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.

I burned accounts frequently so karma didn’t matter, except in terms of meeting posting thresholds. Upvotes/downvotes mattered to me because they were “feedback” for what I said. Other poster’s karma mainly mattered to me when trying to sus out if someone was an alt/bot/troll account.

I think the dirty secret is that social media is both an incredibly vital part of people’s lives and businesses, but it’s free and ad revenue doesn’t really make anyone the crazy profits their valuations suggest it should. That it’s happening all at once is I think partly attributable to financial tightening – higher interest rates mean people have less patience with money they’ve floated, partly that Twitter going weird gave everyone else cover to do the same, and my personal opinion, the Writer’s Strike gives a little room for the companies to do dumb shit without having to worry about getting roasted on late night.

Fuck u/spez

Honestly as an early user of Facebook, Reddit, etc., we shouldn’t forget that when people first came to these services, they were the smaller, cleaner, more text-based alternatives to bigger corporate bullshit. Myspace was busy, bloated, Malware prone, Facebook was light and organized. Digg became super corporatized overnight, Reddit was clean and simple. Once early users are on that shit when it’s good, their friends follow, and eventually communities form and it’s very, very difficult if you care about a community to abandon it for an alternative. Websites aren’t just “websites,” they’re people, and just like tech companies eventually always put profits over people, people put people over software. They’ll put up with a lot of shit to stay on touch woth the people they loved.

Fuck spez.

I uninstalled RIF. For old time’s sake I fell asleep last night browsing many year old threads on r/tolkienfans. Truly relaxing, ad, clutter free, just text, just reading. I hate the idea of a world without that.

Maybe an actual FAQ would be good – people during fractious times have a tendency to catastrophize and create misinformation.

Oh, then why did CDPR apologize for it?

https://www.engadget.com/cyberpunk-2077-apology-video-roadmap-updates-2021-220043550.html

Shit I can’t stand – people fucking up, apologizing for it, and then later insisting they didn’t fuck up. People plead guilty to shit in court then try to retcon it. People who write essays about their behavior and then later say they didn’t do it. This shit here. They fucked up, they said they fucked up. The followup for this shit needs to be: Were you lying then or now?

Oh yes, I once had someone tell me they wanted my family to die in a fire and suffer while doing so because I didn’t think Guardians of the Galaxy was the sort of comic that would make a good movie. I was wrong, but you know, I think I was the only person who ought to suffer for that mistake.

I do tend to think that this is one of those things that the Fediverse, by not demanding everything be monolithic, is uniquely capable of dealing with because instances could provide per-community options (public up and down, private up and down, maybe an actual “fuck you” button) and people could try and figure out what works best for their unique forum.

This tends to assume that each individual is a sincere member of a conversation, but real parties also don’t have swarms of robots and clones wearing disguises coming in to try to destroy your house. User reducing visibility is a strong first-line defense against bad actors that doesn’t require 24/7 moderators. If you poke through big, popular Facebook pages, like the NYT, and look through their comment sections, you’ll often find a ton of copy-pasted spam, scams, etc. (“this psychic saved my marriage! this accountant made me a bitcoin millionaire!”) I don’t believe the up/down system can be the only way to preserve the ability for people to have conversations, but we shouldn’t forget what problems these systems were created to solve.

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.

Spez mistakes being cynical and greedy with “maturing,” as is typical of the cynical and greedy.

Is this like when they let AOL onto Usenet

Business, always business