umbraroze

In the beginning these were not available. Also I remember them costing the same as the C64 itself. As soon as I could afford one I got one obviously.

I guess I was lucky. My parents got me my first Commodore 64 C second hand, and it included the floppy drive. Guess it was affordable that way.

I just another item that could a generational riddle: the hole-punch that made your one-sided floppy two-sided.

Ooh, I didn't have one of those fancy pieces of gear! I lived in a small town. Used to see disk notchers at the book/stationery store, which had the reputation of being slightly pricy place but was the only store in town that had computer stuff at the time.

Instead, I figured out a way to cleanly cut the notch using scissors. Two horizontal cuts, then two cross cuts, then carefully cut out the remainder.

Of course it evolved into a crab.

It was either that, or... something else I guess

The sad part about being a turtle is that you can't really invite anyone else to your home. 🐢

The tape drive has a hole on the top for adjusting the azimuth, but one of my friends basically just removed the top cover entirely for easier access to the screw. I did that too for some particularly tricky tapes.

Another of my friends had basically an unearthly knack of adjusting this stuff. Dude would just walk up to the tape drive, masterfully tweak the screw for a second, and it'd work. Which makes no sense.

This was all a kind of mysterious part of the Commodore 64 culture to me. Because I had a floppy drive and that's what I obviously preferred to use.

"How do I rotate this PDF? I need to print it."

"Uh, you can just set it to print in landscape mode."

(Scornful stare, for using space age words) "NO! I must ROTATE the PDF!"

I'm sure I had a conversation like this with one of the acquaintances of my dad

Short summary: Elon gives Elon some Elon and congratulates Elon for being such an Elon, that big money boy he is. Money!

That's not how making babies works. That's not how any of this works!

Ah, Julius Streicher. I barely had heard of him when I read about the Nuremberg trials. Dude was a propagandist. And they hanged him. He was literally edgelording until his last breath.

At first I was like "well, the other guys they hanged literally oversaw genocide, but this guy was a propagandist. Kinda harsh punishment for a propagandist. Wonder why?"

But now that I've watched the online hate pipeline run it's course for a while and do its thing, I kinda get it.

I'm advocating harsh bans for the birdsite royalty, and if they don't volunteer for that, maybe they should be put somewhere where they can be monitored to not propagandise. Not advocating for death penalty, it's categorically wrong.

No, the 1990s didn't smell of sex and candy. It smelled of a banking crisis and a box of 3.5" floppies.

I'm an artist / writer and I don't see problem with generative AI when you're at a really early concept stage. Exploring ideas, try to get over creative blocks, that sort of stuff. Maybe the AI hallucinations and fuckups can give you ideas worth exploring.

But using them as a literal basis for artwork you work further on is a fool's errand. It's easier to maybe take ideas from there, but work from scratch anyway. And I do realise that even that is controversial.

Also, could be a legal quagmire. Also not happy about the copyright appropriation situation or the environmental impact.