THIS WEBSITE NOW HAS A CUSTOM DOMAIN!!! --> starshift360.com
POLL!!!
neocities/personal websiteswhat better way than to begin this very babel-esque convergence of knowledge, than the website on which it is hosted on itself!
the genesis of personal websites dates back to the mid 90's, a little bit after when the internet had started to take the world by storm, with the contrivance of geocities. geocities was a website hosting service, much like neocities or even strawpage, although organised websites into 'neighbourhoods' (neighborhoods for american spelling) where websites generally followed a certain theme, like Area51 being for sci-fi websites and SiliconValley being for computer-related sites. geocities originally started out with 6 neighbourhoods with its release, expanding to 14 neighbourhoods by the end of 1995 due to the massive increase in popularity of sites being hosted. mix that in with hardware and software limitations at the time, as in you only got 2 MB per site, and you get an incredibly beautifully crafted community of internet newcomers who just want to explore and embed their mark into the endless seas of the world wide web. despite the vast restrictions of technology in the 90's, pretty much every site on geocities was imbued with a profound curiosity as well as a soul (you don't see much of that today :C, every [corporate] website is just the same monochromatic palette), even if it was just a splatter of 16-colour gifs and images everywhere. this convergence kept accreting until geocities was bought out by Yahoo! in 1999, where premium was added to the site and free users/site got less things for, well, free. geocities was completely halted in 2009 (2019 in japan) in favour of Yahoo's own website hosting service... losing all unarchived websites to an inescapable black hole of deletion. side note: if you are curious, there is an archive of geocities websites online (from what did get archived), so if you are sentimental or want to see what websites were really like back then, you can search for it. excluding myspace/other social media platforms, personal websites were kind of left on hold, atleast until the rise of neocities. neocities, the (spiritual) successor to geocities, released in 2013 with a 10 MB storage capacity for individual free sites. although it doesn't seem like much, it is pretty easy to fit a lot of things in under 10 MB (you can even get quite a bit under floppy disk size!). however, on the positive flipside of this, sites hosted on neocities had a lot of opportunity for more creativity and specialised/high-quality content. and that was back in 2013! now, neocities has a 1 GB storage capacity for FREE sites, which is upped to 50 GB for supporters! that's 100x-5000x more content available to be packed into a website. if you want a great example of how high storage availability has led to more creativity check out melonking.net! overall, interests like space, science, maths, art, and whatever else have been threaded throughout the relentless internet in a bunch of different ways, each site having their own bundles of thought infused into them. if you haven't gotten a site yet, how about you make one? it can be about literally ANYTHING you like!
we interrupt this divider for an emergency announcement:
Which matters most to you: Comedy or Tragedy?
choose comedy it is way better than those SNIVELLING TRAGEDIES!!!!
Anybody remember POP3? Telnet? Not even Gopher?!
web 1.0 was the first stage of the internet, way back when it was still new to the world. this was also the stage where absolute gems like 3dfx, Unreal Tournament 1999, Windows 95/98, etc. were being shown to the wider world. around this time, CRTs, dial-up, and other things were globally prominent, although new corners of the interwebs were developing every day. technology was only beginning to strap itself in the slingshot for worldwide growth, and so, the web was extremely limited (just like mentioned in the previous section), not only visually, but also interactively. by this point, javascript was completely nonexistent. nada. null. never heard of. it was only the early versions of HTML and CSS1 a bit later on. websites in the 90's were very basic; there was no broadband in the 90's, but there was dial-up, which was incredibly slow, and by incredibly, i mean it. 56 kilobits of beautiful data per SECOND! to put that into perspective, if you were to download a 128 GB game, it would take, hmm... 211 days, 15 hours, 21 minutes, and 54 seconds. that's a little under two thirds of a year. for this reason, low quality images/gifs were predominantly used on sites; they were quick to download, which meant that a computer with a 56K modem at the time didn't take 10 minutes just trying to load a page. they also added to the charm of personal sites (geocities), as actual creativity was needed to evade the vast limitations of the internet (and hardware) at the time. on the other, more corporate side of the late 90's web, the dot-com bubble was beginning to make a name for itself. i'm sure some of you looking at my website right now will have known/learned about the Wall Street Crash of 1929. in layman's terms, the dot-com bubble (burst) is just a world-wide-web version of that. due to the rapid advancement in digital technology towards the end of the 90's (and into the new millennia), income for new e-commerce sites skyrocketed. startups like boo.com were prominent throughout the bubble's lifetime, bolstering the gains of the digital online shopping genre as a whole. the bubble kept growing until its climax on March 20th, 2000, where it then rapidly declined; the bubble burst. lots of companies filed for bankruptcy after the bubble crash, and even e-commerce corporations established before the millennia (like eBay) took massive hits to their profit, although gaining a colossal boost to their profits a little while after the dot-com crash. the world wide interwebs also came bundled with a bunch of protocols to control the transmission of data, for example: FTP, Gopher, and Telnet were mainly used for file transfer (FTP is still used today!), POP3 was used for emails, IRC and XMPP were used for chatting, and TCP/IP are used to join the internet together and make it work. to finish off, because a lot of people were still new to the internet, companies had friendly and easy-to-maneuver websites to onboard new internet nomads into the rose-tinted tendrils of the information superhighway; Apple and Microsoft are great examples of this.
REMEMBER - Turn your computer off before midnight on 12/31/1999.
at the dusk of the 90's and the dawn of the new millennia, the world was in chaos scrambling to fix the y2k bug. for the uninitiated, the y2k bug was the worry about what would happen when time passed through the new millennia; years were only stored as two digits (e.g. '99 for 1999 and '25 for 2025) so the year digit would loop back to 00. why were they only stored with two digits? to save memory of course! unlike today, memory was not very cheap, and in low quantity (less than 1 GB). this would have been a problem because it was unknown how electronics would function on such a date, especially that behind the unix epoch (1st Janurary 1970). because of the work of many vigilant technological wizards, this global problem never really came to be the monster it was represented as; 2000 came and nothing really happened per se. some systems obviously DID error, although were mostly just inconveniences that didn't really endanger anyone's lives. Y2K wasn't all gloom and doom though; an entirely new and unique culture was born with it! transparent electronics like monitors and controllers became really prominent during this time, becoming nostalgic later on for some people. during this era, a lot of elements of both the internet and the real world were extremely positive, despite the (possible) looming doom of Y2K.
A place for friends.
the breakthrough of the new millenia brought with it intense technological development and improvement, stripping the internet of previous restrictions. more people than ever were joining the interwebs as newcomer netizens and roaming to and from sites like forums and chatrooms - but there was a small problem.
There was no interaction.
posts were very tedious to compose and difficult to come by, excluding the strict specialisation in topics (like in forums). the advent of the early-mid '00s changed this however - with the embedding of interaction and participation into the wide reaches of the internet. this was seen through business collaboration, e-commerce, and (arguably) most importantly, social media. social media has vastly changed since its conception back in the early '00s, due to factors such as customisation, easy communication and just overall freedom in expressing yourself. MySpace was a great representation of those factors (was); it had a simple, though extremely customisable, interface that could be made personal to anybody. like listening to metal music? put that on your profile! like listening to metal... anything else? put that on your profile! in addition to that, pretty much any part of your page could be recoloured, retweaked and distorted - which could lead to other people being attracted to your profile! uniquity was (and still is) a very good element of a profile page: it's a good portal into somebody's favourite movies, music, etc. sometimes, you can even tell what the basics of somebody's interests might be, just by looking at the style of their page - e.g. aesthetics. by its peak in april 2008, MySpace had 115 MILLION MONTHLY VISITORS. thats around 3 million users every single day. during this time, technology was also nowhere near enough to be developed enough to take a chokehold of our lives. this community of customisation and expression flourished - until new platforms by mega-conglomerates began to sanitise the web...
this section was actually made to help with my AQA GCSE english speaking exam, so if it seems to be very saturated with metaphors and emotive language, you now know why.
What would happen if you fell... into a black hole?
just like pretty much everything in life, black holes come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and if you dig deep enough, even types... well, 'shapes' is a bit of an overstatement, but it will work. if you didn't know, black holes come from very large amounts of matter concentrated into a tiny point. ever heard of the star Betelgeuse? that will go supernova (star run out of fuel, collapses in on itself, goes boom) and leave a neutron star behind (most likely). now you may be asking, why wouldn't it leave a dwarf star behind? wouldn't that mean the Sun would also turn into a black hole?? you see, a stark difference between the Sun (orange, healthy star) and Betelgeuse (red, supergiant, morbid, elderly star) are their solar masses; the Sun has one solar mass (who would've guessed?) while Betelgeuse has about 15 solar masses (from what NASA says). there is a threshold around 20 solar masses beyond which any star to go supernova is thought to leave a black hole behind (Stephenson 2-18) as opposed to a dwarf star (the Sun does not have enough mass to go supernova; a star needs 8 solar masses to go supernova). if the solar mass nearly surpasses the threshold, but just stays below it (Betelgeuse), then a neutron star is created. moving on to ACTUAL black hole stuff, they have different sizes, meaning 'different' gravitational pulls. the reason for this is that, well, let's say you have a small black hole. logically more matter would be closer together as opposed to having more matter further away (in a supermassive black hole). this means both the smol and large black holes have different event horizons, which is the point when gravity pulls in everything -- including light -- and nothing can escape. this includes you by the way. YOU are not stronger than TON-618. anyway, it turns out that because more stuff is closer together with a smaller black hole, the event horizon is also smaller. seems like a good thing right? yeaahhh, until you realise that you start to get spaghettified (turned into spaghetti by big gravitational forces) before you hit the event horizon. a black hole is defying the rules of black holes. this is also why a super-small black hole is labelled as more dangerous than a supermassive black hole; the event horizon, although further out, doesn't really inflict a very large amount of gravitational force, so you won't get morphed into spaghetti as quickly from the very strands of the universe itself. there are also spinning black holes, which are black holes that have angular momentum, and have a oblate shape rather than the spherical shape of a regular black hole (SEE? i didn't completely lie about the 'shape' bit!). these spinning black holes also dabble in relativity, which is NOT going to be covered in this section; it will be covered, you'll just have to read more (:D). there is another type of black hole, kalled the kugelblitz, which is basically a black hole made of light. unfortunately they are theoretical, so they aren't actually real. you can blame relativity and quantum physics for that (or something). i also decided i want to make this section into both a writing and hybrid section (with a black hole guide!!!), so here you go:
black holes also have anatomies, like the inner horizon and stuff, but that also links to theoretical physics/time travel, so that will be covered in a different section.
-nym wordsc u l8r m8
i'm sure that most of us have heard abbreviations being used in conversations, even completely brain-depriving ones like ts (this shit) and pmo (pisses me off). well, most of these 'abbreviations' actually have names; by that i mean not what they stand for. because i'm definitely 100% sure that the meanings of these words have not been converged into one page yet, here are the meanings of all of the 'nym words i can find:
i just checked wikipedia and it turns out there is a list of -nym words. oh well! here's my spin on them!
hyper meaning high, glyc meaning glucose, emia meaning presence in blood
what do you think of when your hear the word 'example'? what about 'instance'? maybe even 'nostalgia'? to different people, words can mean different things/bring about different thoughts and feelings. for me, it's words such as these:
200% hyperbole!
most of you who have looked at my website atleast once would have seen that little bar at the top with a text marquee; inside that text marquee being a randomized splash text. well, some if not most of those splash texts that i put in a neat little json file for it have references. so, here is a list of EVERY motive/reference for every splash text. here goes nothing:
i've made a zip bomb that extracts to the teeny tiny size of 55.4 YOTTABYTES. for context, a zettabyte is 0.001 of a yottabyte, and as of 2016, internet traffic is 1.1 zettabyte per year.
data storage size has came a really long way since the 90's: hard drives (HDDs) in the 90's had typical storage sizes of 500 MB to 1 GB. nowadays, hard drives are several TBs large and solid state drives (SSDs) are already reaching 1 TB, despite their mainstream introduction in the mid 2000s. even with storage capacities this large, everything digital still comes from bits and bytes. so, here is a guide to all of the (plausible) units of data. there are 2 types of data storage values: decimal (1000) and binary (1024); both also have different names, and will be seperated into different parts of the guide:
bits and bytes have been arranged as such because they are analogous to both types of data storage.
Windows XP in Windows XP in Windows XP...
if you didn't know, virtual machines are a way of 'emulating' different operating systems, .iso files, floppy disks and whatever else, mainly for things that aren't supported by your main device. they can be really helpful in customization, dependency installation, ease of use, nostalgia, education and a lot of other things. to make and use virtual machines, you typically need a virtual machine manager/client. the two most well-known clients are VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox, although the former is for more of a professional use (VMWare is more performant however). i'm going to provide a little guide for those of you who need to get the ropes of VMs/VirtualBox so you can have an easier life with it!
i don't use Windows anymore, but it doesn't mean i can't provide any help! also, since Windows has very good compatibility, it will be pretty easy to install VirtualBox.
the installation of VB is simple if you already know how to install packages on Arch.
if the human mind tried to comprehend it, the brain would collapse... into a black hole.
if you haven't delved into a topic such as this before, you may think that numbers like a billion and a trillion are big. you wouldn't exactly be wrong... but there are numbers out there that are HUNDREDS of magnitudes larger. for example, did you know that Google (search engine) got its name from the number Googol (which is a 1 with 100 zeroes behind it)? this nomenclature basically applies to any wack number that is created; a googolplex is 10 to the power of a googol (10^10^100), or a 1 followed by a googol zeroes. for reference, the googolplex is so large to the point that it is impossible to physically write down; you would need more space than there is available in the universe. because there is no 'biggest number' (you can always add one if it's not infinite), absolutely incomprehensibly large numbers have been created, both by general thought, and even by competitions. also, since these numbers are so large, a completely different way is needed for writing them: arrow notation (there are a lot of different notations but arrow is one of the most common ones). in arrow notation, each arrow represents 1 (extra) layer of exponentiation; 1 arrow is only exponentiation (2^4), 2 arrows is tetration (2^2^2^2 = 2^16, repeated exponentiation), 3 arrows is pentation (repeated tetration), and so on, so forth.
just a forewarning here, there most definitely WILL be 
spoilers in this review. if you haven't read 'The Martian' yet, you should definitely read it. or, if you don't mind being spoiled, and not being able to read this book at all because you would remember like everything in it, continue on:
The Martian is so far the favourite out of the books that i have read so far (not very much admittedly, but still); it is a rollercoaster of emotions and actually has a positive ending. it is also a diary-type book, meaning that the story is told out in diary entries/logs, rather than just flat out writing. additionally, comedy is strung throughout the entire book, making it funny, and so, very readable! there are some scientific inaccuracies, but they are quite few in number. one of the things i really like about 'The Martian' is how the protagonist (Mark Watney) survives basically anything and thinks up a way around any problem. house blew up? no problem. massive storm? just drive around it; simple enough. it's also really cool how there is a lot of community: everybody works together to try and get Watney off of Mars. that is something you barely see today (if you look in certain places), so it's nice to see happen in a book such as this.
Mom said it's my turn on the xbox.
the xbox 360 marks a major milestone in the history of (console) gaming, most notably the transition to 7th generation consoles and the console wars (between the xbox 360, PS3, and the Wii). it is also notorious, however, for having a 50% failure rate on its core model due to oversights in hardware... which was also the base for a lot of workarounds like the towel trick! the 360 played a major point in most of our lives AND culture, conceiving the novelty around things like Mountain Dew/Doritos at the time. from its release in late 2005, the 360 was officially supported for just under 11 years - after which development focus was shifted towards the xbox one. despite that, people are still playing on their 360s, even playing online and making friends! this is proven well in the r/xbox360 subreddit, if you want to check that out. the xbox 360 was also incredibly hardmoddable; you need to at the very least needed to solder something onto the motherboard of the 360. even despite that drawback, the JTAGged/RGHed 360s (type of hacks to mod the 360) were still quite reliable; especially so if on the right motherboards. you can also softmod the xb360 now with the BadUpdate exploit, although it is reset on reboot. due to the failure rate of the early 360 models, several (motherboard) revisions and different models were made: most notably and reliably the Jasper and Trinity motherboards. if you are perchance looking for a 360 to buy here is a chart of the motherboards you want to look for and which to avoid:
| motherboard | moddability | reliabilty |
|---|---|---|
| Jasper | mod it now!!! | will rarely fail |
| Tonasket | mod it now!!! | will basically never fail |
| Falcon | you should be fine modding | can fail quickly |
| Trinity | mod it now!!!!! | will rarely fail |
| Winchester | no JTAG/RGH - only BadUpdate/softmod | will basically never fail |
| Zephyr | less worth modding | can fail extremely quickly |
| Xenon | less worth modding | can fail extremely quickly |
| Corona | mod it now!!!!! | will rarely fail |
ok maybe this isn't actually that good of a chart... anyway what you basically need to know is Jasper, Tonasket, Corona and Trinity are (really) good for general use and modding (Tonasket/Trinity overall best), while everything else isn't as good. throughout its lifetime, the 360 also had different dashboards: blades (oldest), NXE and Metro (aligning with Windows 8 design). the former two are rarer due to a lot of 360s on sites like eBay being updated to the latest version - but, if you look hard enough, you can still find them! additionally, if you mod your 360, you can choose different dashboards to peer at!
bip bip bip beeeeep
morse code, just like Base64, is another way of encrypting/obfuscating text with the objective of making information harder to read and decipher. morse code can look a little daunting when first trying to learn it though - so i decided to make a guide!
insert ansi art
pretty much since the dawn of time (when terminals first existed), ANSI colour codes were used as a way to colour the foreground (text) and background of a terminal. they are prefixed with the ANSI escape code (\033 in octal) followed by the font effect with a semicolon(1; for boldness) and finally the colour (92m for bright green) (\e[1;92m'green' = green). here is a chart of the foreground (30/90) colour codes, ranging from black to bright white:
| name | value | colour (WinXP console, RGB) |
|---|---|---|
| black | 30 | 0,0,0 |
| red | 31 | 128,0,0 |
| green | 32 | 0,128,0 |
| yellow | 33 | 128,128,0 |
| blue | 34 | 0,0,128 |
| magenta | 35 | 128,0,128 |
| cyan | 36 | 0,128,128 |
| white | 37 | 192,192,192 |
| bright black/gray | 90 | 128,128,128 |
| bright red | 91 | 255,0,0 |
| bright green | 92 | 0,255,0 |
| bright yellow | 93 | 255,255,0 |
| bright blue | 94 | 0,0,255 | bright magenta | 95 | 255,0,255 |
| bright cyan | 96 | 0,255,255 |
| bright white | 97 | 255,255,255 |
fast car fast > fast car slow
not even 10 years ago, a lot of the arcade and simulation (and simcade) racing games on the market had an amazing sense of speed; if you were going fast, you felt like you were going fast. this is easily reflected through the hood cams in games such as Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005 + 2012) and Forza Motorsport 4: if you want to feel like you are going fast, DO NOT EVER use the chase cams. when you are going 150 mph, the chase cam makes it feel like you are going 50. the decay in the feeling of speed over time can be attributed to a variety of reasons: a larger age group playing racing games, speed hurting the realism of simulation games, etc. (it isn't very clear what the main reason actually is).
miscellany madness
here are the other pages of my little own knowledge superhighway:
