I'm not sure that sizeof.cat ever understood that 4chan -- like Twitter -- has always been a shithole, the sort of wretched virtual hive of scum and villainy that made Mos Eisley look classy. Maybe it wasn't the internet equivalent of a sacrifice zone to them because for a time they felt like they belonged there. And now they no longer do.

And 4chan has always had porn: /s/, /e/, and /h/ are among its oldest and most active boards. So I'm not sure sizeof.cat knows WTF they're on about.

To me the whole premise of esoteric adult content and originality being mutually exclusive is just plain false. There were red board generals I followed made almost entirely out of OC even. Most are gone now, sadly.

Some of my paranormal blog entries from my site https://forum.marianabay.com/threads/the-hat-man-have-you-seen-him.101/ https://forum.marianabay.com/threads/memphis-rap-sigils.167/ https://forum.marianabay.com/threads/cult-of-kek-how-pepe-the-frog-chaos-magick-helped-trump-win-the-2016-election.95/

Reminds me of the Agora Road forum.

Was bit inspired by that forum yes UwU

here's my newest post https://www.rinet.biz/blog/pocky-sticks

do you have many asian groceries in the balkans? we have a lot in the US and I exclusively buy things like salmon, pork butt, sirachia, chili oil, etc, etc, etc there. They also have all the staples like Pocky Sticks too.

i was underwhelmed when i tried them for the first time. people go nuts for them, but they're kinda mid

id assume there are some in Belgrade now (back then I don't think so) however I live in a small town back home so I've never seen one.

even here, abroad, it was a regular supermarket not a "specialty" one. i guess that's why it was kinda pricy.

asian markets back home are like physical AliExpress lol. cheap-ish stuff of questionable origin

Wrote a post about me finally pulling the plug on my DeviantART account. It's been sitting there abandoned for a very long time as I hoped for the good days to return again, but it only got worse and worse and now I don't even care about redacting my decade old comments anymore to keep it going.

Interesting read. I'm no artist and so was never into DeviantART culture, but even I could tell, between the handful of times I'd visited, how awful its gotten. A shame how natural it seems for this to happen to platforms, reddit in particular is the one I hate the most, though that at least seems to have its eventual successor: https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Anyways, for any other artists interested, here are a couple more DA alternatives:

• https://www.artfol.co/discover

• https://www.artgram.co/

• https://sheezy.art/

Anyways, been converting old family home video tapes recently and decided to write about it. It's tied to 32-Bit Cafe's 'Back to School' code-jam and the IndieWeb Carnival 'Rituals' themes.

VHS to Digital

First Paragraph:

"Do you know what VHS really stands for, traveler? It’s: “Various Hurdles and Suffering”. That ain’t no contemporary definition neither. My father recently spoke to me of his experience with his home video collection from the late 70s / early 80s. He dealt with a big move and, alongside the business of everyday life, had ended up leaving the tapes unattended for over a year. When he finally returned to them, he tried to play each one to no avail. To his surprise, they’d been covered in mold and when he took the matter to a repair shop they told him he’d lost everything, including the player, and that he should throw it all away; out of concern for his, and his family’s, health. Naturally, the loss of mementos such as, but not limited to: tenderly captured fragments of my brothers’ childhoods, lead to considerable sadness..."

Copying my comment over from BlueDwarf: I was extremely lucky to have worked a summer for a TV station where my job was archiving old VHS tapes, editing them and burning them into DVD-s for storage. I didn't even finish asking but my boss already said "Yeah, sure, just don't come in with a giant stack of them.", and so our old family tapes are all digitalized now... or rather, the "family" part of our old tapes to be more accurate.

Bookmarked them, thank you very much. Fun thing about the DeviantART thing, turns out a deactivated account is still functional — you can log in, you can change your e-mail and passwords, you can delete comments, you can even post art to your Sta.sh, unpublished to the wider site but shareable via links. You might be able to buy membership even, that would be funny.

@starbreaker hosted September's IndieWeb Carnival:

• Power Underneath Despair - In your darkest hour, what saved you? What helped you find the strength to carry on?

• Last Call

• His Own Entry: The Power of Satan Compels Me

I feel like starbreaker fugging mastered using anger as a life-force and I'm jelly as hell. For the most part at least, as I also know that anger / hate / defiance isn't all sunshine and butterflies, despite being more likely to accomplish what you want.

@the-syreth-clan also participated with their entry:

• A Love Letter for Martina Syreth

The power another can have on us, our well-being, our will to live is, life-changing. A ride or die partner can mean so much. I didn't touch on relationship(s) particularly strongly in my own as I really wanted to encourage as much autonomy in a struggler's headspace / situation as possible. But powerful for sure.

@andreixyz as well:

• Power Underneath Despair

Man, I'm very close to my parents, so I know anything negative is going to hit me like a train, but in relation to dogs. What a powerful force of good they can be! Dogs, they live on such a simpler, more straightforward plain of existence. Incredibly good at grounding us, at telling us reminding us: "Yo. Bich. Water, now! Food, now! Walk, now! Love, now!" Just their very being can get us back to moving (on), doing, living.

And I think I'm the last from this forum to contribute:

• Salvations - ♫ Maybe you're the same as me ♫

I commented mildly on each post, but if you're at all interested in this topic (Suicide and its ilk), look forward to starbreaker's Wrap-Up. I'll link it here once it's posted.

I'm flattered, but I wouldn't go that far. And I will touch on this when I get to your post in the round-up. But anger is a sword. It doesn't care who it cuts; the guilty and the innocent bleed the same red as easily as the other. Even when I cut the guilty, innocent people still suffer because even the most egregious assholes still manage to have people who love them. And it's a hiltless blade that cuts me when I grasp it, too, so I'm hesitant to draw that sword without good cause. Fortunately, simply having it on my hip is usually enough.

I'm still working on it. I hope to have it done tomorrow. If not then, then possibly Monday.

Thank you. I wanted focus on the "what saved you" part rather than the "darkest hour" part for this challenge. My opinion on suicide (and thus suicide prevention), ego-death, psychosomatic death and all of non-existence's other shades is unconventional at best and controversial at worst, so I didn't mention specifics. I did add "I really did not want to go on, and wished I could just… disappear." into it in post after some consideration — it was a time of me re-evaluating what "life" and "death" really meant to me (in lieu of witnessing the destruction of Koomer and Oguigi) and it felt in-line with what I'd imagine my true emotions were back in the day succintly enough.

Here's the Power Underneath Despair roundup post

It might have been less than 5,000 words if not for the excerpts.

Martina's reply in jest was, I quote "I'm too orderly to be considered a disorder.", which I thought was funny enough to mention given she is a "maid of my mind" of sorts.

It is only different in the sense of… well, I'm living inside my own story first, the writing comes after (with plentiful of artistic license and symbolism). I'd like to thank you for the opportunity once again in that regard: it was a good chance to revisit those emotions and thoughts and make another chapter out of a "dialogue" I had with, uh… myself? A part of myself? Or just simply "Sophia"?

Bravo, incredible work. Well done, yo.

Can you tell the difference between a post on r/spicy or r/nosleep? This one made my friends really mad at me

This was actually a technical pain, I had to code a quiz script from scratch now that I've gotten tired of Wordpress and Photomatt's bullshit. I guess in the end it's fairly simple but I've been coasting off drag-and-drop software for years.

Thanks. Now I need a break before I write another effortpost about my 20 year marriage.

I've been going to the movies lately, and writing about it.

https://starbreaker.org/blog/entertainment/joker-folie-a-deux-2024/index.html

https://starbreaker.org/blog/entertainment/dracula-1931/index.html

I just finished this as well. I use a terminal as my file manager because graphical file managers don't always do what I need them to do.

https://starbreaker.org/blog/tech/recursive-bulk-file-renaming/index.html

Man, oh man, the original Dracula. I remember watching it about 15-16 years ago when my biggest problems with the world were Twilight and Justin Bieber. I was ready: at home all alone with nothing but the computer and a wine glass of tomato juice in my hand to get into the atmosphere for a real vampire movie. I did not enjoy it, I just about fell asleep it was so boring. I expected it to be old and slow and just different but still, I couldn't watch it till the end.

I don't think Dracula was slow; the story moved along at a reasonable clip and the movie was about 80 minutes long at most. But it probably works best in a theater with an audience of virgins, people who haven't seen a vampire movie before and thus don't realize that the OG has become a cliche because it's been imitated or parodied so many times. If I was seeing it at the cinema for the first time as a little boy, I'd probably have a different opinion of the movie than I do as a middle-aged man.

As for Twilight, I never got the appeal or the appeal of hating these books. I read the first 50 pages of Twilight, decided it was marginally better than the first 50 pages of Eragon, and then put it back on the shelf. A lot of YA fiction just seems insipid to me, but that's what I get for reading Clive Barker as a teenager.

I just figure I'm lucky that my wife hadn't gotten into that stuff, though she was into Harry Potter when we got married, though she did get into Fifty Shades when that was trendy.

Yeah, I think it was just my young adult hyperactive brain waiting for something exciting.

I think it was mostly the movies that magnetized the flak: Kristen Steward's permanently wooden face, the absurdity of glittering vampires in picture and just the plot being bad for film really did it no favors. Admittedly, it was just trendy to hate it most of all, it was just a niché that escaped containment and was judged as if it was more than a cheap, shoddy romance flick. People expected a Tarantino, while searching inside an isekai harem anime and I was none the wiser back then.

Maybe, but in fairness to you the 1930s Universal horror movies are pretty tame compared to 1970s offerings like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, let alone horror movies coming out this decade. Abigail, for example, makes Dracula look like the Count in Sesame Street.

I figure there are two possible reasons for Stewart's mediocre acting:

1. She was putting all her acting chops into pretending she liked dick.

2. The script was shit, she knew it, and she was putting all of her acting chops into not laughing her ass off the entire film.

From what I read, the plot wasn't good for print, either. Stephanie Meyer is one of the three reasons I avoid genre fiction written by Mormons. (The other reasons are Orson Scott Card and Brandon Sanderson.)

It would have made a good alternate video for Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" if somebody had taken a machete to it and trimmed it down some.