Yes, if only the copyright office couldn’t block content from passing through wires and airwaves. Curse their inexplicable yet absolute power!

Wat?? Make the supreme effort to tolerate having to click a button, the article is worth it.

My group has been playing a CoC campaign for around 6 months and it’s fantastic. Very different from D&D, adventuring seems to be a process of slowly losing your sanity. We’ve been jaunting around New England in a Rolls Royce, running into strange townfolk and occasionally inexplicable phenomena. We recently found a telescope that can sort of take over your mind if you look through it. Lots of Lovecraftian props - crystals, lenses and prisms with odd properties, NPCs who have gone insane, medical anomalies… and the style of play is very different from D&D - very little combat, lots of investigation.

I would think the easiest way is to get a cheap old PC and install XP or 98 etc. If you’re afraid of getting hacked keep it off the network.

ASCII art is the best art

LOL put a ginormous bowl on your porch with a sign in it that says RING BELL FOR CANDY

When I think back to when I marveled that one of our office’s 8Gb nightly backup tapes fit in my shirt pocket - EIGHT GIGABYTES - in my POCKET!!!…

In the future Gen ┐ will whine to their parents that their cerebral implant is only 100 terabytes.

But there’s so much room for ACTIVITIES!!!

Yes. I also don’t yell at them to get off my lawn.

• Run a weekly in-person D&D campaign at my house, make dinner for the players.
• Play around with Arduino and ESP32 - home automation, robots and whatever.
• Do a lot of 3d design and printing - make little toys to give away with Halloween candy.
• Build model castles.
• Listen to classic old-time radio shows.
• Help with stage productions at a local theater.
• Write some Discord bots and npm modules.
• Participate in NaNoWriMo

All the comments assume everybody else isn’t also immortal. I forget the title and author but there’s an old sci fi story (or novel?) about a future where everybody lives for centuries, and they’ve found that the brain only retains a certain amount of experience. They have long careers, get tired of doing whatever, re-educate and do something else, or even have multiple families they eventually forget about. A couple of the characters are surprised to find out they used to be married like a century earlier. To me that seems vaguely like reincarnation, and I kind of don’t hate the idea. I really don’t see any downside to that scenario, or even just going on forever.

People are focused on having regrets and negatives that last forever. But buck up li’l camper, you can learn to move on from stuff. And I say this as a dad whose daughter had cancer at age 10 (she survived). It was hell and I wouldn’t want to live through that whole period again, but I don’t consider it a reason not to want to live forever. The trick is to learn how to cope with these things and not let them outweigh the good experiences you have.

Thanks for putting so much time and thought into the discussion. All the problems you talk about exist for every search engine in actual use today. For example, publishing a site on a brand new domain has the exact problem you’re describing with spinning up a new Forte instance. There can be a 24-hr lag before DNS can reliably find the site. Perfect search is an aspirational goal. The realistic goal is to satisfy most needs. No matter how many words you throw at it, I don’t think federated search is an outlandish idea at all.

we hrd u lik fredum so we freed u frm votg

Doesn’t seem to me like you did anything serious enough to be banned from a whole platform, but moderators and administrators are individuals and some of them can’t be objective when something presses their person hot buttons. If a right-wing Christian claimed abortion was Sexual Assault, that obviously would not automatically make abortion an off-limits topic, but I can imagine a moderator thinking differently. I agree with your response that nobody was being forced into anything, but using loaded words like “woke” is a good way to get yourself labeled by someone who thinks in memes.

What if search itself were a federated function? Although I’m a software dev I really don’t know much about the mechanics of large-scale search engines such as Google, but I know their server farms somehow share the load of performing searches and maintaining whatever database they maintain to optimize searching. Seems like the fediverse could do search in a similar way. I’m just saying your critique of the idea, although well thought out, seems like a critique of a particular strategy. It’s not obvious to me that the very idea of federated search is outlandish.

Frequent thrift shopper, I’ve noticed prices going so high I wonder if they know what “thrift store” means anymore.