« On average, the amount of time people spent with friends in-person decreased from 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 hours a month in 2020, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the epidemic of loneliness. That decline was especially marked for people aged 15 to 24. »
OH MY G-D HOW MANY HOURS A MONTH DO I SPEND IN-PERSON WITH FRIENDS IT’S AT LEAST 30 RIGHT
—TIME Magazine. Why Gen Z is drinking less. 2025 January 1.
I want people to be honest and principled, but maybe that’s too much to ask. I don’t really feel “at home” on the Internet anymore.
The Internet has just made everything a lot faster. Too fast, there isn’t time to digest anything. To look over and question and ask if what you’re seeing and what you’re even being told makes sense, and who benefits from the story that you’re being told. I kind of wanna get away from everything. I miss the days when “the Internet”, for me, just meant playing games on Postopia, looking at art on DeviantArt, and reading way too much Wikipedia articles and discussion pages. The whole thing now just feels like an information battlefield where even the most innocuous of publications are just fights for clout.
It’s starting to come to me now, what I wanted to write about, as tired as I am (it’s just before 1 AM now)... So, John Oliver and his Last Week Tonight crew did an episode on AI slop, and its flooding of the Internet with misinformation, and sometimes active disinformation. It’s not just the wannabe-viral crap that concerns me. Because you’ve never needed AI to lie to people, you can just use lies told by real people, omission of inconvenient facts… Just because it comes out of a real person’s mouth, doesn’t mean it’s real. It sucks to look at the state of the world now, and I bet you don’t even have to go that far—you can see it in your personal lives.
I’ve finally got my new blog up an’ ready. It’s strange. I wanted to start this up for the longest time, for at least half a year now, but now that it’s up… I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, my first entry. Earlier I had all these thoughts about what I wanted to write down; maybe I took too long and I’m just too tired to think, now. Swam, chatted with neighbours in the jacuzzi, prepared the Crock-Pot, bathed… I don’t know if I want this to ever “devolve” into just a daily log of what I did on a day-to-day basis. That’s not what I want.
I uninstalled Discord from my smartphone. I only ever used it to communicate with one person. Feels good to get rid of it.
I finished reading Marie Le Conte’s Escape: How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet. A worthwhile read. If miserable.
I’ve just been slowly weaning myself off the Internet, it’s been liberating. Feels like I can breathe an’ enjoy my own presence again.
Why waste life stressing over Internet strangers when you could be drinking BOURBON WITH FRIENDS! From now on? I’m all-in on SOCIAL DRINKING
Sent the marine biologist Yaen’s “Fish Fight!”. Nerd. She’s asking why I have this
You watch ONE JonTron video and now I’ve read the entire Animorphs TV Tropes page. Lying in bed recovering now, oooogh…
OK, The Atlantic. You’ve got me. I’ll subscribe to the paper. (Kudos to Derek Thompson for convincing me)
I’m kind of tired of the Internet. —Well, it’s partially winter cabin fever. I wanna do stuff outside an’ I haven’t gotten to ice skate yet.
The kids these days will never know the joy of playing Chicken Invaders, Insaniquarium, or Digby’s Donuts. Too busy on TikTok and Roblox.
I spent too much time reading r/ShingekiNoKyojin last night. Well, it was fun seeing people discuss the story and what struck them.
Twitter and Facebook used to not have a Like button. People forget that. Or, they’re too young to ever know these platforms weren’t viral.
Picked up Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness because I’m interested in getting rid of destructive post-pandemic online habits.