/lain/ - lain.iwakura

>>2730
good to see someone else here

>>2731
I poke my head in here a good deal, I just keep all my Lain stuff on my big rig, and I don't really turn it on much anymore.

>>2732
i see. well, i'd be happy to see more of it! i don't have that much stuff yet but i'm currently working on a personal archive for all things wired so your input will be much appreciated

>>2733
I'm pulling all of these from the good ol' Lain Pack. Regrettably, it seems like Six10's entire site no longer exists. Maybe I should put the pack up somehow. It was a bunch of pretty old stuff in there; I think your collection is much newer by far so far.

>>2734
yeah, i scavenge what i like on pixiv at least weekly, so most of the stuff i post is mostly new, some are less than a week old, i think

also sorry for missing a few days of posting, been on a work trip

>>2735
I see. What inspired you to start your archive? Connect with the show/VN? Think Lain is an important cultural symbol? Just think Lain is cute? I don't know what prompted me to grab that pack. I've always liked Lain but never been particular about it; my interests are too modern, sorry to say. Having a bunch of old Lain stuff has probably influenced my view of her.

>>2736

>What inspired you to start your archive? Connect with the show/VN? Think Lain is an important cultural symbol? Just think Lain is cute?

all of the above, and also that a lot of ideas from the show have really resonated with me. i came around to understand that everyone gets his own thing from it, mine is that i believe that the interconnected world can no longer be clearly divided between "virtual" and "real". it was never virtual in the first place, ever since the first ever computer communication some decades ago - everything has an impact on the world, no matter the significance - and SE:L perfectly portrays that.

also, i do think that the concept of network spirituality has a place in this world, which is also shown. your presence in the net is more than just your account and things you post, it's part of your personality and soul that is now forever engraved onto countless hard drives in segments and is available to anyone who's willing to dig deep enough. in that sense, it makes the internet some sort of ephemeral, all-knowing and omnipresent being, akin to a god.

there are many ways you can look at it, love it, hate it, accept it, deny it, understand it or remain ignorant, but it still exists and you have to face it every day, since all of our lives are now online to various extent. and Lain is a symbol of that - it exists, regardless of whether you acknowledge her or not, because there will be at least someone in the world that remembers of her existence, even if that is not a person but a machine. she is long immortalized in this deus ex machina that the internet has become, in all senses - from an anime character to a theological concept.

i'll understand if it doesn't make much sense or my answer is not as coherent as both of us would like, that's just what's been on my mind for a while now and i'm still in the process of fully figuring all this out, not even sure if it's really feasible. also, some of the stuff was possibly influenced by the shit i've seen at my job, i can elaborate if you wish.

>>2737
I see. I haven't seen Lain in a while. I've meant to rewatch it for a long time now, but I just always would rather do something else than turn on my television. I've been having a kick looking back at media like Lain and seeing how archaic it is, not archaic in the sense of nothing it says being meaningful anymore, but archaic in its ideas of what the internet really is. I've been looking through a lot of writings on the internet, mainly the 1970s-1980s era. On the one hand these works can be profound in what they say about technology and society, and remain relevant today as revered works, but on the other hand it's kind of obvious these were written when hacking rarely involved more than blowing a whistle into a phone or something. Even Lain, which is much newer than those, shows its age a lot. Take even calling it the Wired, for example. The point of all the wires, of course, was to show the scope of connection the internet brought about, by emblematic of it's sheer size, but we live in a world now where a lot of people look at you funny for even using an ethernet cord, where connection happens in the air all around us now and is not confined to metal lines, so the image of Lain wrapped in wires hints more towards her being an old, rusty machine by modern parlance. It feels like the world that wrote the Arthruian epics and the world that wrote Lain have a lot more in common than the world that wrote Lain and the world I live in now. Lain was written right on that cusp of everything changing forever, but not quite there yet.

Lain being newer than those other works gives it the one advantage of showing just how ubiquitous the internet is. There is a kind of frustration in reading older cyberpunk works (or interacting with newer works based off of them) in that they understood the implications of something like the internet existing and yet failed to see just how ubiquitous it is; they believed the internet would only ever really be obsessed over by a relatively small group of punks who intimately knew how it functioned battling against the evil corporations that define its existence. Kind of hilarious to type. By 1998, this being quite the opposite of how it worked was a bit more obvious, I suppose. I really wish I could find more works that were both deeply familiar with what the internet and computers actually are and had a realistic (by modern reality) view of the internet leviathan.

I would say more about your talk of Lain itself, but as I haven't watched it in a while… weh. The one thing I remember is that Lain is animated very human, which I always thought was odd in the sense that she's the only character in the entire medium I can think of that is animated that way. Stuff like picking up the strap of her top when she's crawling over her computer stuff.

I remember a post I saw a time ago - maybe it was here even - that talked about how Lain was a god in the sense of the Egyptian gods, that the Egyptians didn't really believe there was this green guy who had control over all growth and fertility, but this green guy was the best way they could represent those concepts and pray to them. Regeneration is too beyond humanity to put into conceivable human terms, so they give it a human image so they can pray to it, bargain with it. They said Lain was our version of this for the Internet. I find it a compelling argument, but see before where I say that Lain doesn't really capture the whole of the internet. Lain is the best image I know of, but there's still so much missing if I recall.

>>2738

>On the one hand these works can be profound in what they say about technology and society, and remain relevant today as revered works, but on the other hand it's kind of obvious these were written when hacking rarely involved more than blowing a whistle into a phone or something.

i totally agree, some of the stuff in said works just doesn't make any sense or even comes off as ridiculous, considering that we know what direction technology took after the piece was written. though a lot of stuff presented in SE:L does make sense even now - for example you can compare the Psyche to a GPU/TPU chip or some kind of FPGA, Protocol 7 being something like IPv6(sorta?) but even more advanced, and i think that Navi series of machines are inspired by both Apple and Sun Microsystems/Oracle, Copland OS looks like something that would come out of one of these companies. same goes regarding hacking - it does look weird and doesn't always make sense, but it's presented reasonably enough to show the general idea of the process even today.

>but we live in a world now where a lot of people look at you funny for even using an ethernet cord, where connection happens in the air all around us now and is not confined to metal lines, so the image of Lain wrapped in wires hints more towards her being an old, rusty machine by modern parlance.

i wouldn't exactly say that. sure, the majority of the people on earth are using wireless connections from their end devices to the routers or WAPs to access their networks, primarily the internet - but everything further down the path is wires, from your home GPON/DSL/DOCSIS connection to underwater intercontinental interconnection cables - so i think it's still perfectly acceptable to call it the wired, if you wish. however, i do understand your reasoning here, since most of the people are indifferent to the infrastructure that allows them to use the internet and they only pay attention to the convenience of 802.11 as end users, and that's pretty much all that they ever use for connection nowadays - most don't even have a desktop PC anymore.

>remember a post I saw a time ago - maybe it was here even - that talked about how Lain was a god in the sense of the Egyptian gods, that the Egyptians didn't really believe there was this green guy who had control over all growth and fertility, but this green guy was the best way they could represent those concepts and pray to them. Regeneration is too beyond humanity to put into conceivable human terms, so they give it a human image so they can pray to it, bargain with it. They said Lain was our version of this for the Internet. I find it a compelling argument, but see before where I say that Lain doesn't really capture the whole of the internet. Lain is the best image I know of, but there's still so much missing if I recall.

oh yes, i do remember seeing something like that, could have been on the 8kun's /cyber/ board. and i consider the argument reasonable as well, though i would add that the concepts of gods transform along with humanity, as their views, knowledge and values shift over time - some more, some less. so, what used to be the concept of Lain as a network spiritual deity/patron/god/etc back in 1998 is not the same as today, but it's not completely warped into something fully different as well. i'd say it evolved along with the internet, so did the people and their views.

it might not capture the entirety of the internet in it's original version(the one that people conformed to in 1998), but it just might in it's current. also worth mentioning that the show itself also surged in popularity with early zoomers(i think during covid lockdowns, that's when i got into it as well as other people i know), bringing fresh blood to the fanbase and adjacent communities - and that had also influenced the image of Lain perceived by them.

>>2739
I think most people view the wires as something we put down a long time ago and just kind of have to deal with. Modern internet is very cellular, and often these towers all bum off of just one tower that has a physical connection to the internet lines when they have to, exchanging information with each other back and forth otherwise. Also, as you point out, computers are going more mobile - the thought of the phone as the work computer is a few years old at this point. Nonetheless, the truth is that the Internet is home in those wires, so perhaps the wants and desires of the people and their infrastructure mean nothing when put up against that.

The comparison to modern architecture is really one of the main contributors to aging a work. In current year, the idea that a computer might not have a specific processing unit for graphics and instead just work off of a board for video, and that one would have to imagine the processing unit as some kind of future technology with a different name, just sounds ridiculous, absolute steampunk behavior by modern standards. Then again, though, some of that kind of archaic hardware implementation persists to this day. I was surprised to see that sound cards are still manufactured and have a dedicated user base. Though, of course, I don't hold all of that against Lain; as I said, I don't know a work past or present so good at combining technical knowledge and cultural knowledge when it comes to computers and the Internet. It's like the Web is such an eldritch being that no one can understand it.

With all of that said, I am curious as to why exactly Zoomers grabbed on to the show like the have. At this point, it's been too persistent to merely label it as random algorithm trends. Lain has always, it seems, been a kind of dogwhistle for the terminally online, something you show to let others know you're one of those people who has lived and who will die online. When I say that, though, I think of contemporary examples of living and dying on the internet, and they seem to not really resonate with the image of Lain, both as the people they are and when the situation they are in is examined. You would think that Zoomers would move on from Lain, so to speak, to something that more literally resembles their internet selves, but there is something that makes her ever relevant. I feel again my ignorance is trying to push me ahead of myself.

I don't really know why I got into Lain. Whenever I first started watching anime, it seemed like Lain was always just there. No one recommended her or really talked about her, but her presence was ubiquitous. Interestingly, this seems to be a rare way to be into Lain; from all of the anime people I've talked with in real life, I'm the only one who was even aware of the show. A few people knew the opening song (which is how I think a lot of other Zoomers were introduced to that show) but that was all. Lain just is.

>>2740

>Nonetheless, the truth is that the Internet is home in those wires, so perhaps the wants and desires of the people and their infrastructure mean nothing when put up against that.

yes, i believe that to be true as well. also, it's very interesting how zoomers are starting to pick up on proper home computing - not all of them, of course, but you can see more and more pictures of homelab setups or even entire server racks assembled in someone's room, for different reasons and purposes. i don't know whether it was a similar thing before with previous generations, but i can somewhat compare it to the rise of microcomputers back in the 80s and early 90s, when some portion of the youth got access to Commodores and ZX Spectrums and whatnot. but since now the hardware is much more potent and relatively cheaper than it used to be, and many forums and discussion groups existing - it's way simpler to get into home computing today than 40 years ago or so.

>Then again, though, some of that kind of archaic hardware implementation persists to this day. I was surprised to see that sound cards are still manufactured and have a dedicated user base.
>Though, of course, I don't hold all of that against Lain; as I said, I don't know a work past or present so good at combining technical knowledge and cultural knowledge when it comes to computers and the Internet.

well, a lot of the standards and systems that we still use to this day in a newer version were developed around the time SE:L came out, late 90s and somewhat into the 00s - like PCI(1997, PCI Express came out in 2003), SATA(2000), Gigabit Ethernet(June 1998, funnily enough), and of course, WWW(1994). it's not really archaic, it's just that the computer marked shifted from professionals and enthusiasts to the average consumer, so the tech had to get smaller and simpler to interact with, in fact making it way more complex internally. so the things evolved rapidly since then, sure, but we are still using a lot of stuff that was working pretty much the same way 25-30 years ago, if not earlier. i mean, hell - commercial UNIX is still a thing, not to say about it's direct(BSD) and indirect(Linux) successors. though, maybe it's just me seeing it differently because most of my work is associated with hardware rather than software.

>With all of that said, I am curious as to why exactly Zoomers grabbed on to the show like the have.

i would suggest that a lot of my generation can relate to Lain just too much to ignore or move on. absolute hellstorm that's happening in the world right now overstimulates the brains to the point of apathy, covid shit was also a factor in forcing people inside and giving them some free time to reflect on their lives in the comfort of their home, limiting entertainment for the most to the confines of their electronic devices. also, we were born and raised online for the most part, yet we did capture a glimpse of the childhood without having a phone in our pocket at all times(at least some). we are hypersocial, we need to be connected to each other even in meaningless ways, like sending streaks or whatever the fuck we are doing these days. we depend on the electronics we have way more than anyone before us.

and Lain is an embodiment of this - socially awkward at school, while having an almost mythical status in the wired. can't put down her portable Navi even in class, talking with myriads of people, sometimes spreading chaos, dissociating and descending deeper into her online presence, interpolating it on the parts of the physical world that were untouched.

i guess we simply can relate a lot.

> A few people knew the opening song (which is how I think a lot of other Zoomers were introduced to that show) but that was all. Lain just is.

true.

also, i apologize if some of this is incoherent, i'm dealing with a massive hangover right now.

Everything you've said so far seems to make sense, at least to me, hah. Most of the people I know who run home servers like that are just data hoarders. I know one guy who actually hosts a server to stream movies from himself, but otherwise it's just space for people to download a bunch of stuff. Usually it's movies and shows, but it can also be YouTube videos, video games, books, drawings and photographs, along with other random software and such. At least from my experience. I joined on the hoarding train myself in an attempt to help preserve a certain website that ceased hosting recently, but I'm using a measly 12 TB drive for that. Most people I know start at 32 for their collections, usually in 4-8 TB segments and with at least one complete set of 4-8 TB backup drives. It's all about data preservation. I also know a lot of people who like to collect computers, open them up and upgrade them and mess with their OS, et cetera. It's quite depressing, though, because they seem to not know a lot about how computers work - they couldn't build their own operating software or anything like that, certainly, and even I surpass their knowledge in diagnostics sometimes, which gives me secondhand embarrassment, haha. That's just my experience though.

My experience with old computers is a lot of what informs my opinions on computing evolution, I guess. I don't really know what a GPU is, but I know enough about it for personal maintenance, like what connections might need to be resoldered if it stops working, et cetera. A sound card from 1994 or such seems to hold no similarities with the modern incarnation; none of my knowledge of the modern thing is able to be backported, I don't know what I'm looking at. Though, I'm kind of just ill and obsessed, and that wouldn't hold a candle to professionally working with the hardware; I don't mean to talk over you in that regard.

I think software has always been rapidly changing, hasn't it? I don't think there was even ten years of difference between Microsoft BASIC and Apple's GUI operating software. There's hundreds of examples of that kind of thing. I think a timely microcosm would be Adobe Flash. Flash Internet and Post-Flash Internet are nigh incomparable in a lot of senses, not just on how they operate but how the culture interacted with the software. I also think you understate the demographics change a bit; it's not just that the product became mainstream, it's that it became ubiquitous. Ten years ago, every high school kid was plugged in, and now people ten years younger than we were then are plugging in. I can't think of anything else so ubiquitous as a product, so to speak. The slow conquering of the internet of the children is fascinating to chart - or maybe it just is for me, as I was trying my best to be at the vanguard of that conquest. Everyone on Newgrounds was a Great War veteran, and now you look at a Tweet the wrong way and you'll be getting a lengthy chiding from that person about how they're only fourteen and such.

I do remember that feeling of finally getting a phone in high school, spending as much time in class as feasible sitting and talking with other people from around the world and being the only one doing that - it wasn't that no one else had phones, of course, but others were either trying to be good students and not on them or were playing Fortnite or some other game. Maybe that's why I find the Lain obsession so odd; everyone I know is a normie when it comes to internet stuff. I assume a bit of obsession with the internet onto Lain that I don't really see reflected in the demographic. Maybe that's another changing of the times, maybe I'm looking for a reaction from ten or twenty years ago and not paying attention to the culture enough.

It could also be that Lain's "mythical status," as you say, is what we're all looking for in the Wired. Just about everyone who uses Twitter or Instagram or Facebook simply is a microcelebrity now, regardless of desire or intent. We have framed the internet around having a following and having an influence with that following, have decided that influencing followers is how you be impactful and make a difference in the world, how you make your life fulfilling. It's the way to make all of your time wasted on the internet not so wasted. I think we're well past the point of the internet invading reality. The online world simply is the real world now; the former devoured the latter. All of that is something I recall taking part in as a kid. Being on the internet, surrounded by people all over the world who I had some kind of connection with, made me feel something like important. I regret it all in hindsight, though. I had no idea what I was doing,. I have no idea what I'm doing now.

>>2742

>It's all about data preservation. I also know a lot of people who like to collect computers, open them up and upgrade them and mess with their OS, et cetera. It's quite depressing, though, because they seem to not know a lot about how computers work - they couldn't build their own operating software or anything like that, certainly, and even I surpass their knowledge in diagnostics sometimes, which gives me secondhand embarrassment, haha. That's just my experience though.

i have seen this as well. and i'm afraid i have to admit - i also have fallen pray to hoarding. i have my trusty poweredge r730 humming in the background 24/7, hosting services for me and my friends, as well as storing terabytes of whatever media i come across. but i could never for the life of me write any decent and useful software myself, let alone an operating system. that's a massive skill issue on my part because i never really tried to do programming myself, even though i want to.

hmm, actually, now that i have a lot more free time on my hands…

>I think software has always been rapidly changing, hasn't it?
>Ten years ago, every high school kid was plugged in, and now people ten years younger than we were then are plugging in.

true, especially now that even a non-technical person can prompt an LLM to write a specific program for any usecase. 12 year olds vibecode roblox cheats or whatever they play nowadays.

>I do remember that feeling of finally getting a phone in high school, spending as much time in class as feasible sitting and talking with other people from around the world and being the only one doing that - it wasn't that no one else had phones, of course, but others were either trying to be good students and not on them or were playing Fortnite or some other game. Maybe that's why I find the Lain obsession so odd; everyone I know is a normie when it comes to internet stuff. I assume a bit of obsession with the internet onto Lain that I don't really see reflected in the demographic. Maybe that's another changing of the times, maybe I'm looking for a reaction from ten or twenty years ago and not paying attention to the culture enough.

i've had a similar experience - i was the only person in high school to ever consider that the internet is more than just online games and social media. i mean, i can't blame my peers - the fuck else would they care about at that age? but it was kinda lonely back then, i had nobody to talk about things i did and have seen.

>It could also be that Lain's "mythical status," as you say, is what we're all looking for in the Wired. Just about everyone who uses Twitter or Instagram or Facebook simply is a microcelebrity now, regardless of desire or intent. We have framed the internet around having a following and having an influence with that following, have decided that influencing followers is how you be impactful and make a difference in the world, how you make your life fulfilling. It's the way to make all of your time wasted on the internet not so wasted. I think we're well past the point of the internet invading reality. The online world simply is the real world now; the former devoured the latter. All of that is something I recall taking part in as a kid. Being on the internet, surrounded by people all over the world who I had some kind of connection with, made me feel something like important.

true, everyone wants to be loved and appreciated, and internet enables that, since it's much easier to find like-minded people here than in real life. imageboards are just the same in principle - we come here to take refuge from the world that does not understand things we want to discuss.

>I regret it all in hindsight, though. I had no idea what I was doing,. I have no idea what I'm doing now.

well, i don't know what exactly you did and been through, but i wouldn't regret any of it. all of that is past now, a memory of your former self. i did a lot of dumb shit online as well, some echoing to this day, but i wouldn't say it was all bad. it's just the path my life took, leading me to who i am now, so all i can do is be grateful for all of it happening - otherwise i wouldn't have learned things i know now.

>>2743
Apologies for forgetting to tag your post before. Data hoarding is really easy to be mammon about because it shrugs off the apparent consequences the real-world equivalent has. Typical hoarders will make their entire house an unlivable wreck; data hoarders might raise the energy bill a bit too high. I fear the affects on the heart are the same, but there are genuine reasons to download stuff. It takes more energy to redownload content repeatedly, and having a physical copy ensures reliability. I always download a PDF etc I want to read, for example. There's quite a few links and such I've lost now that I would still have if I saved it and never deleted it. Best of luck with learning coding and such.

I'm not in a position to say how artificial intelligence will effect our internet of things. It seems to use a lot of energy, I guess. I see it as a bad thing, but then I have a bad habit of seeing the development of the internet as a whole as a trek into the mouth of hell one step at a time. Though touching on Roblox does make me think of the stagnation it feels like the Internet is about to fall into. Every major platform now has established history. I shudder a little to imagine that people fifty years from now will be looking up "2020 aesthetics" on Pinterest still, that nothing better will have taken its place. Even video games have succumbed to that kind of thing, beyond Roblox; Overwatch 2 is just Overwatch, Counter-Strike 2 is just Global Offensive. I guess that's just how software works though, you can have your ship and rebuild it too. Though I just said that hasty obsolescence was how software worked, heh. I can't tell which side will win out at this point.

I don't know that the Internet helped me at all with my connections. In fact, it seems to have ruined what little connection and ability to connect I did have. I don't want to dismiss all the stories I hear to the contrary, as suspicious as I like to be, but I can say confidently those things were not what I found. My peers could at least infer things about me through being around me; it feels like being understanding is not something the Internet is capable of. I could relate to my real-life peers at least a little before the internet, but now I fear that I've entered such a dire spiral of eclectic specialization that I'll never really get along with anyone ever again. Yet, at the same time, being too far gone to try and find solace in the people I live near, the Internet is my only remedy for that problem. That "being ruined by the Internet" informs everything about how I think about and how I interact with everything around the Internet. It's how I see Lain, too. The Wired is your escape from reality! Improve yourself on the Wired! But it's all a mess of schizophrenic data pulses. There's nothing meaningful on there at all, at least not for people like me, not for people like my Lain. I never saw her be anything but worse in taking that step, finalizing the societal decay Japan had been fighting off since the end of it's imperial reign. That's something else that's really fun about Lain - she can mean a whole spectrum of different things depending on her beholder.

Anyway, I like to adopt a Calvinistic view to deal with life. Like either I simply could never have stayed away from the Internet, or I would have degraded in this manner in some other fashion. I have to admit I'm quite happy with who I am, even if sometimes I do not appreciate the consequences of it. Sorry to be so down. Do you know of any ways to know better about hardware? Were there any sources you used, or did you just pick it up from hands-on experience?

>>2744

phew, that was a fun couple of days. sorry for being absent - went to another town to see my relatives one last time before i depart from this godforsaken shithole. also went fishing, caught a bunch of rudds and young breams(first pic). cooked the bigger ones, gave the rest to the stray cats.

>Apologies for forgetting to tag your post before. Data hoarding is really easy to be mammon about because it shrugs off the apparent consequences the real-world equivalent has. Typical hoarders will make their entire house an unlivable wreck; data hoarders might raise the energy bill a bit too high. I fear the affects on the heart are the same, but there are genuine reasons to download stuff. It takes more energy to redownload content repeatedly, and having a physical copy ensures reliability. I always download a PDF etc I want to read, for example. There's quite a few links and such I've lost now that I would still have if I saved it and never deleted it.

no worries dude. well, i can only speak for myself - my apartment is kind of a mess, cables and a bunch of random electronics everywhere. energy bill is fine so far, contrary to what i have expected. as per mental strain from all that - never got it, honestly. i use most of the things i download at least once, and then share it with the people, either by letting them grab a copy in person or running my seedboxes.

>I'm not in a position to say how artificial intelligence will effect our internet of things. It seems to use a lot of energy, I guess. I see it as a bad thing, but then I have a bad habit of seeing the development of the internet as a whole as a trek into the mouth of hell one step at a time. Though touching on Roblox does make me think of the stagnation it feels like the Internet is about to fall into. Every major platform now has established history. I shudder a little to imagine that people fifty years from now will be looking up "2020 aesthetics" on Pinterest still, that nothing better will have taken its place. Even video games have succumbed to that kind of thing, beyond Roblox; Overwatch 2 is just Overwatch, Counter-Strike 2 is just Global Offensive. I guess that's just how software works though, you can have your ship and rebuild it too. Though I just said that hasty obsolescence was how software worked, heh. I can't tell which side will win out at this point.

true, and your fears are not irrational. culture has seemed to change from being a thing of evolution to a thing of commerce. most of the shit either went underground, died or became a commodity, which is very sad and not exactly what it's supposed to be. though, there is something genuine left in this world, and especially in the net, so we probably should enjoy it while it lasts.

> I don't know that the Internet helped me at all with my connections. In fact, it seems to have ruined what little connection and ability to connect I did have.

>It's how I see Lain, too. The Wired is your escape from reality! Improve yourself on the Wired! But it's all a mess of schizophrenic data pulses. There's nothing meaningful on there at all, at least not for people like me, not for people like my Lain. I never saw her be anything but worse in taking that step, finalizing the societal decay Japan had been fighting off since the end of it's imperial reign.

i'm sorry for you man. i don't know everything that happened to you that shaped you into the person you are today, but i'm almost certain it ain't that bad either as you portray it. don't take me as dismissive, i mean no offense - but sitting down and thinking about what you actually care for and what's worth keeping in your life does help. i had plenty of time to do that during covid, and it did help me figure out who i am and what i wanna do in this life. but not like this "where do you see yourself in 5 years" bullshit or cover letter questions, no. more like "how do i wanna live this life?" and it's derivatives. and what i realized, that i would rather be taken as a waste of resources in the society but be free to do whatever i want.

lots of my peers already have something going for them like marriage, mortgages, their own enterprises sometimes. most are lost, however. but thankfully, i can say that neither are the case for me. i am free of all that, since i no longer care for what is considered right or wrong by people. i only care for myself and people around me, and i want to do my best for all of us. and in the meantime, i wanna have as much fun as i can for what i have in the rest of my life.

>That's something else that's really fun about Lain - she can mean a whole spectrum of different things depending on her beholder.

true, and i really like it. everyone can make their own thoughts of her, and that's what's beautiful.

>Anyway, I like to adopt a Calvinistic view to deal with life. Like either I simply could never have stayed away from the Internet, or I would have degraded in this manner in some other fashion. I have to admit I'm quite happy with who I am, even if sometimes I do not appreciate the consequences of it.

well, if it works for you - i'm happy. don't know if it's right to call that position stoic of some flavor, but that's what it looks like to me. either way, i hope it works out for you.

>Sorry to be so down.

it's alright, we all feel that way sometimes. just remember - tomorrow is always another day.

>Do you know of any ways to know better about hardware? Were there any sources you used, or did you just pick it up from hands-on experience?

mostly from work and homelab stuff i've been doing. i've researched the things i would come across, be it some datacenter shit i needed to do or whatever e-waste i would pick up from a local marketplace. so my advice would be - think of something cool you wanna do, like hosting a local LLM or building a better home network for yourself - and you will eventually get to know more about both hardware and software behind it. so yeah, it's just a matter of experience.