Opinion

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Why is Advertising So Blatantly Bad

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

There is some sort of weir shift going on where suddenly companies are increasingly cracking down on thing like Ad Blockers and shared accounts and just generally trying to “monetize more”. I don’t know the in and out details of business operation but I saw it mentioned that part of this is related to the recent raising of interest rates. Essentially, when interest Rates are very very low, debt is profitable (somehow??), so investor types would be more willing to let a company lose money or just not be as profitable as they “could be”. I’m not an expert on this. The moral of that comment was more that because interest rate are rising, investors want more actual return, so prices get raised and crackdowns come on ad blocking.

The focus for today is more on the ad blocking part, and the ads in general.

What Is Ad Blocking

In case you’re loving under a rock, it’s probably good to touch on what Ad Blocking is, and to some extend, how to do it. The what is pretty easy, it’s in the name, it’s the blocking of ads on websites or videos. There are a ton of ways this can be done, I use several layers of blocking myself, and see very very few ads when browsing online.

The simplest and easiest is with browser plug ins. The most effective and easiest is U-Block Origin. At one point there was something just called U-Block, which wasn’t as good, and there are also a couple just called Ad-Block, and Ad-Block Plus, neither of which is as effective. U-Block Origin is the one to use. By default, it chops out a LOT of ads. It also has tools built in to create custom filters as well. For example, I have mine set up to block anything from twitter.com and x.com, because Fuck Musk. I also use the built in element picker to block some annoying “subscribe” pop overs on Youtube. Another useful use for the element picker on Youtube is blocking those annoying “watch next” thumbnails that pop over the last 20 seconds of every video.

You don’t need all this extra though, since out of the box, it does it’s basic purpose.

It’s not always just about ads, I have several other plug ins to filter my web experience. I have one that specifically blocks any Rupert Murdoch owned media. I have a similar one that blocks websites known to spread Climate change denial-ism. Another good one is Consent-O-Matic, which will automatically reject any non essential cookies from those annoying GDPR pop ups.

I also would recommend Privacy Badger and Ghostery to block invisible ad trackers that are present all over the webs.

But how do these work?

All of the data coming to you PC runs to your browser, these tools simply intercept and strip out known sources of advertisers and problematic privacy trackers. When a web page is rendered to your view, on the back end code, it’s made of a bunch of blocks of code for each element. When a filtered element is encountered, it simply, isn’t sent to the display and rendered. There are a lot of easy way to detect ads for these tools, many use standard image resolutions, for example, so any image of that height and width get filtered. Another way to detect them is if they come from 3rd party websites, since most advertisers are private data hoovers, they want to serve the ads directly so they can track data about the user attached to their browser or IP address.

Another layer I use to filter ads is PiHole, which is a DNS server designed to run on a Raspberry Pi and filter network traffic before it even reaches your machine. Without too much complicated technical detail, DNS is essentially the phone book of the internet. Your computer or phone is going through a DNS server somewhere anytime you connect to a domain, because servers, that host websites, all use numerical IP addresses. It’s a name vs a phone number. So the Pi-Hole, when a request is made to a known ad provider, the returned “IP Address” or “phone number” is simply blank.

Why Block Ads Though

I want to make it clear here, I am not opposed to web ads, I am not opposed to people making money on their content. My problem is with how shitty ads have become. It’s not just web ads that are the problem, but ads in general. I kind of blame Google and the algorithmizing of ad networks. In the dark ages, a company would generally have sales people who would court companies and try to get them to advertise to their customers. These ads were “targeted” based on the customer data of the website and generally, related to the website itself.

Presumably, if you’re reading a technology news website, you would be interested in ads for computers or phones. That sort of thing.

Google, the largest and most dominant ad provider, destroyed this.

Google is a massive privacy nightmare and hoovers up every scrap of data about everyone that it can. I can’t express just how much data Google collects, and I’m not going to try. They use this to serve ads to people running it’s ads. The main “selling point” here is that instead of ads targeted to potential users of a website, they get targeted directly at users. Maybe Google had decided I am interested in technology products, so when browsing technology websites, I might get technology ads, but these same ads now ALSO track me around when I am looking into other topics, like toys, or food, or anything.

In theory, it’s better, right?

But is it? If my mindset is on toy news, I’m going to be at best, distracted by an ad for a phone, more likely annoyed, because I my mind right now, it’s on technology.

But what do I know, I am sure there is some marketing group who has done some research showing it’s still “effective”.

The problem I have with this is that it all just becomes an annoying circle jerk of bad. Maybe the ad is “effective” because it’s the only ad I’ve seen for a month. Which just reinforces the idea that this targeting is good. It’s not actually good, it’s just created a bubble which creates a self fulfilling bubble of accuracy. Companies no longer have to compete with each other to get my eyeballs, they just pay the most to beat me over the head with their product until I submit.

Which kind of leads into the bigger issue.

Companies don’t have to actually make good products to advertise at me. There is just this increasingly rapid downward spiral of garbage being pushed through advertising. Shitty fake T-shirts that are 3 sizes too small even when you order the 5x size. Ads for crappy cash grab mobile games that show one game and are in actuality something completely different. Ads for bootleg products through Amazon from “companies” that won’t exist in 2 weeks.

Anyone can pay pennies to each 1000 people and the goal is no longer showing off a quality product to get sales, it’s just to show off any product to get any sales.

This creates another self fulfilling bubble, because it decreasing the effectiveness of ads in general, as people become less and less trusting of this bull shit. Legitimate companies stop advertising on these platforms, as people stop clicking and start using more ad blocking mechanisms. The ads become worthless to buy for any real business or service and scammers don’t mind because increasingly only the most gullible marks start falling for their scams.

It also hurts businesses that rely on ad revenue. The big one is online publications, newspapers, magazines, blogs. More people block ads, less people click ads, now they have to run more ads to make ends meet, and the problem just becomes worse as more people get tired of ads EVERYWHERE and more people block them or stop visiting.

It’s Hard to Feel Bad About Ad-Blocking

This also is a bit self inflicted, so it’s hard to feel bad for these companies. I feel a little bad for the writers, who probably just want to write, it’s not their fault. But when some large publication decides it no longer wants to pay a sales staff or editors and their entire site becomes ad ridden, it’s hard to feel bad about blocking their revenue source.

Stop encouraging this garbage and maybe I’ll stop blocking.

Stop covering your page in large banners on every open space and maybe I’ll stop blocking.

Stop trying to trick me with ads embedded in articles that look like links and maybe I’ll stop blocking.

The people I do feel bad for are the honest folks out there. Because they just become collateral damage. Most ad blocking tools provide the ability to white list websites if you want to support them, but this puts the work on the user to decide what’s worth supporting, and you don’t have any way of knowing without going to work to open things up. It’s just, too much effort to bother.

Subscription Overload

There is if course, the alternative of subscribing. Which is increasingly something publications push for. Limited numbers of free articles per month, or just trying to guilt you about how many articles you’ve read. I don’t mind this concept at all, the issue here is a bit multi-faceted though.

First is subscription overload. “Subscribe for $x per month”. Seems reasonable, except that every website wants $x per month. I could probably manage one or two subscriptions even at $7-8 per month if I wanted. But to read every site, it becomes 10-15 subscriptions at $7-8 per month, or more. Part of this may be my personal cheapness. My opinion on digital subscriptions of any kind though has always been “less is better”. There is essentially zero overhead cost different for digital. Offering a subscription for $7-8/month makes some money, but offering it for $1/month becomes “impulse buy” territory and would likely net a massive number more subscriptions. Is it’ 7-8x as many subscriptions? I don’t know, I don’t care, my question is “is it enough subscriptions to cover operating costs”.

Call me old fashioned but if costs are met, it feels like the goal of publications should be getting their information out in front of as many eyeballs as possible, not so much exponential growth of profits (this will eventually be a post all it’s own).

It’s not JUST the cost though, it’s the internal scammyness so many publications have with subscriptions. It’s the “Get a discount for the first year of 80% off please forget to cancel later” offers. I don’t bother with trials and discounts at all for this reason. If that’s not just “the price” I don’t care. I’m not letting this into my life and workflow only to have to rip it out later when the cost becomes 5x what I initially paid, sorry.

And then there is the part where cancelling is often an actual pain in the ass. I had a few digital subscriptions for a while, and when I wanted to cancel, in several cases, I had to CALL TO CANCEL. I had to talk to a fucking sales person, often in another fucking country, and convince them that no, I didn’t want a new offer, I just wanted to cancel.

This is something that should literally just be a click through checkbox on a profile page of the website.

Trust Destroyed

It’s all part of the endless downward spiral of bull shit I mentioned above. It’s just more scams that drive people like me away from supporting something.

This leads to just a general distrust of anything being pushed or sold. A prime example of this in my area. My state, Illinois, is pushing household solar adoption hard. There are programs that “in theory” make the consumer cost zero. But it’s also not clear how this works. And my overall distrust of anything being “sold” to me, means that even though I would love to have Solar, I don’t have any desire to ever bother with any company that would provide solar, no matter the rebates or later returns. If the state wanted to come in and do it for me and I never see a bill, hey, probably, but i am pretty sure that’s not how any of these systems work.

Any my distrust runs deep enough that I actively avoid the main aisle at my local Wal-Mart when shopping because there are people selling this in the store, and I don’t want to be hassles about it.

And this is just one example. I have grown to actively distrust essentially all advertising at this point. And I have not even BEEN scammed. I have family members who have gotten trash from Facebook ads or been taken in by straight money scammers, which just leads to more reason to be a paranoid ad blocking digital data leech. I want to support sites, but everything is just such a scammy minefield.

Final side note, this is why I actually do like things like KOFI and Patreon, because I can support people, directly, often for a reasonable cost, and I can cancel/stop supporting them if I can’t afford it or no longer want to support them.

It’s Going to Get Worse

It’s going to get worse.

AI Will make it worse. AI is “neat”, it’s also the “filter bubble concept” at an extreme level. When it starts feeding itself live data it’s just going to conclude it’s right about everything because that’s all it’s sending out. AI will be used to target ads, it’ll take all your personal data in and remix it with similar data and spit out a chimera ad with 8 fingers and weird looking eyes and an extra elbow that is a mobile ad for a game where you run an empire selling bootleg T-shirts but the actual app is just a shitty clicker game full of micro-transactions. Bit it will be “AI powered” to be perfectly tailored to get you to spend money on whatever.

There is also the increasing crack down by larger companies on ad blocking. Youtube is supposedly stopping people from watching videos when it detects ad blocking. Google is also pushing this bull shit initiative about “trusted browsers” that will only be used to make it’s tracking stronger. Make no mistake, Google pushes lots of “standards” on the web using it’s massive weight to force changes, it dresses these up as “good for the user and privacy” but they are an ad company. These privacy measures are ONLY pushed because they already have a way around it and it will harm their competitor’s ability to track and advertise.

Companies have experimented with eye tracking to make sure you are actually WATCHING these ads.

PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN

At the end of the day the only way to escape may just be to simply unplug and do something else away from the computer.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

The Writers and Actor’s Strike

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

I generally don’t comment much on Next Door, a lesser known, location based social network. Most of the posts are dumb, but not worth really arguing. I did see this image, somewhat randomly posted, and did comment, and I’m going to expand on the idea of my comment here. I also don’t know why they bothered posting it. The whole point of Next Door is “local discussion”, not stupid Macro politics discussions.

For a few weeks or so, there has been a writer’s strike in Hollywood. This isn’t the firs tone, it’s probably not the last, these people also really seem to know how to at least put an effort into their demands. Recently, a day or so ago, the actors union joined in the strike. Hollywood is effectively at a stand still. Expect another boon in shitty reality TV like back in the 2009 time frame.

This graphic feels like some sort of “clever gotcha” about rich Hollywood stars, singling out Matt Daemon. Does he make too much money for his films? Eh, probably. Of all the “rich people” in the world, I really find it hard to get too upset over movie and music star millionaires. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but it basically joint boils down to, a lot of them tend to actually support philanthropic causes, and their star power creates a draw and work for a LOT of other people. Also once reaching “star level”, especially Matt Daemon star level, there tends to be a lot of extra baggage and upkeep needed, nice clothes, an expensive security detail, etc. I’m not saying at the end of the day Matt Daemon is poor, I’m just saying, his 2+ Million months income, probably has a pretty heft amount shaved off for “Monthly expenses” that most people do not have.

He still probably makes too much money, but he also isn’t going around doing shitty things and promoting hate groups online.

Anyway, the bigger issue is, that 90%, probably more, of “Hollywood” isn’t anywhere near Matt Daemon. They are probably way less than “most people” in terms of income. Using these big stars for reference is stupid. The strike isn’t about Matt Daemon, it’s about Ryan Rathbun, Jack Wang, and Ansa Woo. Who are these people? Who knows? I pulled them off of IMDB from Daemon’s most recent film Oppenheimer, they are “Lecture Attendee,” “Cambridge Student,” and “Female Student #70” respectively.

They are all listed as “Uncredited”. But they did still, do work, they still got paid. I have no idea what the pay rate for “Female Student #70” is, but I am sure it’s not $20+ Million a year.

So ok, there’s some angle I suppose, maybe Matt Daemon should get less from his part and these walk on extras should get more for their part. Possibly. The strike isn’t about that though. At least not for the part of the actors.

It’s about the use of AI.

For actors, it’s about the use of AI likenesses. It’s increasingly becoming a problem. There was a story about the use of an AI generated Bruce Willis being used in commercials. Increasingly companies are adding clauses for AI Likeness use in actor contracts.

The issue here isn’t really an issue for Matt Daemon or Bruce Willis. They would be fine never working again ever (Bruce Willis actually can’t anymore due to declining health). It’s an issue for “nobody actors” like Ryan Rathbun, Jack Wang, and Ansa Woo. Because maybe they worked for a day, made a little money for some walk on background role. Maybe in a few years, the studio decides to make Oppenheimer 2: Nuclear Boogaloo, and they decide they need Female Student #70 to make another appearance, but hey, now they can save probably $500 and not bring Ansa Woo back on set again, they can just roll out the AI version.

In any movie.

Why bother with extras when you can just use AI and CGI to add them in. You don’t even need the detail of a leading actor like Matt Daemon or Bruce Willis, they just need to look good as an NPC sitting at a table 20 feet in the background slightly out of focus taking notes or drinking a coffee.

Then there is the writer’s side of things, which is just as bad, and also AI related. It wouldn’t be specifically ChatGPT, but the idea is that for a lot of these shows these days, studios could just, feed data to a LLM AI algorithm and then have it start spitting out episodes. This kind of just points out how sad the state of current TV is a bit, that an entire script could be written by spicy autocorrect, but the point remains, someone is out of the job. And in the case of some long lived shows, it’s still technically using effort put in by that person since it’ll be using old scripts.

And it’s definitely possible. There was a Twitch channel that was essentially just an endless loop of sloppy CGI 2 minutes bits based on Seinfeld. These were extremely repetitive in content and kind of shit, but the whole operation was clearly run on a very “fly by night” level and even a little bit of extra cash influx, like what a movie or television studio could do, would help it be “better”. As for the graphical part, well, Same concept, replace the shoddy CGI with an AI driven creation image. All for cheaper than the cost of hiring a bunch of real writers and actors.

Essentially, AI generated content would cause the entire media industry to completely stagnate even more, even faster, People joke about the world becoming Idiocracy, but this the kind of content that would feed that world. Simple idiot content for idiot people to just consume consume, please drink verification can!

The worst part of all this is, even if the writers and actors win this round, the studio execs won’t stop, and next time they won’t bat an eye at dropping these people. It’s all just so, frustrating, it’s part of why I stopped bothering with Stable diffusion after my initial tests and experiments. It’s just all so completely empty and soulless. It’s the end came of the focus group economy. Take the average and spit it out as “content” which just re-enters the system and churns back out until everything unique about art and media is just smoothed out and identical.

Medical Mechanica factory from FLCL
Opinion/Editorial/Life

On Reddit Drama

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

Oh Reddit, how shall I miss thee. Maybe…

I should probably start off by saying, I have used Reddit, a lot, over a decade now, and I’m up over half a million Karma there, which is pretty high. I’ve probably participated in hundreds of communities.

Reddit isn’t quite as dead as Twitter is trying to be, not yet anyway, but it seems to be trying really hard. The CEO, Steve Huffman, aka /u/spez, has apparently stated he admires the work Musk has been doing at Twitter, which is kind of baffling, because Twitter is trying to speed run it’s demise.

Is this some sort of new Tech Bro Exit Strategy? Like, here’s the goals for a tech company, get bought by Google, failing that, get bought by Facebook, failing that, go full blown stupid and smash the website into the ground as hard as possible.

What’s Happening?

For a quick rundown of what has happened recently on Reddit, a month or so ago, Reddit announced it was changing how it handles it’s API, which is used for a lot of things, primarily Auto moderation tools and 3rd party clients. The issue isn’t really that they wanted to charge for the API, it’s that they want to charge an exorbitant amount for the API. It’s very clear, the intention is not for anyone to actually pay, but for everyone to abandon using it.

In response to this, a bunch of popular sub-Reddits (subs) went dark for a few days, or even permanently by going Private, meaning no one can see the content there. Others started marking everything NSFW (Not Safe For Work) because NSFW subs don’t have advertising. Others started posting meme content like only pictures of John Oliver.

Basically, a lot of the users revolted and complained, and nothing was changed on Reddit’s stance, in fact, reddit got more hostile with mods as things escalated. Reddit has threatened to or actually gone through with replacing moderators and forcing subs to reopen.

Spez says that Reddit needs to be profitable, and is not, which is fine, they deserve to make money off their site. The driver here seems to be the desire for an IPO (going public, ie stocks).

What’s the Problem?

The core issue here is, Reddit, is driven ENTIRELY by the users. Everything on the site is links to outside user created content. Everything on the links is user created discussion around the topic. The subreddits are ALL user created and user moderated. Moderators who are there voluntarily. Reddit doesn’t pay these people. Which is why they often use tools like Auto-Mod which is software used to automatically strip out the most egregious violations.

Yes, some mods are shitty people on a power trip, but they are still doing this effort, for free, on their own time. Reddit’s actually overhead is essentially only server costs, which I am sure are quite large, this is one of the most popular websites on the internet, but they aren’t paying for much else at the end of the day.

Reddit has money making mechanisms as well, advertising, they sell a premium subscription deal called Reddit Gold, etc.

This leads in a bit to what is probably the larger motivation for the API cost changes, to kill 3rd party applications, which often don’t show the advertisements.

The problem is, the cost proposed. There was an AMA with Spez who mentioned the API costs them around a dollar per user or something per month, but from what I gather, they want to charge devs roughly $20/user per month. Maybe it’s less, but it’s way more than $1 per user.

There would be a lot of better ways to handle this. Charge less per user for starters, let the 3rd party devs decide how to handle it.

Another soltution would be to work out the API so that ads are required to be shown, so 3rd party app devs have to put ads along.

My personal favorite is simply letting users subscribe and get an API key to use in 3rd party apps. If it costs $1 a month, let people pay $3/month (reasonable) and let them keep using their preferred app.

Why Not Use Official Channels?

Reddit is still up and going of course, you can visit Reddit.com and Reddit has an official app. So what’s the problem with just, using Reddit as intended? Well, they are kind of numerous honestly.

The ads are a problem. Like every website, and TV, and well, everything, Advertising on Reddit is a constant downward spiral to the lowest denominator of garbage ads. Dating Apps, Crypto Scams, Sketchy Bootleg T-Shirt sites, etc. Probably paying a penny for 10,000 impressions. There are also ads that look like regular posts for garbage constantly, which is really sketch.

The interface also sucks. I recently tried using the regular website, partially as an effort to just spend less time using the site in general, this was maybe a month before all this drama even started. The touch targets to do the most basic interactions are all weirdly small and unintuitive. I didn’t even figure out how to collapse threads on mobile until I had been using it for a few weeks, which is a super basic need to interact with the site.

It also has too many extraneous notifications. For example, Reddit has this chat feature they added, sometime. Many 3rd party apps don’t surface this feature at all, because many users, do not give a shit about Reddit Chat and it’s 100% just spam chats anyway. The main site also has all these weird crypto/blockchain things going on, like fancy avatar parts. You can upload anything you want as an avatar, I have no idea why you would want to pay for a hat for a Snoo (The Reddit Mascot).

One big one for me, it’s a pain in the ass to save things. The app I was using, Bacon Reader, makes it trivial to save any gif or image to my phone. Official channels block this. Reddit wants you to share the threat and link to share funny cat gif. I’m not exposing people to that crap. I can save the gif and send the file over through FB Messenger or Discord later.

So it’s Not Dead?

Reddit isn’t dead, it’s probably not even dying, at least not to the level of say, Twitter. But this really feels like a likely first step in what will likely be a downhill run to crap. There are a lot of other possible secondary things that can start happening without 3rd party apps, especially with the owners clearly stating they are profit motivated.

They might take away the ability to use your own avatar image, for example. They could start adding more and more shitty ads, to encourage buying Reddit Gold (Gold users don’t see ads). Subs will likely get worse without auto-moderator tools. In general, it means slightly less control for users, which makes the feed in general more susceptible to manipulation. There are plenty of 3rd party sites that monitor trends and activity across the site looking for things that are sus, that probably won’t work anymore.

The frustrating part is, there isn’t a real good alternative to this community yet. People keep pushing the Fediverse alternative Lemmy, but it’s in an even sadder state than mastodon was. As much as I like Mastodon, it’s still pretty jank compared to Twitter in a lot of ways. Discoverability is garbage for starters, due to the lack of a proper content based search.

Personally, I’d already been using RSS more again, which is good for finding interesting stories. In general, I’ll just slightly ramp up my use of other sites a bit more. I’m still trying to get the hang of Tumblr. There’s always Discord, but discord has it’s own issues. I’ve been trying to just, comment more, not just on personal blogs I follow, but on other smaller community based sites like Hacker News, Slashdot, etc.

Ultimately, things are probably better without Reddit.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

A Netflix Wishlist of Features

Ramen Junkie 0Comment

Netflix is pretty great but it really could use a lot of streamlining for it’s interface and library.  Multiple Profiles at least help with recommendations across a family but it’s really not enough.

For starters, related to that family aspect.

I’ve Already Watched This

At least in my house, I’ve set up profiles for my kids and one for the house.  Often when we watch things all together, we just use the house profile, but it would be great if I could mark something as watched on my own profile.  To get related recommendations based on having watched that movie, along with my other viewing habits.

Somewhat related, I really wish that Netflix would stop trying to show me shows and movies I have watched.  I don’t need a “watch it again”, I can’t even keep up with what I want to watch.  This also leads into the idea of

Don’t Show Me This

There is a lot lot lot of stuff that shows up as suggested that I will never watch.  I really wish I could filter this stuff permanently from the viewing list.  It would really help with finding things that I actually DO want to watch.  Often these things just get added to a list for later viewing anyway, but partially because it’s the only good way to even remember it was there int he first place.  Speaking of lists, I would love…

Multiple, Custom Lists

Watch Later is great.  How about the ability to make more of these lists.  TV to Watch later, Movies to watch later, Comic Movies and Shows, that sort of thing.  So I can better keep track of what I want to watch and maybe tailor it a bit to better match what kind of thing I am int he mood to watch at any particular time.

Somewhat related, My list, and Continue watching, really need to always be on top.  Especially for shows, most of the time, I just want to keep watching the show I was watching.  Many time I log in only to find my “Continue Watching” list is gone.  Somewhat related to the last point, if I start watching something, and decide it’s crap, let me manually remove it from the Continue Watching list.  Finally…

Leaving Soon

Netflix is constantly adding and dropping stuff.  Maybe have one of those little categories, similar to what’s new, only instead it’s what’s leaving.  Put things on there fairly far out for shows, maybe less so for movies.  Maybe just do a generic month out.  Maybe I will discover something I didn’t know was on there, or a show I was meaning to watch, that will be gone in a month.  So I can actually get to watching it.

Opinion/Editorial/Life

Back in my Day…

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I’ve been using computers and technology for a long time.  The vast majority of my life in fact.  I have early memories of playing games on our Commodore 64, back when I was like 4 or 5 years old.  Eventually we had a DOS based system, though it didn’t have a hard drive in it.  In fact it needed a floppy disk to even boot up.

I came across some of my old disk boxes while visiting my parent’s house not too long ago.  I have no idea if these disks are even any good anymore, I may have a 5.25 disk drive floating around somewhere but I’m not sure it’s even compatible with any modern computer, at least not without some sort of cable conversion system.  Not to mention most of this stuff can be found on abandon ware websites online, that gray area of legality for software that’s no longer particularly useful or in demand.  Each of these disks contains around 500kb of data.  Half of a megabyte.  This image of these floppy disks, likely couldn’t fit on one of these floppy disks.

There’s a lot of fun classics in here.  I always really loved the games where you could create your own content.  Earl Weaver baseball, let you make your own teams, I made many based on other video games, though the Mega Man Team with it’s perfect stats (because robots) always ended up winning.  Ancient Art of War was an early RTS sort of game where you could create custom campaigns.  The old Gold Box Dragon Lance games were classic RPG titles where you would make custom parties and characters.  My friends and I figured out a bug where you could duplicate characters and weapons so we would create unstoppable characters all equipped with the best gear.

Another favorite was NewsMaster.  A simple program designed for making newsletters and fliers.  I found some old files from Newsmaster on my portable drive recently.  Here’s a fun chain, my 500GB portable drive is full of files I’ve been sorting out over time, many of these files came from old archive DVDs, which in turn are a collection of old archival CD-rs.  one of these CDs had a collection of files pulled from sole 3.5 diskettes, one of which was an archive of files originally on these 5.25 disks.

And now, bring it around, I found an abandon ware copy of Newsmaster to open the files with.

These files are an eclectic collection of fake news papers, random graphics, journal entries (which were no longer than Tweets) and very short stories from my childhood.  I’m sure that writing a paragraph back then felt like a monumental achievement, these days I feel like most blog posts contain more typed words than the entirety of my first ten years of life.

One particularly fun set of files was the NEWS News/Times.  This was a video game news letter written by myself and my best friend at the time.  Each “issue” had top ten lists and codes and brief notes on some game we’d been playing.  The reality is it was probably a crib notes version of the most recent Nintendo Power.  It’s only really notable because I often consider it the precursor to my modern blogging.  The above issue was created in 1991.  roughly seven years later, I’d create The Chaos Xone on Geocities, which would evolve into Lameazoid.com.  It’s kind of funny how my interests really have not changed a whole ton in the past 30 years.

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