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.

There’s a lingering belief that Spez is the same Spez who criticized Digg as too corporate and described Reddit in terms of community. It’s difficult, sometimes, for people to realize when fellow travelers are no longer fellows.

There’s also some satisfaction in knowing that in the end, you did all you could to avert a bad outcome. Even if it passes, you don’t need to have regrets.

You sound like a normal person who doesn’t take shit personally – some people really, really do take negative feedback on social media the way that you might someone keying your car, and I worry about the repercussions of downvoting the 'wrong" person who might seek reprisal. An anonymous downvote button feels like an “oh, fuck off” button, a public one feels like “fuck YOU for real” to me.

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

You’re misunderstanding. The Washington Times is a fire oligarchs throw money into by giving away for free and selling it at cost so they can spread far-right wing propaganda (and print Mallard Filmore strips.) It’s a much more extreme example of what you’re talking about.

Business, always business

I don’t believe Washington Times is actually intended as a moneymaking endeavor. It’s a weird little mouthpiece funded by the Unification Church. As a DC region native, I’ve seen them give that rag away at every opportunity and sell it at cost – according to the Times itself, it lost a billion dollars over 33 years before turning a profit for the first time in 2015.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/oct/14/washington-times-reaches-profitability-after-33-ye/

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