Posts tagged with "internet culture"
Review: The Gig Economy

The Gig Economy, which is as of this writing the single post on a WordPress blog entitled Zero HP Lovecraft, is of and about the internet. Specifically, the internet of 2018, its social media and blockchains. What initially appears to be a particularly flowery and rambling blogpost reveals itself as a fictional story at whichever point you start curiously googling its references to invented subreddits and cryptocurrencies. It’s an ambitious work that doesn’t completely hang together: the strong introduction is let down by an jarring change...

The Mandela Effect and your imperfect memory

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. CS Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew If you haven’t heard of it, the Mandela Effect is a conspiracy theory that uses the shared false memories of multiple people as a jumping off point for outlandish ideas about alternate realities and diverging timelines. While initially appearing to be an interesting thought experiment, the most cursory exploration reveals it to be profoundly retarded. That, or it’s a big joke that everyone in the world but me...

Password strength

So here’s something most people in the know will tell you about setting a strong password: length beats complexity. A 30 character password made up entirely of lowercase letters is going to be more difficult for an attacker to break (whether by brute force guessing passwords on an online login page or cracking password hashes compromised in a data breach) than an 8 character password with the requisite mix of upper case and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. What’s really convenient and almost mind-blowing about this is the...

GamerGate and game reviews

A gamergate is a reproductively viable female worker ant that is able to reproduce with mature males when the colony is lacking a queen. Wikipedia, defining what I wish was the only usage of “gamergate” The web is a machine made to take in stupid ideas and put out overblown campaigns based on hearsay and ignorance. For reasons beyond sane comprehension, the “#GamerGate controversy” exploded onto the Twitterverse a few months ago and instead of being a short-lived, ultimately failing troll attempt, has become a horrible debacle and dragged on for...

[s4s] and internet memes

[s4s] is the best board on 4chan.org because it is the nicest board and because it is everything in internet culture not only accepted but also taken to crazy extremes. It is a funhouse mirror held up to the reddits and 9gags and 4chan boards and all the rest. On [s4s] making a new meme is as easy as posting an image and calling it a meme, preferably misspelling the word meme somehow. All the tired old internet words like “epic” and “lol” are made new again by changing random...