julian-wolf

Lots of these guys flying around today I wonder what they’re up to

@Duke Mantee An honor to’ve been among the first & among the last Big ups to you for finding a cool niche for yourself, building up a great skill set, and getting out on your own terms—even any one of those alone would be a big accomplishment

Wish me luck…

@cultpop 0217 What size are yours? A W30 pair in good condition just popped up on Yahoo recently…

Decisions of a smartphone: human in focus vs. dogs in focus Bronson / Tender Co. x2 / Roy / Birk’s

@Jared_Lee Y’all really look like you belong in Vegas, but the cool cinematic mid-century version What route did you take for that leg? The Utah 12 and 24 are some of the coolest drives I’ve done; it would be great to go back on a bike. Looks like a really sweet ride so far—Southern Utah always has my heart

I’m with 00 on this one, although I’m not sure how serious he was being There aren’t all that many “rules” that I consistently follow when dressing myself, but not mixing black & blue denim is one of them

The cabbages are Brussels sprouts (not standard, but delicious); the bananas are lemon halves (absolutely essential)

@Maynard Friedman It seems you’ve got the gist of it Seafood*, sausage, potatoes, and veggies go in a pot on a propane burner and boil for a while with heavy seasoning, then get dumped out on a big table (often on butcher paper, as here) where everyone gathers and eats with their hands * In the South, shellfish is common, usually prawns and crawfish (crab if you’ve got good friends); the sausage is hot links or andouille; the seasoning is Zatarain’s Crab Boil or Old Bay, or a mix. I know that folks in the Midwest do seafood boils with whitefish. This was the Southern kind. The foreground looks light on seafood ‘cause the pot got dumped from one end of the table to the other, and I guess shrimp is less dense than potatoes

Union Special / Tender Co. x2 / Tezomeya / Roy / MOTO Don’t know why the photo’s showing up all fuzzy

Seafood boil yesterday for a friend’s birthday (our contribution was boiled peanuts, not shown)

Great Lakes / Union Special / Hollows / Word of Mouth / White’s

That's awesome. I do think we talked about Waffles at some point, maybe not What though. I was never very active there. I think I joined the two at around the same time (I was never around for Oink's, so I missed the very start, but not by much). Before I got into the community aspect, though, I was really there just for the music, so I think I gravitated much more towards What since their collection was so much more complete and so much better organized, and I guess that just transferred over to being more active on their forums. It's a shame, 'cause I did get the impression that the community on Waffles was really tight-knit. Despite never having been that active, I do still take credit for having made the post that led pretty directly to the end of the mutual ban on offering invites between sites—although, at the time, I think my only intention was probably just to poke fun. No, I wouldn't be surprised either. What subforums / IRC channels were you active on? I still download from HDBits and Redacted, but that's about it at this point. A lot of the regulars from What do seem to have made the transition over to Redacted, but I haven't been active on the forums there since around the first year. Every now and then I think about trying to jump back in, but at this point there's a decade's worth of inside jokes and lore that I'd need to catch up on, and it just seems like such a hassle ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@indigoeagle What are your goals? Are you hoping to just set up a VPN between your own machines on different physical networks (e.g., to get around firewalls), or are you hoping to find a VPN service that also gives you access to shared nodes around the world (e.g., to get around location-blocked content)?

@Double 0 Soul Thanks for the early message board musings My intro to internet communities was through MMORPGs, mostly Runescape. I probably averaged 2+ hours a day on that game for most of middle school in the mid-2000s. It was the wild west, if not in terms of 4chan-style free speech maximalism then certainly in terms of general social and economic chaos. I think spending 2–3 years watching thousands of pre-teens and teenagers socially engineer each other out of their hard-earned pixels probably saved my sub-generation from tens of thousands of real-world bucks in avoided scams. The social hierarchies of the clans put old-school forum rep wars to shame. My real forum awakening, though, was on What.CD from around 2010 through its closure in 2016. It was a private community centered around a bit torrent tracker for music. Maybe some other time I'll talk about the music end of things, because there wasn't anywhere else that came close in terms of archival music and metadata collection (including even, e.g., the Library of Congress), and in the post-streaming internet I don't expect anywhere else to take its place—as far as I can tell, none of the natural successors that have popped up in the last decade have come anywhere close. Music aside, though, the forums were top top notch, and were not at all music-specific besides a few particular subforums. I know of a couple other folks here on SuFu who were variously active; wouldn't be at all surprised if there were a few more. At its peak, there were around 150k users, with maybe 5% present on the forums, and maybe 1k really active regulars. The approach was 4chan's polar opposite, with pretty strict rules and pretty heavy-handed moderation. There were active threads on just about anything you can imagine—clothes, headphones, relationships, dark web drug acquisitions, weird supermarket finds—and a lot of very kind folks participating, some of whom I kept in touch with for years after it closed down. The site was invite-only, but had an interview system (held over IRC—another technology, along with classic forums like this, that I dearly miss) which let folks join by answering an hour's worth of questions about audio encoding, metadata best practices, etc., and I spent a few years on the Interview Team, which was a very cool sub-community in itself. I do think the closed-doors aspect made for a better community, overall. It's not so necessary for smaller, focused forums like we have here, but a large general forum can benefit a lot from only letting folks participate who have shown that they're willing to put in some time to learn the basic rules, first. My take, anyway. After that I spent another year or so on the Build Team nominally working on new website features. The Gazelle project was originally built for What.CD, and their private GitLab fork had a lot of really cool cutting edge (within the particular context) stuff going on. I was still green with computers at the time and never successfully contributed all that much, but the other developers there taught me a lot of early lessons about project planning and management, some of which have stuck with me. It was a tight ship top to bottom. The What.CD forums and IRC server were a big part of my whole coming of age story, honestly—and I still really, really miss them.