Mate, I haven’t forgiven them for google reader.

They killed my boy.

…we didn’t start the fire…

Yes, do this if you want your work to have the same feel as every other writer who runs their work through an llm.

(Idiots)… Way to roast normal people. Don’t know if they will ever recover. The best bit was putting it in brackets.

You are normal people.

Web in the search, AI in the search, personal assistant in your files, things in your things that you don’t want, didn’t ask for and are struggling to extract.

What is this? A shredder for ants?!

Seconded. I keep trying others. I tried feedly for a while. I also tried readyou (which I still keep on my phone)… But nothing comes as close to inoreader for doing what I want.

Also, I’ve learnt how to aggregate other feeds into a single feed to pass them into it to get around the 150 limit. Not ideal, but I’m cheap.

Was it though? It was full steam ahead even in the early days when the servers were overwhelmed in what seemed like a classic case of the dishoom effect.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine game, but I think folk got carried away.

Hypetrain game + publisher shenanigans… Pretty sure I’ve heard this one before.

Bad AIDS?

Right you are. They started in 2003 a full two years before YouTube and a solid four years after the 90s.

I’m betting they weren’t around in the early 90s. I mean… If we are talking any real sort of publicly available machinima, we must be talking about the start of YouTube.

Unless watching your mate, Gary, do that thing where he voiced over Zangief as if we was a WWF wrester counts.

It is a great step forward, but the barrier to entry is relatively high. You can sign up to substack for free and they take a cut of your profits (that most writers don’t draw enough attention to earn.

Meanwhile ghost charges $9 a month, billed annually.

That’s a significant barrier to anyone that can’t afford to see if their writing will be popular and as long as that remains it will struggle to gain traction in the same way.

And yeah, I know you could host your own too, but again a price point and a technical barrier.

I like ghost, the interface and the ecology, but the truth is that it isn’t going to attract the sort of vibrant, young community it needs if you have to stump up $108 just to see.

I think one of the great things about 2000s/early 2010s internet was the proliferation of free to use platforms like livejournal, blogger and WordPress. Sure there was a lot or jank, but I found some of my favourite writers back when they were scratching their name into the internet.

Get a point for being bold enough to nominate yourself too.

I mean it, that was a cool thing to do and I’m glad you recognise it.

But not the cyclist as the cycle right through it.

Ah, The international defence of “bygones”.

20 years is a lot of time for a 20 year old, right?

The bigger picture is that 20 years is still very recent history.

That’s like saying that people can’t be upset at other countries for discriminating against LGBTQ+ people because American TV in the early 2000’s had jokes at their expense

Yeah. It is. The fact the US still has TV shows that make those jokes, the very fact that morality is relative to the US is sort of the problem here. At best it is imperialism. At worst it is rank hypocrisy.

Do you really think there weren’t people in the US, prominent people, people in politics and in the media, calling for the death of innocent Muslims?

There were tons of public calls for some of the most brutal forms of reprisal. There were mass burnings of the Koran.

Did you miss the bit where the US invaded an entire country that had, it turns out, nothing to do with the terrorist attack at all?

I’m not saying any of what is happening in Israel is right. Far from it. But the idea that the US is somehow in a position of moral superiority here is wild.

You seem to be adopting a revisionist past where actually all they did was rename some fries in the cafeteria of their actual government.

The absolute torrent of global hatred that spewed out through the mainstream US media dwarfed what we are currently seeing from Israel, in terms of both soft insinuation and outright calls for death.

Ok, maybe not that blunt, but it was there. The blueprint and the absurd patriotism that wandered into hostile.

France was a US ally too. And the rhetoric coming out wasn’t from some young men that make pop music but from grown men politicians.

US exceptionalism is one of the factors that has led us here, is what I’m saying.

“This shit doesn’t even happen in the US”

Ok, Trump aside, do you remember the US response to the 9-11 attacks?

Israel is bang out of order, but it doesn’t help that the groundwork for dealing with “terrorists” on a global scale was laid by the US.

Remember renaming French fries to “Freedom Fries” because the French dared to oppose the invasion of Iraq, a country that had very little to do with the terrorist act?