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Posts by The Self Taught Man
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2024-12-17 at 2:53 PM UTC in In a third world beach resort
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2024-12-17 at 2:32 PM UTC in I heard back from Jeff z Hunter this morning
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2024-12-17 at 2:09 PM UTC in Haha someone got my gf to leave meWas it the alcoholics, the pedos, the casual racists, the shit posters or the drugs she didn't like?
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2024-12-17 at 9:23 AM UTC in In a third world beach resort
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2024-12-17 at 9:20 AM UTC in &TOTSE/totse.com. Old Babbage Bi-Monthly articleIn a forgotten alley, where the streetlights buzzed with dying voltage and shadows swallowed the pavement, there was a bar only whispered about: The Temple of the Screaming Electron, or simply TOTSE. No one advertised it. No flyers, no Yelp reviews, and certainly no website. But if you needed to find it, somehow, you did.
The entrance was easy to miss—a narrow door, blackened by time, with no handle and a single brass buzzer below a faded sign. The letters T-O-T-S-E were etched unevenly, like someone had carved them with a knife in a moment of frustration. If you rang the buzzer, there’d be no response at first, just silence. Then, a voice—warped and distorted—would crackle through a hidden speaker:
“Shall pass no law”
The door opened inward, and suddenly you were inside.
The first thing you noticed was the sound. It wasn’t music, at least not in the conventional sense. Speakers mounted in the corners hissed static, interspersed with fragments of broken transmissions: a news broadcast from the '50s, a Soviet-era number station, the chirp of a modem connecting to nowhere. Underneath it all, the low hum of electronics pulsed like a heartbeat.
The bar itself sprawled in impossible ways. At the center was the counter, a slab of old, pockmarked steel lined with mismatched stools. The bartender, an enigmatic figure known only as “Warden”, never smiled, never laughed—just served drinks with the precision of a machinist. A pair of thick, taped glasses magnified his eyes to cartoonish proportions, and his stained apron seemed to have more burn marks than a welder’s coat.
The drinks were infamous. No cocktails with umbrellas or sugared rims here. Instead, there were concoctions named "Short Circuit," "Blue Screen of Death," and the lethal "Rootkit." Rumor had it the last one contained absinthe, espresso, and something that glowed faintly under black light. Warden would sometimes mix them without looking, as though the bottles knew exactly where to land in his hands.
The regulars at TOTSE were the kind of people you didn’t meet anywhere else. In one corner sat a man known only as “Null,” tapping endlessly at a mechanical keyboard hooked up to nothing—no monitor, no wires. Across from him, a woman with silver hair and mirrored sunglasses argued passionately with a man wearing a tinfoil hat. They spoke in riddles, throwing around phrases like “signal interference,” “crypto-lattice walls,” and “the electron is screaming again.”
Scattered booths with torn upholstery lined the walls, each one home to a different enigma. Writers hunched over notebooks, scribbling furiously. Hackers tapped away on laptops with cracked screens, the keys worn bare. Philosophers leaned over half-empty glasses, muttering about the collapse of society, the rise of machines, or the beauty of chaos.
And the chalkboard. The blackboard behind the bar was sacred. Anyone who thought they had something to say could stand up and write on it—whether it was lines of code, fragments of manifestos, or a question no one could answer. Warden would always wipe it clean by morning, but somehow, pieces remained, buried under layers of chalk dust like ghosts of ideas unspoken.
The lights above the bar flickered unpredictably, casting shadows that didn’t always make sense. Some said the wiring was shot; others claimed the bar was alive. Occasionally, the hum would shift to an eerie silence, the kind that made you hold your breath without realizing it. That’s when you’d hear the stories.
People said TOTSE had always been there, in some form or another. Before it was a bar, it was a speakeasy during Prohibition. Before that, a forgotten basement where alchemists mixed poisons and cures alike. Some claimed it was older still, built on ley lines, drawing power from energies no one could name. But in its current form, The Temple of the Screaming Electron was something else entirely—a sanctuary for ideas no one else would host.
The hum, the walls, the name itself—it all echoed a singular philosophy: Speech is power, and power must never be silenced. This was TOTSE's creed, scrawled above the bar in jagged letters:
“Freedom of speech: Enter at your own peril.”
Here, words were sacred, dangerous, and limitless. People came to TOTSE because they had nowhere else to go—no other place where they could speak without fear, where their ideas could live or die on merit alone.
Some newcomers embraced it. Others fled, overwhelmed by the raw, unenhancemented nature of it all. But those who stayed? They found a kind of freedom most people only dreamed of. They became part of the conversation—a chaotic, electric current that screamed across the dark void of silence.
TOTSE wasn’t just a bar; it was a battleground for ideas. Some were mad, some were genius, and some were both. But all of them were given the space to exist. And if you walked out those doors feeling unsettled, electrified, or forever changed—then TOTSE had done its job.
Because, as the Warden often grumbled while wiping down the bar, “Speech is free. But freedom? That’ll cost you.”
When you left TOTSE, whether it was after one drink or a lost weekend, the outside world never felt quite the same. The city seemed quieter, the air heavier, as though some unseen force had rearranged the atoms of reality while you were inside. Streetlights buzzed louder, their glow harsher, and even the graffiti on the walls seemed to watch you with newfound intent. The hum of traffic no longer blended into the background—it gnawed at your ears, sharp and insistent. People on the sidewalks moved differently too, faces down, eyes blank, their conversations muted and empty compared to the chaos and electricity you’d left behind. The world felt sanitized, muffled, as if someone had turned down the volume on life itself. You’d check your phone, only to find it frozen, or your clock inexplicably wrong, as though time had been rewritten while you were gone. And lingering in the back of your mind, like the fading whisper of a dream, was the hum—the low, pulsing reminder that you had been somewhere real. -
2024-12-17 at 9:13 AM UTC in In a third world beach resortIn Tunisia. This place has 5*, but I dunno if the star ratings here are legit or not. This place is gorgeous, everything is clean, beautiful gardens, lovely pools. The tourists are all old Germans and Japanese, and there isn't too many of them, it's the off season now, but it's nicer with less people. There are staff going around getting new features ready for the summer and doing maintenance work and tending to the garden.
The contrast with the street outside is amazing. The street outside has graffiti everywhere, rubbish strewn all about the place, noisy minibikes and all sorts of vehicles going by, insane traffic. I stayed at a moderate hotel my first night - $40, then a really cheap place for $10, that the owner tried to talk me out of staying at as the heating wasn't on or anything. It wasn't too bad for the price. This place was $75, and it's worth it as it has everything you want, like a beach, a heated indoor pool, an outdoor infinity pool, and nice gardens, and really fancy restaurants which I feel out of place in. -
2024-12-17 at 9:04 AM UTC in &TOTSE/totse.com. Old Babbage Bi-Monthly articleOnce upon a time, in a forgotten corner of a bustling city, there was a bar known only to those who wandered far enough off the beaten path: The Temple of the Screaming Electron, or TOTSE for short. Hidden behind a flickering neon sign and a door with no handle—just a buzzer—TOTSE wasn’t your typical dive.
The moment you stepped in, the hum of electronics filled the air, as if the walls themselves were alive. Old CRT monitors looped static and cryptic messages. The jukebox didn’t play songs; it emitted distorted sounds that somehow felt like music after your third drink.
At the bar, the drinks had names like "404 Not Found", "Packet Lost", and "Electroshock Martini"—each one stronger and stranger than the last. The bartender, a mysterious figure with a soldering iron instead of a bar spoon, swore he could "reboot your soul" if you had the right mix.
The regulars were misfits: hackers, writers, philosophers, and conspiracy theorists—all huddled in booths, whispering about secrets that could change the world or ruin it. Every so often, someone would get up and scribble something on the chalkboard behind the bar: a manifesto, a piece of code, or a question that no one could answer.
TOTSE wasn’t just a bar; it was an idea—a place where the unspoken got spoken, where chaos met creativity, and where you were always one drink away from uncovering the truth or losing your mind entirely.
And if you ever found yourself there, you didn’t stumble upon it by accident. You were meant to find it. -
2024-12-17 at 8:01 AM UTC in Perplexity is the new best search engineNot even talking about bias, Google is biased but it has also turned into shit at the same time.
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2024-12-17 at 7:28 AM UTC in Perplexity is the new best search enginehttps://www.theregister.com/2024/12/16/opinion_column_perplexity_vs_google/
It is pretty good. It has that magic feel about it, like what Google used to be in 2006. Too bad Google became so greedy and woke.
https://www.perplexity.ai/ -
2024-12-16 at 3:30 PM UTC in Things I don't likeI don't like those who are intolerant of others and who go around making lists of things they don't like
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2024-12-16 at 3:27 PM UTC in Recent Mass UAP Phenomenon
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2024-12-16 at 3:05 PM UTC in THE FURNITURE FILES
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2024-12-16 at 2:57 PM UTC in THE FURNITURE FILESAre you going to get a wood burning stove installed?
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2024-12-16 at 2:56 PM UTC in TinyChat is Offically DoneIt's insane how online platforms which become modestly successful are sold and shut down.
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2024-12-16 at 2:44 PM UTC in Suing Lanny because of what happened
Originally posted by ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ It was a Bell system where a bunch of people would share the same telephone line and each person had a different ring. So the guy across the street would receive his calls that came in with two short rings, the guy at the end of the street would receive calls that came in with two long rings, the guy on the next street over would receive his call with a short ring and a long ring, and so forth. However, anyone on the line could pick up on anyone else's rings, or just pick up the phone and quietly listen in on the other guy's calls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)
He's a zoomer, you need to start off by explaining to him that back then the telephones didn't have Instagram installed. -
2024-12-16 at 2:39 PM UTC in THE FURNITURE FILES
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2024-12-16 at 2:37 PM UTC in THE FURNITURE FILESI'm in Tunisia, last night I saw some guy with a fire in a steel bucket in the middle of a room. The fire was smokey and the smoke was pouring out the open door. This kinda reminds me of that.
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2024-12-16 at 2:32 PM UTC in Lebanon Paused, Syria Restarted - WHAT MEANS!!!
Originally posted by Charles Ex Machina irregardless he remains solely responsible for the decay and decadence of his syrian army that was under his "dicktatorship".
i mean its not like he didnt have any loyalists or something, in 14 years of war we have never heard of any purge and any attempt to consolidate power by appointing loyalists and blood relatives to positions of power.
this is very unbecoming of baathism and dicktatorship.
in the end he just wasnt a someone cut out for the role hes playing.
100% 💯
He is more middle class buy-to-let landlord than dictator. What sort of dictator goes to college to be an opthalmologist? Real dictators gouge eyes out, they don't fix them. -
2024-12-16 at 12:21 PM UTC in Apology to the people of Japan for telekinetic mischief
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2024-12-16 at 9:45 AM UTC in THE FURNITURE FILES
