Content not viewable in your region
Sometimes, for whatever reason, a forum thread eventually becomes an image graveyard. I'm visiting a, I dunno, six year old Lemmasoft post to figure something out when the image examples are clearly not what they originally were, instead now just the image-host's placeholder image and maybe some consolidation text about the image being unavailable.
"Fuck me," I guess, but I actually rarely get irritated by this phenomenon alone. Even now, I can't bring myself to hate it, which is weird because I'm so pro-archival and anti-finite. Stick the nostalgia label on it and call it a day, I guess. You're an indie web user, none of this experience is exclusive to me, so you tell me how you feel about that sort of thing.
That said, whatever forgiveness I have to offer to external image hosting platforms, I can't give to the UK government. Of course age verification had to hit one of the largest image hosting platforms. I don't hold the decision to host images on Imgur against anyone, it just gets the job done and I can't hold any malice towards people who don't care to accommodate the British. Still, there's cruel humour to seeing something potentially awesome just pasted over by the ugliest placeholder, and if I dwell on it I do get bogged down.
I'm not really looking for a solution nor any accommodation from anyone who's reading this and feeling a bit guilty. Yeah, on my screen, your site is purple box hell, but them's the breaks. I used Imgur for the longest time, actually, as seen in my first Neocities layout, before I decided to self-host or use less "mainstream" file hosts, at least ones that slip under the radar and haven't been called to implement age verification yet. In the meantime, if I'm really dying to catch a lick of the awesome sauce, I do have a VPN.
I just needed to get this out. I'm tired. Are our children safe yet?
4 hours, 33 minutes