Thanks, we know, we will instead be getting theocratic fascism in about a year.

Can I marry you and move to wherever you live?

Newgrounds (still exists!)

Homestarrunner (still exists!)

Neopets (also somehow still exists!)

Websites for advertising movies was a thrilling new phenomenon.

Search algorithms were much more primitive, but due to the public internet being basically much, much smaller, it was faaaar easier to find basically random people’s personal sites (before the term blog even came around), discussing a niche topic.

At the same time, a whole lot of sites were still disseminated by word of mouth, person to person, or maybe via email. Running a TV ad for a website was basically a gigantic gamble for early sites… only those with huge amounts of money could even attempt it and it often just outright caused the whole enterprise to fail if you had moderate or little funding.

We did not have touch screen mobile devices with full keyboards, we had SMS T9 texting, which (like pagers before them) led to shorthand (lol is probably the best example) and a good deal of early internet lingo.

There was no ability to basically constantly post some kind if personal update to your personal site or eventually MySpace as is now the norm with modern tech and social media, so people that post usually put a good deal more thought into it.

Forums. The old net used to be far, far more based on communities in forums. Far less emphasis on basically mundane, every day posts about your life and opinions, and more centered around actual discussion of topics or issues.

Oh right of course: GameFaqs.

Back when you could only use the internet if no one else was using a phone in the house, waay before 8 hour in depth video guides explained to you how to do everything in a game…

We had to print out guides with chapter headings written in ASCII art, and it was quite common to be seen as giving up or cheating if you needed a guide to complete a mission or unlock some secret.

Oh and if you think lag is a problem nowadays in online games, try playing an FPS where most people have a ping around or over 200, constantly rubber banding all over the place, yourself included.

Or getting desynced in Starcraft for 30 seconds, every 5 minutes, basically every game.

I think it was ABC that just showed a poll saying 15% of independents would be more likely to vote for Trump if he’s a convicted felon, 8% less likely, and 74% indifferent.

So uh, at least amongst independent voters, no, apparently being a felon does not matter that much.

Wild thing is I am white, cis and basically hetero…

…and I don’t see how anyone can not take this all seriously.

Lots of non white, non hetero talking heads on major channels that don’t seem to care either.

A lot of it is just the lucky few that made the right connection, or were born into wealth, who never had any life destroying tragedy ruin their career, who had reserve finances or other contacts or safety nets to rely on…

Ive met loads if people like that. They’ll give you all the emotional support in the world, until either disagree with them about nearly anything somewhat serious, or if you ask for help that might actually cost them some time or money.

There’s programs for that! I donate to a charity that… yeah, its all underfunded, extremely difficult to apply to and pass.

Then they get angry because in their head theyre a good person, but this grates upon their fundamental belief in a meritocratic society, causes cognitive dissonance.

Survivorship bias is deadly.

Most likely its a mix of cognitive dissonance (it can’t happen here) and not really caring as theyre mostly well off liberals (oh well, if it does, im wealthy so my life won’t seriously change that much!).

snorts line of coke

Ok, so the idea is, game make lots of money if people play it for a long time, so what we do is

sniff

We make an extremely flashy but mechanically very, veeery simple game, and we use big well known IPs, but make sure to hire writers off of Fiverr, that’ll save on overhead, anyway, season pass, microtransactions, lots and lots of marketing and hype!

After Game Release

WTF nobody is playing after a botched buggy launch, and people didnt enjoy the gameplay, complained it was too simple and unrewarding when it even worked, and that the story was awful?

How could this have happened???

Anyway time to layoff 1/4 of our employees and randomly shuffle the other half around our giant array of various studios and projects, that’ll shake things up and put the fear of God into our workforce.

What me? Oh no I’m retiring now with my golden parachute after my amazing work running thia department through a trainwreck

snort

I mean “guiding our team through a demanding development process”. See you in Cabo!