It's like all the cheat codes are on, and a complicated, difficult, nuanced, but brilliant game became simple and flat. Why are you even playing this shit?
I took the bus so I could wander around downtown today. How did I know the bus schedules? My phone told me. I wandered the streets. Restaurant. Nail salon. Hair place. Electronics store - this'll be neat.
It's a waste. Their business ruined by Amazon and the internet, local shops can't compete. Boring shit for sale. I've seen it all before, I could get it all for cheaper.
I found a store that sells video games. All cookie cutter clones. Devs reuse and share game engines. Everything is a rehash of things I've seen before. And if I haven't, the internet is right at hand to tell me about it.
An arcade - dwindled down to a handful of shit games. Aged, decrepit, the only thing they've updated is their prices.
An internet cafe - a place to kill a few hours. The only people who come in are Asians who chatter constantly in some foreign language. Being in the cafe isn't much different from being at my computer at home, except for the gobbling of the surrounding gooks, and the feeling that I can't look at pornography.
The internet makes everything so easy, and by making it so easy it becomes worthless.
So learn how to talk in Asian
I found a Japanese bookstore that sells anime in the International District. Neat. I walked around and looked at stuff for a while. Here's a book about what it's like to work as a Host in a Host club. Yeah, it's like that documentary on Netflix that has ten million views, or the thousand similar YouTube videos. I found an interesting manga, lemme check google, yep, it's a hugely popular one, reviewed and well known.
There's a store that sells record players and records. That'd be kind of cool, except I don't know how record players work, I only vaguely remember them from childhood. Lemme check google, okay, I need a record player, preamp, amp, speaker. All old, used shit. Amazon has them cheaper, newer, better. And you know what? What's the fucking point of spending all this money and time, my fucking phone can beam any music I want anytime into my wireless fucking headphones.
the one thing it can't do is bring you nature.
the internet makes everything to do in a city environment boring and stupid, because it's just a global city.
but it can't show you the world outside the city
There's this clip from the show Seinfeld I think about sometimes. Soon, kids won't get it at all. George pretends to be an architect - "You know the addition to the guggenheim? I did that, really didn't take that long" He tells some girl Jerry is with.
That was a lie that you could have gotten away with. At least, back before all the world's information wasn't in the hand, purse, or pocket, of every man, woman, and child.
There's a card store nearby that plays Magic The Gathering. I'm just barely old enough to remember what Magic used to be like back before everyone was on the internet. You'd have to get magazines, to wait a fucking month, write letters, talk to people, gather information, experiment and build your own deck. Now? Lemme google the cards in this set. Actually, that's too much work, lemme google for the deck that won the most recent tournament. Buy it online with one click? Sure.
Go play Standard now at the local card shop. Go on, play against twenty netdecks. Hope you brought yours, and hope you read the strategy guides for the relevant metagames, and preferably watched the streams of pros playing against the same decks you'll be playing against. Otherwise, what's the point?
"You could bring a new deck! They wouldn't know how to play against it!" They only need to know how to play against decks designed and refined by pros. When they are piloting such a deck, even a novel amateur concept will get crushed without much thought.
>>28112455
Stop deriving pleasure from the work of other people. Life is a game, not a movie.
i was agreeing until you kept on saying gook
fuck off racist asshole
anyways its even worse where i live, every small city is the same copy of the same couple of dozen stores and restaurants, albertsons, bank of america, best buy, autozone, fast food restaurants, same gas stations, starbucks, etc
YOU SON OF A BlTCH
>you will never live in the LOTR universe
I fucking hate the internet. It's shattered my focus and drive, and exposed how unbelievably vast the world is, while pointing out how useless, small and untalented I am.
It's also ruined conversation. Only very esoteric subjects result in speculation; there's no more sitting around wondering about details of things, because some asshole will just check on his phone.
Fuck this horrid age.
>>28112655
I've noticed that with every game, now. Information travels so fast that the optimal strategy gets found within a week, and everyone is forced to do the same exact thing unless they want to get wrecked. It's a really shitty phenomenon, and has made any competitive interaction between humans predictable and unrewarding. I'm sure it happened earlier, but CSGO was my first exposure to it.
>>28112455
>>28112540
>>28112655
What were things like before every one was online? Before everyone knew everything, all information was free and easy to attain?
I want there to be subcultures. I want to be able to explore and find neat things. I want to figure out how to do something, to put it together, and be proud of it. But I fucking can't when better results are a google search and an amazon shipment away.
I want to invest time and effort and make things that are respectable and tasteful. Look at my record collection - that used to be a thing people did! "Oh, you have access to every song for free? Of course, me too." That's the conversation now. "What music do you like? The shit your various algorithms suggest to you based on learning your preferences? Cool, cool, me too."
I needed new silverware after a move recently. Let's hit up amazon! Hmmm, a lot of different kinds. Let me read wikipedia a bit for types of stainless steel and what the differences mean. Okay, let's refine that amazon search a bit, the right kind of metal, the right weight, the right style, the right price, sort by reviews... one click buy."
Ten minutes on my computer, in a chair, listening to music, probably with a 4chan tab in the background. Now I have some nice silverware. It's better than I would have gotten in the old days. It's cheaper. But it's nothing to be proud of. The idea that you could be proud of your silverware is quaint, but why not? If you spent time researching it, if you looked through magazines, travelled to local stores, maybe got some input from people who work at restaurants... You could have got something you were proud of! Now? What's the fucking point?
OP there's a point in the film 'AI', where Davyd, the artificial intelligence that resembles a real boy finally finds the place where he was manufactured, to find his 'maker'. He sees other robots that resemble him exactly - and he's terrified and upset by this. He's just a replicant, he's not "special".
I think we're going through something right now that's similar to this. Things are being broken down and seen for what they really are. You example about games is good. Everything resembles everything else. If you go on Google Earth streetview, or look at HD footage on Youtube, or HD images on instagram from literally any country on earth - it can be very hard to know even what continent you're looking at, things are becoming the same everywhere.
I don't think this is a bad thing, though. Maybe we're just giving up false idols and being forced to look towards what's really important?
>>28112777
I wish I could say the internet ruined my conversation skills but I really can't because I was a turbo-autist who spent a year in special education before I ever used the internet.
If anything the internet is just what kept me alive and managed to make me "successful" career and school-wise, but a worthless non-human at the same time.
If anything the internet has made conversation a wee bit easier for me because other people are becoming more autistic
>>28112690
big
fatmeanie
>>28112703
ching chong ping pong
>>>/r/AsianMasculinity
Nigger
>>28112836
post of the fucking year
>>28112631
>watch nature documentaries
>go outside
>nature is basically the same, only with more walking, starving, and tedium in between
>>28112802
it's an illusion, you DO NOT know everything, you just THINK you do because you read a short bit of information. Hence why you have all these SJW types who think they know history in a few reads of buzzfeed.
If you ever try to code something without using copy-paste you will realize this pretty quickly. Even more apparrent is if you try to physically build something using only youtube
>>28112836
Im not even asian. Im white.
Still messed up outlook you have, grow up
>>28112856
>If you ever try to code something without using copy-paste you will realize this pretty quickly. Even more apparrent is if you try to physically build something using only youtube
Have you ever considered that you're just retarded and dysfunctional? Programming is incredibly easy, and developing physical skills is just a matter of time invested and money spent on supplies.
>>28112855
Until they come up with holodecks that make you feel and smell they'll never replace nature, you're just lazy and conditioned to only be stimulated intensely with sound and flat visuals.
>>28112882
you might have me on coding, but there you have it, you didn't replace time invested learning a physical skill with the internet, you still had to do it in real life to learn it.
>>28112455
>>28112540
>>28112655
>>28112802
When I was in school, I told my parents about my grades. "Don't worry, C's are expected. College can be hard. C's are average! It's not a bad thing..."
At the time, I thought it was because I was a fucking genius. I hardly ever go to class, I skip homework, miss quizzes, don't do the reading, and I'm still a C student? I must be brilliant!
But over time it dawns on you. That's everyone's experience. Even the dribbling retards you went to high school with are fucking around and getting decent grades. What gives?
Part of it is obvious. The internet. Hmmm, what does Heidegger think about Aristotle? Wikipedia? Thanks for that, and those sources, let me rephrase that and repeat it a few times. "I start writing papers the day they're due - LOL SO SMART BUT LAZY!"
But that isn't all of it. The other half is that the internet is taking up so much of everyone's time, that they don't have time and attention to do hard things any more. Your professors aren't retarded. They know you aren't a fucking scholar staying up in the library. However, they can't fail everyone and everyone is too fucking stupid and lazy to do the old workload. AND, the professors are just as busy jacking off to internet porn and watching YouTube compilations as everyone else. "I just glance at my student's papers and give them grades. I do all my grading at the last second, WHO ELSE SMART BUT LAZY, AM I RIGHT?"
My parents were cool with my grades
>>28112902
>you still had to do it in real life to learn it.
Using tutorials from youtube and accumulated data from wikipedia and other websites.
You're missing the point. Most of the time there's no uncertainty or struggle, and when there is a struggle you know exactly how long it will last and what the outcome will be, and therefore whether it's worth it to continue struggling. We've accumulated so much information and are able to access it so quickly, that we've realized most of the information isn't particularly interesting. It's like buying a video game and immediately reading the walkthrough. Except in that case you can choose not to read the walkthrough, but in real life you'll get outcompeted by everyone else who uses the information available to them.
My parents were cool with my grades, because they remembered real college. Can you fucking imagine what it was like to do research, write papers, study math, without the internet to tell you the right answers and show you how to get them? Hell, finding your class for the first time would be challenging enough without Google Maps whispering the turns in your ears.
It's no wonder my parents thought C's were okay. That would have been a monumental accomplishment back when. Now? Like I said before. What is the fucking point?
I was around in the 90's when the Internet was still a growing thing, where many or even most kids could be without an internet connection - and sites like wikipedia didn't exist yet.
We weren't any better off for it, we didn't "struggle" to learn things, most of us just gave up or remained oblivious to even the possibility of finding answers. We were still lazy with assignments, getting them done at the last minute.
Things are just easier now, and this is a good thing - why shouldn't basic information be easier to access? Why should we have to memorise all sorts of crap, rather than dedicate our minds to more profound things?
>>28112988
I still had plenty of uncertainty and struggle with relationships, but that's probably because I was too autistic to ever look up PUA guides and the likes on the internet
>>28113050
>Why should we have to memorise all sorts of crap, rather than dedicate our minds to more profound things?
Because we've realized nothing is profound, so we need to occupy our time by doing things inefficiently.
>>28113050
The problem lies in the fact that Google and much of the internet aren't objective sources, they're controlled by groups of people who don't have your best interest in mind. So basically Jewgle and their globalist friends literally possess a piece of your brain and can lobotomize the population on whim whenever they want with a kill switch
The internet killed creativity and wonder and romance in life. I mean the present internet not the Wild West internet that was actually complementary to life. I think the internet should have remained the domain of academics and professionals. Normalfags are all about apps and walled gardens anyways.
>>28112703
>fuck off racist asshole
Racism is about thinking other races are inferior or superior, not about using magic words you dumb cunt. If I had said they should be deported back to their homelands to make my sweatshirts and soccer balls because their ugly yellow skin ruined the aesthetic of my internet cafe, that would have been racism. Calling them by slang for their race isn't the same thing as advocating for them to be treated worse or me to be treated better.
>>28112783
I tried to express that with the Magic the Gathering example. I also think about it with the recent Diablo game. When they released the Auction House, my enthusiasm for that game deflated so fucking fast. The auction house increased my character's strength by a multiple of ten immediately. Why? It's like releasing a ludicrously imbalanced game.
>>28112806
It's not that I think I'm special. It's that I know the illusions of being special could be restored if everyone weren't constantly connected to everything.
>>28112856
>code
Okay, Stack Overflow and modern IDEs. Modern devs make stuff way more complicated and better than past devs, but that's because they have the internet, git, high level languages, and modern IDEs. Do you think most programmers understand the art of programming better now, or thirty years ago?
>>28112872
>Still messed up outlook you have, grow up
You think a word can inform you about a person's "outlook". You grow up, you fucking moron.
>>28113108
Internet technology should have stopped advancing in the early 2000s.
>>28113113
>if everyone weren't constantly connected to everything.
It's almost like we've gone from being independent minds, to neurons in a greater hive-mind. I don't like it one bit. I don't want to be connected anymore.
>>28113153
this is the irony of people on /pol/ and conspiracy forums being against the New World Order and globalism... THEY'RE IN IT
the Amish were fucking right.
>>28113169
To be fair, it's nearly impossible to survive without being connected nowadays. The best we can do is try to carve out a niche in some obscure corner of this great internet brain, where we can be left alone, briefly, until other people inevitably try to connect to us and we have to move again. Real life interactions are dead, there is nothing left but here.
>>28113169
really, the process that ended with the internet was already in place and being built a century ago with the industrial revolution, electricity, and the telephone
>>28113205
you forget that physical things can and do still happen that force us to disconnect, they're just not in our backyard yet.
Can someone with good punctuation skills comment on this post?
>>28113223
for example, what's gonna happen when they realize cell phones and wifi are causing brain damage or cancer and people start physically dying and getting early-onset dementia?
>>28113259
It's >muh internet nostalgia thread.
The OP is convinced that the world was better at some point or that people were somehow more authentic. It's a delusion pretty much everyone has held at one point in their life.
>>28113261
That doesn't happen though, and physics-wise there's no reason to believe it would.
>>28113287
And your post is the the delusion that follows after it.
>>28113287
it's likely true. But as those who were only small children before the internet was big, we'll never truly be able to tell if it's the internet that made people less authentic, or if it was just us growing up that made us realize that.
If older adults have any truth though, the former is somewhat true
>>28113287
>It's a delusion pretty much everyone has held at one point in their life.
"It's something that everyone thinks - therefore it's a delusion." Great reasoning skills there, dumbass.
>>28113287
Has it ever occurred to you that everyone has this thought because the world progressively gets worse? If you graphed the "greatness" of men in a given society over time, it would form a descending sawtooth wave, where occasionally things get so bad that society collapses and has to be rebuilt by great men, only to immediately continue declining.
>>28113328
>>implying they weren't right every single time
>>28113113
I bet your ass you'd never call an Asian a "gook" in public. Try explaining "Its just words bro!!!!" to them after they get offended that you call them that. Oh wait, you won't call them that in person. Because you're just an internet tough guy.
>>28112455
so in other words, you can nothing
you know nothing, you have no talents and are stupid as fuck but life is too easy becasue you can look at the bus plan with your phone?
i bet you dobt even know how a telephone works without looking at wikipedia and quote stupid bullshit you dont even partly understand.
just fuck off you massive retard.
>>28113336
>implying that's not what i'm implying
We're on the same side, anon.
>>28113306
If anything I find younger people to be more authentic. Older people had less individual autonomy and choice. Look at the cultural media they consumed - most people from my parents generation liked The Beatles, a band that got famous because of a system of centralised top-down mass communications. I've always hated the Beatles. Young people today may well find music that's "recommended" to them by algorithms, but there's more variation in this alone than the amount of variation and choice the boomers had, and today's generation isn't LIMITED to algorithms. Look at the IMVDB database (internet music video database) website's listing for music videos by year - they have about 200 music videos listed per year during that decade... in the 2000's it was maybe 500 a year... in 2015 there were almost 5,000.
So who had more choice and more ability to develop their 'own' tastes and interests? People today.
>>28113314
That wasn't my argument. The fact that people even 2,000 years ago were 'conservatives', and that there were people who believed things were better in former times suggests something about human psychology. It suggests that we have a tendency to project this view onto the facts, rather than the other way around.
>>28113378
I think you're only correct up to the Boomer generation.
I would like to think that if you took some small-town people from the days before TV and mass media was everywhere they'd be more authentic than anyone from the past 80 years or so
I wonder sometimes why I can't get a girlfriend. Why my life is stuck in young-adulthood. At my age, my parents were married and having children. When my parents were my age, I was a fucking child. That's mind blowing for me. My parents seem like adults, and I seem like I was arrested in late adolescence.
But, this question isn't actually that hard to answer. Why don't I have a girlfriend? Because instead of going to dances, or parties, or being social, or joining clubs, I was tucked away at home, playing on my computer. "Yay, another level" was what I was saying, sat at home and missing some social function. Meanwhile, my soulmate of a few miles away was likely also skipping that social function so she could watch a YouTube video about knitting.
I can't read any more. It's a real struggle. I was reading a short book about drug smuggling while I was on vacation. I took about a week to get through it. My uncle dropped by to visit early in the morning, and read the same book while he was waiting for me to wake up and get ready.
Is my uncle a speed reader? Is he a genius? Am I retarded?
OP Reading: "Chapter 1: Drug Smu-" bzz, bzz, hmm, what's that phone? "Chapter 1: Dr-" bzz, bzz. Hmm, I wonder what's on 4chan right now? "Chapter 1: Drug Smuggling in the U-" I wonder what the etymology of drug smuggling is? And so on, ad infinitum.
Conversely, when my uncle sat down to read, he had a few hours to kill, so he just sat there turning pages, until he had eventually turned them all. It sounds so simple, but, I'm hooked. Let me just check this fact out. Let me just read this thing. Let me just play some music. Oh, that video looks interesting. What did my internet friend say? AIEEEEE!
>>28113424
I wish I had your experience, but I was socially retarded even before I had my own computer and internet access. If anything I've done a little bit more social stuff just because of internships and college events, only now, I'm not even that abnormal in those situations because now all the normal "social" people are glued to phones too
You're right about reading though.
>>28113470
I just wish I could go back to reading textbooks for fun, doodling and daydreaming whole game designs in my head, which is what I did as an autist kid
>>28113424
>I wonder sometimes why I can't get a girlfriend. Why my life is stuck in young-adulthood...
Most normie boomers are stuck in young-adulthood, they just happened to have kids. Is a single mother living in welfare-housing somehow more 'adult' than a 30 year old virgin robot who likes to read philosophy? No. Things have changed in the sexual and romantic world, but this isn't all the result of computers. Divorce was exploding over the past 100 years. It was 8% in 1910 or so, it got to 50% in the 90's and had started to decline because people stay in 'partnerships' rather than marry now.
> Meanwhile, my soulmate of a few miles away was likely also skipping that social function so she could watch a YouTube video about knitting...
Actually more likely than anything, you as a male were sitting indoors whie your female counterpart was out having fun and slutting around, ruining any chance of her being meaningful to you. Introvert girls exist today, and you can easily find a virginal 17 year old introvert girl online to talk to and eventually meet.
>I can't read any more...
Yeah, attention span. This is one negative consequence of computing, but it can be controlled. But more people are literate today than ever before. Do you think a coal-miner working in 1950 had no trouble sitting down and reading? Every epoch has its issues and consequences. That doesn't make everything bad. The arrival of sugar caused many people to lose their teeth or become ill and die, this doesn't meant that sugar itself can't be eaten responsibly.
>>28113356
Of course I don't know how a telephone works you fucking mongoloid. (Neither do you). Read the thread and then kill yourself.
>>28113339
>I bet your ass you'd never call an Asian a "gook" in public.
Wow, amazing! I also wouldn't call people a "dumb cunt" in public. I wouldn't go on rants about the internet in public either. I'm not in public though, am I, internet smart person?
I'm at home, semi-anonymous, and writing on a forum with looser rules about what is and isn't socially acceptable. I hope you can see why observations like "You are acting differently from how you'd act in a different circumstance." Aren't especially valuable.
>>28113378
>Hates the Beatles
Good man.
Seriously, fuck those British faggots.
>>28113515
>>Most normie boomers are stuck in young-adulthood, they just happened to have kids
100% true, and guess what? My 50 year old boomer parents are glued to their ipad and netflix, or watching classic rock and VH1 videos on youtube for almost as long as I am to 4chan.
it's HAVING KIDS that really makes you an adult more than anything else, which is the only reason boomers are a bit more mature compared to people our age.
>>28113533
Look up the connection between the Beatles, Crowley and of course the infamous Frankfurt School and Theodor Adorno. The whole thing was some evil, evil cultural engineerin psyop shit.
>>28112762
>you will never live in the Adventure Time universe
also if you wanna get spook'd some more google Hendricus Loos and the patents he had filed regarding nervous system manipulation via screen flicker rates.
The stuff this thread talks about, isn't just simply information overload and our stupid monkey brains, it's something much more terrifying.
>>28113539
>My 50 year old boomer parents are glued to their ipad and netflix, or watching classic rock and VH1 videos on youtube
Right, they're still stuck in that mindset of being a 'passive viewer', I know that the expansion of Youtube and Vimeo and sites like it have encouraged that behaviour online, but if you're half smart you can overcome this. You can use addons for your browser that limit your time on those sites if you don't have the self-control.
4chan on the other hand is a place where people actually discuss things, often meaningful things. A lot of it is shittalk, and I feel like the quality has dropped dramatically over the past 5 years or so (another instance of the issue of perceiving a 'downward trend', when I know for a fact that many people agree, but many people also disagree on the timeframe and quality drop i'm referring to)... but 4chan is still a significantly different experience. You are engaging with real people, you have the ability to ask questions and get responses, to change your mind in accordance with what others say. This is 'sideways' communication, not 'top down' as the boomers had things.
>>28113641
True, my parents hate facebook or any other type of online interaction besides email and texting, with the exception of my mom once being involved in a cringeworthy TV fanfiction forum when I was like 12-13 (and accidentally discovered her history of lewd House MD stories)
>>28113524
how is life too easy if you are not even capable to know or fullflill the easiest things you fucking idiot.
whats the point of your thread?
hurr durr i googled the way to walmart once, life is too easy, society collapses now and its not the fault of left wing freak media and politics, its because of the internet. by nature we had to cut trees to get to wallmart everythibg is too easy now, i cannot masturbate in the internet cafe, fucking gooks!
>>28113697
>how is life too easy if you are not even capable to know or fullflill the easiest things you fucking idiot.
I wrote that I don't know how a phone works, which is very different from being incapable of learning how a phone works. You seem to struggle to write English sentences, so I can only imagine how much trouble you are having reading mine. Perhaps it would help if we completed this conversation in your native language - which is....?
