I get all the sides of this dilemma and I think it comes down to personal choice. I got rid of most of mine and kept a handful. Then we had kids and I herited an old TV/vid combo so they were able to watch my wife’s old Disney movies she’d kept. For a few years there they enjoyed a brief renaissance, but as they got older and less keen the tapes just take up space.

We can access every thing we want online, and, while the VHS does have that nostalgia, my children aren’t that into the novelty of it anymore and would prefer to stream stuff instead.

In terms of ownership, I struggle with which physical formats to retain. Musically I’ve kept my vinyl, but we’ve got 100s of CDs that I can’t bring myself to toss out. I’ve got a load of Blu-ray which is cool, but never gets played.

Even all the media files in my NAS are rarely used. It seems like IPTV is king or us at the moment, and physical media is somewhat redundant. But hey, we’ve got a basement, so there’s always the option to store them out of site, which is a workable compromise for now.

:::

Same! Wild how they went from throwaway accounts being part of the culture to banning people forever and employing techniques beyond what Facebook does to control accounts.

I’m 48. I have a few buddies that I rarely see in my hometown. I travel once or twice a year on a city break to drink and eat with a few old pals.

But yeah, generally I don’t not hang with anyone outside my own wife and kids and extended fam. This isn’t through choice, it just seems to be the way things have gone.

Depends entirely on whether or not it has an incognito mode.

Sensible choice.

That might be the case. Or you could be part of something else. A collective consciousness, of which you are a transient node. Or maybe there is no time at all. What we call time could just be our current state on a progress bar as we process life. Or maybe we’re part of a nervous system for some larger construct. Or perhaps we are just reluctantly self-aware iterations of bio computers with fleeting lives that appeared through the chance combination of carbon-based structures.

Who knows. That’s the beauty of it, which I personally feel religion and a certain type of confident atheism tend to deny with their respective faith/certainty.

Even if we did, most of us will likely be born into slavery on some distant colony as the property of a deranged tech trillionaire.

I think ‘that guy’ is phenomenally successful due to the weird and wildly superficial dating world tech has created.

I’m quite fortunate as I met my wife before the apps had taken over. Other than being reasonably tall and having a pulse, I am far from being that handsome dude.

But I did ok as I was brought up around women and have always used humour as a crutch since I was a kid, which I found women were responsive to when I grew up.

I doubt I’d have attracted any attention in the online dating world with my beer belly and average face.

I watched this with my son last night. Quite enjoyed it. I find the cadences of the narrator’s voice oddly soothing, although ironically it sounds very like an AI voice.

I did have another account on another instance a few weeks back, but it kept going down so I created this one on lemmy.world. I had the same username without the 2 on the end, so it could be that. Can you recall the username?

Love being online, where people can casually say “I spend a fair about of time in kink clubs” and nobody bats an eyelid.

Absolutely. I recently needed to satisfy auditors with a report on our network security. Our main guy was on leave, but I quickly got the evidence I needed with a few powershell commands that I would have previously spent way more time googling.

It’s also decent at reports and short, impersonal emails to suppliers etc. It frees up a lot of my time to do actual work, and for that I think it’s decent.

Like basically everything in life, the truth is between the extremes. For me it’s useful, but doesn’t replace me and my team. I’m neither an AI evangelist or detractor. It’s just another tool.

I posted on another thread about this a while back. Oddly, I have a weird mental block that stopped me gaming when I was 16 back in the 90s.

Basically, being a nerd in small-town rural Scotland was not something to be proud of after a certain age, and gaming was social kryptonite, so being an insecure teen I focused my energies on bands and drinking.

This was great for a while, but looking back, it would appear that I completely missed out on the Golden Age of gaming, and now it’s me who is the odd one out at work, having never played anything beyond a sneaky stab at Portal.

I’m now 48 and in two minds about it. On one hand, some of the guys at work have failed to launch and live physically isolated lives and spend all their time gaming. On the other, I see my own kids laughing their asses off playing Fortnite with their friends, and they are clearly having the best time.

I did try playing with them briefly, but they’re already leaving me for dust. So yeah, my plan is to maybe low-key get into gaming again when I retire in like 17 years’ time. We shall see.

I’d finally secured a permanent, full-time job in IT at the age of 29. Then my new girlfriend, who was a charming alcoholic with borderline personality disorder, convinced me to quit and travel the world with her. Which I did. We broke up somewhere in Malaysia. I sent my 30th working on reception in a Backpacker joint in Brisbane. I regret nothing!

Now happily married, 2 kids (11 an 9) and working as an IT manager back in my hometown.

I’m not into gaming. I think I’m the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn’t. I don’t really know why. I think it’s a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.

Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.

But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.

Lemmy is like internet jail. We got sent here for breaking the rules on Reddit, but now we’re institutionalised and it feels safe, even if there are some very odd people here with us - they’re mostly nice and just serving their time…

Thanks for the info - yes, Lemmy’s worked out pretty well so far and it’s given me a chance to use the Boost app again, which was my favourite way to use Reddit anyway. Be cool to check out Digg when it’s ready, but Lemmy has definitely filled a gap!

I tried to join when I got banned from Reddit permanently after like 12 years for ban evasion (using a throway account). I joined the waiting list for an invite but still waiting. That’s when I discovered Lemmy, which I’m quite liking. Never heard of Piefed. Is it similar?

I used to use the NME website, which was a weekly music paper in the UK, back in the day.

It had forums and free webmail, so I had had an nme.com address that made me feel kinda cool (I was a teenager and music was very much my identity).

Then they cancelled the webmail and that was that. All my teen emails gone forever. I’d love to get them back, and who knows,they could be sitting on a server somewhere, but I doubt it.

Oh, also Bebo. Posted a lot on that precursor to Facebook and now it’s all gone.

To be brutally honest, I have only the slightest inkling as to what it actually is - I was just looking for a Reddit alternative. I signed up, entered my credits into the Boost android app and here I am. It’s liked the Reddit experience I miss from years ago, except with less content but nicer people.