this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

I met someone when I was pretty young who had received a generous inheritance -- not enough to live a life of luxury, but enough to live on comfortably without working. He had chosen to simply keep going to school his whole life. He did get degrees, but he didn't use them for anything other than pleasure -- he had a Ph.D but also two Master's degrees, three BAs, and was currently serving an apprenticeship in blacksmithing while considering trying out some trade schools next. I thought, if I had the money I'd do that too, and then thought about how I still could learn all the time, it would just have to be a hobby instead of the career he'd made of it. It definitely changed the way I saw both education and leisure.

The "but" is always the giveaway. They know exactly what they're doing.

"people deserve basic human rights but i simply don't care"

Your hoarder grandfather dies and you gotta clean out his hoarder house but unfortunately he was a powerful wizard so you gotta clean out twelve tower floors of floor-to-ceiling cursed artefacts and expired mystery potions.

There's a rat infestation and you genuinely can't tell if they're natural rats or not.

He's got some really nice magical cupboards that lead to huge extradimensional spaces but those spaces are also crammed full of random bullshit.

You find like twelve magical ancestral swords in there. You're pretty sure that your family has a magical ancestral sword but you have no idea if it's any of these ones. You'll have to ask your mum but she refused to come to the tower so you're gonna have to lug all twelve of them across the country to her idyllic little village to find out.

You call a mover but a giant Drake with a saddle with like twelve hundred bags hanging off its side shows up with exactly two Kobolds on its back. Small shiny things go missing.

You do this on purpose because the more random shit they steal, the less you have to worry about trying to sell or dispose of.

@hellsite-hall-of-fame @worldheritagepostorganization

is this the ORIGINAL?!???

oh holy shit i didn’t even know where this meme came from

OH MY ACTUAL GOD THE ORIGINAL

ORIGINALS ON THE ROLL

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

#there is so much abandonware just...out there being used and carefully maintained#because nothing quite replicates the functionality

Singing in the Aisles (+ Oscar Biopic)

Guys I’ve gotten crazier about Robert and Lucy’s relationship I didn’t think this was possible!!!!

i have no further context on it unfortunately… i only know of its existence because of one piece of info from it that was on the wiki (roberts page)

it was mistakenly written as “behind the actors studio” rather than the correct title (inside the actors sanctum) and whoever wrote it didn’t link the video or anything, so i’d been going crazy trying to find it. very difficult when multiple words are wrong lol.

i also have a memory of the wiki having some other fact cited to this video, but it doesn’t seem to be there now (something about his mum’s garage?). i probably have a screenshot somewhere so i’ll have a look for it another time — it’s 1am for me atm haha. it might also just be on a different page of the wiki.

but yeah. it’s been one of my greatest cornley lore mysteries so i’m very glad we have the video now. even if we have zero other context surrounding it.

ah okay, so "inside the actors studio" is the name of the composition used in the intro and outro of the video, so I can see the confusion, not sure exactly where 'behind' would have come from but it feels like it rings a bell, either way, easy mistake

the wiki seems to imply that the video used to be readily available (as does the view count tbf) so I wonder what happened to it... We had a theory that it was maybe a precursor to the dressing room hour videos, but if they used to be available simultaneously then who knows

still, I'm glad I came at the mystery from the angle that I did haha, I'm certain I'd have spent hours down a rabbit hole if I was trying to solve it from the other end

we love a mystery!! I'd love to hear about them if u have any more, idk if I'll b able to clear anything up straight away but theres genuinely nothing better than trying to find out

Fun fact:

Robert Grove has a sister called Pamela

In an in-universe interview with Gonad Shultz (played by Adam Meggido) Robert (Henry Lewis) reveals a variety of family history and Cornley lore, including his fathers position as a dr, and the title of his first acting book

Fun fact:

Robert Grove has a sister called Pamela

In an in-universe interview with Gonad Shultz (played by Adam Meggido) Robert (Henry Lewis) reveals a variety of family history and Cornley lore, including his fathers position as a dr, and the title of his first acting book

Fun fact:

Robert Grove has a sister called Pamela

In an in-universe interview with Gonad Shultz (played by Adam Meggido) Robert (Henry Lewis) reveals a variety of family history and Cornley lore, including his fathers position as a dr, and the title of his first acting book

who up chrissing their trev

i could never be normal about anything. i dont have it in me