This one doesn't get discussed a lot despite its highish member count and some rich people being involved, but I remember the NXIVM cult for its weird name and also doubling as a self-help company and ponzi scheme. Apparently the leader was convicted to 120 years in prison this October. One of the related organizations was called DOS(I think the leader was a bit of an early video game nerd since other terminology is also game related), an acronym of incorrect latin which means Master over Slave Women.

It was also a sex cult with sex slave members. The guy who made it has an ugly haircut, so some people were incredulous about that. It's really annoying how orignal footage and interviews are drowned out by boring, shitty news coverage. Thankfully, the channel Keith Raniere Conversations still exists, so you can look at that if you're curious.

>>36485
Because there's not much to discuss because it was fairly obvious what the goal was.
It wasn't some Aum or Heaven's Gate insanity, it was just a man manipulating heiresses for his own gain.
A bizarre active one that is almost never talked about is the rainbow family. They're little hippie parties but attract violent types and have been linked to a disappearance

>>36373
Do you have any recommendations for reading about Aum Shinrikyo and how they managed to get so many very educated followers? It seems like a fascinating topic to me, since the kind of technological backbone the had is rare in cults (especially fairly localized ones).

>>36560
There's probably plenty in Japanese.

>>34658
Then it might interest you that the prototypes for the 1st and 2nd gen Pokemon games were recently leaked:
https://boards.4channel.org/vp/ppg

>>34736
That does interest me, I like especially the older pokemon games.

>>34658
If you're into worldbuilding definitely read Ursula K Le Guin's Always Coming Home.

>>34658
When it comes to Anime, one of the critiques I always see is that the stories often start off with an interesting premise but, for some reason, the writers fail in execution. Perhaps the reason why you're often more drawn to the prototype is because the prototype is legitimately more interesting than the final product.

>>36433
I think there's a bit more to it than that.
Negative attitudes can be infectious, depressed people might drag others down with them to have some company. Likewise, sometimes acting happy and keeping a positive attitude can have a lasting effect on an unhappy person.

>>36434
I don't come here to fill the role of someones therapist.

>>36434
>spelled out for me if I decided to read the /so/ archives
/so/ has never really struck me as a particularly "depressing" board. Yes it's certainly not all smiles and optimism, but that doesn't mean it's an endless gloom pit either. What's discussed there feels raw and human, and above all most of the posts are of a constructive nature – rather than falling into the pit of wallowing in self-despair as other such places have fallen prey to. Even if you don't usually take to the "ronery" atmosphere, given the presence of topics such as the "random memories" one (kudos to the OP to who created that; I've enjoyed the momentary glimpses into others' lives), maybe you could instead view it as encompassing something like "saudade."

>How many of you have read through some of TC's archives to any degree?
I've read just a little.
>What were your favorite board's archives to read through? What were your favorite posts?
I haven't read that much, so nothing really stands out that much, most of what I've read was /ot/ and /ma/.
>Did you ever feel tempted to make a thread that one of them covered from years ago because you wanted to see what modern TC's users thought compared to back then, because you wanted more discussion, or any other reason?
I'm the one who made the Prison School thread on /ma/. I just made to talk about it, nothing more. The manga wasn't concluded at the time, so the threads are different.
Personally, I don't see much point in reading the archives like that, I am pleased with the website as it is, and I believe even now there's a dreamlike quality to it, no matter how nightmarish things may seem at the moment, some years from now I think most users will look back to this era and also remember it fondly. Most users from the dreamlike past, didn't felt dreamlike at the time, it will be time that will show to us the happiness we could not perceive.
Oh, and tell Maki to stop smoking and get some rest.

You didn't miss a whole lot, there were some fun times and a different attitude to the net but the vast majority was porn/game trading, excessive flaming and spam.
Media wasn't as easy to come by either so secondaries ran rampant in 2D circles.

>How long have you been on the internet?
Well I first started using it sometime around 2000, when I was 8. But during that time I was rarely allowed online (mom would always say "no, I'm waiting for a friend to call", but I imagine she just didn't want me running up the bill). The few times I could get online, all I really did was look up cheat codes and play flash games.

It wasn't until 2004 that I could get online consistently and I started trying to take part in communities. Mainly gaming forums for what few games I had. Of course, being 12 among a group of 15+-year-olds, it was only natural that I made a massive ass of myself. So after a few tries to fit in somewhere, I just kept to myself until stumbling upon 4chan via YTMND (which in turn I found through the Wikipedia article on Sonic the Hedgehog) in 2006.

>What are your best memories?
Having spent most of my time on imageboards, that's where all of the best memories are. Even then I don't know if they're all that good. I remember my first day on 4chan pretty clearly, there was a motivational poster thread on /b/ that immediately got hijacked into a porn dump. I won't say what kind it was, but I'll just say it was like nothing I'd seen before and I came buckets several times. Also hung out on small chans' /i/nvasion boards, was a good place to vent my teenage frustration in the form of raiding other people.

I guess other good memories would be getting into new games and the occasional new anime. But with my computer being the 1998 toaster it was, "games" only meant SNES JRPGs and Doom WADs, and "anime" just meant whatever I could find on streaming sites. I lurked a few forums for the stuff I enjoyed, but I never posted on them since I was too shy. Looking back, I feel like I should have tried to be a part of those communities, I probably would have been driven to pursue the artistic passions I had back in my teens. Without the support of having friends, all I could really do was just dabble occasionally in code and music, never really getting anywhere.

>How have your internet habit changed?
Well I stopped using 4chan. I still use imageboards frequ

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>>36129
Been around since the late 90s.
My best experience was a small non-English BBS with quite a nice community. I still miss friends from there, but it died quite suddenly when the admin went to Iraq and didn't come back so most people didn't connect up again.

As far as I'm concerned, the clearnet is as good as dead. It's been overrun by the social media hordes that spread like a plague and who complain about anyone that's different, which gets sites taken down (see: 8chan), net infrastructure companies (DNS-providers, hosts, anti-DDOS...) are banning sites at random and it's accepted by their other customers, and giant quasi-monopolies eat websites. Forums have been killed by Reddit, IRC/Mumble by Discord, webrings by Google, personal websites by FB...
I'm moving more and more to darknet stuff, I2P, TOR, hopefully gnunet at some point. There's still more interesting things there and less of that centralization stuff that's killing the clearnet.

>>36312
> My best experience was a small non-English BBS with quite a nice community. I still miss friends from there, but it died quite suddenly when the admin went to Iraq and didn't come back so most people didn't connect up again.

I'm sorry to hear that, online communities just going down with no backup means of communication is always a tragedy.

>>35997
Malay?

>>36003
Indonesian nasi

Soft fluffy jiggly cheesecake

Seafood paella

2020 is overhated. A little pestilence here and some civil unrest there and people act like the world is ending when western civilization has been through far worse.

>>36029
I guess it depends in what country you live in, but in some it hasn't been "a little pestilence" but the most devastating year since the last war they were directly involved. We're talking about GDP getting fucked between 10-15% in one year, that's absolutely nuts. Of course some countries will recover fast but others will lag for decades, if they ever recover. It could also be the year of the beginning of an enormous change in geopolitics and how the world power is distributed.

>>36040
I'm not the person to be talking about the geopolitical ramifications of it with, to be honest. I was more talking about the severity of the actual pandemic, the death rate of the virus is very low compared to things of the past.
I was also just talking about how people on social media bitch about every year like it's the worst ever.

Your life will pretty much carry on as is while all the normal people freak out about not being able to go out and get drunk for a few months. The economy will go to shit but since you're not retarded with money (and lucky) you won't really notice that either outside of some "free" money showing up in your bank account.

Its been a good year for me but a lot of it's down to luck. I saw the freakout over corona coming with how Italy went and planned ahead. When everyone else went grocery shopping I already had everything I'd need for over a month. A lot of normal people lost their shit in isolation. It took them down a peg mentally and helped my self image.

>>36040
Yeah, the economy has been the real thing. I've been learning more about finance lately and it really seems like the govt is pulling all sorts of tricks to keep the economy afloat until the election.

Some of the mangakaka I follow release chapters/bonuses on Twitter. Does that count?

I don't follow many, but I am annoyed by how many are uploaded onto the panda, often with poor, almost machine-tier translation.

I hate Korean webtoons because I don't like the big single page format they use. Web manga is not really the same.

>>34815
Is that darjeeling?

I tried to enjoy some Korean webtoons, but the art isn't anything special (and doesn't seem to vary across different artists), and the stories don't appeal to me. Maybe one has to do some digging to find the good stuff.

>>35991
I enjoy older romance stuff a lot, or even just SoL, the typical otaku fare. It makes me feel good. I will branch out and read a lot of stuff though, like even stuff I wouldn't typically read like tragedy or sports, even if it's not that great because of the fact that lot of SoL isn't fully translated unfortunately. Not to mention that a lot of romance manga have taken the western comic/battle shonen route of never having an ending planned to drag it out.

Regardless, I probably should post on /ma/ more.

>>35999
I don't really enjoy romance but with regards to SoL, have you read Chotto Ippai and Maid-san wa Taberu Dake?

>>36002
I've read a bit of the former. It's cute.
I just enjoy romance because I unashamedly self-insert and it makes me feel less alone.

>>36006
It's quite surprising that there isn't an anime adaptation of it yet, considering it's been around for quite a while and doing fairly well in Japan. Not to mention it's published in Manga Time Kirara.

I'd like to have a dog and some chickens but I should move to the countryside.

My family used to have hens before I moved to an apartment.

Ducks. They can fly, swim and walk. The ultimate all-terrain animal; also more social than geese.

I owned a kitty which I loved, but she died of old age. I won't be in a position to own another pet for years because the house is too small and my parents are too old.

>>32224
They look much better when compared to TV cartoons from 2000's and on, but compared to Anime they do look kind of bad, they look a bit better in movement though.

Also why was my picture deleted but OP's one wasn't?

>>32225
One of the mods must not like Disney girls much.

>>32181
I want some of that now

>>32181
Cos violence makes children into adults, am I right?

[-]

大天使アカリエル

mp4s are allowed here?

>>35920
It's "allowed" but as you might have noticed it can be a bit buggy.