I.T Unprofessional

Hey all, took a big break for the winter seasons from writing here. Wasn’t really in the mood to write much to be honest but I’m getting the feeling again now that Spring has sprung and I’m starting to brainstorm a few things I could write about! Hope everyone has been doing great while I’ve been gone. I’ve had my ups and downs but all in all I can’t complain I’m doing quite well!

I’m talking about physical media again cause well its just awesome and important okay? Have you noticed how many streaming services there are nowadays and how none of them are making any money with the exception of like Netflix ( and how Netflix is increasingly becoming more greedy ) ? It sucks!!! If you end up paying for all of these services you’ll be out of so much money monthly and for what just to watch content that is on a cycle rotation? The movies that YOU want are NOT at your fingertips anymore its just whatever they feel like serving up that month.

There has to be a solution to this right? Yes! there is!! buy Blu-rays and DVDs!!!! You might think well that doesn’t make any sense since most streaming services are like 12 bucks at most how would buying physical media help?

Well its simple, realistically think about how many movies you actually watch with your subscription and how you feel compelled to use it since you’re paying monthly. With physical media its just a onetime purchase and its yours FOREVER ( unless u break the disk ).

Another nice thing is you can own the movies you want! You can buy them online which is a little more costly, but if your patient thrifting is the way to go. You can usually pick up DVDs and Blu-rays for around $2-$3 dollars which is a absolute steal!

You probably don’t have a device that can play DVDs and Blu-rays but a nice device that can do both AND play games is PS3. You can usually pick one up for $100 bucks or even cheaper if you can find it in person. Its a great multipurpose device and helps reduce on waste.

Anyway that’s my spiel collect and preserve physical media! Have a good day!

Making a little post to show some pics of the Pittsburgh Ren Fair I attended. Had great fun with good people, its nice to dress up and act silly as an adult sometimes. Hope I can attend again next year!

This is the crew I went with, I of course am the king…

Snagged a pic with one of the guys who run the show called ” The Duelists ” very funny show well worth attending.

To end, a feast fit for a king…. CHILIS!!!! In full ren fair attire of course, we got so many looks but it was totally worth it. You gotta just be silly sometimes even if everyone else is looking at you weird.

I have many more pics but thats all I’ll share for now. Very grateful to have friends to go with and share the experience with, its nice to go and do something completely out of the ordinary.

BONUS

Video of a joust we attended, super cool these guys are good!!! Gotta be sweating like crazy in all that armor though. Still super cool and grateful to have watched.

Hey internet, sorry for not posting for months, work was crazy and I didin’t have much to say but i’m back to talk about something thats really intrigued me lately, Minidiscs. Minidisc is like a normal CD but mini!! Its inserted into a small player like a casette and played. It sounds very simple but something about it feels so futuristic to me.

The cool thing about Minidisc is how the blank CDs are re-recordable so you can create a playlist on a Minidisc and then go back and put a whole new playlist on it, super cool! You can do this two ways, one from Analog by connecting it to a another device like a Radio or Vinyl player. Or you could use NETMD which allows you to upload MP3s and whatnot to the CD which is what I personally use.

I think what attracted me most to Minidisc is the aesthetic. The blank CDs have a very cool future looking design and are just so unique, I’ve never seen anything like it. Carrying a small player with me to play my Minidiscs is also very cool and unique feeling. I think the main appeal at least to me is its novelty, here is a format that was almost then next big thing but not quite. And as someone who loves CDs, Minidisc is a super fun alternative to grow alongside my CD collection.

You ever browse the internet and see nostalgic screenshots old Facebook and Myspace? These posts always resonate with me not because of nostalgia for a era I was too young to experience, but because of the fun nature and community seen in the posts.

Back in the early days of social media there were no rules, you just posted whatever you want. Nowadays if you post anything out of the ordinary you can almost feel the digital glances at you and judgmental thoughts ( in reality nobody cares but it can feel this way because of the web etiquette developed over the years ). But back then you’d just post whatever you wanted. Like South Park? Post a pic of you watching it! Generally back then you just posted whatever came to your mind and everyone would interact and it generally felt like a community. Social media just feels so distant and bleak these days I feel as if its almost unsalvageable.

The only place I feel like this culture of fun interaction and saying whatever comes to your mind is Spacehey which is just meant to mimic the early days of Myspace so it makes sense. Now I’m not saying you CANT do this on existing social media sites, it just feels like your doing it alone and it doesn’t seem anyone is going to join in. I recommend you get on a nice site like Spacehey and start talking to cool people like I have if you find yourself missing these types of interactions on the internet.

In the end it all comes down to the same thing, these sites used to be great but capital took over and they stopped listening to the users and started listening to shareholders. This is the inescapable cycle of products under our current economic system. I’m a hopeful person though and websites like Spacehey give me hope that we can still create products meant for people, not shareholders. We can still foster genuine relationships on the internet and have fun; we just need to do it in the right places.

You guys remember that brief moment of time when Twitter was fun? I cant stand to even think of the place now that dumbass Elon Musk runs the whole thing. I can’t stand that guy he seems to ruin everything he touches with shocking ease. He used to be such a worshiped individual on the internet I’m glad we all see him for what he is now, a royal dumbass.

For a brief moment though, before twitter was X and wasn’t a scum pit it was actually pretty fun. I remember interacting with people and sharing funny memes and it really felt like a nice general vibe with the occasional funny twitter beef but now you get the worst alt-right warriors fighting the worst leftist knights and its not even fun fighting its just lame.

I think we should all go back to myspace ( USE SPACEHEY ITS FUN) or something similar, we all just need to treat each other with decency and look at cool pages I think then we can make social media fun again.

Hiii everyone sorry for not posting I’ve been busy!!! I come bearing gifts though in the form of more obsolete tech I recommend you to buy. Today’s post is about these cool Sony Walkman USB MP3 Players.

I got this one straight out of Japan for only 15 Dollars! ( 10 Dollars shipping but that brings it just under the average price for one of these). This thing is so cool guys there’s so much to talk about. I really like the little album pictures it displays when a song is playing. The sound is pretty good as for such a small vintage device. To add music you just pop the top off of it which exposes a USB port that you can connect to any PC. Its small size makes it perfect to throw into your pockets if you’re looking for a dedicated device to stream your music. I think it aesthetically looks great too, the colors on this are very unique and the Walkman Logo is iconic.

Its not all cookies and cream with this device though, there are some drawbacks. The main drawback is the small size it only carries about 1gb – 2gb worth of music depending on the model. You can fit around 5-10 albums on it which will be good enough for most people but its still a bummer that you can’t throw everything you want on there, although it does make you appreciate the songs you choose even more. Another drawback is the software you have to use to get music onto it. I had to download the old 2008 Sony Soundstage program off the Internet Archive to get music onto it, you can’t just dump mp3’s onto it. It took me about and hour to figure it out but after that its pretty easy to load music onto it.

All things considered even with its drawbacks I think its a pretty cool little thing that can make a nice gift at its low price. I’m going to try and turn mine into a necklace I can wear around and listen to some tracks on the go ( Heavily inspired by the Persona 3 Mp3 Player ). My model is the NW-E023F if you’re looking to pick one up for yourself!

I used to love going on Etsy. There used to be so many unique little handmade items made by small business owners trying to get by on the internet. You wanna know what it is now? Amazon 2. The search results are just filled with cheap Chinese manufactured goods from AliExpress! What the hell happened?!?!

I don’t even know when this change took place but you can’t search a single thing without seeing it. Its terrible the state of Etsy it used to be a little safe space away from giant wasteful manufacturing.

Etsy is even trying to stop it either they just let it flood the search results and let people who don’t know get scammed by these shitty products. What a complete betrayal of the initial premise of the website. This is what happens when you let capital influence decision making it all goes to shit pretty quick.

I hate this trend of everything becoming shit on the internet it makes me think im going crazy. I swear I sound like an old person when I say everything is becoming shit but it really is true! True enough to have a Wikipedia page now at least….

There’s going to have to be some radical change regarding how we use the internet soon or its just all going to be junk soon. I’m sure some brilliant furry will figure it out hopefully.

When people think of the ultimate gaming device on the go, a couple devices come to mind usually. The Steam Deck (Which I still love despite what I’m going to say in this blogpost), The ROG Ally, the Nintendo Switch, even your phone but to me the ultimate device is going to be the PlayStation Portable (1000 version to be specific).

That statement might raise a few questions, why would a portable gaming device from 2005 be the ultimate device for gaming on the go in 2024? I’ll give you a few reasons why number one which to me is the most important is portability. As much as I like the Steam Deck and Switch they aren’t very good for spur of the moment on the go gaming, you usually have to pull it out of its case and get all set up which takes maybe only a couple minutes but then in my mind I really have to commit to wanting to play something especially in public.

Which the PSP all I’ve got to do is take it right out of my pocket and flip a switch then boom I’m back into my game where I left off. The other portable device are just too damn big, with my PSP I can just shove it in a pocket and carry it around very easily.

Another reason I love the PSP is the layout. With the other portable gaming options controls can feel a little clunky and holding the thing and become tiresome (especially with the Steam Deck). But the PSP is super light and the controls are very compact but feel great except for most first person shooters which can be a little rough but Metal Gear Peace walker plays like a dream to me.

Which brings me to my next point the games. There are some FANTASTIC titles on the PSP, Metal Gear, Tons of Racing Titles, Little big Planet, and many many more which I wont cover but yeah its got some amazing titles to choose from. But if the base catalog doesn’t suit your needs you’ll be happy to know this thing is easy as hell to homebrew and can emulate some PS1, Gameboy Advance, SNES, and other consoles quite well on the go. There’s also some other cool things the PSP can do once homebrewed like movies on the go and much more. There’s a whole scene testing the limits of what this thing can do so give it a look if you’re interested.

I think my final points for getting a PSP is the aesthetic and price. I think this thing is aesthetically gorgeous and you will look super cool in public if you pull one of these out and starting doing a little gaming while you’re on the bus or in a shop. And you can usually pick these things up pretty cheap. If you want the best experience I’d recommend either modding or buying a pre-modded IPS screen for it as the base display can be a little lacking especially after all these years. The IPS mod brings it back into the modern era and looks stunning.

So yeah, save the money on grabbing a Switch or a Steam Deck that’s just going to sit around and get yourself a PSP!

Do you use Facebook? Probably not if you’re not over the age of 40, but if current trends persist soon nobody not even your uncle is still going to be using Facebook. Since the emergence of AI image tools there has been increasingly large number strange posts like the ones below on Facebook that go completely viral, we’re talking around 300k likes

To the less technically literate there might appear nothing wrong with these pictures but on closer inspection you can start to pick apart the flaws and easily deduct that these are AI generated. But that’s not even the start of the problem with these posts, you see all those comments? ALMOST NONE OF THEM ARE REAL ACCOUNTS. Let me clarify they might have been real people at one point or are based off of real people but 90% of these accounts are just bots feeding into the bot account that posts these AI generated images based on engagement.

What does that leave us with? An infinite self feeding loop of garbage content where AI controlled accounts will engage these posts and AI accounts that will post images based on what it perceives to engaging content. But since real people aren’t interacting with these accounts it just generates nonsense for the bots to like and comment on mass.

This to me signals the beginning of the end for social media as we know it. This content is made for NOBODY. This content is garbage made to feed an endless cycle of robotic spam. Its going to keep expanding until eventually it consumes all of our feeds unless Facebook makes a serious effort in trying to crack down on botted content. Its kinda crazy if you think about it, these posts use our real life resources and server space to exist yet its purpose isn’t to serve the humans that created it, but other bots. Who knows what the future will hold for us as AI becomes more prevalent, I’m scared one day I’m going to be wishing the bots went back to liking pictures of Crab Jesus instead of whatever sinister task we give them in the future.

Thanks for reading, take care everyone.

Ugh its so hard to be the person you want to be sometimes. I’ve been slacking on working out the whole week and every time I get home I usually only have enough energy to do like 2 things then shower then sleep. Its frustrating but it usually doesn’t last forever so I hope I get some energy backs soon!!! It upsets me but im trying not to be upset since I can’t be perfect and achieve all my goals every single day sometimes being alive is a good enough goal for a day. In the end I hope I become the cool person I am to be.