If ther’s on thing I hat, it’s words ending with silent e’s. And whil we’r at it, we ned to get rid of doubl e’s as well.

I’ve said this before, but Factorio is genuinely the only thing that has made me lose track of time before. When I’m goofing off into the wee hours of the night, normally I have a vague sense of time passing. I won’t know what time it is, but I’ll know that it’s late and I should probably stop whatever it is I’m doing (and won’t). And then I’ll look at the clock and it’s 2am-- late, but not surprising.

But then came Factorio. This was when I first started playing, around the time I just started making black science packs. I was refitting my bases to work with laser turrets, and making minor modifications here and there like upgrading from 2 saturated belts of iron to 4 and such. Nothing major. I’d just do these things, maybe an hour or two, and head to bed. So you can imagine my surprise when I look at the clock and it was 5:30 AM. I was baffled; I had no idea I’d spent that long modifying my base. Like 7 hours straight, no breaks. And then the exhaustion hit, and I saved and went immediately to bed.

Cracktorio man, the addiction is real.

I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.

For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you’ve made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay– people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.

This obviously isn’t true of all communities, but I think it’s a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then… you’re good, for the most part.

don’t mind me, just watching the above comic unfold in real time

“My name is Perry, not Terry, with a ‘P’ as in ‘Pterodactyl’.”