Am middle-aged(ish) nerd, can confirm this would work.

I am equally, if not more embarrassed to say this is an excellent idea and I need to steal it.

Eh, the hype around it maybe, but it can be a useful/unique experience for some - at least if you’re not the type where it’d be acutely painful, in which case do whatever gets you through the flight/whatever.

Think about modern life - how often do you find yourself in a position where there are no acute demands, no expectations for how you need to spend your time, and you can just sit with your thoughts for a few hours? Unless you consciously carve out some time for that, IMO it’s pretty rare. Multihour travel as a flight/train/bus passenger affords that time with no special effort.

I like at least attempting it for a chunk of the trip, if not the whole time - imagination starts running wild in cool ways, which otherwise doesn’t happen as often as I’d like it to. Though in fairness, if it’s a plane the cabin noise usually puts me to sleep during the attempt.

I’ll put it this way - if you’re the kind of person that finds the idea of isolation tanks appealing, depending on why you may enjoy raw-dogging flights or other passenger travel. 100% not for everyone though, and that’s fine - different strokes and all that.

ChatGPT reaches the same conclusion thousands of teenagers who’ve ingested a psychedelic compound have reached at some point. Now here’s Tom with the weather.

Got dang*

As someone who rescued Micah by immediately shooting the Sherriff of Strawberry and his buddies in the face, much to my sibling’s utter shock when they were letting me try RDR2 the first time, I’d say the reverse is also true.

YYYY/MM/DD hhmm, 24 hour clock gang unite!

(We also support our YYYY.MM.DD and YYYYMMDD compatriots)

This is a Once in a Lifetime romance.

Do it! Heck, take a friend and some garbage bags and make it nicer for everyone (if you are up to it).

I feel a lot of us would benefit from more time in the bush.

Vaguely related: As a flappy-headed Canadian child, there was some web 1.5 proto-social media site for kids that advertised on tv. I distinctly remember one of the characters saying the phrase “Do you like Limp Cookie?” in it.

I hope this comment keeps the memory of a company obscuring a band’s name referring to a cookie a bunch of dudes jacked off onto, while retaining the exact same connotation, on children’s television alive. That is all.

[Bonus points if anyone remembers wtf that website was]

I feel like there was a very short window where PCs were just easy enough to use that most people had one, but the OS experience was just complex enough, with things breaking frequently enough, that you had to learn some basics out of necessity.

Like , I’m a 100% not an IT guy - but I know all sorts of shit that seems like it should be common knowledge, but isn’t. Any time I manage to get something in our IT and software environment functioning at work, or explain the chain of events to some catastrophe based on evidence in our software logs, and I get talked about like some kind of wunderkind, it is frustrating more than anything else.

I’m not some IT genius, I’m your average asshole who knows some basics about the tools we use in 99.9% of the work we do. Chances are if there were more of said assholes we wouldn’t run into the problems I address in the first place. But admittedly, perhaps some of that knowledge/ability to think that way comes from having to figure out shit like why my DOS game wouldn’t work in 1995, or what the fuck that purple monkey Mom downloaded a few years later was actually doing.

Ugh - sorry, this turned into a rant, this kind of shit has been top of mind recently…

All of this is one reason why I find myself using ‘fellow humans’ as a form of address. Yeah, it sounds like you’re an alien overlord in a skin suit, but it’s 100% inclusive.

That and (to get all hippy about it) it’s a consciousness shifting exercise - refuse divisions when they’re not necessary for a specific discussion, think at the level of shared humanity as the default.

Never had that one, just looked it up. That’s a poutine crime if I’ve ever seen one.

Every so often I’ll see a link to Newgrounds and I’m shocked it’s still around every time.

NSFW rather than NSFL, but sooo many children learning things when going to whitehouse.com for a project on the U.S…

This is how I learned about top-level domains.

Idk, at the time I would have bought this if possible: https://youtu.be/UWzHkeBObw0

Every song ever made is either by Eminem or Weird Al, and I refuse to believe otherwise.

(Actually, for any long-standing data hoarders out there who retained filenames for limewire downloads - you know what would be fun? A playlist of songs based on the limewire-attributed artist.)

There’s a lot - MSN, forums in their hey-day, Geocities, the days when almost every ISP had free web hosting, long-form letter style emails being a common means of communication, email newsletters, etc. etc.

But three particular things come to mind:

R.E. League at Reality’s End (https://www.realitysend.com/) - like many children in the 90s-2000s, I was obsessed with Pokemon. This guy made a web-based Pokemon RPG, with all the usual stuff (battles, badges, etc.) BUT with puzzles and amazing writing. What’s more, anyone could make a website and be their own gym leader, WITH BADGE, with just a little code from Reality’s End. It. Was. Awesome. Still around, kind of, but most of the fan-made gyms are looong gone, and I’m not certain you can create a new user for the main site stuff anymore. Edit: OMG I WAS WRONG, you can still make new accounts! Nostalgia time! For anyone wanting to try this, see: https://www.realitysend.com/league/gssignup

[Town Redacted]MP3.com - As a young teenager I lived in a small city with a disproportionally lively music scene. This website had recordings from local artists of all genres, and started me off on finding all ages shows [this was also still thriving, I don’t see that many posters etc. for these anymore]. Met a ton of other kids, listened to a lot of good music, and it became a ‘cool kid’ feather in my cap. Also, in a roundabout way, was a catalyst for me discovering pot (listen to music and click on link for the band’s webpage -> get into a discussion in their guestbook with a member of a different, all teen girl punk band -> start chatting with members of this band often -> band smokes me out for the first time at a show for the band we met over, which was also my last night in town before moving)

The Pojo.com Forums - Again, Pokemon obsessed kid. Loved Pojo for TCG stuff, but it also introduced me to fanfiction. I wrote my own fanfics that were well received, which gave me a lot of confidence about writing in general. Also met some cool people here, and for nostalgia’s sake I find myself Googling usernames I remember sometimes.

I swear to god it’s intentional - defending your position is harder to do when squatting over a latrine. Morale (specifically defined as willingness to fight) is also high when you’re pissed off that you can’t poop. “Something’s getting unloaded, one way or another”.

The chili con carne they give Canadian troops is my jam, though. Kinda want a bunch of those for camping now that I’m thinking about it.

Not quite yet, but when RiF is gone so am I.

Partially because this situation is outrageous. Partially because I forgot my password a long time ago and didn’t provide a recovery email, and I like my username.