• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • Fair.

    I’m struggling with that a lot right now. I’m not even “old”, I’m a martial artist, I’m a computer graphics artist, I want to design games, but I’m constantly feeling too slow to handle everything.

    Am I getting dumber? Am I getting slower? Why is it taking longer to remember things?

    And I feel my sense of imagination and wonder is slipping, being replaced more and more by “impending threats” anxiety: “Oh shit, food prices are doing what now?” “Wait what fundamental freedom are they now ‘cracking down’ on?”

    A lot of artists and gamedevs and tabletop game masters all say they have “too many ideas.” Lately I just see fog and don’t know how to engage my creativity.

    I wonder if COVID stole my brain power. :(



  • This is a very valuable take and much needed perspective here. I appreciate you sharing it!

    Also can’t help but lol at your experience with the wild girl who definitely used Skinner Box conditioning to make sure you always opened her emails! 😂

    I miss a lot of the spirit of the hijinks and lulz internet, but I definitely don’t miss all the disgusting shock content that came with deeper web exploration. I visited the famous /b/ exactly once and decided my soul didn’t need that shit.

    There’s a lot of gore stuff that I think was photoshopped, but also damn someone spent time making that?! I didn’t care to analyze it, I just wished there was such a thing as brain bleach.

    There was also sites that would punish hotlinking by replacing images with the infamous “goatse” (no.), which was really great when trying to send my girlfriend a funny picture I found and she got to it too late. LOL that was fun to explain why she was seeing what she was seeing.

    People warned me of misnamed videos on Kazaa and stuff turning out to be abuse material or execution footage but thankfully I mostly avoided that.

    I remember clicking a phony download link and getting eyeball-blasted with CSAM ads seared into my brain once. (Actually I think I sent the link to the FBI on this one.)

    Yeah, I miss the expressive freedom of “at your own risk” Internet, simply because you weren’t as much constantly being tailed by marketing bots and algorithms, but I don’t miss the mental trauma that came with clicking the wrong link.

    You’re right though, in a weird way a bit of prior desensitizing can almost help us keep it together if we find ourselves in a really, really bad place. But I wish for a world where nobody has to do that…

    This is all also why, even though I find the Dark Web super intriguing…I don’t need that shit. Lol




  • “You can set up your own email server at home, for fun!”

    – The 90’s, Probably.

    Lol. I’m kinda sad I missed out on that expressive time of making websites when I was growing up. You’re right, now everything is very homogenized and there’s a billion botswarms just waiting for you to be 3 seconds late to a security update so they can zombify your site for…

    (Flips papers) Crypto somehow… it’s always crypto.

    Internet crime isn’t even cool anymore. Lol



  • Oh definitely! If there’s one thing I’m done with, it’s people calling on speakerphone while their phone is like, seemingly, in their gym bag in the trunk LOL.

    Like bro, you’re not Jack Bauer and I’m not your handler, it can wait until you’re done going 75 on the freeway.

    Maybe my work’s phone network service is just awful, even landline to landline, but yeah, for how much faster data connections have gotten, I feel like I got clearer voice quality on my cordless Vtech in 2004 LOL.

    Maybe it’s me and I should get my hearing checked. 😅