The official new members and lurkers thread

[nudge_unit]

<taps mic> is this thing on? hi all.

[Elihu]

hello nudge, that was some pretty good woo about pdiddy the other day. this blog was all about woo back in the day. Intelligently applied though. i think this message board was pretty woo too back before my time. maybe we've used up all the woo

[nudge_unit]

hello nudge, that was some pretty good woo about pdiddy the other day. this blog was all about woo back in the day. Intelligently applied though. i think this message board was pretty woo too back before my time. maybe we've used up all the woo

Thanks Elihu. I think 2011 must have been around when I started casually reading this forum, but never created an account. Some great threads here, for sure, though it does seem to have changed a bit in recent years.

Woo is such an interesting term. Which part(s) of the pdiddy posts I made were woo to you, and in what way? They were somewhat low effort, I must admit.

[Grizzly]

^^^

This used to be a thriving board until JW abandoned it to JR and Elvis whom are both absentee half hearten landlords. Still a lot of archived stuff here. but for how much longer and how much has already been disappeared?

[SonicG]

^^^

This used to be a thriving board until JW abandoned it to JR and Elvis whom are both absentee half hearten landlords. Still a lot of archived stuff here. but for how much longer and how much has already been disappeared?

Is the old board completely gone? I imagine so.

a propos of that:

We're about to enter the Digital Dark Ages
Online archives are vanishing — and they're taking our history with them.

The long-promised digital apocalypse has finally arrived, and it was heralded by a blog post.
Published on July 18, the post's headline sounded pretty arcane. "Google URL Shortener links will no longer be available," it declared. I know, I know — not exactly an attack of alien zombies from the death dimension. But the news nevertheless freaked me out. It means another swath of the web is about to disappear.

***
Attempts to quantify the scope of the problem are heartbreaking. Half of links in US Supreme Court decisions no longer lead to the information being cited. A report in 2021 found that a full quarter of the more than 2.2 million hyperlinks on The New York Times website were broken. Even worse, the Pew Research Center estimates that a quarter of everything put on the web from 2013 to 2023 is inaccessible — meaning almost 40% of the web as it existed in 2013 is simply not there today, a decade later.
The degradation of those links wouldn't panic me so much if they hadn't replaced what came before them — if museum storerooms and dusty library stacks still served as the warehouses of our collective memory. It's not that I miss the days of wrangling with old newspapers preserved on microfiche, or trying to sweet-talk a librarian into an international interlibrary loan. I'm glad lots of old movies are streaming and many out-of-print books are only a few clicks away. But archives and databases are more than places to keep old stuff; what we save defines who we are. Today, so much of everything is only digital that when it disappears, it leaves a hole in our shared culture.
Gawker is gone. So is the archive of The Awl, the beloved culture-criticism site. You can go to a library and read the entire output of long-dead newspapers like the Los Angeles Herald Examiner or New York Newsday, but God help you if you want to read old Vice articles. Shenanigans over the ownership of what used to be Paramount have resulted in the deletion of decades' worth of shows on MTV and Comedy Central.
The Cartoon Network archive is gone. So are Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Answers, big chunks of the Imgur photo service, the spicy parts of Tumblr that got zapped in a porn purge, everything that ever happened on Friendster and the other pre-Facebook social networks, Club Penguin, Neopets, Geocities, AOL, and Prodigy. Vast swaths of video games made for obsolete systems are unplayable memories.
Hard drives have a finite lifespan, and the ones the music industry used for storage in the 1990s ahead of the transition to digital are crumbling. The Department of Veterans Affairs is legally required to preserve all medical records for 75 years after the death of a vet — but it's having problems, in part because of a balky digital records system. And that's not to mention things like personal photographs, most of which now exist only on your phone, and nowhere else. Every email you sent or received in your last job, or anything a deceased relative had on their now-unusable computer? These are the things that make us us. Yet I dare you to find them

https://archive.md/3dVw9#selection-2059.0-2117.23

Sarah Kendzior has pointed out how difficult it is to research even the recent past because a lot of articles just get poofed after a short time...

[BenDhyan]

^^^

This used to be a thriving board until JW abandoned it to JR and Elvis whom are both absentee half hearten landlords. Still a lot of archived stuff here. but for how much longer and how much has already been disappeared?

Grizz, without JR and Elvis, the board would probably not exist, remember the SQL ERROR problems, I thought I was going to win the "Last one to post in this thread wins - The Finals".

[Elihu]

Woo is such an interesting term. Which part(s) of the pdiddy posts I made were woo to you, and in what way? They were somewhat low effort, I must admit.

woo is symbols, signs, entendre's etc. used to interpret clownworld events. it's usually hearsay and esoteric in nature. when it pops up i usually find the explanations at least as plausible as what the infobabes are babbling through the clown portals. regarding pdiddy, an obscure part of the male reproductive organs and some sort of operative with handlers? pretty woo. and this is where woo usually pulls up short and stops. if that were true and looked into and published through the clown portals what a terrifying hostile situation that would be! no more cloak and dagger. guys (with their names published) in suits and frocks would actively be tracked down and arrested! and the chase would not stop there! It would take in most of the upper managment of our entire country, nay the entire western world! utterly impossible. all functional positions for running clownworld are in safe hands. the clowns themselves let drip the woo slowly slowly from time to time. sort of a pressure modulator i guess.

[nudge_unit]

Woo is such an interesting term. Which part(s) of the pdiddy posts I made were woo to you, and in what way? They were somewhat low effort, I must admit.

woo is symbols, signs, entendre's etc. used to interpret clownworld events. it's usually hearsay and esoteric in nature. when it pops up i usually find the explanations at least as plausible as what the infobabes are babbling through the clown portals. regarding pdiddy, an obscure part of the male reproductive organs and some sort of operative with handlers? pretty woo. and this is where woo usually pulls up short and stops. if that were true and looked into and published through the clown portals what a terrifying hostile situation that would be! no more cloak and dagger. guys (with their names published) in suits and frocks would actively be tracked down and arrested! and the chase would not stop there! It would take in most of the upper managment of our entire country, nay the entire western world! utterly impossible. all functional positions for running clownworld are in safe hands. the clowns themselves let drip the woo slowly slowly from time to time. sort of a pressure modulator i guess.

I see. I'd have to disagree; popular music is clearly a vector for cultural engineering, and hedonistic sex parties would serve the dual purpose of blackmail and of creating and promoting the kind of degenerate values popular culture itself propagates. Plus Clive Davis has Sabbatean-Frankist written all over him. I thought this kind of interpretation would be taken as rote and self-evident here. Am I wrong? Or has that RI now become a thing of the past?

[Elihu]

I see. I'd have to disagree; popular music is clearly a vector for cultural engineering, and hedonistic sex parties would serve the dual purpose of blackmail and of creating and promoting the kind of degenerate values popular culture itself propagates. Plus Clive Davis has Sabbatean-Frankist written all over him. I thought this kind of interpretation would be taken as rote and self-evident here. Am I wrong? Or has that RI now become a thing of the past?

i was remarking more about politics, public events and the like. vintage stuff like Jeff Wellls used to blog. I think we agree in the big sense. all aspects of culture are surrounded and permeated and propped up with woo..... imo. I appreciate interpretations and hints and references that i can collate but it's not something i plan to delve into. did you have anything more on the diddy case?

[Belligerent Savant]

...Plus Clive Davis has Sabbatean-Frankist written all over him. I thought this kind of interpretation would be taken as rote and self-evident here. Am I wrong? Or has that RI now become a thing of the past?

I for one (and I believe a few others here, including lurkers, etc) certainly appreciate such interpretations, and welcome them, regardless of whatever the current state of RI may be (ever in flux, anyway, depending on who's participating).

This place may shut down soon enough. But for now, proceed as you deem fit (so long as it's within forum rules, of course)