it's been recommended to me many times that I break myself of the habit of doing everything in the web browser, which of course is the pattern of usage that web browsers and web developers have been encouraging for decades now. folks have been pointing out for a long time now that the web browser, which seemed like something new and amazing back in the NCSA Mosaic days of early 199x—oh dear gods was that actually Marc Andreessen who did that, gross—has transmogrified into a bloated miscreation, a kind of half-assed virtual machine that for lots of personal computer users has become the only way they interact with anything, through web applications and assuming that "the cloud" will simply keep all their data for them.

do people NOT notice how telling the names of these things are? "the cloud". how permanent are clouds? do you trust information you see written in clouds? (sighs) anyway

despite decades of experience with personal computers I've never developed much genuine facility for them, thanks to the intensity of the visceral and irrational loathing I've developed for the entire industry. but loathing of such vehemence stems from feelings of betrayal: I despise modern computing because at one time I was naïve enough to put all my hopes into it. there was an interval of childhood where computing really did seem like magic (and also something I felt my father was cool for knowing something about, in his older-fashioned way) so watching that old magical promise shrivel up under corporate misrule made me feel like I'd been tricked, led astray. by 1995 or so I could legitimately feel like computers had ruined my life because of how much time I wasted on them during my failed Caltech undergrad. but even then the magic hadn't completely gone out from them and I could still hope that maybe there was a future for me in learning to program computers and make money in software.

then I moved to Seattle in late 1999 to pursue that dream, and by late 2001 I was out of the industry altogether, for good. yay me

anyway thanks to this unpleasant set of experiences I've utterly failed to develop the kind of easy relationship and swift workflow that computer geeks experience on their machines. my computing habits have been toxic ones. I've alternated between spells of manic hyperfocus and overactivity on computers (probably coming from various introjects hidden deep within the Pnictogen Wing, seizing control for some specific activity) and intervals of loathing and avoiding computers altogether, seeking the solace of friendlier tasks like reading or watching movies or cooking. and in general I've stuck to the lowest-resistance methods of using the personal computer, i.e. I've behaved like an "end user", an unsophisticated consumer of computing using a bare minimum of mass-market applications. so, like any housefrau or clerk or schoolkid who uses computers mostly because it's expected of them, I've been limiting myself to common web applications and using them in the expected way. open a browser, go to the website, type away.

that's a poor idea in practice because one of the most reliable traits of web applications is unreliability from multiple directions. even the best designed website can still be defeated by a browser crash or an Internet outage, after all, but more to the point: it's difficult for a web application to deal with interruptions properly. a native application can easily "save state" and recover easily from a crash, but a web application can't easily do that, so most don't bother. if the website suddenly bombs while you're in the middle of typing deathless prose, just like I'm doing right this moment, welp that's your fault isn't it? you should have been more careful! and anyway you should be grateful you get to do anything at all on a computer, you [slur], I bet your IQ is [get bent]. if you want something better program it yourself, etc.

I trust I've made my point. making software labyrinthine and unreliable has become almost a point of pride with toxic computer geeks, evidence of "intelligence" and a way to screen out the "dumb" people. if you're a "power user", i.e. someone willing to pour a ludicrous amount of wasted time into ferreting out and reverse-engineering the hidden secrets of software which shitty programmers like to put into their shit, then you've got something to brag about. additionally, the programmers are highly likely to be better screened from the consequences of janky and unreliable computing equipment and software. they have the money for the highest quality toys and generous amounts of free time to get everything working to their satisfaction. the ordinary user who wants simply to use a tool rather than turn a ten-minute task into a weekend project in recompiling their Linux kernel gets no respect. hence we're forced to muddle along with semi-functional software.

you'd think I'd have learned my lesson with web applications then and done what (say) my metamour Gravislizard habitually does, which is write all their posts in a text editor first. but I have yet to develop such a habit. even text editors don't seem fun any more, or pleasant to use.

~Chara of Pnictogen

one of the horrible ironies I've come to realize about the difficult relationship between my older sibling and myself, which I'm starting to remember in better detail from past decades, is that we were both maximally afraid all the time, but our addled brains went in two completely different directions with it. and I rather wonder why that might have been. I went towards total dissociation; Frisk went towards the far less pleasant option, extreme paranoia.

cw: mental illness, dealing with extreme emotional pain, paranoia vs. dissociation

and don't get me wrong. I am not reflexively against nuclear power and one of my major beefs with the militarization of the atom is that it's made nuclear power about a million times harder than it ever needed to be

but just imagine being someone who experienced the initial TMI scare—a child at the time maybe—and being frightened by the accident, and then the place just becomes a tomb after that. and finally it's maybe gonna be recommissioned, finally maybe the TMI reactor can do some good again, and what happens? OpenAI or Microsoft or whoever spreads a lot of bribe money around in Pennsylvania in exchange for a twenty year exclusive deal to power some LLM trash generator.

powering homes? pfft that's not "effective altruism", wasting precious nuclear electricity on the common herd, they just waste it! anyway it builds character to learn to live with brownouts. it's more efficient to channel all that juice into a giant Microsoft-branded forgery machine.

[expletive deleted]

~Mono 🦄

There was a time in my life—gawd fucking dammit I hate to admit it, it's like having a tooth pulled for some reason—when I thought computers were COOL. I pored over computer catalogues the same way I'd read Astronomy magazine or the Edmund Scientific catalogue. Remember when catalogues were how you entertained yourself once?

This sort of thing just makes me wanna shrivel up and die. Ooh wow the PENTIUM! Surely this will make my life better! Just think of how much pure rot I underwent on Pentium computers in one school lab or another, playing games—really bad games, mostly, like DOOM II.

~Chara of Pnictogen