Twitter Info Threads

I like to ramble about things on twitter. Sometimes these are interesting long threads, so I'm going to try to collect them here.
==Aliexpress/ebay/amazon is full of Weird Junk==
*Censored Hello Kitty, creepy masks, giant vegetable pillows,
*There are no vape phones, but you can punch beekeepers, sadden your beard, and wear haunted masks
*Tiny phones!
*Weird connectors, like connecting to PCI over DVI
*Strange SD cards and Mini-PCIe cards
*Power USB devices with 9V batteries, or spin your BBQ rotisserie spit from USB
*Save me USB adapters! And the secret behind USB yfrjgbntkm
*Industrial connectors: Because sometimes you want to screw in your USB-C connector
*USB cables come in the same types as romance novels
*Sex toys, to ensure porper pressure on your tender skin
*Strange novelty phones
*Who needs a 9-key keyboard?
*Industrial keyboards on ebay
*Custom/industrial keyboards on ebay
*The government deals site has paintings, police soda machines, and driving simulators
*I was bored at a Guitar Center and took a bunch of pictures of musical stuff
*Does ebay have SATAN? on VHS? Oh yes
*What about Jesus? On VHS? Yes as well.
*Point of Sale keyboards
*Waterproof Connectors
*Old IBM computer controllers, with a tangent into how Williams Tubes Memory worked
*Anti-barking devices, mice, and USB drives
*Cat carriers & backpacks
*TOSLINK for your phone! USB Pottery Wheels! Fiber optic mice!
*Anime Bodysuits of horror, mannequins with no eyes, and the Palace of Meat
*Android head units/in-car infotainment units are strange, and you must enjoy the special smooth
*Farm animals require gross and weird machines
*Teeth Teeth Teeth Teeth Teeth
*Teeth and USB cables and pepe boobs?
*amongus babies and sex toy suspicion
*Teethcams and magnets, but not magnetic teeth
*meme clothes and more meme clothes
*keycaps: dogbutt and nft and more, oh my
*RFID cows and undefined trousers
*weird mini-pcie and pcie adapters, and external molex power
*ZIPPERFACE, plastic raincoats, and strange chicken devices
*Trying to find light-up pushbuttons, I get distracted by exercise devices and the amazing quantum resonance magnetic bioplasm non-linear system full body analyzers
*Smart doors, bird costumes, and keyboard autoclickers
==Anthropomorphic Animals (aka Furries)==
*How do catgirls wear headphones, anyway?
*How do furry animals wear masks? or use phones?
*Robot Fucking and how do keyboards get designed in a world of hooves?
*That time I collected my list of fursona jokes and realized this probably isn't a joke
*Hey does your fursona have to be a single animal-person? Can it be like, four animals with a hive mind?
*Bird furries on airplanes, vampires on the moon, the mysterious Horsetaur, and the furry spectrum
==ADHD==
*ADHD and the "I don't know what time is" logic that causes anxiety
*Being a detective about your own life, and why you shouldn't worry if you find ADHD stories relatable
*You can't mail Adderall, you just gotta be really good at scheduling when to pick it up and remembering to do that.
*I either have ADHD or I am living in a haunted house which is playing fruit jokes on me
*I'm vague about what I'm doing because I don't want to lose the motivation
==Biology==
*Eyes are weird and use timetravel to hide your temporary blindness
*How long could you run a human on a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator?
*Scanning your body using antimatter, the same kind that's in bananas
*Don't eat the rich, it isn't healthy. Compost the rich instead.
*Joking about the 7th sense, and how many senses do we have anyway? And how that relates to ADHD.
*Why you can see moving dots when you look at a blue sky
*Winking vs. Blinking, Smiling, Latin Trumpets, and Babylon 5?
==Calendars==
*Kodak's Nuclear Reactor and the International Fixed Calendar
*The US Presidential Date System, invented in the 4th Year of Trump
*Windows 95 doesn't know about George W. Bush and his ideas about Daylight Saving Time
*HEY POPE, REVAMP THE CALENDAR ALREADY
==The Cold War & Radiation==
*Why not put a nuclear reactor in a plane?
*How do you take pictures on a spy satellite in the age of film?
*Can you run a plane on AA batteries? (no) and why the USSR accidentally irradiated Canada.
*Why are Bikinis named after an island that the US nuked?
*Duck and Cover isn't silly propaganda, it's good advice
*Electron Beam Irradiators, Radiation Doesn't ZigZag, Pigs With Nukes, and Keep Your Head Out Of Particle Accelerators
*Gender security, nuclear weapon arming/protection, nuclear submarines and the Scud missile
*Soviet Ekranoplans: A simple guide to telling them apart
==Computer Displays==
*How CRTs work and the amazing image of a round nude tube
*How does your computer figure out what monitor you plugged in?
*Planar graphics and why they were used
*Do lights in games use real electricity? Yes, maybe, it depends, no.
==Computer Keyboards & Mice & Joysticks & Printers==
*The looming security implications of mechanical keyboards
*How Keyboards Work
*How can my mouse have 8 buttons if Windows only lets you have 5 buttons?
*The PC Joystick interface is slightly bananas: It's two timers
*How do those serial-to-ps/2 adapters for mice work?
*How Mice Work
*How keyboards communicate keypresses to Windows, and why you can't easily get a keyboard with an Emoji Button
*Why are printers are so terrible?
==Computer History==
*Why 2038 is The End Of Time
*The connection between Naked Lunch and PNG files
*Punch Cards and the history of IBM
*How did you program in 1962?
*How you can use your CD-ROM driver to stop MS-DOS from booting
*How does your computer know which hard drive is which?
*EZ-Drive/Data Lifeguard/On Track Disk Manager, and how they let you have a hard drive bigger than 500mb
*Why Windows 95 had a "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen and how the boot-screen was animated without being animated
*Why you can't have a file named "aux.h" on Windows
*Bubble Memory: The Next Big Thing that Never Was
*HP LaserJet Font Cartridges and Dot Matrix Printers
*Sony's Optical Disc Archive cartridge, and the history of Optical Libraries
*I had a dream about infodumping on how PC-DOS and MS-DOS related and why CP/M missed out, and accidentally made it real
==Computer Programming/Engineering==
*Web scraping and the many sins of Tumblr
*The endless failures of the Panera Bread & McDonalds websites
*The horrors of hacking and my dad's deathtrap van
*Bad ideas for networks, like water or bullets instead of wires
*How many crabs do we need to run Doom?
*Computers are Magic. Literal Magic
*The time I hacked Github on accident, and more stories of weird test machines
==Chemical Elements==
*Hafnium and the possibility of a nuclear hand-grenade
*Rhodium doesn't cause cancer, it can prevent it! and how that's connected to Bunsen burners
*Dysprosium is why you shouldn't eat a Prius
==Cryptocurrency/NFTs==
*Cryptocurrency is a bad idea, NFTs are a bad idea, and everyone into them is into them way too hard
*The Blockchain is built on p2p tech and that annoys me
*I am going to steal every single NFT
*BDSM, Turing Completeness, and the cost of bad APIs
*Tungsten Cubes? Lotteries? Lootboxes? Collusion? What
*Web3: The Web but only for Making Money, and why NFTs are so ugly
*I'm trying to steal all the NFTs but every time I start coding it makes me too angry to continue
*How to scam people with NFTs and how the IRS is going to ruin it: a beginners guide
*Someone else stole all the NFTs and made a torrent. Good. But the replyguys do not stop.
*Do not engage with NFT-avatar people, just block them. Twitter wants you to be mad, so mad.
==Electronics==
*What connector you should definitely NOT use for a sex machine?
==Fiction Writing==
*Ablative Humanity
*TRANSCRIPT: The 2025 Senate Hearings on the CLEAN SWEEP Satellite's Attempt on Elon Musk's Life
*The Oracle Answers A Question
*Space Cannibalism, aka In-Situ Resource Extraction (outline)
*The kingdom of base-11
*IRS Isekai, or how the tax collectors found a wizard's secret summer home
==Flea Market (Electronics/De Anza)==
*March 2017
*May 2017
*June 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
*July 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
*August 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
*September 2017 and Follow-up with stuff I Got
*April 2018
*May 2018
*August 2018
*April 2019
*May 2019
*June 2019
*September 2019
*April 2022
==Floppy Disks==
*How superfloppy drives were able to fit more data on the same size disks as standard floppies
*What does formatting a disk mean, and how it's completely different from hard drives or SSDs
*How USB Floppy Drives use a protocol from Shugart embedded in another protocol from Shugart embedded in another protocol from Shugart and who is this Shugart Guy anyway?
*The cool trick used in double-sided drives
*Why is it Optical Discs, but Floppy Disks? (And how IDE works)
*The spiral-disks of the Famicom Disk System
==Games==
*River-crossing puzzles
*Amulets & Armor: Is it Doom? And if not, why would anyone think it was?
*How I used a moustache to prevent cheating when playing videogames back in the early 2000s
*Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood is neat and should get a remake
*How game controls have shifted over time
*How DOOM encrypted its cheat codes, and how long did it take someone to figure them out anyway
*Playing through the KFC Visual Novel
*Why PC games don't have ROMs, what a ROM is, and why your Nintendo Switch games are DOOMED
*ExciteBike for the Famicom and how it stored tracks, and what that has to do with batteries and floppy disks
*Pilotwings for the SNES can work differently, even on an identical ROM and the follow-up when the game was released on the Switch
*Companion chips used to enhance SNES games
*Building a generator for Silent Hill 2 is so hard that I get mad and livetweet building a Rambo (NES) generator
*The SNES was designed with NES backwards compatibility in mind, even if it never had it
*How the 10NES chip kept you from playing games if the connector was dirty
*Gaming in the transhumanist future
*SimCity 2000, SimCopter, The Yes Men, and the Bhopal Disaster
*Playing Super Mario Bros on a printer, and why Super Mario Bros 2 is Like That
*The phrasing of Oregon Trail memes, and some history of Apple II ports
*The characters in Super Mario Bros 2 have alien parasites in their eyes
*Unisex Duke Nukem 3D Bathrooms, and all the tricks used to make mirrors and lakes work in the Build engine
*HTML encoding? and how Foocubi in Nethack work
==Gender==
*Doctor James Barry was an awesome trans man you should have learned about in history class
*The woman who took a picture of a black hole, the harassment, and my awesome grandma
==My Government Job==
*I made a progress bar that was 100% lies
*The Air Force loves World of Warcraft
*Everything is fractal disasters and why there are no New Projects, ever
*The horrors of CSV and how to loophole a government contract to intentionally lose 10 years of data
*Why a free program cost too much for the US government to afford, and why you should never scan anything with Windows 98
*Why we charged you for public domain information that was free
*Why I don't think the US military is fully off floppy disks, why they used them in the first place, and why there's so much weather data from Alaska
*Why I had to virus scan my own files or lose a couple million dollars
*Working for the government was like trying to solve an endless series of programming challenges
*The FBI is probably spying on furries, or Why They Tried To Get Me Fired
*The placement of weather stations is a Political Issue and also Printers are bad
==US History & Politics==
*Florence Nightgale's contribution to statistics, a scam in Ohio, and how to fight a war with counterfeiting
*The Black Hawk War that Sufjan Stevens sung about
*Jury Nullification and how it has been used
*The Goodyear Blimp is none of those three things
==The James Webb Ground Device==
*It has a twitter account. That makes me angry
*All the other space projects that have launched in the meantime, and why that makes me angry
*Maybe Elon Musk could launch the JWST for free? He didn't, and that makes me angry.
*Can we launch (no pun intended) a kickstarter for NASA to launch the JWST? Because the funding problems make me angry
*The JWST is coded in Javascript running on an iMac and that makes me angry
*McDonald's JWST machine broke... which makes me angry
*Google says you can get a "good telescope" for only 2.5 billion, and that makes me angry.
*It got delayed again, and I blame nazis, who make me angry
*hey guess what IT GOT DELAYED AGAIN WITH ONLY 58 DAYS GO TO
==Linguistics==
*How do sci-fi universal translators know when to stop?
*Jabberwocky, the word ye, and why we have two words for cow and two words for feces
*How rebracketing changed English words
*The history of the snowclone "X is hard, let's go shopping"
==Magazines==
*Electronic adverts in 1980s Playboys
*Video Games & hardware from PC Review, May 1992
*Hardware from PC Magazine, January 1995
*Input devices and software from Byte, March 1992
==Misc Science==
*Learning about things you already knew: How written numbers work, how grammatical cases work, and the difference between centralized communist economies and capitalist ones
*Why is there coal? Because trees won the evolutionary arms race.
==Money==
*The US has had some weird currency and why our current bills are illegal and have to be redesigned, and how Lin-Manuel Miranda messed that up
*How rich is Jeff Bezos? He's a dragon.
==Music==
*Weird Al's endless licensing issues
*The history of the Rickroll
*If Never Gonna Give You Up is the rickroll of the 80s, what are the rickrolls of other decades?
==Personal History==
*How I ended up owing 18k$ because of a single typo
*The horror of the company that had The Repo
*The animals that tried to invade my bedroom as a teen, and the Snake in my PC
*Why the FBI mentioned my old username in a federal investigation
==Religion==
*How do you find the direction to Mecca? What if you're in space?
*Continuity planning for the post-Rapture world
==Space Science==
*Nuclear reactors before humans and WHY IS THERE A MOON?
*We learned something about meteorites by setting off a nuclear bomb, and the mystery of the nuclear explosion where there shouldn't have been one
*How we figured out if there's more than one galaxy: Cepheid Variables
*The Challenger disaster, and Normalization of Deviance
*What films did they watch on the International Space Station?
*Does the International Space Station have a "front"?
*The first picture of earth taken from a satellite, and what that has to do with the UK's nuclear missiles
*A spaceship engine that's slower than a snail, and why jet engines are CHEATING
*There are floppy disks on the International Space Station: How'd they get there?
*How can we get power out of a black hole?
*Why is there an astrological symbol for Makemake? and what the heck is dark matter?
==Science Fiction & Anime==
*Giant robots are stupid and fictional superweapons are weaker than ones we've already deployed
*When is the Golden Age of Star Trek, 1997 or 2020? And then just "boy look at all this 90s sci-fi"
*Alternate casts for Star Trek: TNG? and also, if you released Star Wars one month earlier, Obama wouldn't have been president.
*How uniforms and props from Forbidden Planet kept showing up in later films and shows
*The first episode of Star Trek and why it had to be restored from multiple sources
*Why ebay thinks I want to buy a skirt, and what that has to do with Star Trek and navels
*My idea for a Star Trek fanshow: incredulous starfleet officers reading mission logs
*The original story for Zyuranger, which Power Rangers was based on, involves DINOSAURS and SATAN and I love it
*How Contact keeps its special effects grounded to make it feel more real
*My favorite thing in Sci-Fi: Bullshit Cosmology/Ontology
*That movie where a dragon-rider fights a hydra on the moon
*How I realized a plot point from my Starmap setting was stolen from Asimov's Foundation series
*Star Trek TOS didn't have floppy disks in it. And the data tapes in Star Wars probably aren't tapes. And why the Star Trek timeline is weird
*The neat animation of Akira
*Mechanical animation of Evangelion
*Nintendo Famicom Disk System copy protection/bootlegs, sex machines, explaining PG&E fires to aliens, and alien socialists quarantining earth for the most dangerous meme of all
*Kira from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Ivanova from Babylon 5 meet up for coffee
*Spock's name, and old computers in the far future of Star Trek
*When did vampires start being scared of crosses?
*Is space full of vampires?
*Has anyone written a Star Trek novel about Worf's Bar Mitzvah?
*Dune is a utopia because there's no computers, and how Copyright solves the Fermi Paradox
==Thrifting==
*Goodwill Thrifting that got my tires slashed
*Dolls wrapped in Plastic
*Thrifting with Cool Phones and Uranium Glass
*Looking for laserdiscs and finding Tijuana Christmas
*Unisex Rocking
*Laserdiscs in Santa Cruz, and Everflex Balls
*Appropriately weird stuff at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Giant Hard Drives at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*IBM PC/XTs at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*More PCs at Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Test your network with a suitcase at Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Plotters & MPreg at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Minidiscs & a stealthy CRT at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*The Noise Generator at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Vic-20s at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Floppies and Tandy CoCos at the Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Half a car at the very Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Sphygmomanometers and mixer panels at Weird Stuff Warehouse
*Slockets and power adapters
*Minidisc recorders at Excess Solutions
*Prototyping boards and tube-testers at Halted
*Pinball with friends, and thrifting at Urban Ore
==Video, Film, & Television==
*Why it was hard to make amateur porn films in 1980 and what that has to do with proprietary Sony SSDs
*Early Instant-Replay systems were DEADLY giant hard drives
*How Slip Rings were vital to your VCR, and how helical-scan made VHS tapes small enough to be usable
*How to morph a character on screen in 1960, without cutting, but it'll only work in black & white
*The marketing of Wonder Woman 1984 & the making of Battlefield Earth