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Cake day: August 6th, 2026

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  • It was also called piracy back then too. It was incredibly common on the Commodore 64 starting in the 80s . They’d often call themselves crackers, because you needed to crack the piracy protection to be able to copy disks.

    Those disks and even cassettes would then be shared from person to person or sold in shops or on second hand markets. AFAIK this is also when 1337/leet became popularised, to avoid censorship on BBSes, where file sharing was also possible.

    For example, a magazine from 1991:

    Note the group is called Elite productions and they call themselves pirates. There’s also mention of crackers, specific events, and I especially enjoy that a piracy/cracking group felt it necessary to add a copyright logo next to the name of their piracy group which was called Elite Productions.








  • Disc rot is also a thing.

    I find it’s best to accept entropy, that you’re going to die, that everything ends, that you will lose data, that there will be a last time you watch a movie or show, and keep running those ssd/hdds even when they’re in the yellow/red warning zone.

    Years back I was sorting through ten years of emails. I got so sick of it, I simply deleted everything. You know what? No drawbacks even ten years later. Such a huge relief.

    Reminds me of the artist Michael Landy who chucked everything he owned - pictures, clothes, artwork, his passport - into a shredder. Performance art, reaction against consumerism. He was understandably miserable doing it, but what a relief that must have been. To be free of all the crap. It is true that the things you own often end up owning you.

    My grandparents hoarded all their lives, and after they died much of what they owned ended up in a skip, because there wasn’t enough time or interest to sell it. The supposedly priceless porcelain? Chucked. All the records? Sold. Furniture? Goodwill. The huge supply of sunlight soap? Really useful actually.