Study Things

Amazing. This is ten thousand year old water trapped inside of a polished quartz crystal.

Of course Peter Gallagher knows that "dank" is a weed thing. He also knows that "in heat" is a sex thing and that when aliens "probe" someone it's in the anus.

These are words, not things. Heathcliff is a comic about symbols.

You're never going to get a comic where an alien actually probes someone any more than you're going to get a comic where the Man-Eating Giant eats a man. You're just going to get a dozen comics where aliens like the word "probe".

Heathcliff wears the ham helmet because it's the helmet you wear when you eat a ham. You can tell it's that helmet because it says "ham" on it. The helmet's function is determined not by its form but by its label.

summer = beach = sand = desert = mummy and thus there is the Summer Mummy. Because of symbolic associations that do not otherwise cohere.

Robots don't wear clothes but the mere act of labeling them "nude" makes them nude. And once a painting is a nude painting there has to be a fig leaf because a "nude" without a "figleaf" is "indecent".

You don't need data centers to serve Tumblr. Or your gps maps. And for sure not to use a gig jobs app.

You need a server, indeed. That server is basically a computer that needs to be somewhere with a good internet connection. If the site or app has a lot of usage, you may need several of them, rarely more than the lower two figures. That's it.

"the internet we know" doesn't rely on data centers. Data centers, as we know nowadays, basically were invented by Amazon, who started selling them "as a service" maybe 15 years ago. Before that, companies used to, well, have their own servers. Often in their own office buildings. Sometimes in MUCH smaller facilities dedicated to host servers.

But the modern concept of data server? That is needed mostly for data mining and selling processing power as a service, so shitty startups can try to invent the next torment Nexus without needing to hire people who actually know how to work with physical servers nor spending big money on hardware.

But most of the apps and websites you use everyday? Any shitty laptop could very well be used as their server and support a couple of hundred concurrent users without breaking a sweat.

Read "gig jobs using cloud apps" and thought I meant Uber Eats

Unironic Torment Nexus reference in a serious discourse post in 2026

Implication that companies running their own data servers locally is a more energy efficient model than renting cloud VMs