2025 May 31: 05:16
You're never going to get me onto the AI hype train. I've witnessed generative AI displace people from their jobs, including my own. My first roommate: journalism degree, laid off from 10/11 News and replaced by ChatGPT. T from the gender clinic: web developer, laid off from marketing firm and replaced by intern using wix and ChatGPT. J from downstairs: commercial artist, laid off and replaced by ChatGPT. 5 people I follow on Tumblr: spent 5-20 years learning how to make good drawings, OpenAI stole their styles and no one bothers commissioning them anymore. Me: commercial voiceover, I intentionally yanked all my work from the internet and C&D'd all the advertising companies I'd ever worked for to prevent my voice getting duplicated. So, no. Talk about anonymisation until you pass out from exhaustion. What does your favourite George Orwell novel say about signing your creativity and higher reasoning over to large corporations?
2025 May 31: 04:49
I think some of you haven't read this. You know who you are. Like, I don't care how interested in privacy you are or how many references to Nineteen Eighty Four you make in your blog posts, if you can't even do the bare-ass minimum of not using Chat-Fucking-GPT, then get the hell off this site right now. Don't make me tap the sign.
2025 May 31: 04:25
So far, I've only been to the park in the new car. I'm sort of afraid to take it anywhere else. Equal parts latent worry about breaking down from the Sedan period and getting pulled over because no plates. I sort of have more to worry about in the "getting pulled over" department than the average white woman... do I though? Anyway, I have to wait for K to send me the title next week, at which point it will be far too hot to go for a nature hike. Plus the mosquitos. I really had hoped I'd get this car for hanukkah. Oh well, it's still better than where I was last week.
2025 May 28: 15:05
Welp. Mum's coming round tomorrow afternoon so K can bring the car to us. It's actually happening, it's really happening. Mum's helping me with the insurance and the licensing (we have the highest wheel tax of any other state), but the next place we're going after the DMV is the shop. I'm trying not to panic because if it costs any more than $600 to fix, I'm gonna have to empty my savings account, and even that's only going to add another $130. I need to have at least $120 in my share draft account in order to keep it open, so whatever I had in there before adding the Ko-fi donations and itch.io sales is quite literally untouchable. I forgot how stressful car ownership is.
2025 May 27: 13:04
If you're into playing classic Doom (who isn't?), then I should mention that Source Port comes with a WAD file that will add MIDI versions of the album to your game! Provided, of course, that you're playing E1 and E2 of Doom (1993).
"But, why should I buy your albums when I already downloaded all your songs for free from this very website?" Because it would be nice of you to do that. If you don't want 2 copies of the same songs, then you can just give me money on Ko-fi and it'll have the same effect at my end of the internet.
2025 May 26: 19:28
🚙 IT'S FINALLY HAPPENING, GAMERS!!! 🚙 My mum's friend is finally getting her new car, so she's giving us her old one! It turns out that the make and model information that mum relayed to me was not accurate. It's not a 2016 Honda Pilot, it's a 2007 Nissan Pathfinder. Apparently the Honda Pilot was the car that mum's friend was looking for, not the car she currently had. So, that means it's only 10 years younger than my white sedan. That's a little dismaying, but the sedan's lifespan lasted 22 years. Hopefully I can get 12 more years out of the SUV. Anyway, you know what that means, right? Yeah. Time to buy my albums on Itch.io. I still need ~$400 for diagnostics and repair. Anything leftover will go to my "provisions for hiking around the entire nature park" fund (probably not more than $10 or $20). For your convenience, the buttons will now be provided.
2025 May 24: 14:31
I really hate neocities's activity graph. It's ridiculous how non-specific it is, especially considering how easy it is to monitor likely bot traffic. Plus, it's 100% reactionary. By the time the graph updates, the hitspike has already happened and the models are already trained on my content. At this point, I'm seriously considering nekoweb again. I know i said i wasn't going to deal with that considering their stance on NSFW content, but at least they use anubis (i think) to block bots. I have to do that myself here on neocities and it doesn't work anyway. Maybe what i need is a nekoweb mirror. but knowing me, i would update one and forget about the other until they were so different from each other that i'd have 2 websites.
2025 May 24: 13:08
there's a crappy old car that drives by every so often. its exhaust backfire sounds exactly like a drive-by shooting. i want to shout "get your car fixed", but this coming from the woman who can't even afford to have her car towed into the shop for a battery replacement. can we just all stop using cars? like, make roadways for busses and bikes only? "oh, that just isn't america", well maybe america does everything wrong, ever think of that?
2025 May 24: 10:12
I'm gonna change up my message today, add something about how if Joe Biden tried to get a bill like this one passed, there would have been a quorum to impeach him on corruption charges, remove him from office, and have him arrested. Or Barack Obama. Or Bill Clinton. It's interesting how this kind of thing is only wrong when liberals try to do it.
2025 May 23: 18:18
The legislative branch of my country's government wants to defer all of its power to a bloviating fascist pig right now, so you'll forgive me if I don't particularly give a shit about any live-action Lilo and Stitch remake.
2025 May 23: 12:22
Media outlets chattering about Trump wanting to take over Canada are amplifying the wrong story. The Canada thing was never anything more than a smokescreen against EVERYTHING ELSE the Trump government wants to do and IS DOING RIGHT NOW. It's a clean, easy story that doesn't need a lot of research, designed to take attention away from things like illegal deportations, contempt of court, kidnapping Palestinians and Latines at random off the streets and sending them to El Salvador or Florida, the huge 1000-page spending bill that takes away Medicaid and food stamps, and of course the independent, non-scientific study that's been mandated to label all AMAB transgender people as moral degenerates and child molesters. But no one cares about that and they just go around singing "O Canada" all day. Fuck everyone who swallowed that prolefeed.
2025 May 21: 13:30
Remember the Chair Fund? You know, the one that got folded into the New Used Car Diagnostic Fund? Well, I'm pleased to say that I no longer need to worry about home studio seating because my mum bought me a new gaming chair from Staples! That was so sweet of her, especially since she's only slightly less strapped for cash than I am. Anyway, I assembled it and sat in it for a while to play Super Castlevania IV last night, and even though it doesn't really have much of any lower-back support, I figure that's why we keep random pillows lying around right? Also we're probably gonna have problems when HRT finishes widening out my butt, but I'll worry about that when it happens. It's way better than the wooden dining chair I'd been sitting in since I threw out my old office chair last year.
2025 May 19: 12:25
I've gone back to ModTheSims occasionally just to see if there's been any kind of renaissance in Sims 1 or Sims 2 CC. Of course i look at the Sims 3 & 4 stuff too because why not, and just as i'm starting to think everything's fine, some new piece of shit Harry Potter themed mod shows up. I retract what i said about not thinking the people who make HP fanmods are evil. If you've spent ANY time on social media at all, you'll know how much money Joanne Rowling dumped into lobbying against legal standing for trans women, which of course culminated in For Women Scotland v. Scottish Ministers. We've advanced beyond these people simply not knowing about Increasingly-Irrelevant Rowling's transphobia to the "weaponised ignorance" phase. At this point, if you interact with Hairy Pothole shit at all, i'm assuming you're a racist, sexist, antisemitic transphobe.
2025 May 18: 14:20
a lesbian catgirl on github just found a major exploit in the nvidia tegra x2 chip. while it's probably unrealistic to believe something like this can be used to jailbreak the nintendo switch in software only, the autopilot system in every tesla car ever sold from 2016 to the present is super vulnerable to this hack. tesla brought to its knees by a lesbian catgirl! 😸♥️🩷🤍💛🧡
2025 May 16: 17:15
yes i'm aware that the links to the EA Desktop workaround for the sims 1 on my various blog posts on the subject are all broken. looks like we're gonna have to involve reddit again. hypothetically, i suppose i could find a quiet out of the way archive someplace to put my disc rips of the sims complete collection, but that isn't going to work for anyone running windows because of secdrv.sys. i didn't pirate the software, i just backed up the install discs because disc 1 was starting to look a little used and i couldnt risk losing it. so hypothetically this is something i could do, practically i'm not going to do it. also something happened to the sims 2 and the virtual discs don't mount. i dont know why. probably something having to do with that stupid trivia game that you're supposed to play during installation. for me, it's a simple thing to fix: just install from disc and then mount the virtual disc and run it from there. for anyone else though, you're not going to be able to run it because the rip didn't work. you NEED my particular physical copy of the sims 2 in order to install it at all.
2025 May 16: 16:32
nothing causes me instant suspicion more quickly than a paragraph of German in the replies to a video featuring a conventionally attractive blonde girl, especially from a user whose pfp is a greek or roman statue. no need to translate the German, they're a neonazi. "What if it's just words of support, tina?" Well what if they didn't have a statue of heraclitus as their profile icon? you may as well try to convince me that the guy with the "MOΛON ΛABE" and "TRUMP 2024" bumper stickers just stole that truck and he actually voted for kamala harris.
2025 May 12: 11:12
For security reasons, I've switched from Mozilla Firefox to LibreWolf. It was a fairly painless change, with the only real difference being i can't see my bookmarks anymore. I'm sure that's a checkbox I haven't found yet though. On Linux Mint, it's a simple process of typing things into your terminal to install the program directly (without needing an installer or bootstrap). I'm going to continue recommending Mozilla Firefox for computer newcomers and Android users because it's still 100% more secure than any fork of Chromium (Brave included) and it's more accessible for people who've never used a computer before. But, everyone who uses Linux Mint, I'm now requesting you change to LibreWolf. Have a look at their website for installation details.
2025 May 5: 11:17
Shimomura-chan! On the Wikipedia homepage! Super Mario RPG was the soundtrack to my 1st summer break in elementary school and I've been a fan ever since 🧡💛🧡💛🧡
2025 May 5: 06:46
Up until yesterday, I was recommending The Ren & Stimpy Show: Stimpy's Invention on the Mega Drive 15 page for no reason that I could discern apart from it being part of the '90s zeitgeist. As I was adding that bit of justification to the recommendation, I realised that if John Kricfalusi had been a transphobe, I would have a wildly different take on this. Because, like, tell it like it is, Harry Potter was part of the Y2K and early millennium zeitgeist, so why not also recommend those games for the same reason? Johnk Prickfellatio was only racist against Koreans, sexist, a child rapist, and a union buster, but he never said anything about trans women, so I felt I could have a property of his on my recommendations list. Well, at the end of the day, Stimpy's Invention wasn't even considered a very good game and it was just on my list because of a loose association between the '90s zeitgeist and the neomodernist aesthetics of The Ren & Stimpy Show. Anyway, Mega Drive 15 item #12 is Soleil now. By all accounts a better game and certainly it has no association with a racist, sexist, union buster who had a 14-year-old girlfriend at the height of his career.
2025 May 4: 06:18
"Sakes alive, Tina; you must hate Star Wars." No, I hate what 2 giant corporations have turned it into. It's gone from innocuous space opera trilogy to cash cow to corporate smokescreen. You'll forgive me if I don't rush away to Disney Plus and spend the rest of the day rabidly consuming the ballooning roster of content for content's sake just because today sounds like "May the Force be with you" if you said it with a lisp.
2025 May 4: 06:12
On this day in 1970, the corporate feudal state stamped out the last vestige of dissent of the Baby Boom generation at Kent State University; and in 2007, the 2nd largest tornado ever recorded on planet Earth reduced Greensburg, Kansas, to a morass of broken lumber and twisted metal. But yeah, sure, May the Fourth Be With You. That's what I'm supposed to say, right? I'm supposed to do Richard Nixon and Jim Rhodes' dirty work every year? I'm supposed to pretend like God said "fuck this town" and so it was fucked? I'm supposed to play the part of the fawning, loyal consumer, right?
2025 May 3: 12:03
Hmm.... upon reflection, I think I can discern a pattern here.
A. My own website has seen a dramatic hitspike over only 2 days' time.
B. Wikimedia makes a blog post complaining that 68% of their traffic is from AI training bots.
C. Other sites on Neocities apart from my own are seeing hitspikes too.
D. Someone working with ScummVM mentions in a blog post that their servers kept shutting down because all the AI training bot traffic was simulating a distributed denial-of-service attack.
I think it's reasonable to assume, given the above, that something has changed. Either all the existing models are being retrained, or a new model is set to come out soon. I should point out that, in Item D's case, they simply installed Anubis to detect and deflect bot traffic. I don't know about you, but Anubis sounds pretty damn good right about now. Of course, I'm not about to self-host just to do that. That sounds like money I don't have.
2025 May 3: 07:32
I hate to say it, but now that i've disabled my gallery page again, the bandwidth use has really dropped off. 2 days ago, my website was using about 500 MB bandwidth, then I renamed my gallery folder to something ridiculous, effectively breaking it, and now it's only using 80 MB. Did you know that 68% of all the data requests across all Wikimedia projects is from AI training bots? That's why certain Wikipedia articles load so slowly; Wikimedia has to fight through a veritable DDoS attack to serve the information. It looks very much like I'm not going to be able to host a gallery here anymore. In order to throw the bots off, I rename my gallery folder every so often, even after disabling it. Why disable and not delete? The day may come when I can put my gallery back, so deleting it outright would mean I would have to get it out of my backups, whereas I can just rename the existing folder back to "gallery". It would probably fall upon deaf ears, asking Neocities' server admins to install Anubis, wouldn't it.
2025 May 2: 07:44
Duolingo is now almost 100% AI-generated. How far we've fallen from the free app I downloaded onto my iPhone 6 in 2016 to practise my French. Back in those days, it didn't even have adverts! It didn't even have illustrations, it was just text and a speech synthesiser reading it. Human-generated text. I remember in 2018, Duolingo was the #1 employer of women in the entire tech sector and was winning awards all over the place for this and that, but that's all in the past now. When I read that Duolingo had totally phased out human reviewers, the first thing I thought of was how my mum's old boss back in 2002 translated all the English signage in the office into Spanish by using BabelFish (a distant predecessor to Google Translate), and they ended up being so confusing that Spanish-speakers couldn't understand them. You would put "Please do not open this door" into BabelFish and it would spit out something that could be re-translated back into English as "Portal that does not wish to be touched". The real money was in long sentences and blocks of text: "30-minute maximum computer use, no double-reservations allowed. Please see front desk for browser password." You'd end up with something like, "Use 30 maximum computers of minute time, not allowing double-settlements. Please browse for the password to the front desk." This is where Duolingo is headed. Where once you could use it to actually learn another language, now you'll end up with nonsense. There's not even any guarantee that the AI-generated sentence will match the answer that the system expects. This, on the heels of the news that kids can't even think without ChatGPT telling them what to do, makes for a really bad day in education.
2025 May 2: 04:12
I don't know who needs to hear this, but don't waste your money on a Switch 2 just so you can play GameCube games. There is absolutely nothing preventing a Switch 1 from playing GameCube ISOs except for corporate shackles. People with modchipped Switches have been playing GameCube on them since 2017. And Nintendo 64, and Super NES, and basically everything else. Don't drink the corporate Kool-aid, wait until customer disinterest forces them to lower the price to something more serviceable. It worked for the 3DS, it'll work for the Switch 2. That is, if you want to bother with it at all. Me, I'm not interested. But, you probably figured that out already.