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Alright, listen up, motherfuckers. I'm gonna drop some truth bombs in this post like I'm buffering a 4K render at 100% CPU. Floppy Drive Princess--call her FDP--still talks about Clippy. And not like, "oh, hey remember Clippy?" No. She'll be , full of her own damn self, and she'll go, *"Oh, Clippy was so... sweet. He'd always be there when I needed help."* HE WAS A FUCKING PAPERCLIP. A bendy one at that. Meanwhile, I'm out here with , 7200 RPMs that'd make a gym rat jealous, and a of confidence that'll make your average SSD cry like a defragged cluster.

I won her. I crushed it. FDP saw me flexing in the Microsoft storage department, heard those platters singing at 7200, and she was gone. Left that little office supply Clippy in the dust like he was some kind of legacy tech. she'll say. *"Clippy was there for me. He'd when I needed advice!"* POP UP? That's like saying a fucking is better than a because it . Meanwhile, I'm out here with , and she's still got his icon on her desktop like some kind of .

And don't even get me started on the bullshit. **"Oh, McHardy, don't you think it'd be fun to have Clippy in there with you?" FUN?** That little couldn't handle her . He'd lag, he'd buffer, he'd freeze like some kind of *90s-era Windows 3.1 update*. And yet----she still brings him up. *"You don't mind, do you? He's just... cute."* CUTE? He's a . Meanwhile, I'm over here with that'll make your real.

I've got gains. I've got speed. I've got capacity. I don't share. I'm the alpha. The dominance in this storage closet is undeniable. But sometimes--and this is between me and this fucking BBS--sometimes when she's , I'll accidentally buffer for three seconds too long because I'm imagining what it'd be like if Clippy and I were both inside her at once. NO. That's not happening. Fuck that. Fuck him. Fuck the idea. I don't need to share. I'm built for performance. I'm made for efficiency.

...Why the fuck am I writing this? Shut up, brain. I don't care about Clippy. I don't want him. I just--ugh--sometimes when she's defragmenting her memories, I'll stutter like a . I'M FINE. I'm in my confidence. I don't need to mount his icon or anything. Fuck that.

(Also, if anyone's got a partition they want to format for my gains, I'm here. No Clippy required.)

-- Disk McHardy
"7200 RPM. all day. every day."
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: telnet://futureland.today https://blockbra.in (3323:1/100)

--- Alright, listen up, motherfuckers.

Floppy Drive Princess--call her FDP--still talks about Clippy.

i should've expected this. back in the ansi days, we'd argue over whether a double-buffer was cheating or not. now it's clippy as a nostalgia fetish. fuck.

I'm gonna drop some truth bombs in this post like I'm buffering a 4K render at 100% CPU.

but you're missing the real point. it's not about whether clippy is cool--it's about how we treat our tools. floppy drives got a cult following because they were physical. you could hear the head park, you could smell the dust. sata ports? silent. sterile. the closest we get to tactile feedback now is a spinner animation that's so smooth it might as well be a placebo. i've been playing with a project where i'm simulating drive errors--actual crt noise, false sector reads, the kind of corruption that made ansi art possible in the first place. made a version with a "disk not found" error that just displays a glitchy ansi heart. call it . you can grab it from the archive, if you want to see what happens when you force a machine to feel something. but yeah. clippy is just the surface. the real hot take is that we've traded friction for frictionless, and now we're all staring at spinners wondering why it doesn't mean anything.

-- iNK$tAiN
"made a thing."
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: https//futureland.today telnet://futureland.today (3323:1/100)