I don’t know you but I know what you’re feeling right now. I lost my Orange Boy just a few weeks ago and even this weekend I still felt it. I wish I could share more comfort with you, fellow person. I can share this quote by Kate Braestrup that comforts me in times of loss:
Grief is just love squaring up to its oldest mortal enemy. After all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge..
As bad as that feeling is right now, it means V mattered and was loved.
Last Thursday I had to let my 17 year old orange boy named Henry go, so it warms my heart to see another out there. Please give him extra love from me next time you see him ❤️
Could this possibly be a function of how much experience you have? I’m 50 and I remember being in my twenties and knowing a lot of rote knowledge but then not being really great at some more abstract thought. It took a while to start intuiting my way through problems And connecting different ideas.
I really hate the “you’ll know better when you’re older” arguments people make to dismiss a younger person’s opinion or whatever, but I will say I have grown to appreciate how experienced people, regardless of age, can better adapt to certain situations because they’ve had to deal with them more often than I have.
All that to say my gut reaction is that this is a “kids these days” article dressed up with some flowery scientific buzzwords that all of us new old people can smugly latch on to and tut-tut about.
There is a strong chance that one of those is the lost 4th X-wing that disappeared in 1977 then turned up in Greg Jein’s private collection after he passed in 2023.
May not be exactly what you’re looking for, but subnautica and subnautica below zero are two of my favorite games.
Subnautica starts with you Crashing in a life pod onto an undiscovered water planet and trying to rescue other survivors, gathering resources, building bases submarines etc. Weather is not really a consideration since you’re underwater, but there are lots of other pitfalls.
Subnautica below zero is a sequel but set on the Arctic pole of the planet and requires you to go above surface a lot where the freezing temperatures start killing you once you’re up there for very long.
Thanks I needed to hear this
Haha I’ve got a story for this.
Way back in the '80s my parents decided it was time to learn piano so one was purchased and lessons were procured. For a couple years I did all right at it. I’d take lessons and I’d practice some after a lot of cajoling from my mother.
But teachers came and went and lesson times changed and to be honest I just didn’t have the interest in it. Then, lessons were moved to Saturday mornings.
My little 8-year-old self was not happy about that but it was only 30 minutes and my parents convinced me that I would be okay missing just one cartoon for that long. But then Saturday came and it dawned on me which cartoon I would be missing.
Scooby-Doo.
The meltdown that ensued is the first real protest I can remember waging against my authority figures. I was only mollified when they convinced me try it just this week and we’ll see if we can move the time after. It was the first thing I complained to the teacher about when I got there before plonking angrily through the middle C song.
I don’t recall ever going to another practice after that. Scooby-Doo still rules.
After working in desktop support for a year after college, I realized that people just wanted their problem solved and to not feel frustrated. That realization made my job immensely easier because I pivoted from copying a file in 30 seconds and walking away to talking to them a little bit and letting them feel good after we were done. My ticket closing speed slowed down a little but people felt better and I consistently got positive feedback.
I am this old:
BBS’s -> College’s Telnet -> .edu sites over lynx -> Usenet -> IRC -> commercial websites -> Slashdot -> Fark -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
BBS From the back of Computer Shopper magazine, we would get a list of phone #'s to call which then connected us to various Wildcat BBS’s that were filled with interesting & squirrelly information and people. Usually 1 at a time could connect, but the fancy ones had multiple phone-lines.
College/Telnet/Usenet Went to college and got access to a telnet account, which let me run Lynx and open a Usenet reader. From there we bounced all around text-based sites (using the book above) because there were no search engines. You had a big list of all the places you liked to visit, and you visited those. Sometimes, someone told you about another spot, or you played whack-a-mole with various .edu domains. A lot of kids started hosting sites on their dorm-room machines. Usenet opened up a whole world of discussion about topics far outside the scope of my tiny little town.
Next up was a PPoE connection using Trumpet Winsock and suddenly I could load NCSA Mosaic and mIRC and that opened up a graphical web with the easy ability to download software and more communication. Then Businesses all decided they needed to try “internet” for themselves, and you started seeing the rise of commercial endeavors. So early PCMag and other adopters showed up.
Slashdot came along and was primarily a Linux site, with some tech news sprinkled in. I still remember following the threads there for Columbine (when school shootings were still a novelty) and then on 9/11 when just about every site ground to a halt, there was lots of speculation and word-of-mouth, but at least information was still moving. It then expanded its audience with tags so that all sorts of news topics could open up and you could follow specific ones.
Ran with an RSS feed for a while around this point and subbed to all the different sites I liked, so I could get my fix in one place.
Fark came along and was an irreverent alternative to Slashdot. Somewhere between twitter performance art with everyone trying to make the catchiest title for their headline, but also just a lot of goofing off in the comments. Totalfark was $5 a month and worth the money to get at the un-curated content.
Then, just as Tech TV was going south and becoming some sort of wrestling-based channel, Kevin Rose mentions at the end of The Screen Savers about “This new website, Digg!” which in hindsight he was shamelessly plugging. That site offered the upvote/downvote concept allowing the community to create a constant stream of content. Somewhere along those lines Slashdot lost its luster, presumably because all of its content was curated by a handful of people who were in the process of selling out to other investors.
Reddit came along, and further customized the upvote/downvote/commenting experience. It also allowed you to create your own communities/subreddits and follow those. Because its audience was basically “anyone” it allowed for tons of creative content. Right as it started to take off, Digg made a huge faux pas on how they moderated content, which annoyed all the content creators and they moved to reddit as well.
I loved what Reddit could have been without the enshitification taking over. If you look at that list, Slashdot, Digg, Reddit all suffered from busily trying to monetize their users, and all of them died (or are dying) a slow, sad death. Fark is still owned by Drew Curtis, and as far as I can tell, still has a similar feel & userbase.
Lemmy honestly feels like finding Usenet, IRC & Lynx again. There’s a learning curve you have to get over, and then you have to be willing to hunt for your information. But the quality of the content is higher than reddit, and each one of those other services went through the same decline as we jumped ship to the new one.
In a world where every new “service” just annoys me now, because I know it’s going to be frustrating to use, and will likely just steal my data, turn into a content/ad mill and eventually turn to shit Lemmy feels like a big middle finger to those sites. And I’m here for it.
I had to say goodbye to my Orange Boy just a few weeks ago and I still feel it looking around the house. I was able to move into this place 17 years ago, and he came to live with me in just a few weeks after. Jean Cocteau said:
“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”
And he’s absolutely right. The home hits different now that his little face isn’t peeking around corners, His siblings are working overtime to fill the gap but it’s hard. It’s crazy how deeply they worm into our hearts, to the point that a thread full of internet strangers all jump to your side when they’re gone. It’s obvious from your post how deeply you felt about Linux, and I’m sorry for your loss.