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In Ubik by Philip K Dick, the door of his apartment won't open unless he pays it five cents each time. Life imitates art.

“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

I still hold that the scene where Grant and Sattler first see the Brachiosaur is one of the best acted (and I suppose directed) scenes ever. That subtle feeling of vindication when his theory is proven right against all the critics[1]... "they do move in herds"... and then the sheer wonder and child-like awe of Grant/Sam Neill when he just says, agape "...how'd you do this?" just spellbinds me each time.

I just couldn't imagine having that kind of emotional reponse as a viewer with today's CGI design by committee shitfest that seems to be the norm.

Also, don't forget that the first movie was based (fairly) closely on a riveting book written by a fantastic story teller - that sure helps with telling a good story.

[1] who you don't even know about - its just the way he says it makes you understand that he's been advancing that theory for a long time and facing a lot of criticism for it.

I take it to mean that they're composed well: there's a balanced and sensible spacing/padding, the lines are a good weight, they are easy on the eye, there's a consistent look and feel between all of them etc etc.

For instance, I could mangle some SVG icons and while you could scale them to an infinite size.. you wouldn't want to use them ;)

These look great BTW!

Thanks for ZZT Tim. That game changed my life when I was starting high school in the mid 90s; it was one of the ways I learnt to really have fun with computers as well as to program and make my own games.

Also, Unreal Tournament still holds a very fond place in my heart. I don't play games these days, but on the very rare occasion I feel like it, that's one of my major go-tos, just for the nostalgia of Facing-Worlds ;)

My wife started buying Who Gives A Crap for our household a few months a go and we love it. We went the "mid-tier" quality (although we experimented with the the lower - 1ply tier at first wasn't that bad either). We also get the huge pack with 10 or 20 boxes of tissues included.

Most mainstream toilet roll brands source their wood pulp from boreal forests in Canada, which are very old and take between 20 to 50 years to regenerate.

it's this kind of crap (pardon the pun) that makes us feel good about using recycled TP.

also, i have to give a shoutout to whoever Who Gives A Crap's copywriters are; the stuff they put on the undersides of the tissue boxes and TP rolls is genuinely hilarious. I worked along side great copywriters years ago, and I can just picture those kind of people sitting around brainstorming funny stuff to adorn the wrapping with.

edit: it's made from bamboo, not recycled.

It kind of sickens me that we only have this because some smart person dumpster dived behind the building of a bankrupt game company...

Who threw this stuff out?!

How much other irreplaceable source code has been lost because some janitor threw out some boxes of "old floppy disks" or whatever when everything was getting cleaned out...

oh gee, i just LOVE websites that have about 300 pixels of readable space.

get rid of the huge fixed headers and fixed footers garbage. PLEASE. fuck this stupid trend.

I'm in the same boat as you my friend. Mid thirties guy, hit adolescence right as the net was blowing up mid 90s. I still remember the first mp3 I found on a computer in the library at school and it blew my freakin mind how small it was (I had experimented with ripping CDs before resulting in huge, huge wav files...)

I think it's natural that any time things get as absolutely crazy as they are right now, there's a natural yearning for "simpler times".. I'm sure when the technological revolutions came around in previous generations (and centuries) there was the same yearning for more pastoral times.. I think what we're both feeling is that same kind of yearning.. This doesn't make what we're feeling any less relevant or important.

In my opinion, the real murderer of the internet was the iPhone and then soon after facebook. Suddenly every single person has an internet machine in their pocket and the flood of normies began. Even early 2000s, most people online were there for learning or fun (actual fun) as opposed to just social validation (FB/IG/TW) or pure media consumption (netflix, YT). Broadband/ADSL probably contributed as well, as it was no longer "I'm going on the internet", just "I'm always on the internet"... To me, somehow there's a psychological difference to that.

I have vivid and pleasant memories of scouring geocities sites in the 90s for new X-File JPGs that I didn't have in my collection yet, episode summaries, or FAQs about my favourite bands. I got chatting with Blink 182's web master at one point when I had some suggestions for their site. Now all of that is pretty much just done through the grinding gears of facebook and with far less charm or enjoyment.

I met and chatted with randoms on ICQ, I played C&C over Westwood chat. I did 33.6k dial up games of Duke 3D with my friends, I learnt to program QBasic, I was blown away when I discovered Nesticle, I collected lists of cheats for games I'd probably never end up playing, and the list goes on.

I miss the basic charm of "personal websites" too, I guess. It's all just on facebook now. In the vein of geocities sites; simple designs, simple technology (no fucking React or Angular or whatever's popular these days); just a bit of HTML and some styling and some pages about your interests. Buy a domain name, dump it on an S3 (cheap/free) and just keep updating when you feel like it. (I still feel like with how bad google's search has gotten you'll never be discovered, but maybe: who cares..) Maybe it's one of those "create the future you want to see" type things. Small, but if everyone got off facebook and did something like this, maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

John Carmack is an absolutely brilliant speaker. Conversational, captivating and effortlessly natural. I could listen to him talk all day about the most arcane bits of graphics development which i'll never understand but am fascinated by regardless.

His QuakeCon talks are particularly good.

QuakeCon 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28

QuakeCon 2012 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk

I like his talks because he's always interested by what he's doing and it tends to make me interested again in code.

Linus Torvalds is another surprisingly good speaker. His talk on git - one of the dryest possible topics - was very interesting. There's not many other people I'd sit and listen to talk about SCM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

Just want to say; I'm checking in after a few days of using it and... if i think about it, i guess i'm clicking that "killsticky" bookmark less and less.

its funny, suddenly i don't even have to think about it, which is what this is all about - reducing cognitive load.

re inclusion on ublock and the like: it should probably be an option that people can enable/disable; ublock is more about blocking ads/trackers, but i would wager that most people are annoyed with sticky stuff too.

ready for the next challenge?.... getting rid of sites that fuck with the default scroll behaviour ;)

thanks again :)

I just have a bookmarklet to kill all "fixed" position divs.

I'm clicking it more and more these days - even those damn fixed navs that take up a stupid percentage of the screen give me the shits.

If clicking the bookmarklet doesn't get rid of your stupid modal newsletter sign up or annoying sticky nav, I'm just closing the tab.

Here's the bookmarklet btw:

javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()