Molly Noise 🌙 @MollyNoise@shrike.club

site note - while searching for these stories I hit several dead links, several "not available in your region" and paywalled stories

the current web really sucks

we might need to consider some type of mass curation, some kind of web of trust (thought not WoT because they were tracking people, lol https://www.pcworld.com/article/410966/web-of-trust-browser-extensions-yanked-after-proving-untrustworthy.html)

back on topic -

if search engines, esp google, cant actually find a way to deal with text-generated websites clogging the results with plausible sounding nonsense results (which has RUINED my ability to find things) AND search engines like duckduckgo are (apparently) simplifying what operators you can use (as well as straight up lying about privacy https://www.digit.fyi/duckduckgo-tracking-controversy-explained/)

we might need to go back to webrings at this point, link friends to stuff we know is actually decent

im not kidding

tangent - I really miss stumbleupon, something about the curation of topics / interests was great and now is absent

other tangent -

you have doubtless failed to notice that half the shit anywhere is a screenshot from a different site?

screenshots of reddit/tumblr posts on twitter and vice versa, tiktoks using old twitter jokes read by a foetus, etc etc

isnt that ... grim?

back then it was just difficult finding anything

i remember spending over an hour looking for the name of the intro song to Soul Reaver (its a version of ozar midrashim by information society) and was overjoyed when I found it, im glad places like wikipedia exist for that kind of basic info *now* but the problem we have is trying to

1. step beyond the walled garden (FB, Google, Twitter etc)
2. actually find something created by a human

there was a kind of erratic motion through the earlier internet..... like crawling through a ....web, you might say

and then obv more people got online, businesses got advertising, sites got loaded with popups etc and everyone and their aunt signed up for facebook

the web shrank as it expanded

and now

now whenever I search for anything on google im getting "ai" text-generated websites instead

we have a qualitatively different problem but yet similar to a pre google era

you had an interest in something -> you'd talk to people irl or online / you'd do some searching for it -> you go through a few bad and find a few good sites -> you'd branch out from there

you'd find out who NIN were because some post on a quake fansite would mention them (it happened to me anyway :D)

you might drop into random chatrooms and get band recommendations from complete strangers (how I found out about Laibach)

etc

previously it was the case that if you wanted , say, mods for Severance Blade of Darkness, you looked around till you found some cool nerd who had their own website

I still remember "big truck" from canada (a fansite exists here as the old one is gone :( https://bigtruck.altervista.org/ )

bookmarks *mattered* because you'd not necessarily just be able to search for the site and find it again

webrings helped you find stuff *from* sites you liked

you'd likely know usernames of site creators+trust them

non-linear flow of thoughts on the internet and recurrence:

im older than google

i was literally born in the last century

(this is slightly irrelevant but funny to say)

pre google it was search engines like Dogpile, Ask jeeves, altavista etc

this was long before corporate web consolidation, which imo only really got started in the late 00's w facebooks's ascendance over myspace, google buying youtube, digg being eclipsed by reddit

generally - less sites, you go less places online

also, the most prophetic part of the show from an earlier episode (i hope shes doing well)

we got pieces of the true cross and esoteric Nazi's, a factional secular-religious schism in the millennium group, angels showing up, yee fucking haw

im getting some good samples outta this

we've gone from frank dismissively saying "the killer thinks he's hearing messages from god" and saying he has no faith to a priest

to

frank literally seeing demons, talking to a ghost, sees a divine assassin cast lightning bolt on a devil(?) and is being drawn into a millenarian prophecy of the end times

Frank is now seeing a *literal" demon everywhere

lol, fair

demon (literally) posessed child satanic panic lite episode

hell yeah

strong start - crap ending :/

the solution to this weird mystical evil dog problem is for The Gay's cabin to be burnt down and for him to leave

i am not joking

wtf

not loving this "big city fag who escaped to the country" and lives in a queered up log cabin

like, he's asking for fat free milk and cinnamon for his coffee in the small country diner (oblivious to how annoying he is) offering people diet drinks, lisping along to some old musical, talking in some *imagined* vernacular of An Irksome Gay

dont care for that