comments. I’m so sorry that I didn’t take the time to qualify my statement with an essay about my personal bullshit here.

I’m truly sorry about what you’re going through. If you feel that way then you aren’t getting the help you need. Notably, you also already have your clear reason not to end it. You should focus on that and work to build more reasons not to instead of getting pissy at an internet stranger for calling people out on glorification of suicide.

To put this as simple as fucking possible, in incredibly vague and simplistic terms (that are still true by personal fucking experience)

• Repeated self talk about how you don’t want to be alive and the like isn’t going to help you or anyone else who is having these feelings. It reinforces those thought patterns that you clearly already understand are not healthy.

• Being able to identify when you are having those disordered thoughts and doing your best to turn away from them helps reinforce against those patterns. It gets easier over time.

• Posting suicidal ideation content into the void of the internet does not ultimately help you or others with handling or moving past those feelings

There is value in knowing you’re not alone in your feelings, and humor reaches farther than other means, sure. But the internet as a whole is clearly far past that point, and I’m getting increasingly more exhausted sitting by and watching this shit be normalized.

I’ve been living with ADHD my whole life (close to 35 years now). Depression (officially) for around 15. Anxiety for around a decade.

There’s at least a five year span of my life that effectively isn’t there. There’s still a small voice in the back of my head afraid I’ll either wake up one morning and be back there, or I’ll come back to my senses and find that the past decade has been all delusion as my car is plummeting off the local bridge or into oncoming traffic lanes from what was a constant battle every day not to just fucking do it.

And I’m not talking about the relatively “normal” time sink from the covid lockdowns.

I have a mental list of various options for how I’d do it if it came to it, backed by actual fucking research. I did back then too, and was fucked up enough to not care anymore about the hurt to those around me or the potential pain to myself from doing it in a dumb as hell way like a traffic accident. Good way to end up still alive but crippled physically and financially for the rest of your life.

Anyway.

One of the hardest things to accept is that there is some logic and soundness to the dumbasses saying “have you just tried not being x?”.

It’s not that simple, true. People who don’t have these issues will never understand, true. It will be some of the most unrewarding, soul draining shit you’ve ever attempted, and there’s no shame if you can’t get there yet or if you can’t do it on your own.

But here’s the worst part: they aren’t entirely wrong.

You build your healthy coping mechanisms and your psychological toolkit to fight against this shit through constant neverending effort to work against the bad internal shit. The more you work against it, the stronger those tools get. Eventually, like repeated practice of martial arts or musical instruments over years, the things that took concious effort will begin to become unconcious. The equivalent of mental muscle memory, for lack of a phrase for it that doesn’t sound silly.

You’ll stumble. You’ll fail. You’ll have to start back over from what feels like (and may actually be) square one. But that work against it is ultimately the core of any way you’re going to be able to keep moving forward.

It will never be as simple as “just don’t be sad, lol”, but some aspect of your journey out of it will have to come from personal effort to not be what you are today.

On top of all that?

This isn’t even an actually funny joke about not wanting to exist anymore. “haha, I don’t want to live anymore even though they do! Rofl lmao.”

Boo! Get some better material.

I think a lot of people doing the funny haha suicidal ideation thing forget that it’s entirely within their power to opt-out of life if they really mean it.

Edit: and the evidence that you’re still here would happily indicate that you don’t truly mean it. So could you all please just cut it out?

I built right as the nVidia 3000 series came out, and when I wasn’t able to get one in the first month or two after release I said fuck it and bought one of the last new 2070 Supers I could find. Hooray for availability alerts.

I’ve been wanting to upgrade parts for like a year now, because it’s just starting to have issues with higher graphics settings on 1440p (had 1080p monitors when I bought it). Glad I went with 64GB RAM (DDR4, as was the standard of the time) and a little above mid range on the CPU. It’s absolutely fucking absurd to me that the parts that are still available (mobo, PSU, and GPU aren’t anymore) have effectively held their price point.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog is one of the best things to come out of that writer’s strike.

A lot of computing “standards” seem to happen in waves. Not as directly as fashion, but still. Mainframes with endpoints are now the cloud.

You probably already know, but for the crowd:

Usually thin clients are clients that remotely connect into a central server that runs their VM, and the VM actually handles the compute. Like older mainframe and endpoint setups.

There’s still some minor compute hardware/resources on the thin client itself, but it’ll probably be more lightweight than expected. Maybe equivalent to an early model raspi?

Yeah, and when’s the last time anyone has legitimately seen Windows bluescreen for lack of RAM? I’m assuming that’s the “logic” here, because in what world would a stuck browser cause a full crash?

Man, I sure love tech memes not remotely based in reality.

Not sure the exact age, but it’s xkcd 1288, they’re up to 3195 now, and they’re usually posted every Monday Wednesday and Friday.

Napkin math says roughly 12 and a quarter years ago. (3195 - 1288 for total comics since, / 3 for number of weeks since, / 52 for number of years since, gets you 12.22 ish)

There’s some slightly more recent ones that are still many years old:

1625:

And 1697:

Lord, Channing Tatum. The Big Bang Theory. Truly from a different time.

I don’t get why these lazy one-off text replacement extensions keep making “tech news”. You can do this shit easily with a short userscript, and there are plenty of extensions for practically every browser that let you set your own text replacement settings. No need for individual extensions for each.

• slams -> literally disintegrates the bloodline of
• keyboard -> leopard
• cloud -> butt
• microsoft -> microslop
•