Tashlan

Blackout curtains, melatonin, whatever you can to control your sleep and block out noise and light are a must. The ice cream man can be your enemy. Stock up on emergency 5 hour energies, I like to have soylent in reserve too because sometimes food and shit won’t be available.

I won’t lie, night shift strained many of my relationships. It took quite a bit from me. But it can give back too. Things like audiobooks and videogames replaced drinking at bars with friends. Have solo hobbies prepared.

There’s a temptation to become diurnal on weekends that will work against you.

Also, you have to be firm about your schedule with people. They don’t consider night shifts in their plans, so you want to make sure you let people know often what can or can’t work with your sleep cycle.

I’m not online so I can stare at websites, and any website will do. I want discussions, people and content. A platform with five users, as you say, has relatively little value to me unless they’re like my best friends.

Most recently Spez said the IPO is further away now than it was last year lmao

We didn’t vote for that shit over in DC, this is some nonsense they’re doing in the states. DC doesn’t even get a vote in the Congress or Senate, why punish the 700,000 people here not involved in politics?

Like “my elected officials cut the whole state off from porn” is entirely something voters IN THOSE STATES need to work out for themselves lmao

How do we define edge case? Incarceration is a fact of life, and in the US we have somewhere around one in a hundred Americans jailed. It’s not an insubstantial sum of people, and like military deployments, is something that should be accounted for when looking at scenarios where someone might be away from their computer for a sum of time.

if you haven’t even accessed anything in an account in several years, why have it?

Email is a bit different to me than like cloud storage, because so much gets tied there – social media, banking, etc., that I don’t like the idea of gambling with it unless I’m sure an account is a throwaway. People incarcerated, hospitalized or dead may not be able to regularly access their email, yet the information inside may be vital to them and their family.

Ghoulish, but as I mentioned earlier, now I have to remind people to be sure to log into their dead relative’s email accounts to preserve information.

Someone in jail for a two year stint that ends in December may be emerging to find the email they had for twenty years, which may be the key to most of their other accounts, is gone, which could be hugely impactful.

In my personal life, I do now have the unfortunate task of reminding people to log into dead relative’s email accounts so they can preserve some shit they need, which kind of sucks.

No great surprise, sadly–Bethesda has been on this road for a while. One of my angriest “gamer moments” was when I bought the Skyrim PC disc from the store and brought it to my PC and I was told I had to install Steam to play it. I wasn’t a Steam-user at the time, and it felt very, very bad, especially since at that time (2013), the family home did not have high-speed Internet (they did not run cables to that neighborhood) and instead we shared a cellular modem plugged into a router a friend at an IP solutions start-up hooked us up with. I had just moved back to that house and was specifically trying to find something big I could do that would not require me to be online.

I am a huge proponent of digital media because, as an anime fan, I’ve seen firsthand that big, important properties like Evangelion can disappear from circulation for a decade at a time if something happens to the publisher, so I would rather own what I can than have to ask a company for permission to use something I’ve paid for. I am generally distraught that in order to deal with my other major beef with modern gaming (lack of backwards compatibility in consoles leading to having to repurchase the same shit over and over again) I have to use digital downloads and deal with DRM.

Yep – I love that franchise for that reason! Instead of sprawling, they’re just dense and full of life. I still got lost even after playing five of those games in the same neighborhood but like, I wish more people looked at that density vs sprawl

They usually have two cities!

I call them “man on horse” simulators. I think open worlds have generally gotten a bit bigger than they need to be – I remember feeling like FFXV was actually very empty, despite being massive, and while Skyrim is beloved, so much of current replay has been slogging through massive amounts of nothing. I tend to wish open world games were somewhat smaller but denser, with more variety instead of huge, empty terrains of sort of bad-feeling, filler quests between the good ones.

Is this like when they let AOL onto Usenet

Business, always business

Careful now, that sort of open honesty is going to net you even more users who now have even higher expectations.

This is honestly my favorite. All the concern trolls saying there are millions of people who would love to be mods now have the opportunity.

You a ZZT fan, or just ASCII generally? That little man avatar is giving me flashbacks to when Tim Sweeney was my fucking hero

I don’t think there’s an age cut off, I just think you got into the hobby when it was niche and your peers didn’t. I’m an NES-generation video game player and I don’t really know anyone my age who doesn’t at least have a gamer in their household. On the other end, I don’t know a single person who has a cable subscription.

No need for sarcasm – I was ASKING if there were other ways outside of up/downvotes, AI moderation, manual/human curation, or no moderation. Hence question mark.

Dated, but has anyone come up with a better way? Outside of having another human carefully curate your shit, or some kind of Zuckerbot doing it, you need some way to filter out bullshit or any community will be overwhelmed with spam and trolls

it appears we’re all too engrossed in our personal lives.

I understand the sentiment, and when I was younger I probably would agree and I might agree again when I’m older. But right now, my personal life is the only one I have, and the world has organized itself in a way that all I can do is work to slow my losses.

I’m giving the fediverse a real shot, but it’s a slow burn It’s not “there” yet, there aren’t a decade worth of conversations about my favorite topics. For some people, they have more immediate needs and desires that can’t be satisfied here and if Reddit is all there is, it’s where they’ll go. But it’s important to me that nobody forget that most people aren’t in love with spez and the Reddit corporation, they love their communities, the way many people dislike Zuck but stay on Facebook because they love their friends. Platforms are code, they’re also people, and our peers are not mindless sheep for wanting to be with people in spaces they enjoy. It’s what’s human.

For Fediverse to win, we have to provide more than just platforms, we have to have good people, good content, something to stay for. A reason to join beyond just Fuck Reddit.

I think I’ve seen enough now to conclude for-profit social media will always end looking like 90s AOL. But you know, I was on AIM until 2010, because despite all my contempt for AOL it wasn’t about whether or not I loved Steve Case, it was about whether or not the people in my life could talk to me.

I just have one life. I have strong beliefs about many things, tech ethos especially, but I have only one life and I don’t want to empty it wholly of the communities that enrich it to score points for FOSS.