Joe’s Classic Videogames is great and fun nostalgia about the insides of the classic arcade cabinets and pinball machines of yore.

Lots of insider information on how these things worked and what goes wrong with them, and satisfying play on the machines after they’ve been fixed!

If they haven’t been brushing their teeth and there’s visible calculus on them, you could use a metal pick and scrape it off like a dentist doing teeth cleaning, to show them how thick it is.

I disagree somewhat.

A lot of high tech development comes with a greed motive, e.g. IPO, or getting bought out by a large company seeking to enter the space, e.g. Google buying Android, or Facebook buying Instagram and Oculus.

And conversely, a lot of open source software are copies of commercially successful products, albeit they only become widely adopted after the originals have entered the enshittified phase of their life.

Is there a Lemmy without Reddit? Is there a Mastodon without Twitter? Is there LibreOffice without Microsoft Office and decades of commercial word processors and spreadsheets before that? Or OpenOffice becoming enshittified for that matter? Is there qBittorrent without uTorrent enshittified? Is there postgreSQL without IBM’s DB2?

The exception that I can see is social media and networked services that require active network and server resources, like Facebook YouTube, or even Dropbox and Evernote.

Okay, The WELL is still around and is arguably the granddaddy of all online services, and has avoided enshittification, but it isn’t really open source.

Calling a male a “nephew” in Chinese 契弟 kai dai is calling them a male prostitute.

Usually it doesn’t mean target male has actually been used sexually, but commonly used for general belittlement.

This term comes from ancient times: Traveling businessmen who would take a young boy with them for sexual use, but if anyone on the road or destination asked who the boy was, the business man would euphemistically explain “He’s my nephew”

契弟 kai dai is commonly translated as “nephew” but it means “adopted brother”

In Chinese we say “your mouth/breath smells”

It’s true that crypto is commonly used in online drug transactions, but there are other justifiable uses, such as moving money out of countries with repressive regimes like China and Russia.

Also paying for certain genres of porn that major credit card banks like Visa and MasterCard have somewhat arbitrarily designated as unacceptable, such as certain types of BDSM e.g. consensual nonconsensual, anything that shows blood, kinky hypnosis and mind control, vampires, etc.

Of course obvious child porn and bestiality should be banned period, so some regulation is needed. But I’m not sure that the government delegating responsibility for regulation to the credit card banks is the best way to do it. The rules and enforcement are completely arbitrary and cannot be appealed.

Crypto as an investment, and NFT for digital art, sure it’s a scam.

Crypto as an extralegal means of moving money is totally useful.

We don’t hear about them anymore, therefore the aliens have given up on researching or invading or infiltrating the hooooman planet.

Or is it social expectations to wear pants that were developed by subtle marketing by the pants corporations?

E.g. All the marketing you have ever seen shows models wearing pants. Therefore you believe everyone, including yourself, must wear pants all the time, because you believe this the norm.

Toothpaste.

You only need to squeeze out an amount the size of a pea on to the bristles of your toothbrush.

The image of squeezing along the entire length of the brush bristles was concocted by an ad agency, a la Mad Men, to make consumers use their toothpaste faster, hence buy more product.

To continue my travails:

Httrack didn’t do a great job: It was slow, even copying from the same machine, and it flattened the directory structure of the website it was writing, making it almost un-navigable.

Here’s where Cyotek WebCopy shines: It’s copying the website from SurfOffline’s database webserver quickly, so I should have the entire website re-extracted very soon!

Optional: Add olive oil, or just about any kind of cheap melting cheese, or even milk, or non-dairy creamer to give it richness.

Also optional: Add crushed red pepper flakes, just like the ones for pizza, to give sauce some kick.

Then ye need plenty of wenches! And he-wenches and nonbinary wenches, if ye be that way!

And grog! Plenty of grog!

The problem with older media is that you have to actively create torrents, the tracker might fold, etc.

With eD2K, it’s very old school P2P filesharing, just give it a directory and the files on it are shared on the network.

Of course, the “push” part to torrent tracker sites isn’t as active.

I use both torrents and eD2K, depending on what I’m looking for.

User and community filters aren’t working.

I changed my base instance to lemmynsfw.com, entered some community and user filters, but their posts aren’t being filtered.

pornlemmy and lemmynsfw are both linked to each other, but there isn’t much content on pornlemmy so far.

The porn instances got defederated by most of the “mainstream” instances, including this one, lemmy.ml.

That strikes me as a bad move, because free porn == user growth

Cries in Street Fighter…

I installed and played around with ArchiveBox after your suggestion.

The login/cookie copying function seems to be oriented to how Chromium is installed on Linux, which I don’t have up and running in any meaningful way, and there doesn’t seem to be any support place where I can ask questions.

Okay, I found SurfOffline that does the trick without too much hassle, but…

It’s verrrrrrrry slooooooooow.

It uses Internet Explorer as a module, and calls each individual resource separately, instead of file copying from IE’s cache, which is weird and slow, especially when hundreds of images are involved.

And SurfOffline doesn’t appear to be supported anymore, i.e. the support email’s inbox is full.

edit: Aaaaand SurfOffline doesn’t save to .html files with a directory structure!!! It stores everything in some kind of sql database, and it only saves to .mht and .chm files, which are deprecated Microsoft help file formats!!!

What it does have is a built in web server that only works while the program is running.

So what I plan to do is have the program up but doing nothing, while I sick Httrack on the 127.0.0.1 web address for my ripped website.

Httrrack will hopefully “extract” the website to .html format.

Whew, what a hassle!