This is very true. Before he trooned out many of his videos were among the few newer videos from LTT that were actually worth a damn.
Anthony transitioning and then immediately disappearing from the channel is extremely funny. Real mask off moment. Makes me wonder if Linus or other senior staff are unironically transphobic or just smart enough to know they need to keep Anthony off screen now. I watch the channel sporadically but i don't think he's been seen or mentioned since he came out? He's like a fucking cryptid now.
From my limited interactions with Zoomers they seem to be less technologically literate then the average Gen Xer or Millennial. In the old days using a computer outside of a work setting for anything other than basic word processing and/or internet browsing required a lot of investment in money (paying someone to keep it running) or time (learning how to keep it running yourself). You had to figure out how to do shit yourself. If you fucked something up you had to learn how to unfuck it or it would forever stay fucked.
They are very much aware their audience does not care in the slightest about "Emily". The few times he got wheeled out for a video since his "transition", the comments section was culled harder than a chicken farm after an Avian Flu diagnosis. Linus & Co. know exactly how radioactive Anthony is right now so they're paying lip service and occasionally putting him in the background, but they're definitely sidelining him as they bring out their more "techy" new hires.
As a kid, I pulled a 5 year old Dell P4 out of a dumpster for my first machine. It was 2007, and we were poor going through a foreclosure. I just wanted to play Oblivion and the Sims 2. I learned everything about that machine. I printed off service manuals from the library when we couldn't afford internet. I went to computer swap meets and "everything must go sales" to shuck archaic DDR1 RAM sticks and a P4 CPU with just .3 GHZ more from "for parts" machines. I setup a dual drive system on used 80GB IDE drives when 320GB SATA 2 was out. The turning point for me was when I got a Sapphire Radeon HD2000 series in 2009 from a friend whose dad was liquidating an IT company nearby. I could finally play the games I wanted, albeit at 15fps. There's a certain type of magic in taking something old, and learning every way that you can rice it and push it to get what you want. Even if it's a slow piece of shit at the end of the day, it's your slow piece of shit. Even though the Zoomers are better off, it's a damn shame they will never know that feeling.
If we didn't have anyone to do it for us, we had to figure it out for ourselves. Oh, you're using DOS, okay, take your disks and install the game... hope you know how to navigate the command prompt. Okay, you installed the game and maybe you were lucky enough to have MOO 3.1; figure out how to put the game on the menu and be sure to point the option at the correct executable.
Going to stop you right there, because you said "double click" which is a concept I've actually had to explain to a zoomer who had only used, as you said, tablets and phones before.
You just reawakened a memory of me cannibalizing computers from my first stint at college. I managed to score a Blu-ray drive that I still use to this day. I've also have a hard drive bay that was pulled out from a computer a decade ago and I still use. Reinforcing the old knowledge with the new knowledge and going deeper into concepts that I already knew has made my love for computers even stronger. My current hobby work of gaming on Linux has been extremely fun and that feeds into my studies. Linus and his zoomer fanbase will never understand our experiences and I pity them for it.
I still remember having multiple AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files, just so I could run certain DOS games or run Windows 3.1.
I wake up and thank God every day that sound cards are no longer a thing. I can only imagine bringing up "Sound Blaster" and having someone think it's a game. I mean, if you're a legitimate audio engineer or something I get it; but for most shit, having it built in on every mother board and shit now... fuck yes. Because nothing is worse than getting a game, and only having beeps and boops while you're dad's computer has actual sound and shit going on.
Unironically... WinAmp! It really whips the llama's ass!
Zoomer said:
This is why I've never watched this shit except for the occasional shit so bad it's lolcow content. Nobody learns anything from this. I honestly fucking hate content like this so goddamn much. It contributes nothing, and somehow these losers make millions. Maybe I'm the loser. I wouldn't even call myself a computer expert and I know more than any of these fucking idiots.
I resemble this comment.
For a long time, I never had my own computer and would always use school computers and computers at the family business or that other people had. When I finally did get a computer, it was cobbled together from spare parts taken from other computers I'd fixed at a job, so I'd have stuff like a half-fried motherboard where half the ISA slots didn't work, a dodgy hard drive, maybe an actual good video card like a Voodoo card, and generally a case that was never closed or was even missing parts. Once I had a machine pretty much for deathmatch LAN parties that was in a literal pizza box, not the case of that name but a box that a pizza had been in.
I think that's also the first PC component I bought with actual money, albeit at a discount. A video card, not that particular one.
And Xupiter toolbar! That. . .really annoyed the fuck out of you the 20th or so time you had to remove it from some boomer's computer.
Linus's content was always at its best when he showcased stuff outside the regular consumer hardware space, like the video on some new production Sandy Bridge motherboards from China using recycled laptop CPUs on a socket adapter. His second best was content that wasn't 100% him and still had something more novel than putting together parts from sponsors like Scrapyard Wars. But now if I want to watch someone review janky Chinese electronics from Taobao or Aliexpress, I can find someone who isn't as grating as Linus Sebastian.
God, you're making me so goddamn nostalgic right now. I remember doing all sorts of crazy stuff like this back in the XP days. My Windows Media Player skin was a neat-looking Batman Begins thing, I hacked Royale Noir into my XP install, had a massive fancy Rainmeter setup, custom icons for everything, a Spider-Man screensaver, and even had a custom font set for the system UI. Hell, I even made my own cursors.
Limewire unironically paid my rent for at least two years.
