Here's a Eurobeat song about Marsey trolling on the internet

Here's some folk songs about !jinxthinkers

I was looking for the origin of "lunchtime rowdies" and found this super active site. Apparently economists don't have much real work to do so they spend their time gossiping, hating on minorities and shitposting.

It's legit economists

Random shitposts

So much racism against

Their snappy is various versions of "tell your mom"

Funny shit on there, check it out.

Note: The UI is older than digg, zero images, completely opaque upvote and username system. Probably impossible to infiltrate

What is a redditor? Is it a person that merely uses reddit? Or are there spiritual qualities of a person that makes them a redditor? Can a person be a redditor without using reddit? Can a person use reddit without being a redditor? I ask because the term "redditor" has become mixed up in a whole lot of other ideas, including consumerism, soullessness, atheism, etc.

I'm interested in your opinions, so please leave a comment below. As for me, here's my current theory on what makes a redditor...

1. Complete Deference To Mainstream Opinion: Modern redditors will almost always follow the general thrust of mainstream opinion. I hope that my readers will understand that I'm not referring to whoever holds the most power in society - this is a thing that swings back and forth as time goes on - but rather what are considered generally acceptable opinions, especially as expressed by the media and corporate interests. Having mainstream opinions is not unusual, obviously (otherwise they wouldn't be mainstream, right?), but what is unusual is complete deference to those opinions. Most people have at least some thought process and disagreements with mainstream consensus.

2. Celebration of Dweebishness: I don't mean that redditors are dweebs - many of them are, but that's not the point. Everyone has low points, everyone feels afraid or sad or lazy at times. The difference between a normal person and a redditor is that redditors celebrate their own dweebishness. They celebrate their lowliness and refuse to even consider changing. There is a psychological element of inferiority at play here. They don't think they are capable of being better, and they are afraid of failing in the process of being better, so they linger in a familiar heck.

3. Rejection of Normalcy: This is the other side of Point 2. Anything that is things that "other people" do is instantly negative. Sports, Family, Popular social media, Religion, Homeownership, and being well groomed are all classic examples. Again, the hatred of these things is mostly a reflection of their own sense of inferiority. They don't think they can be normal, and thinking about themselves in comparison to others makes them feel inferior, so they reject normalcy as a whole.

4. Obsession with Objectivity: In any issue, redditors believe, if something can't be proven with logic, it is worthless and even harmful. The biggest example of this is reddit's neurodivergent atheism. They don't just not believe in God, they are obsessed with their lack of belief in God. For instance, getting pissy when someone says "Thank God". To put it another way - they only live in their Ego Mind. They've cut off any connection to anything deeper within themselves, chalking any conflict up to a variety of mental illnesses (see also: point 2). Another example is living in pods. "Living in pods is more economical and better for the environment. It's dehumanizing, you say? I'm going to need a source for that claim. Clearly, you're being irrational, so you are mentally ill, so you will need to take some anti-depressants."

5. Pseudo-Anonymity: On reddit, you don't form connections with individuals, you form connections with content. It would be extremely unusual on reddit to remember someone's username and think of them as an individual user with idiosyncrasies and tastes. The difference between reddit and 4chan, however, is that anons are literally anonymous, and suffer no real repercussions for acting strangely, whereas on reddit you get punished, both by karma and being banned. There's two sides of this - on the one hand, reddit as a website encourages this with the technical details of the website, where usernames are small and they all look the same. On the other hand, all redditors act in essentially the same way. They have the same opinions and behaviors. This, of course, ends up leaking into the rest of their lives.

6. Obsession with Things apart from their Intrinsic Qualities: This is a super-wordy way to describe "franchise consumerism", because the consoomer meme doesn't capture the absurdity of these people. Consider Star Wars, for instance. The original Star Wars trilogy were genuinely good - not in a nerdy sci-fi sense, but just as movies. There had lovable characters, an engaging plot, a simple theme about good and evil with a little bit of heroes journey stuff. Star Wars fanboys, however, don't care about the movie, they care about the franchise. They think that it was the laser swords and jedi that made Star Wars good, so they consume any piece of media that has laser swords and jedi - for instance, the Prequels and the Sequels. Another example is LotR - one of the greatest pieces of fantasy ever written, with masterful and poetic writing and themes about how insignificant people can play a big role in resisting evil - is reduced down to the setting and characters and "lore", so they obsess over any piece of media with those elements.

7. General Sense of Negativity, Dread, and Cynicism: Redditors are negative about everything, unless it is one of their pet obsessions. Everything is going down the drain in the world for redditors. The greedy corporations are actively ruining X, before long X will be gone, X isn't even that good anyways, X used to be good but now it isn't. The world is a few years away from ending and we will all starve to death, earth is overpopulated so anyone having children is evil, even if we get our guys into office, the other guys will ruin it from the shadows. Nothing is good about the world, everything is 100% bleak. Ironically, the best example of this is the opposite: /r/WholesomeMemes, which is a response to this overwhelming sentiment. Even the posts about hecking doggos are laced with a bitter irony or two-facedness - this is all just a short distraction until we return to our nihilistic existence. This contributes to Point 6, because redditors try to escape this with muh nostalgia and returning to an "idyllic youth". It is contributed to by 2 and 4, because being so obsessed with their ego mind, they are unable to accept their own flaws. I think their is a psychological element here as well, where redditors project their own flawed state onto the world at large.

8. Humor is Repeating Things: Redditors think that the peak of comedy is repeating things. They make references, quote movies, etc. Outside of that, their comedy is post-ironic self-reference to - you guessed it - other funny things. This is the notion of a circlejerk.

9. They think they are significant: To be fair, reddit has 50 million daily visitors. However, only 1% of those users comment every month. That leaves us with 500,000 active redditors worldwide. If all of those redditors were in the United States, they would make up just over a thousandth of a percent of the population. (Assuming US population is 330 million). Any redditor that you see calling for a revolution is calling for 0.001% of the population to go against the other 99.999%. They have no power whatsoever.

Tldr

Man buys over a million cds, Vinyls, and cassettes from a failed company in an attempt to start the company over again. Abandons his family and buys and moves into a warehouse in another state in one of the most violent cities in America. Spends over half a million dollars to get cockblocked by the city for zoning violations and gets robbed over 30+ times. He sneeds about the city and it's inhabitants on twitter documenting his journey. He's also trying to build a fusion reactor and a science museum in the city

MY CASSETTES!

Backstory

Murfie was a startup company that focused on the digitization of physical media into digital media. People would send their CDs, Vinyls, and cassettes, which the company would store in their warehouse and rip the contents onto their own platform for people to stream. Murfie even allowed people to buy and sell with other users on their platform.

During sometime during early November, the company asked all of it's current customers to make sure they renewed their current subscription before November 17th. No more than 5 days later, the company sent out an email to it's customers saying that the compnay was ceasing all operations including the website. This abrupt shutdown shocked everyone, that even that former CEO had one idea what had happened .

The situation only continued to spiral out of control. Murfies ToS had a clause that promised its customers that they would return all of their physical media in the case the company shut down (For a small shipping fee of course ), but with all of their services down, customers had no way of getting back their cassettes and cds. In total, there were close to a million CDs, cassestes, and Vinyls left somewhere in limbo. Unsurprisingly, people were soying out about this:

😢 Our first “startup” client was Murfie. We’re super proud of being part of their story, and our world is better off because of their music-ownership-focused journey.

They have my 100+ cd's and $1000+ dollars. nothing to be proud of if they leave people in a lurch.

At this point everyone had lost hope that they wouldn't get their stuff back. Until one determined man showed up.

John Fenley

SHOW MORE

I did a poll a while back asking what I should write about. Surprisingly "my old boomer times" won by a large margin. So I present you with a history of MUDs, the thinking man's multiplayer game.

Telnet

Back in the 1800s (yes, that's how far back I'm going) Americans invented all kinds of awesome things: telephones, machine guns, movie cameras, record players. Two of these devices, the typewriter and the telegraph, were combined into something even more powerful. The keyboard of one typewriter sent electrical signals to control a typewriter at a distant location. This was known as teletype. It's how big organizations like militaries and multinational corporations sent data for about a century.

Teletype Model 33.

Eventually Americans invented even more cool stuff like mainframe computers capable of doing time sharing. This meant they could respond almost instantly. You could connect a teletype to the computer but that was suboptimal as the teletype couldn't print as fast as the computer could think. So the printer was replaced with a video screen, and now you had a dumb terminal. It could show text on a screen and accept text input but that was about it. These came into use in the 1970s among big organizations that could afford to pay for the luxury.

A DEC VT100 terminal. This is the standard terminal that's emulated in software.

Another revolution quickly followed in the 1980s with microcomputers, little computers so cheap that an individual person could own one. These were not very powerful at first but they were smart enough to pretend they were a dumb terminal and connect to mainframe. It's a computer emulating a terminal emulating a teletype.

Telnet being used for something more serious.

Why waste your time with this history lesson? It's important to understand the environment we're dealing with here. The Telnet protocol that you use to connect to a MUD is all about text. The technical details of how it gets from one place to another are more advanced, but in the end it's just alphanumeric characters going in and out like a machine from the 1800s.

Gaymers Rise Up

As universities got mainframes capable of time sharing, computer games soon followed. Among the most revolutionary was 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure. The player explores a cave system made up of a network of rooms. Each room has a text description and it can have items in it for the player to pick up. The player gives commands by simply typing in what they want to do. Many more games following this formula followed and the text adventure genre was born.

Don't get eaten by a grue.

Zork was among the most popular of these new games. Some nerd at the University of Essex loved to play a version of it called Dungeon. In 1978 he decided to make a multiplayer game based on it, which he naturally called Multi User Dungeon, and the MUD was born. In 1980 the university was connected to the internet, exposing MUD to the whole world.

UNIX Nerds Emerge

The roots of the MUD genre were now firmly planted but it would be many years before it bloomed. There were a number of technical obstacles which made it prohibitively expensive for all but a lucky few to play MUDs. The internet was only available at a few dozen universities and major computer companies, most of which frowned on using it for monkey business like playing games. By the late 1980s there were several MUDs running on commercial networks like CompuServe and AOL but these charged obscene amounts for connection time. Microcomputers like the PC became available but were still far too expensive for an ordinary family to get just to play games. A modem had to be purchased separately and these were incredibly slow and expensive as well.

Remember how to calculate your THAC0.

Despite these challenges, the 1980s saw great progress. A new nerd monoculture was sprouting in America and Europe, one that would prove to be fertile ground for the emergence of MUDs. The UNIX operating system and C language were taking over university computer science programs replacing a hodgepodge of weird proprietary systems. This made it much easier to share code, which would be crucial in the golden age of MUDs. There was compatibility in culture as well. Every nerd liked The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons.

Explosion

Ultimately MUDs would explode in popularity not because of some revolutionary idea from a creative genius but simply because computers got better and cheaper over the years. By 1995 you could get a Windows PC with a modem for a reasonable price. The fiber optic backbone of the internet was laid and in the early 1990s the government allowed it to be used for commercial purposes. University computers became powerful enough that running a MUD wasn't too big a drain on resources.

Around 1990 a few free (as in Richard Stallman eating something off his foot and calling it "GNU") MUDs appear. Most MUDs in the future are descendants of these, especially the enormously influential DikuMUD. However there are also all kinds of MUDs with their own unique codebase, some of them quite bizarre like one based on LISP. The most enduring are true labors of love, often based in a university computer science department and passed down from one class of students to the next.

A map of the city of Midgaard. DikuMUDs generally kept the same layout.

Some MUDs were for roleplaying. You were expected to stay in character pretending you were an elf or a Romulan or something. As shameful and embarrassing as it was to engage in this type of behavior, it had a charm. You were essentially cooperating with the other players to write a story in real time. If nothing else, you could learn how to write quickly under time pressure. Some of these artsy-fartsy type MUDs let you create your own areas and even program them. It was kind of like Second Life except without graphics or Bardfinn. With no graphics and such a simple user interface it was easy to add whatever gameplay mechanics you could think of.

But most were simple hack and slash affairs. You go out to an area appropriate for your level, preferably in a group, and hunt for mobs. When you find one you type something like "kill orc" and enter combat, taking turns attacking each other. Occasionally you "kick" or "cast magic missile" or whatever your class' special power is. When you kill it you get xp, gold, and maybe equipment. This should sound very familiar to you. MUDs were inspired by D&D and in turn became the basis of MMOs. EverQuest, the first MMO to achieve mainstream success, ripped off DikuMUD to a large extent.

Legacy

The golden age of MUDs lasted until around 2000. During this period they were really the only game in town. There were multiplayer FPSs and RTSs but nothing that gave you a similar experience. On a 56k modem it took a few seconds just to download a jpeg. Internet connections were much less stable, frequently cutting out for a second or two. So text still made sense as the medium for a multiplayer game.

Then MMOs arrived like Spanish conquistadors, bringing ruin for our civilization. Better PCs and better communications technology like DSL finally allowed the dream of a "graphical MUD" to come true. These were the shiny new thing. Why read walls of text written by some random 20 Finnish nerd boy when you could be looking at 3D graphics instead? If you had any normie friends they would be playing WoW, not words words words. Of course some MUDs have survived and are still thriving today, but the age when there were a thousand running at a time with all kinds of creative new ideas is over.

You can't compete with graphics like this.

So why do I lament the passing of this era? Is it just nostalgia for a time when ska ruled and action movies had real stunts? No. It's more. That was a time when we were free. Free to express yourself. Free to make your own world. Free to implement any crazy gameplay system you wanted. Free to be a Romulan. Jolan 'tru, dramanauts.

Please join me in celebrating our wonderful rdrama users, y'all are beautiful.

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Did I miss anyone? Please contribute.

Edit: goddam, there's a lot of self doxxers here...