Let me reword that. We have no liberal democracies as we thought of them in the 90s.

Best part of all this is there are still probably people who think that leftists are the anti-democratic ones…

What is so fucked that the US isn’t an anomaly. Authoritarianism has been on the rise since the 90s and we don’t really have any more true democracies. The crazy right-wing jackasses that people back in 2000 and 2005 thought were just kooks and nutjobs are now 100% mainstream and they’re taking over their respective countries… We are not in a good place.

I remember the first big MMORPG that was on the internet: Ultima Online. I wanted to play it back in the day, but I couldn’t because I was far too young to have my own credit card to pay (and my dad was quite firmly not going to pay) and in the very late 90s, at least where I lived, the internet was still a pay-as-you-play affair, meaning every second you spent was logged and charged on your next phone bill. Sometime around 2000 or very early 2001 the internet got some plans by the company that had us pay a single fixed fee, so I could remain online as long as I wanted without worrying about a skyrocketting bill.

I used to be an avid Plants Vs. Zombies player and I won the Jade League No. 1 spot and earned almost every plant that could be earned and I did it without paying a single dime in real life money. I eventually quit because after you finish the main game and win the Jade League (even once) there really isn’t much else for you to do, and when you grind up your plants’ exp to the level I got them the games become a sinch.

Oooohhh burn!

Am I the only one who wonders how Kermit got mutated?

Some Nazis take deep pride in the slaughter of others. They believe in the Vae victis philosophy of having absolutely no rules of conduct other than ‘I am the last man standing and you are dead’ idea.

A holocaust denier or Nazi might claim that her death was due to natural causes. Ignoring that the reason why she got typhus is due to the horrid conditions in the camp and her lack of treatment in it.

And near them are TRAP…ezoids

Meanwhile your Nazi friends actually set fire to monuments and historic landmarks and people somehow still blame refugees.

Fuck you.

Greta is a shining light of inspiration for every autistic person out there. I was in my mid-30s when she rose to prominence and I want to say that when I grow up I want to be her…

Good thing I never trusted it.

Didn’t the triangle waistshirt fire happen because the employers were fucking assholes and locked the fire escapes? This is like that, but with water instead of fire.

This is why I still download movies and try to keep them. They make up the bulk of the crap I keep on my hard drives.

And there was a time when the computer science world wanted to avoid this… and it was 1990 (yes, almost 35 years ago) when the term digital dark age was coined. It was in response to several things. Firstly: the first voyager probe was sent and the code used to store the information could not be disciphered by (then) the latest computers, which resulted in a problem. The second thing is that governments all around the world were starting to be heavily computerized and the older computers used in the 1960s were 100% incompatible with newer systems.

In the US and UK in 1960 the first census were done by computers, and by just 1976 there were only two computers in the world that could read that data, and one of them was a museum piece.

The FOSS community has done far more to combat this with emulation over the past 30 years than any corporation has ever done. Whether it is for video games like MAME, MESS, or whatever console emulator you want to mention, or by OSes like MS-DOS and Amiga Lemon and countless others that emulate almost every system ever created.

Now these fucks are just shitting all streaming media and forcing normal people to have to break the law by pirating the stuff just to keep the stuff from vanishing into oblivion.

Good thing I never used telegram.

Google maps is the last vestige of Google that I use. I was never a Google search user and I only use Gmail for ‘official’ stuff.

So yeah, I want this to work.

This is why libertarians and many modern authoritarian LOVE corporations. Unlike governments which have some accountability (that has seriously been dwindling) corporations can basically do what they want. Laws are effectively written by corporations so that anyone in any position of authority is never thrown in prison or even needs to worry about that (ultra low level workers can be thrown to the dogs to placate the public every once in a while) and meanwhile the right of protestors has been so seriously curtailed that soon even in formerly first world countries they might be able to break out the machine guns like they did in central America in the 1910s and 1950s. In Britain protestors are being sentenced to record prison terms that were formerly reserved for rapists and muggers.

There is little question that corporations are behind them all.

I am aware, but sometimes my autism still demands I write it anyway. In my experience comments read by people can still inform them even if they have no idea who wrote them and the reason why. I just want to leave the world a better place than I found it.

Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn’t keep an archive for too long, if something ‘suspicious’ happened a few weeks prior that you weren’t informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.

The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.

Robocop… the movie they love but don’t realize is a complete mockery of THEM. As a kid I thought that Robo was just cool, but as I got older and rewatched it a few times, I realized just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

You know what’s one profound thing I noticed a few years ago that flew over my head? The ED-209 robot does not have a non-lethal apprehension method. It only threatens to kill for non-compliance, and then does so if compliance is not absolute. It has no way of restraining or leading arrested suspects if they comply, and no other method to deal with non-compliant suspects other than to blow them away. No tasers, no net gun, no ropes, no tear gas, no sci-fi ‘set for stun’ laser beam, nothing.

On top of that another thing I realized is that Dick Jones considered that thing to be street ready to take on law enforcement. From everything to ultra-violent encounters to jaywalking and parking tickets. What it tells me about his mentality is that he would be a HIGHLY successful billionaire today…