datarama (@[email protected])

@[email protected] I think one of the reasons I never really got into retrocomputing - despite nerding out with a C64 or an Amiga sure did feel a lot more fun than computing in the current day - is that what made it feel so great back then was that it felt like I could just make out the contours of the future, and it looked like it would be amazing. So much creativity waiting to be unlocked! We'd make kinds of art not even conceived yet! We'd be making wonderful discoveries! Now I live in that future, and it fucking sucks. The fruit of all those great discoveries have turned out to be mostly figuring out new ways to spy on people and manipulate them - and now, to declare all-out war against even the concept of human creativity. My C64 still runs (I no longer have a working Amiga), but playing around with it won't bring back that feeling of a promised future of wonders - all I see is that it turned out to become a present full of horrors instead. I'm sure part of all this - from a purely personal perspective - is just that I've hit the point where I'm supposed to be having my regularly-scheduled midlife crisis. "Did I waste my entire life?" sure does feel to fit the stereotype. I've thought about trying to retrain to do something else, but I honestly have no idea what that could even be. I'm disabled, I'm getting old, and there's not a whole lot I can do that anyone would want to pay me for that isn't related to software development. (I'm currently an embedded dev; prior to that I taught CS at a community college for ten years.)