Plouf de Phoque

@phoque.ing

A perpetually-tired, mostly-functional ADHD poindexter since 1990. Skiing, retro tech, software, geography, and other things of interest. Also a furry. Montréal/Ottawa, he/they, FR/EN/ES/DE/日本語 🔞 May occasionally interact with NSFW content.

The following emoji, pasted into a text editor and saved as a 141-byte COM file, will run as an executable in DosBox-X with options: cpu cputype=8086 machine cga 🐸☺️🐰🐎♐🗃️🧯🧯🧯🐮💗🦮🪏♐🐰🐹🗃️🧯🧯🧯🧯💗🪗🧯😗🧮🫪😗🧮😗🐮😪😔⭐ #retrocomputing #assembly #x86

TIL you can install a Gentoo userland in a prefix and have it coexist with the rest of your system. You don't even need a VM/container/chroot. Just throw it somewhere in $HOME, on top of any distro, or even BSD or MacOS. Apparently it supported Cygwin and Interix at some point too, so… even Windows.

Medicine. Medicine has grown by leaps and bounds. You cannot introduce vaccines that crater cancer rates, cure AIDS, and cure sickle cell, and then tell me things have only gotten worse. Also: Food. To a HUGE degree. I eat what I once considered rare treats every day, now.

Constantine@ajaxsinger.bsky.social · yesterday

Food, man. Food is so much better than it was in 1986. All of it. Poor-people food, restaurant food, fresh food, frozen food. Food is just a hell of a lot better.

dorian

@doriantaylor.com

air travel is one of those experiences that has gotten monotonically worse over my entire lifetime

question though: has *anything* in the last 40+ years genuinely gotten *better*?

like, there's *more* stuff, sure, but is any of it *better*?

2:58 PM Aug 4, 2026

Doing a bunch of online new-hire training stuff at work. This one module: "First, make sure your screen resolution is set to 1024x768 before continuing." ...oh. That one's been around a while.