I watched Star Trek, Pokemon, Gargoyles and Dino Adventure Jurassic Tripper - all of those ran on TV here, which was awesome.
Apart from that, I probably read four to five books every week and I even won a reading contest at the local library one time. They loved me so much there, they just gave me books sometimes to keep for myself. (That’s how I discovered “The Day of the Triffids”, and it’s glorious.)

I was extremely into that whole “Native American” thing and read all kinds of fiction about it. I loved the Winnetou movies to death and I must’ve read the whole works of Karl May. That was definitely cringe and a lot of people made fun of me because of that. I still think they’re pretty well written books, but not unproblematic, of course.

Apart from that, I tinkered a lot with electronics and got pretty good at soldering and semi-good at fixing circuits. When I was seven years old, my dad bought a computer and I learned how to work with DOS, Win95 and Linux. I definitely was a weird kid and I didn’t have many friends (still don’t), but I enjoyed my childhood regardless of that, because my parents supported all of my endeavours.

I listened to rave and techno music, which was very unusual here in North Germany. None of the radio stations played it, but we had cable radio so I was able to listen to it and fall in love with it. Needless to say, a young teenager listening to Scooter screaming “HOW MUCH IS THE FISH?” just increased the level of teasing from my classmates. But fuck them, it was great music to dance to!

Nowadays I work as a coder in a small advertising agency, so I guess my childhood prepared me pretty well for my adulthood. Overcoming social anxiety was hard, though. I only achieved that in my late 20s. Turns out that growing up as an only child in a small village messes with your head a little bit.

Edit: Oh, and I was hardcore against alcohol, for some stupid reason. I never drank anything and when my friends went to a party and had a good time, I was an ass about it afterwards. For some reason I wanted everyone to be as abstinent as me, lol. Nowadays I drink occasionally and I enjoy it, I don’t know what was up with me back then.

Yes that’s the one, with the drunk guy. The episode is so over the top, I love it.

The scene where all of those underdeveloped people come on board the Enterprise with their animals and one woman is shouting throughout the whole deck. Patrick Stewart lost it at this point, turns away from the camera and starts to laugh uncontrollably. But they kept the camera rolling and the scene turned out great!

Edit: It’s S02E18 “Up the Long Ladder”

Went to my very first concert this year, actually (Porter Robinson). It was awesome (was in the front row, too!). Now I’m hooked and I already booked tickets for two other ones this year. 🥰

The reason why I never went to any concert in my life was a mixture of having too much social anxiety and not enough money. Tackled both of these problems, but it took me a while.

Silo. I like the music so much!

…and also: Gargoyles!

One thousand years ago, superstition and the sword ruled. It was a time of darkness, it was a world of fear, it was the age of gargoyles. Stone by day, warriors by night. We were betrayed by the humans we had sworn to protect, frozen in stone by a magic spell for a thousand years. Now, here in Manhattan, the spell is broken and we live again!

We are defenders of the night. We are gargoyles!

Bear McCreary’s music is such a masterpiece.

“This is the best time of your life, it will never be as easy.” I wasted more time at school than at work and I didn’t have Fridays off, so that was a lie.

Use knockd and iptables, gone are the fucking bots.

And does it get easier to manage as you start to get used to it and make a routine?

European here. I worked many years for 40h/week and I never got used to it, really. There was not enough spare time in my life to enjoy it (especially, since commuting to work took off even more useful time). I neglected cleaning my room, postponed important appointments as much as possible and I was often too tired to do the things I love.

Since 2024, I now work 30h/week, completely from home. I have every Friday off and Thursday is a short day. My life has improved drastically. I am no longer tired all the time, I’m more motivated at work and I am actually capable of going to concerts, parties, cinema. It’s amazing.

Every human is built different. I realized I absolutely cannot function having a 9to5 job from Monday to Friday.

Only as long as Gabe Newell runs it. After that it will enshittify like any other company that needs to make profits.

I tried that Replika app before AI was trendy

Same here, it was unbelievably shallow. Everything I liked it just mimiced, without even trying to do a simulation of a real conversation. “Oh you like cucumbers? Me too! I also like electronic music, of course. Do you want some nudes?”

Even when I’m at my loneliest, I still prefer to be lonely than have a “conversation” with something like this. I really don’t understand how some people can have relationships with an AI.

I regularly visit https://vogons.org/ to talk about retro computers.

I’d say its mostly convenience. Discord is easier to use on mobile devices and provides voice chat.

Thank you! :) It’s definitely a passion project for me, because I love the game so much.

I run a forum where the first post was started 23 years ago. Although the activity has drastically gone down during recent years, people still occasionally come by. I’m very happy I kept it up, even though a lot of people switched over to a Discord server.

Recently we had an incident where the sole admin of the Discord server was banned and the whole Discord had to be abandoned and created from scratch. People still keep using this trash! I’m not arguing with them, I’ll just keep an alternative up. One day, when Discord really enshittifies itself to a point where it becomes unuseable, people will be happy for my stubborness. I hope.

(It’s a forum for an obscure space pirate game for the PC - I-War 2. Its first post is here.)

Rewatched that recently. I was really surprised how dark it sometimes gets for a kids’ show. It still holds up really well!

I’m a webdev and I mainly work with Vanilla JS, React and PHP - I use phpStorm now. Everything mostly works out of the box, it auto-detects my PHP environment, composer install (which is basically just npm for PHP), nice-to-have features like Stylelint and ESLint are also integrated and enable themselves by default if specific config files are found inside a project folder…it’s just nice. Open a project, see it do all of its magic, start to code.

Previously I’ve worked with VSCode and I needed a plugin for every single feature and every plugin had its own settings that you needed to be aware of. It was horrible. I was configuring my own IDE more than I was actually writing code. I get that it’s probably more flexible than phpStorm, but I just don’t have time do dig into plugin settings all of the time - and god forbid I work with a project from another developer and he uses a different extension than me for Stylelint or formatting .md files…

Yeah, she got us all really hyped up before Porter came on. He was so nice! He even forgot the lyrics for one of his songs, because he was a little nervous, so he started to beatbox randomly 🤣

Porter Robinson and underscores, a few days ago.

Run some games in higher resolution/framerate with GoldHen Cheats Manager (especially on PS4 Pro). And you can play games like P.T., which was removed from storefronts a while ago.