Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

  • 0 Posts
  • 746 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 13th, 2024

help-circle

  • This year marks three for me. Also still learning.

    I’d quote Abe Simpson about being “with it” until they change what “it” is, but that doesn’t quite apply online. You’re always going to be a couple of steps behind with something as niche things crawl out of the darkness, ever mutating as they turn mainstream.

    And to think, when I started on the Internet, I was already technically an adult, but I didn’t act like one, that’s for sure. Some lessons were hard learned.

    Some of it is immortalised if you know where to look. I’ve changed my pseudonym a handful of times as a result.







  • There’s part of an area in Half Life: Opposing Force that has something like this. You later end up using the cannon yourself to open up the path forward.

    You could also be thinking about a couple of parts of the original Half-Life as there are a couple of times with mortar fire (including the ability to use them yourself at one point), and there’s definitely at least one rocket launch silo in the game.

    Depending on how strong your recollection or how muddled your memories these could be a match.





  • Licence / license, and practice / practise. I have to look them up every single time because I forget which of each is the noun and which is the verb, and even then, there are situations where using the noun as a verb might actually be the right thing to do and I hate the whole thing. So I probably still get those wrong whenever I use them.

    Barring brain farts (increasingly common) and muscle memory leading me astray on the keyboard, my spelling is otherwise fairly good, but those pairings I could do without.





  • Police police police police. Police police police police police police.

    (The people who monitor and ensure the good behaviour of (i.e. “police” as a verb) law enforcement (the police) are called the “police police”. The people who do the same for the police police must therefore be the police police police. The original phrasing structure is “2 verb 1. 3 verb 2.”)



  • I’m not sure memes in the original Dawkins sense can be art, so I suppose we must be talking about the modern sense of “funny images and short videos”.

    Elitists will say that for something to be art it has to be produced by someone who is capable of producing traditional kinds of art, but who for artistic reasons has chosen to do otherwise (see: Cubism), and there’s the whole problem of, at least for images, certain meme templates being recycled over and over which diminishes the artistic value of any specific instance.

    But for specific rare instances? Sure. Art is often in the eye of the beholder, regardless of the intent of the creator.

    And as for videos. See any Vine compilation. There’s bound to be at least couple in there.

    Finally, if you really want to turn an existing meme into art, use those elitist traditional methods to imitate one. An oil-painting triptych of “OMG they were roommates” without captions would be both art and lean into the meme incredibly heavily.

    Would that be a comic strip writ large? Maybe. But there’d be nothing inherently funny about two frames of a woman walking and then a man’s face in close up. But if you know the meme, buddy, that’s art.