loadingreadyrun.com

When we were just this group of people who liked some funny Canadians
When things were manageable and life wasn't as difficult
Without all these Discords and other confusing stuff
When we weren't worried about the world ending (in various ways)

Would like to recapture that feeling, but I fear it's just fleeting memories at this point.

Hey, I remembered my password.

Boy, howdy, do I get it, Memo.

I took a break from social media from Election Day to yesterday. I just couldn't deal with the stress of not knowing, so long as the 'game' wasn't over. (I often don't watch the Super Bowl for the same reasons, but I also normally work the Super Bowl, especially if the Pats are in it, but that's another story.)

It was actually really nice, not focusing on the chaos of the outside world and just doing the things I wanted to do. (I didn't do any online gaming or watching of modern programming, since they might have given the game away.) But it was so even more isolating than normal.

I so much prefer a forum setting like this to the entirely intangible and fleeting format of Discord. It's a great alternative to Skype, and we badly needed one of those, but otherwise, I'm not huge on it. I prefer something more permanent, even if there's surely a record of me behaving in a way that would chagrin me now somewhere in these blue walls.

This year has been the most deeply exhausting of any in my life, and not just because I've had to deal directly with the public AND get paid less than normal. The people I've worked with for eight months... it feels like I've known them for ten years. I am so weary of all this nonsense, of the bad behavior of my alleged countrymen, all the armchair idiots who think they know the world because someone determined that the best place to dump toxic waste was in the heads of men and women over sixty.

I've been trying to maximize the things that I like to do and limit the 'doomscrolling,' as I've heard it so adroitly named. I have Twitter blocked on my PC and my phone now, and I really hope I can avoid ever returning there. (Facebook is probably more destructive than Twitter, but at least I KNOW everyone on my Facebook and GENERALLY don't get accosted by dipshits.)

I don't have any answers. I don't even know if I have any words anyone would find the least bit comforting. I just have to push on. But maybe a familiar face popping back in, maybe for the last time on this forum... maybe there can be some comfort in that.

Oh hey, I'm only a week late to this.

I miss the old days too, and watching Desert Bus always takes me back to them. I don't think the forum will ever come back to life like it was — it was such a certain point in time on the internet, and a certain point in LRR's growth where they were big enough to draw us all in and not as big as they are now (though of course I'm thrilled to see them continue to grow and evolve). It was a great size for a community, just big enough to stay active, but small enough to know everybody.

I still enjoy keeping up with all of the forum-folk who are on Twitter, but I'm not good at inserting myself into conversations there, so I definitely feel like I'm more of a lurker than I was on here. And like you two, I find Discord to just be a lot and as someone with a brain that needs to see all the posts or none of the posts, it just doesn't work for me with the amount of people there. Same with Twitch streams, by and large.

But this was a great place for me at a formative time in my life, and helped me examine a lot of my world views with the great conversations here, and I made some great internet friends, and even if we don't talk much anymore I still remember tons of conversations with so many of you. Honestly, my one regret is that I didn't take big enough advantage of LRRcon when it happened. I had a blast, but I was just discovering that I had pretty bad anxiety and was feeling really sick from that and didn't make as much of an effort to meet everyone and introduce myself as I should have. But I still had an awesome time, met lots of you, and it indirectly led to me meeting my now-wife, so can't be too upset about that.

Maybe what we need to do is have some kind of LRR forum virtual reuinion. I don't know what format that would take, but I'd be super down for that.

Anyway, hope you're all doing okay and staying as safe as you can with everything going on!

Oh, hey, I guess I still have an account here.

I recently moved and while I was unpacking I came across my collection of LRR DVDs. One thing led to another and here I rode the Nostalgia Train(tm) to a forum that I haven't looked at in way too long. For context: I stopped checking in regularly around the time of the first Desert Bus, but I couldn't tell you why. I've slept since then. This isn't some indictment or condemnation of the direction that the site or the community went in or anything like that, but just another entry under the heading of Things Change(tm).

I don't think that there's anything wrong with nostalgia. Nostalgia can be great! It's fun to think about the good times and reminisce about what we were doing the first time we saw Hagiography Today or we listened to the LRRcast or whatever. And it's fun to know that as a result there are some in-jokes that are still kicking around in the back of my head that nobody will understand but me.

But as fun as reminiscing about the simpler times of the Good Old Days(tm) is, it's important to me that I don't live there. I have to live in the here and now because that's what's most important (second most important is the future because it will be the future will be now soon). And I don't want to throw away the past, either, because the past made me who I am today. Even though a lot of stuff about The Internet in general is almost completely unrecognizable from what it was in the early 2000's (some of it is better, yeah, but a lot of it is definitely worse) and I wouldn't trade my experiences back then for the world. I'll be carrying around some bits of LRR in the back of my head for the rest of my life, which is pretty amazing, to be honest.

basscomm wrote:Oh, hey, I guess I still have an account here.

I recently moved and while I was unpacking I came across my collection of LRR DVDs. One thing led to another and here I rode the Nostalgia Train(tm) to a forum that I haven't looked at in way too long. For context: I stopped checking in regularly around the time of the first Desert Bus, but I couldn't tell you why. I've slept since then. This isn't some indictment or condemnation of the direction that the site or the community went in or anything like that, but just another entry under the heading of Things Change(tm).

I don't think that there's anything wrong with nostalgia. Nostalgia can be great! It's fun to think about the good times and reminisce about what we were doing the first time we saw Hagiography Today or we listened to the LRRcast or whatever. And it's fun to know that as a result there are some in-jokes that are still kicking around in the back of my head that nobody will understand but me.

But as fun as reminiscing about the simpler times of the Good Old Days(tm) is, it's important to me that I don't live there. I have to live in the here and now because that's what's most important (second most important is the future because it will be the future will be now soon). And I don't want to throw away the past, either, because the past made me who I am today. Even though a lot of stuff about The Internet in general is almost completely unrecognizable from what it was in the early 2000's (some of it is better, yeah, but a lot of it is definitely worse) and I wouldn't trade my experiences back then for the world. I'll be carrying around some bits of LRR in the back of my head for the rest of my life, which is pretty amazing, to be honest.

Whoa dang, you _stopped_ checking in around the first Desert Bus?! :O Old school.

But yeah. Good points. Things have changed, which is OK, even if a lot of stuff is worse now. Remembering the previous times is OK and not living in them is probably good too.

(Also there's certainly probably a handful of people who share those in-jokes with you who are still around! Mostly on Discord probably, which is certainly bigger and different and maybe more overwhelming. But it is a step at least toward more of a forum-like thing, away from the very big/public twitter/facebook. I still wonder if/when Discord-type things will evolve further and end up re-inventing forums. I feel like it's only a matter of time.

I'm here, too and I still have a password.

I agree that this was a great time and place for me. I remember it fondly, but I also don't think it's practical for the time and place, anymore. LRR is different than it was and so is the community.

I also agree with AlexanderDitto that discord will probably eventually roll out a forum of some kind. People are starting to get a little sick of permanent ephemera. The FGC community is getting pretty sick of having people rediscover tech over and over again, because there's no sticky thread that keeps a running record of everything.

I miss this place, but I'm not sure I'd want to live here again.

Edit: I am sad my forum badge is gone. lol.

Can't say I was ever an active member of the community, but I still pop in here every once in a while to drink from the bitter sweet chalice of nostalgia.

It's been a long time since I first heard of LRR back in '07, sitting in my high school cafeteria listening to my friend giving an enthusiastic description of Installation Anxiety. Every time I move or clean out my closet I find my old Loading Ready Runners t-shirt. Every time I smile, refold it and put it back to be found again some day, because that's what you do with memories.

Time went on and the community evolved and that's not a bad thing. After all, the Crew has found new ways to do their thing and the community is still kicking, even if I'm not really a part of it anymore.

ecocd wrote:People are starting to get a little sick of permanent ephemera.

See, part of my problem is that I never liked it in the first place. Asynchronous communication is my jam for most things. I love Twitch chat, of course, but that's like an "event" while Discord is just... there. It's like an old-school chat room, which is good for that purpose, but not for others. Forums are basically gone, with nothing to replace them.

I did miss them. But I find Ysbryd Games' Discord server the best version of what this community used to feel like. Maybe it'll be good for you too?

I find it's honestly pretty hard to get back into things here. I've tried a couple of times to catch the streams and stuff, but stream chat goes by so fast nobody knows I'm gay

Am I doing this right?

Elomin Sha wrote:Am I doing this right?

I hope so, because I came back to shout into the void about how much I hate Discord again.

Discord is fine at doing its job of a chat room, but the fact that it killed off an entirely different form of communication (public asynchronous communication) really sucks, and I hate it.

I'm not that interested in the streams. Streamed video is also hard to share. You can't throw an hour-long-plus video at someone unfamiliar with LRR and ask them to watch 15 minutes of video to absorb enough context to get the joke made at 35:02.

Short sketches are easy to consume and easy to share. That's how I ended up logging in tonight. Just like "obligatory xkcd," I can usually find an "obligatory LRR." I went looking for "CSI:CSI," saw the YouTube geo-blocking message.

Discord is a crap replacement for a Web forum, but if you're mostly streaming, which is to say creating content not really intended to be re-watched then an ephemeral place for people to post their reactions is all you need.

CancerBottle wrote:if you're mostly streaming, which is to say creating content not really intended to be re-watched then an ephemeral place for people to post their reactions is all you need.

Yeah, it's for that, and for gamers to be able to use voice chat with each other, and it's great for both...

But it wasn't ever NEEDED for your reason, because Twitch has built-in chat right on it.

But with Discord now integrating with crypto and NFTs and crap... I'm hoping people jump ship and come back here. Crypto will ruin Discord.

CancerBottle wrote:if you're mostly streaming, which is to say creating content not really intended to be re-watched then an ephemeral place for people to post their reactions is all you need.

Yeah, it's for that, and for gamers to be able to use voice chat with each other, and it's great for both...

But it wasn't ever NEEDED for your reason, because Twitch has built-in chat right on it.

But with Discord now integrating with crypto and NFTs and crap... I'm hoping people jump ship and come back here. Crypto will ruin Discord.

To say "bump" would trigger half here and confound the other half. To that, I say "nananana ", but bump I shall. I know I wasn't the most prevalent, outspoken/seen or controversial back then but I was a witness. To those that know me in the discord asking for a "venting" channel, henlo to you. To the rest, I pour a beer to you all and drink to simpler, if not more... challenging times.

I remember I was going through some very bad times back in the day and this forum helped me feel connected to people who liked the same stuff. However, I was rather off-kilter, weirdly enthusiastic at times and I now worry I was very annoying. I really appreciated this community back in the day, even if I was not really good at expressing it. Doing much better now in a different city, even got married.

I have occasionally popped back, and I still follow most of LRR's stuff on YouTube. Don't use Discord except as a modern TeamSpeak.

Much love <3

You never came across as annoying to me! But I totally get the feeling of thinking back to things said here and cringing a bit, I was pretty young when I started here and I'm sure it showed in the way I wrote sometimes. Probably wanted to sound older and over-compensated.

Anyway, great to hear from you, and hope things are going well! It's been nice seeing so many familiar names in this thread.

It's pride so I just came back to check if Lavos was still gay. Confirmed.

Lavos wrote:I find it's honestly pretty hard to get back into things here. I've tried a couple of times to catch the streams and stuff, but stream chat goes by so fast nobody knows I'm gay

TheRocket wrote:It's pride so I just came back to check if Lavos was still gay. Confirmed.

Lavos wrote:I find it's honestly pretty hard to get back into things here. I've tried a couple of times to catch the streams and stuff, but stream chat goes by so fast nobody knows I'm gay

This is completely stupid question but I jsut wish to verify, you ARE TheRocketSiobhan?

gcninja wrote:

TheRocket wrote:It's pride so I just came back to check if Lavos was still gay. Confirmed.

Lavos wrote:I find it's honestly pretty hard to get back into things here. I've tried a couple of times to catch the streams and stuff, but stream chat goes by so fast nobody knows I'm gay

This is completely stupid question but I jsut wish to verify, you ARE TheRocketSiobhan?

Whoever it is, they're gorgeous.

Just tried finding and linking that image from years ago, and imageshack no longer hosts it anymore... =(

I don't believe it, I found the image on my NAS

Wow, seeing and reading this thread brought a smile to my face and warmth to my soul. Gosh, I don't know how long its been. Years, I think. I set Chrome to launch as an empty tab ages ago, but today I accidentally hit the home button by mistake, and here I am.

I'd just like to echo everyone's sentiments about dissatisfaction with the current form of online communication. I feel like I never really got into Twitch for the same reason I never really vibed with Discord. IT's all too demanding of my attention. I feel like if you want to keep up at all, you have to revolve your life around it, and there is so many other things I'd rather be doing. I've also heard it said that people function best in communities of only a few hundred or so, where you feel like you know everyone. I feel like with most discords they are either super huge and you have to spend all your free time posting in them in order to have any relevance, or they're so small and frail that they fall apart at the smallest conflict. I used to have actual conversations on the internet, but now anywhere I go it feels like I am shouting in to the void. I don't know anyone, no one knows me. You can't say anything meaningful on Twitter, Facebook's algorithm control everything you see, comment sections are useless. I miss having a place where I could express my thoughts and feelings, and get a real response. A place full of support and understanding, that can weather a little conflict without falling apart or casting anyone out. Take Lavos for example. If Lavos Lavos'd in most places these days, he'd get banned for sure. Or I remember this one time getting super fucking heated with King Kool because he didn't like Strip Search.

I would love to be a part of any sort of 'I Survived the LRR Forums" group, for all of us oldheads. Not because I'm against freshblood, I'm glad that they are still attracting new fans and going strong. But ya'll are my people. And I miss having a place where I can talk about what's bothering me or what I'm excited about or just wha't on my mind and get more of a response than a Like or a <3

You're so right, and it's honestly a social change. Everything just got a whole lot faster. Tom Scott called it "The Speed of Outrage" and I think that's appropriate. Once the big social media companies of Twitter and Facebook took hold, nothing seems to have changed, and yet everything seems to have changed. Web culture seems to have simultaneously stagnated and accelerated. There have been no major changes or breakthroughs in the way the Internet works in the last 10ish years, but everything has just gotten faster and faster. An event can occur and people will already be responding to the second backlash against the first backlash before other people even have a chance to wake up. Someone once wrote something like "Good morning, Twitter! We know you just woke up, but we need your fully-formed opinion RIGHT NOW about a giant social controversy that you just found out about 3 seconds ago. We need to sort you into the correct fighting camp." Tom Scott had it right when he said it's no longer a debate but a "ritual shouting match" at this point.

And then there's what's I've seen called "pancaking": "Twitter is the only place where well-articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say 'I like pancakes' and someone will say 'So you hate waffles?'"

I think I'll just leave with: