Has Vidya fried your brain?

Don't blame vidya for your negative thoughts and behaviors. Every experience in life is "productive" in one way or another.
I use vidya for fun and expressing creativity through modding.

Look within if you want to get rid of your negativity.

It really depends on what type of games you play.
Fast games condition you for constant activity and shit happening around you. These are terrible for concentration.
Slower games develop concentration but also take a lot of it. So within the same day you cannot expect to learn a new skill or read a lot of material and remember it.

In general I find vidya very damaging to activities outside of the PC.
I developed *the urge*. If I'm not playing or browsing here I feel uneasy. As if something is missing. It's terrible when I have to take certification courses and I have to study after a day at work.
It can really set you back in life.

While that is true FPS, ASSFAGGOTS, CRAPCUNTS and etc are designed to give you the fastest access to flashy eye-blinding action possible coupled with exciting(read annoying faggots) people. If you combine that with browsing movies/comics/porn you might as well be an addict.

I'm fine with films. I may get a bit disinterested, but I won't do some quick browsing during it. I do during some opening credits which I've seen many times though.

As for gaming, I find just a few days is enough most times. I also struggle with having lots to play, resulting in not bothering with any of them. Considering going back to horror games because Halloween, platformers, WWE 2K16, Enderal, stealth games etc. Too much choice.

This is literally every aspect of civilisation today. In fact its the entire point of schools.

Probably true but it turns out work and education isn't that good for your brain either.

Maybe. I started getting heavy into fightan, learning frame data, keeping up on news etc. Its just harder as it feels like it's taken over my other hobbies now

Yes. People have written about this a lot. Always-on social media (which can also mean imageboards), constant e-mail interruptions (if you have that kind of a job), jumping from tab to tab, skimming through endless amounts of content on the web… these fuck up your ability to concentrate. Tweets, likes, (You)s, upboats and replies also give your brain little rewards, like constantly playing a slot machine or something.

I would recommend the book Deep Work by Cal Newport.

The lack of vidya has made me depressed and suicidal.

You're a fucking retard. It's not like you would've used that time for anything else productive. Doing something like watching TV would've been even less productive.

That is not how the brain works retard. Your brain doesn't learn anything.

This is so true. Checking imageboards at home and e-mails at work has affected me. Attention span was better few years ago. Completing pc-games is so rare nowadays. However I prefer e-books and consolegames because then boards are further than one click away.

I'm a couple months outside of 30.

I mostly play games where I build functional things out of many small and complex parts, and also try to make them visually appealing. I feel as if this is good for me rather than a detriment, but I can't be sure. Sometimes I feel as if I'm stupider than I was back in high school, but that's probably just the fact that in high school I was constantly getting reminded of it because of scholastic achievement. Since I've left public education, the only thing is a bunch of idiot anons telling me I must be smart because I can play stuff like Dwarf Fortress; this doesn't have quite the same effect as getting max scores on AP class essays.

As for "giving a damn"? Hard to say if video games have caused a change, there, because I'm apathetic, depressive, and nihilistic already.

Read a fucking book sometimes. Do other things than just vidya.

I've played mostly turn based strategy and RPG games which have a pleasant pace. I'm certainly not made for the fast paced FPS shooters. All media seems to be made to have you absorb something every millisecond. Jumpcuts, fast talking and all kinds of noises all the time.

You can tell kids are affected by it. Then the (((pharmaceutical companies))) can sell them ADHD medication for a disease they created and make money on all fronts.

I like to relax with the kind of slow paced games I mentioned. Ironically, those games require more thinking i.e character and skill development, thinking ahead of turns etcetra rather than fast twitch and muscle memory.

I don't feel my brain has been fried by those games, because they are at the same relaxed pace as if you would read a book or study something. Fast paced action games just try to cram as much stuff into your head as fast as possible, and all of it is meaningless bullshit.

I feel the same way user. Escapism is a terrible drug

I'm 35 years old, throughout history people have always wasted their time by drinking to excess every night, by gambling, by playing musical instruments, wittling, and so on.

The problems you're having are just due to aging; my normalfag friends that don't even play vidya are the same way.

You not giving a damn about things is called "disillusionment" and it's due to the 10 years of economic Depression we're living in (which will go on for at least another 10 years, possibly 20). We're not hopeful for the future anymore, everything's gotten worse over time, people have gotten stupider and shallower, the previous generation had landing on the moon, we've got cellphones.

You've grown up and now your brain is telling you to cut that shit out and stop wasting your time.

im 28 and i think most of you are casuals and homosexuals that should be ended

Oldfags were never interested in e-items, achievements, trophies, gamer score, # of hours you'd have in an online profile to show off online like that 360 kid meme.

It was your reputation on a server, your handle on a top score list. You were competing against others of similar skill level not mindlessly doing repetitive tasks or collecting baubles in a game you'll stop caring about a year from now.

That's why I can see myself still playing games at 60(maybe I'll still be trying to ascend in NetHack) while the ones that grew up with an xbox or ps3 will have been burnt out completely having the pleasure parts of their brain fried by getting excited whenever a notification pops up congratulating them on killing a specific enemy 10,000 times.

You're seeing them zone out in front of streams or let's play videos because it provides the exact same level of excitement they once received with none of the effort required.

Gaming has made me an anti-social twat.

Because of gaming, I haven't made any lasting relationships with people because I prioritized all of my free time on gaming, and because my parents never pushed me to be social, I was never social.

Now I'm 26, have a good job and no friends, stuck living in my parent's house with no drive in life besides working.

I don't even really play games anymore because the games / IPs I invested in fucked me in the ass / were bad investments.

Have a screenshot from Closed Beta Warframe. You deserve it.

You really should take up other shit, like drawing, using a treadmill, watching movies or shows, something besides just vidya.

Endorphins, you guys should try and get some. It'll help quell the depression, if nothing else.

I've found lately that I don't read text like I used to. Even if it's a newer game, I have to break the habit of speeding through text just to get to the next objective, and then I don't care because I don't know the context. I hate it.

I know that feel. MMOs do this to you, specifically.

This is truth.

Vidya and especially action games trick you into believing you're moving around and doing exercise, when you're actually just collecting fat.

I gotta get out

I've had the opposite problem. My thousands of hours in Monster Hunter and SMT games have made me like the grind of working a food service job. And it bothers me, I feel like a lunatic for enjoying working at a fast food place

OP you fucking retard, most people on non-cuck Holla Forums are in their twenties.

If you're a cuck who finds the game a chore or boring or don't absorb the experience of course your brain will not register things.

hanging out with a bad crowd made me anti-social. i played vidya on all my spare time then forced myself to go meet new people and try to make friends. turns out i made friends with the shittiest fucking people you could meet and now its come full circle and im back to vidya all day thinking if i should try find friends again

Boondoggle. The soulless cretins that make video games these days can only make boondoggles. They don't create or force any meaningful change in the player, they just leach time and money. They are negative culture. They exist only for their own parasitic needs rather than symbiosis.

I have trouble focusing, but I am cripplingly depressed so there is that.

Video games have always been time wasters for me and I've never invested much thought into them, so they haven't really affected my life.

Although getting good at CoD and trolling the shit out of people for 2 years was fun so there's that.

user you are describing every hobby ever.

Yes. It's a hobby, man. Also you probably have burnout, so go do other things and come back to it later.

yes :(

wouldn't the doc name the top suspects as sleep, diet, exercise, friends, etc?

research paper where

But you retain general skill. This will make it easier to jump into a game of that type and be good at it. Easier to figure out the mechanics of games, easier to guess how the game was likely designed and what the devs were likely to do in any situation.

I'm old enough to have watched my general skill go up and down with different types of games, depending on how much I was playing them. The existence of general skill is unmistakable. This isn't just twitch skill, but gaining an understanding of game design. You may lose that cool loot, but you become better at figuring out how to get cool loot and solve puzzles.

If you are not becoming better at games in general you are doing it wrong somehow. Most likely you take your better gaming instincts for granted when going to the next game and do not realize how much they are helping.

I can get good in a few hours while most people take weeks or months.
I think you're just retarded OP.

found the issue.

That's why I love puzzle and strat games. good way of keeping the mind sharp

Nope, in fact I've become more of a normalfag thanks to video games. For example, I've been giving more of a shit about sports because of Midway Sports games. So no, my brain hasn't turned to shit. I'd say that you've always been an idiot and now you've become self aware.
Sage for /r9gay/ thread and for trying to get a pity party about how vidya made you an unfuckable faggot.

Holy shit, same.

IRL grinding is a thing, it seems.

It's very complex. The problem is that vidya is a process. And nothing in real life rewards process anywhere near as much as vidya.
The only thing I know of that's close is playing a musical instrument but even that is much worse than vidya.
So the real problem is you enjoy process mastery and there just isn't going to be anything as rewarding as vidya for you.

...

Holy shit, this guy is seriously projecting and I love it. I've never seen anyone that's gayer.

Ironically vidya has made me into a complete normalfag.
I don't even play anymore, the only thing I do is visit this site and watch Digital Foundry.

Upon having this revelation my enjoyment of vidya significantly decreased. It was then that I realized, dare I say it, a waste of time?

life is a waste of time

I did a dishwashing stint for two weeks as my first job before I had to quit because they underpaid me. (as in 5 bucks an hour pay)

Washing my own dishes is fucking easy as fuck now. God damn, never get a dishwashing job, it's hell.

The Internet and especially porn has fried my brain a lot more than vidya ever did. I noticed that, when I picked up learning the piano. It got much better since then, learning a musical instrument seems to be some sort of brain recovery procedure.

Folks have that expectation, that you have to put more than 100 hours into a single game to "git gud" and stuff.
Personally I set the limit by around 30 hours for each game. If I have to put in more than that to get somethere, then there something seriously wrong with it. "MMOs" like Elite Dangerous, which drag the thin content out over 1000 hours of nothing are very bad.
That doesn't mean you have to get through the entire content in a single 5 hour session, of course.

That's a short lasting fix, if I ever see one.

If you have to use the term "work" for vidya, you're doing it wrong.

That's a old people on facebook-tier argument user.
I mean not only the cellphones you're talking about are a thousands times more powerful and lot smaller than the computers used to land people on the moon (and that's a feat by itself), but we also have robots, we're at the beginning of the artificial intelligence age and we're about to "colonize" Mars, not to mention all the others discoveries and stuff in a lot of fields. Not seeing it means you're exactly the shallow and stupid person you're talking about.

I don't know. I've been at this since the early 80s. I still have my colecovision and everything. I'd say it goes without saying most people eventually do grow out of video games but after a certain age, if you're still playing, you're most likely going to play forever but I'm still here typing coherently so I guess my brain isn't fried. Not yet, anyway. Maybe when I'm older and alzheimer's takes over.

I'd say the only thing that's "fried" me is the whole politics of video games right now. There's always been a thing since the great moral panics of the 90s from Thomson but holy shit. Millennials are truly the worst generation in history after the boomers, I hope most of you get gassed for even inventing the term "SJW" much less taking up all the insane bullshit that comes with it. You ruined video games and MMORPGs and everything ever about gaming.

But SJW was invented by their detractors, are you more upset with them or the people who argue with them?

vidyer DOES have an positive effect on your skills, but it's only visible when you leave your basement or try to do stuff your mom used to do it for you

...

How many robots do you have, exactly? Maybe a roomba? There have been assembly line robots in service since the early 70s.
People have been saying this for decades. Obviously, just having faster computers must mean we're objectively closer to that goal, but there's clearly more to intelligence than the basic number crunching computers do. Shit's further off than fusion power. At least we actually understand how fusion works, and the trouble is engineering a machine to make it happen in a way that produces net useful energy. And we're still pretty far off of that, despite close to 50 years of work. I'm sure it's just 20 years away, like they've been saying the whole time.

What we are closer to is computer software that can recognize patterns and faces well enough to create a real panopticon state, where everyone is tracked and monitored in real time, be it through their phone, or their car, or the fucking "internet of things", or public cameras, or other people's phones and cars, etc. I'm not optimistic about it. Total government surveillance of all electronic communication has been a thing for years.

People been saying that shit since the late 70s. amusingly, the development of rocket engines essentially ended for several decades with the development of the space shuttle main engines. The USSR collapsed, and along with it the funds to research new engines over there. Funding for new ICBMs dried up on the US side too, and NASA had it's shuttle and wasn't getting funding for anything else. There was a good 25 years in which rocket engine technology was completely stagnant. As it stands, only now is SpaceX working on an engine that outperforms engines from the 70s, NASA's first engine since 1981s is an improved version of the J2 engine from the Apollo mission's second stage, originally developed in the mid 1960s.

In sheer rocketry terms, we are currently less capable of going to mars than we were in 1970, That may change in the coming years as new systems come online, but today's launch capability is a shadow of what it was in the Apollo era.

The greatest invention of our lifetimes was, and might well always be the Internet. And as we type we're watching it go to shit.

Just because "people have been saying for decades" it doesn't mean it will never happen or that it's not happening right now (or pretty close to now).
There are assembly line robots far more advanced than simple "robot arms", capable of recognizing not only patterns and do simple jobs, but also identifying workers not only by ids but also by their faces. They can even recognize emotions and understand that like a trailer for a horror movie is scary and stuff like that.
I said "colonize" because there are already plans for a Mars mission and people already have been selected to live on the planet.
Obviously we're not in the "future" people pictured 30-50 years ago but, maybe it's my optimistic and naive and delusional side, i say we're somewhat close.
i mean user don't you want robot waifus and reject humanity already? Have hope for the future man

I know and have that exact same feel that winning or loosing in vidya its not important anymore, i dont care if i win or lose, i dont care if i do good or not when i play MMOs, i dont care about rare items and all that stuff, i just try to find a bit of fun and once i have consume it all i get bored and play something else until the circles starts again. Its a weird feeling and that's one of the reason i havent buy a single game in the past two years, nothing really apeals me anymore.

Gee, why am I not surprised?

It's called "getting older".

Can you please not shitpost? This looks like a decent thread.

Polite sage.

Then you have no future, you cuck.

Vidya has dominated my life tbh, prefered playing on my computah more than developing social skills or just skills in general. Skipped classes and dropped out of school because of it.

Living outside of any inclusion has made me disillusioned and see the world for what it is. In this i'm more 'aware' than most. However, i think i never emotionally developed past the angsty-teen phase.

Now i'm a unemployed kissless/hugless 30yo virgin living off neetbux doing nothing but drinking and playing vidya. In a way i'm more fortunate than most in this world but i'd give up all this comfort and ease in an instant just to have someone care about me.

That said.. pic related, it's all the same in the end.

Boy you're in for a disappointment if you think these worthless proclamations from Mr 'Yes we can' who's on the way out or some Silicon Valley hotshot in the middle of losing half his net worth in messy divorce #2 means anything other than getting free publicity. Nobody is going to walk on the moon within your lifetime much less on Mars.

Go look at how much a real humanoid robots costs today, it's in the range of tens of millions of dollars. To rent one like the ASIMO for a single day it costs hundreds of thousands including a technician to properly control it. You also need to purchase insurance and can only use it in an approved location.

Unless you expect your 'robot' waifu to be mostly silicone flesh on a metal frame and vibrate or have internal heating coils you're in for disappointment yet again. Oh and that's ten thousand dollars starting, the price is unlikely to decrease anytime soon. That much properly cast high grade silicone isn't cheap and neither is shipping it.

user, there's lots you can only learn about people and the world by being involved in the world socially. Being angsty blinds you more than it liberates you; it's possible to see that some/many relationships are bad or some/many things are corrupt without being obsessed with things being bad.

Sage because not strictly on topic.

Take a hint just because people hut your feefees when they call you a faggot it doesn't mean they aren't shitposting, there's your problem
That's 95% of everything you ever learn in school, and the other 5% you could've figured out by reason or on the free time you lost with the 95%

i have bad news for you user even without vidya you didn't have the brain capacity to make friends

probably. ha ha ha

Congratulations on your quiet life user.

Your mind has more connections than there are atoms in the universe.
There isn't a limit on how many skills you can learn.
Vidya has made you more efficient at developing new skills to solve new problems.

Although, internet access is a huge distraction, and you probably have information addiction.
You should be more worried about how much time you waste on Holla Forums and youtube.

I was better when I played more games, now I just waste time browsing the internet and maybe play a few times a week if I'm lucky.

I think getting a good PC ruined me, when I played exclusively on console I'd only have the games but with a PC you can just alt tab anytime and sink hours on the internet.

How naive can you be? As if a 30 year old hasn't been through childhood, teenagehood and adulthood or spent a day away from his computer.

Those who who tear their own eye out when they see something offensive are faint and simple.

I've downloaded this book and it's all jizz.

The essence of this "Deep Work" states explicitly not to remove distractions, but 'remove the behaviours that cause distraction'. It's like a manual of how to think yourself into a lobotomy.

Get rekt you fucking waste of bandwith. Don't ever recommend books again.

Also there is nothing wrong with turn-based strategy games.

>Your mind has more connections than there are atoms in the universe.
That's pure bullshit, and you know it. 'Potential' is not the same as 'actual'.

in soviet russia your brain fries video games!

reported for wasting quads

One of my favorite articles, shame it came from (((The Atlantic))) though
archive.is/reYiV

the title is intentional parody of clickbait in case it isn't obvious

I think video games fucked with my memory since I remember more about what am I gonna do in this game and where I left off or which game I was planning on playing out of over 100 games then remembering what exactly did this person say to me ten minutes ago. Short term memory loss is a bitch.

I'm not sure. I know every kid thinks they're a fucking genius when they know nothing, but I sure felt more competent overall before games really started taking up most of my day. I just feel mentally slower overall after the 7 years I've been out of school and walked away from the last of my "friends". My grades were horribly average when I tried and I never learned how to properly retain information when studying, so I was never great at anything. I think the lack of real social interaction with people I'm not familiar with is what's done more damage, but holing up in my room and playing weebshit all day probably hasn't helped either. I wish I could still fall for the "if you admit you're a fucking idiot than that means you're actually a genius" meme.

*then

that's a pretty rare wojak you got there user
would be a shame if someone downloaded that illegally

oh boy im saving this one, you should have used FileProtector by Dicksoft

Everyone and their mother already has that wojack in their harddrvies. it was giving out free in a promotion you idoit.

it isnt free if you had to go to the pokemon movie to get it

Cellphones are cancer. They can't do anything but waste their own battery and even if you could do anything with them, no one would. Things have never been worse for young people than right now, in terms of wealth, health, jobs, home ownership, number of children, etc. and yet you cunts can't shut the fuck up about what your phone is theoretically capable of.

This is an 18+ board by the way, just a heads up.

These two and also vidya has become really really normalized, I see the same shit over and over again, not only nobody makes a game that really makes you think anymore but a lot of gameplay styles have been lost to time and most games are either a TPS, an FPS or MOBA

Instead of having more stuff than before we actually have LESS

Any specific question I can dream of can almost certainly be answered within a minute of research no matter where I am in the world because I carry around an internet connected cellphone. I don't give a shit that most people just use it for retarded things like snapchat, that doesn't change the fact that it is an incredibly powerful device that I use every day. I can have a fucking face to face conversation with someone on the opposite side of the planet with no hassle because of this thing, if you don't see why that's rad as hell then what the fuck is wrong with you?

If you think phones are so shit then why do are you posting on a website on your desktop computer? A phone is merely a portable computer. Obviously it's considerably less powerful and has less options for free and open source software but it is still a miniature computer. Say what you want about Jewbuntu, but I can hook up my Ubuntu tablet to any monitor, keyboard, and mouse and use it like a regular computer with all of my files and programs intact no matter where I am.

You are nothing but a contrarian hipster blinded by nostalgia for the "good ol' days" that you think are so great because you only remember the good parts of those "good ol' days."

H-how…?

Vidya is part of it but the constant onslaught of little rewards for your brain and information overload are a pretty large problem for all young people that have grown up around computers. I used to work at a job where I was on my feet and working with my hands on a single task, but now I'm at a shitty office job where I'm bombarded by information all day and I can feel myself becoming less focused, more irritable and less motivated by the day. I've been spending more time outdoors on weekends and I can feel my brain fog clear up a little bit, but if you're as bad as I am you will need larger lifestyle changes to escape this.

It depends who and how someone plays vidya. Mindless playing for the sake of playing makes you addicted and sucks in all other vital motivation into your vidya habit while turning them upside down and useless for RL.

I play vidya since I'm 6. Currently 28. But I always played for the sake of competitiveness & to improve myself (reaction, planing) and sometimes just to wind down after school, work or college. If I didn't like a game, I dropped it, no matter how far I was invested (Items, people I liked to paly with). This prevented me from palying games for the sake of playing.

It was my job (code monkey) which reduced my attention span, because I needed to focus on 1000 things at a same time, constant interruptions and so on. But It is a good thing, depending on the perspective. Why do you need to complete a book instead of just pulling the relevant information out of it? I think It's a boon. 100 years ago people wouldn't be able to do what we do now, because they couldn't have dealt with the amount of information we do nowadays.

The only negative effect I've noticed so far is that vidya/coding can make you less patient, as you are accustomed to instant and constant flow of information. If you manage to deal with this, you'll be fine.

Didn't even have to go full nofap, just once every two days for a while instead of 5 times a day.

video games and music and the internet are deeply entrenched into my life because when you live in Bumfuck, Nowhere, nobody wants to talk about "some obscure video games" (autistically asked about some older games), especially in a vocal tone of dryness, without any vitriolic sarcasm. In a country of

Same. Vidya has given me so much in my life - language skills, coordiination skills, quicker thinking, thinking outside the box, "gamification" in real life interests, friends.

The list goes on. Only thing that worries me is that the amount of shit games now is far exceeding the amount of good games, even in genres I previously thought could always deliver. The weeb style market is especially guilty of this, pushing out lackluster dungeon-crawling title with tits and ass as the selling point every week.

Basically this. I can't see myself stopping playing games altogether. But it's true that my backlog is only increasing and I don't have that drive to start games anymore, especially RPGs.
Maybe it'll get better when I start doing something with my life instead of just procrastinating

I gotta motivate myself but I just don't know how

I dont regret it. Gaming was fucking amazing until the normalfag hordes started arriving in massive numbers from 2005 onwards.

I don't know why, but clicking picture just made start sobbing violently, I just began shaking and let a fuckload of emotion out. A part of me just snapped reading that, and unleashed a violent deluge of sorrow.

I have to thank you user, I've felt very tense and alone these past few months, I can't quite shake it off, but I'm grateful you posted that image. All I've wanted was comfort, at least temporarily, and now I found it, this will help me a endure life a bit more.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

On the one hand I feel like I wasted a lot of time that could have been used towards expertise in something more rewarding in the world outside of vidya. On the other hand, a lifetime of powergaming and theorycrafting in business sims and RPG's has finally, recently, translated pretty well to working in actual business, especially with the advances in data collection and analysis.
I feel like my years in a shit retail job fried my brain more than vidya ever did.

Videogames are supposed to be amusement, not a substitute for real life. I've never had OP's problem because I'm not an autist.

Also I didn't read the thread and I won't read any replies. Drown in piss, autists.

Yup. That's me.
It's kind of like a cassette tape. Every time we write over those skills with a new game, the overall tape quality gets shittier.

I can't agree with that. For one, adapting to something new is a skill in and of itself. Every time you pick up a new game, you make comparisons to what you've played before, to identify where you can apply skills or knowledge you already have, and where you need to focus on learning new things specific to this game. Casuals suffer in games that don't pander to them because they specifically lack the ability to actively seek out and correct their own skill deficits.
Ever talked to someone who's mainly played one game for ten years or so? That's terror.

oldfag here, first system was an intellivision.
Been playing nearly everyday for decades.
The NX reveal sadden me, but the RDR2 gave me some optimism. Has always been like that, disappointment and hints of potential and rarely do you get the gem.

Everyone is drawn to vidya to fill a void, mine was the need for exploration– loot, treasures, secret passages are my bag. Some gays just want to play WWE, and that is alright too. But their are times in your life when the need for exploring or being gay isn't on the forefront and that is when gaming isn't as fun as it can be. During this time, it is important to recognize this stagnation and switch genres in vidya, or seek new hobbies or focus on completing whatever needs doing in your life. Sadness, grief, and illness can have games that help it or alleviate the malaise. So, set aside some games for that time and be mindful that there is only so much time on this earth, don't waste it playing Infamous Last Light or other games that have agendas that take away from the natural wonder of games and sully it with political aims or virtue signaling/corporate whoring.

The tape quality is motivation, not skill degredation.

Not that user but I wanted to nitpick on your post like the faggot that I am: only the flow of information is made easier by a smartphone. Whether the information itself is factually correct or not wholly depends on whether you yourself are a retard/not-retard or did you choose to ask Jewgle which will then proceed to provide only approved (((answers))).

The ease with which one can get information also makes it easier to spread misinformation. Just look at all the MIDF posters from the third world unironically believing and sharing all the shit they see on Kikebook of all places.

Sage because starting to go off rails.

It didn't have much in the way of rails to begin with.
Your post reminded me of a quote.
Realtime. And yet Truth arises from data. From data you can—extract—Truth.”

The character is discussing how the most valuable skill in information technology is being able to sort through the massive pile of available bullshit. Pretty good call for a book written in 1989.

Is that from The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran? I asked jewgle If thread theme is about going cold turkey on vidya for a week or so, might as well grab a book and that one sounds interesting.

It is, it's good, and he released it for free

Thanks user, reading it right now.