2026-07-31 06:43:00
Someone called one of my Reddit comments “AI slop” the other day.
Another developer defended me, checked out a few of my videos, and sent me this:
Me and you do this cause we love this shit.
It knocked me loose. I've been pretty depressed in response to all of the AI stuff lately.
It's no secret that I've adapted my workflow to rely on it, but I'm also not interested in the "if it's not an ATM, why the fuck would I care" attitude toward building that's in the air right now.
I’ve spent too much time mentally wedging myself into the same category as people who discovered software development six months ago, generated a clone, and started calling themselves builders.
Despite building and shipping more than I ever have before, it's easy—at least, lately, for me it has been—to see all of that noise and project it on to my own work and marketing efforts.
I use AI. I make small products. I work alone. From far enough away, I suppose it all looks similar.
It isn’t. I fucking love building software.
I love building something because I think it should exist and doesn’t. I love finding some old project on my computer, realizing it has merit in the present, and hacking on the missing pieces. I love following a real need until it turns into a tool, a product, or some weird little thing only I care about.
I took a "break" after shipping Fortivibe to build Banmi. There was no economic incentive. I just wanted the fucking thing to exist:
Most of my work starts the same way: necessity -> curiosity -> take a swing, kid.
The people I’m talking about don’t love this. They love what they think it can get them. Another fudged revenue screenshot. Attention from the masses who will forget about them the next day. The ability to apply the "founder" label to themselves.
All of it is just a shortcut around learning how to do the work properly. If you can just say "I'm not worried about quality, I'm focused on driving revenue" you lose the most important part (in my opinion): the soul of the thing.
That’s fine. Have at it. But no matter what labels you slap onto your avatar-self: we are not the same.
I was doing this before anybody watched. First with table layouts and guitar-playing crocodile GIFs in GeoCities and today, deep in the code.
And I’ll still be doing it after the current gold rush. And the one after that.
If you fall into the same camp and find yourself frustrated by all of this insanity: don't. Just keep building. Keep making the things you want to exist in the world, however you most enjoy making them. If you don't want to use AI, don't. If you want to, great.
But no matter how you get a result, for the sake of a better outcome for all of us (technical and non-technical): don't stop loving what you do and keep fucking building.
If there aren't any good examples, there won't be any good outcomes.
2026-07-31 04:02:41
A discussion about the best practices for running online games, alongside some of my own opinions and preferences for which you, the fledgling online referee, should follow exactly.
Special thanks to all the referees whom I solicited feedback from on this:
This guide wouldn't be nearly as complete without them!
This section is about the nuts and bolts behind the game, things like platform, sharing of text, and software. If it doesn't relate to the conduct of the game itself, it's probably not in here!
The first decision is probably the most crucial one: Where (and by what method) are you going to speak to one another?
For both voice and text-based games, Discord remains the top dog, precisely because of its healthy number of features and widespread use. People are already familiar with this (probably) and the various text channels allow easy segregation of information. If you're playing a voiced game, great! Discord has you covered. If you're playing a text-only game, Discord still has you covered.
For people who aren't familiar with Discord, it's essentially Slack or Microsoft Teams for Friends instead of Smelly Coworkers.
Teamspeak, an older competitor to Discord, has similar features... I'll pass it over to an expert on the matter, resident TS power user oldhawkeyes, who runs games in Teamspeak regularly.
Teamspeak is not a replacement for Discord first off. You will still need Discord for your persistent, asynchronous text channels, webcams, and dice bots. Teamspeak is however much better than Discord at voice communication. TS offers 3D sound to get rid of cross talk, higher quality bitrate and voice codecs, and better options for noise gates and volume control for Voice Activity users. You can rent a server for real cheap, or if you have some hosting knowledge can spin up a server for dollars a month. If Discord's voice quality or crosstalk issues really irritate you, try a few sessions in TS. Be sure to use the TS3 client as the newest TS6 client does not have 3D audio. TS does have mobile versions but they are not as well made as the desktop application and last I checked still cost a few bucks.
There are a few things to keep in mind when choosing a platform to play your game on. Consider the relative familiarity your playing group has with the software. Consider also the price point; if the application costs money, who is paying it? Can you justify the cost to your players?
My current vocation being Broke College Student, and my current identity being Straight White American Guy, I primarily play and run games on Discord. All of my player-base uses it already as well, so it's a natural fit.
One of the hobbies adjacent to TTRPGs is book binding, and for good reason: more copies of RPG books are profoundly expensive, and it's often easier to print copies of what you need and bind them yourself. The benefits of this beyond money are nice, too. Having only one copy of the book at the table means time is wasted waiting for the book to make it to you. Handouts and bound materials are good for alleviating this problem, since a referee can bind multiple copies of say, the equipment/arms/armor lists, and people can shop and discuss simultaneously without waiting. Another benefit of this approach is that the referee can curate the material visible to the players and reserve other material for the referee's eyes only (certain bestiary monsters, or adventure notes, for example).
I mention all of this because the same statements apply pretty directly to online games, too.
There are two ways to present rules to your players online. The simplest is to link them to an online reference for the game you're running or upload a PDF that they can use to view the rules.
This approach sidesteps the problem you have in physical space with one copy of the book; multiple people can reference the file or the online reference. There are three problems created by doing this, though.
Depending on the people you play with, reading, understanding, and retaining key information in a 100+ page PDF file is next to impossible. If you throw, say, the free version of Worlds Without Number at them, they'll be hit with way too much information all at once and probably won't be able to navigate the file efficiently (I'm speaking from experience).
You can solve this problem by creating guides to using/referencing the PDF or using session time to run through the PDF together. You'd think that the Table of Contents would be enough here but, having chaperoned clueless gamers for many long hours through paragraphs without number, I can assure you that it is not.
The second problem with this approach is that, like handing the physical book around the physical table, the entire text you're using is visible to players, though this is only a problem if your players can actually read (rare) and derive pleasure in reading RPG texts (even rarer).
You can always "solve" this problem by playing with adults who will listen to your requests not to read the sections in question. Barring that (we are talking about gamers, after all) it's reasonably straightforward to remove pages from a PDF. Plenty of online services exist that do this for free, but I'm a fan of PDF24 for Windows machines.
The last and most damning problem is the inevitable house rule or additional content you wish to codify into the rules of your game. Sending an email to the person hosting the online rules reference arguing that your home game's changes should be reflected in the reference has a (as of the time of writing, I'll get you one day Gavin Norman!!!) 0% chance of success, and changing a PDF in any meaningfully complex way is about as painful as wedging ten toothpicks underneath your biggest toenail and kicking a door frame. This is where we start to bookbind.
Digital "Bookbinding" usually comes in the form of collaborative documents, the gold standard of which is currently Google Docs. It's concurrent for all users, which means that you can tinker and bicker over rules and your players always have an up-to-date copy. It's also got rudimentary version control, so if someone's "cat" accidentally highlights the section on Death and Dying and changes the rules to benefit their "owner's" character there is a record of that and an easy way to revert to the original version. If you want to sidestep that problem entirely, you can also set permissions on each document such that all visitors can only read the document or leave comments, leaving the text sacrosanct and free from feline fuckery.
You can also use Discord's channels to hold rules. Write or paste the relevant rules in a text channel, pin the relevant messages, and lock the channel so that only you or other trusted parties can add to it, which serves as a handy reference in the same platform you're playing in. (Thanks Havoc for bringing this option to my attention!)
The degree to which you bookbind digitally is ultimately up to your preference and what makes life easier for your players. This is also not solely on the shoulders of the referee; encourage your players to make and share references that help them play the game more efficiently!
For my own games, I opt for a mix between the two extremes and often switch my approach based on the goal I have in mind. For 1000 Statues, I refer to Delving Deeper's v4 online rules reference and having a pinned message in a Discord channel mentioning any deviations from the text. In the short Line-Ways game I ran, I wrote a system entirely in Google Docs, because I was pulling the rules from one source, the setting from another, and needed a way to unify them for player sanity.
Thinking about how to present your game materials is probably one of the more important things to do before a campaign actually begins, since it influences the mouthfeel of the campaign to your players. If everything is easy to reference and smooth, the game feels nicer. Balancing this with the limited time and energy you have as a human being is the hard part. When in doubt, enlist help from your other players!
Aptly named "the final boss of RPGs," scheduling is maybe the most-cited reason why that one friend hasn't run his epic campaign. It is also one of the most exaggerated problems in the scene. If your players want to play games, they will make time for it. If they don't, then they don't. It's totally normal not to want to pretend to be an elf for hours at a time.
Digital tools like when2meet and lettucemeet allow users to schedule meetings across time-zone differences. If you're on Discord, you can make a relative timestamp on any Desktop/Laptop device by typing "@time" and following the prompts on screen. If you're not on one of those devices, you can use websites like Hammertime to generate the timestamps for you. Relative timestamps show the time of any event in the time zone it is being viewed from. That is, something that is seen as 5am on the East Coast of the United States will be seen as 10am in the UK and 2am on the West Coast.
Regardless, choosing players who truly want to make time to play in your game will go farther than any tool or softwaare I can recommend.
Speaking anecdotally, sessions in real life are less taxing than online ones. This is for a variety of reasons; being in a screenless environment with your friends can be exhausting but is ultimately rejuvinating, while staring down a laptop screen for 4 hours is torturous on the best of days.
This is why I recommend scheduling your first handful of sessions to run for a shorter time than your usual IRL time. If this is your first game, shoot for 2-3 hours. The smaller timeslot makes it easier to fit into busy schedules and if this feels too short you can easily extend, allowing players who can't continue to play to hop off and continuing on with the brave souls that remain. As always, this is a balancing act between the stamina of your gamers and the material you can easily prepare between sessions. When in doubt, shorter is probably better online. It's better to end when everyone is in a good mood than to push through and end the game feeling drained.
For my part, 3 hours is the maximum length I'll run in games, though occasionally I've run for longer. Usually, though, I'm just happy to fit in a 2-hour delve once a week.
In terms of frequency, it's good to be consistent. Biweekly and monthly or bimonthly sessions, while much less of a time commitment, can sometimes create problems when one addled player forgets that this week was session week or accidentally booked a dentist's appointment during game time. This hurts a lot depending on your attendance policy; if you go two months without playing, that's a sixth of your whole year gone!
Generally, I try to run weekly. I make and follow my calendar by week, so this works best for me. It's less of a big deal if I have to cancel one week for something because I have three other weeks in the month to run, too.
I think you can get away with being a little stricter with your attendance policy online than in real life. All sorts of transit problems can affect your player's ability to come to the physical table, but that same player is likely not inconvenienced at all by having to sit down at a computer in their home for a few hours.
That being said, being a hardass about attendance is the quickest way to having no players. Life happens and the more accomodating you can be without compromising the game, the better.
In most of the games I run these days, I run for any number of players greater than or equal to two, and the news that a player can't make the following session does nothing to my cortisol levels. One day, you too may reach my level of chill.
Sometimes, it may be better to handle certain game actions outside of session time. Most commonly, these actions are shopping and downtime actions.
Defining the preferred format and honor policy for these actions is important. How involved are the procedures? Is the referee scheduling sessions with one player to play out an adventure they do in downtime, or is it a handful of text messages exchanged while you're on workbreak? Establishing what kind of culture these sorts of asynchronous actions exist in is important to avoid alienating players who don't have as much time to dedicate to RPGs outside of session.
In terms of best practices, I tend to do downtime in a text channel and trust players to handle bookkeeping-adjacent tasks like shopping on their own time and without any sort of honor policy. I have enough going on without having to price check a steel nail for Craig at 2pm on a Tuesday.
If this isn't your speed, though, it may be good to elect a Manager to handle downtime actions for you. Reducing the cognitive load held by any one player is usually a good way to reduce burnout and unnecessary stress for what is ultimately supposed to be a fun hobby.
These two topics are grouped together because it's mainly a matter of trust and preference. Are dice rolls public or private? Are they done with real dice and the result then conveyed or are they done with digital tools?
The gold standard for Discord dice bots is Rollem, which is soon to be in Version 2.0. According to the patch notes this will make it even easier to use than it was already. Other alternatives include Dice Maiden, which is a discrete dice roller, and the extensions to other, general purpose roleplaying Discord dice bots like Dash Delta.
Character sheets follow a similar logic. Where are you keeping them? Are they public or private? How do you ensure players are keeping their records correctly?
Unfortunately, Google Sheets is the standard for shared character sheets. There's even a whole blogpost/spreadsheet on it!
For my own part, I typically don't care that much about how players record their character, but I do ask that they share any new characters they make so the group can ensure they didn't accidentally make a mistake in the process. That being said, having a shared Google Sheet has been a really nice way to hold memories and look back on in a way that I don't think can be captured in the same fidelity through physical notes.
This is the section for all the tips of conducting the game at the (virtual) table.
Managing focus and attention is a problem to keep in mind throughout the online campaign. Finding what works for your group that allows you all to pay attention to the game for the allotted time is a little trickier online than it is offline, since playing online is like putting a toddler in the toy room and telling it to only play with the blocks; lady, I got all these Hot Wheels to play with too!
It's worth noting here that this should be a group concern and not something that keeps the referee up at night. Everyone should desire to participate and be present, and if one player is too distracted playing bullet chess or League of Legends to participate in the game then online gaming probably isn't for them.
In my own experience, having a shared whiteboard or other resource the players create and keep themselves is an excellent tool for driving focus. The goal is to give them a task that's related to or at least tangential to the conversation happening during play. Maps are awesome for this because they are created through active listening and maintained through paying attention to what happens and marking notes accordingly. For session report freaks, you can even label the order in which you visit rooms during the session and refer to the map later as a tool for writing your reflections.
I've grown stricter on it, but in the past I used to be much more loose with videogaming at the online table. I trust people to only do these activities when there is a true and serious lull in the gameplay or an issue doesn't need their attention (the decker hacking into the matrix is the classic example). Obviously this isn't always how it's used (in one case, a dear friend of mine interrupted my narration to ask if we could be quiet until his bullet chess game was over) so it might be worth putting an explicit ban on the activity at your table.
Some people find cameras necessary to running online; others find it ultimately distracting and unhelpful. I bring up cameras this late to say that the function of cameras is largely for reasons of focus and attention than for any other reason; if cameras are distracting, there's no need to have them on, likewise if they're a necessary part of paying attention. Work with your group's comforts in this regard. Not everyone is comfortable being on camera, and I certainly don't want to see gamer skid marks if I can help it.
Maybe the most frustrating element of gaming online is crosstalk. Depending on your platform it becomes either a minor annoyance or a game-ender. The following is a handful of tricks, tips, and a general discussion on things that eliminate the negative effects of crosstalk.
Having a hierarchy of speakers (that is, who is allowed to speak or who gets priority when speaking) creates less moments where everyone feels the need to contribute to a situation. This has the downside of feeling very unnatural, as many players will have no experience having conversation in such a structured manner. Congresspeople, Model UN enthusiasts, and formal debaters probably jive with this really well. The most common example of such a roll is the Caller, who is the only person allowed to give actions to the referee.
Utilizing another manner of communication in addition to voice is super helpful, also. For me, this looks like the sidebar channel in discord, but it could also mean raising your hand on your webcam or wiggling your token seductively on your VTT of choice. The point here is to signal for attention in a manner that doesn't involve voice, leaving the voice channel free for other (often ongoing) business.
It's helpful as both a referee and a player to think about the rhythms of conversation that happen throughout a game. If you notice one player speaking first always, it might be wise to wait until they've spoken to try and get a word in edgewise. Likewise, if you notice your referee tends to pause before the last sentence of their narration, it might behoove you to give them time to ensure they've spoken their piece in its entirety. Consciously keeping an eye out for these patterns lets you be a more attentive player and create less crosstalk.
When things are particularly hectic, having an established order for people to speak in is a good trick. Combat is a good example of this sort of problem, when everyone wants to do something and there's no initiative system to guide them. On Discord, you can use the order of participants in the voice channel as a list to go through and collect responses. It would be trivial to create a list manually or through some other method.
For various reasons, microphone quality across the internet can be shitty. If you identify this as a problem in your games, there are a few avenues you can take to improving it (assuming that the problem is more structural than "Craig is using a tin can and string to speak into his computer").
Speaking clearly and slowly, enunciating words as you go instead of dropping into the quicker, less thoughtful speech of day-to-day life is worth employing and saves tons of time through avoiding annoying clarifying questions.
Easily parseable speech patterns and patterns of conversation are also useful here. A room description always starts with the dimensions, the contents, and then anything alive that is visible within it. That way, if the first half of the description gets garbled and rendered inaudible, someone can ask a specific question about the dimensions of the room insteaf of asking for the description to be repeated wholesale.
Regardless of the quality of sound produced by your microphone, picking up excess background noise like fans, children, or motorcycles can be distracting to other players. If you notice this happening, consider using push-to-talk or some sort of noise gate on your microphone to prevent this (recommendations of this particular nature are outside the scope since I don't have experience with this problem; reach out if you have advice!)
Regardless of whether you're using physical dice or virtual ones, it helps to have a record of rolls you can use to parse results from, since you can't see everyone's dice totals or ask them to repeat their total (see Crosstalk). Labeling your dice rolls when done virtually, or writing the purpose and result of your dice roll in a text chat, can all help the referee and the player process rolls faster.
In general, since attention and focus is a bigger problem in online games, you want to make sure you can process any rolls you make quickly and effectively as a player and a referee. Making physical aids is very helpful, nearly moreso than in-person since the physical aids don't take up the ever-valuable computer monitor space (which should have whatever maximizes attention and focus on it) and can be annotated and changed on the fly without any computer hiccups (leaving the voice call, closing your browser, etc.).
I've alluded to them a few times in the rest of the post, but you may discover while conducting the game that there are certain parts of the game that give you great pain. Counting turns, wrangling all the encumbrance numbers, or any other menial task. Creating designated Player Roles may help offset some of this mental burden, and helps contribute to overall group focus, reduces crosstalk, and speeds up the processing of information. It's worth noting that you don't need player roles. It is certainly possible to play without them and have great fun. Player roles are a tool you can use to address any of the aforementioned issues with conducting the game.
For my part, I use two main "roles" when I referee online. The Caller, which I primarily deploy only in large or particularly talkative groups, and the Turn Tracker, which serves as a double for my own turn tracking. Mapping is a collective effort, though typically some brave soul declares themself the mapper and handles most of that work. Of course, highly skilled players may create and designate their own roles to perform better as a group, but that is outside the scope of this article.
This advice applies specifically to games which feature some sort of leveled advancement, like Old Dungeons and Dragons. If you play these sorts of games, it may be prudent to examine the rate of advancment either before your campaign begins or the moment it seems to drag in play. One of the cultural changes that has happened since these original games were released is the collapse of large chunks of free time and the corresponding shrinkage in game time people have each week to play. This means that sometimes, especially at higher levels, the progression happens far too slowly for a certain table's liking. This is compounded by shorter sessions and the general difficulty of conducting play online compared to in person.
If the rate of advancement becomes too slow for the group, in the case of Old School D&D, consider not splitting XP between the party members; every player character gets the full amount of experience at the end of every session. There are many ways to tinker with this basic idea, so I'll leave you to it.
Ultimately, the big difference between online play and at-the-table play is the computer, with all its wonders and wickedness. If you can figure out a way to lessen the barrier between you and your group created by the damnable little silicon thing, you can get something pretty close (dare I say better) than at-the-table play. Good luck!
2026-07-30 22:22:00
Every tech company is different, every tech company is the same. Welcome to the suck.
Yeah no. I'm out.
Of course it's generative AI. Not the tech. The social phenomenon and the mass hysteria of the managerial class. They jumped at the slightest whiff of being able to cut staff, cut costs, cut corners. The unavoidable end of the tech industry McKinsification. It's not new tho. The only thing the average tech company managed to do with every subsequent silver bullet is shoot themselves in the foot. Object Oriented Programming will save us! Now it's agile! The future is big data, wait no, it's blockchain! At every turn, not grasping that the problem was cultural and not that they weren't copying the latest Silicon Valley trend.
Younger, the web represented the new frontier, the democratization of knowledge and entrepreneurship. The barrier of entry was having an internet connection and a laptop. Of course, the newly minted mega corps of the early 00s just sucked everything that was good about it. Growth at all cost and all that. Actual bots -- or human acting like bots -- pleasing algorithms for a quick buck killed the Internet in the mid 2010s. LLMs, like a super bacteria, finished the job and picked the bones clean. Going on the commercial internet is now a source of pain, a labyrinth of dark patterns and traps.
I am grateful I entered the industry at the tail end of its golden age. Still riding the hyper growth wave of early internet and early mobile. I got to make a lot of money doing what I was already doing in my free time since I was a kid. When I started working, I had no quip calling my job software engineering. Now, I don't remember the last time I got to solve actual problems for a user. The industry is more interested in building companies than building products. The inextricable march toward a fully realized mix of Gervais and Peter principle.
I mourn our collective loss of the digital realm to corporate interests. I don't mourn being obligated to use shit products from shit companies because some business idiot decided he needed to do something. Goodbye Jira, Chrome, and Windows, and every other piece of crap SaaS that adds to the true cost of my employment. I was able to ship in spite of them, not because.
Although I'm stopping selling my particular software and product making skills, I am not breaking up with tech entirely. I will continue fostering my digital homestead, using and hosting software that respects me and solve my issues. I still want to write code, slowly, mostly by hand. I already type syntax as fast as my understanding of the things I'm building grows. Doing the thing is doing the thing and no amount of delegating makes you better at it.
As for money and not dying of hunger, I'm switching to providing something closer to real human needs. I am not fooling myself than the grass is greener there. Not even close to inflated software salaries and miles harder on the body. More hours too and still working with other humans, some of them ego full idiots. But hey, at least I won't be dealing with self imposed idiosyncrasies and make belief problems anymore. With blameless culture, accountability washing and ritualistic meetings to share information that should easily be surfaced with project management tools.
So long tech industry, I am happy that you can now go faster toward the wall your were already speeding toward before generative AI. I won't be there for the crash.
o7
2026-07-30 14:20:00
A couple of months ago, I saw this in a "Mr. DIY" in a nearby shopping mall. It's basically the Southeast Asian version of a Dollar Store. It costs about $20 and I immediately grabbed it.
My girlfriend is obsessed with everything pink, so I had to get it. We haven't been using it that much because we already have tons of cameras we cycle with, but whenever I do, it's just so much fun.
Obviously, it's not the best camera. I mean look at the thing, but it's got cool stuff going on.
The quality of photos is very Lo-Fi. I would even call it shit, the photos sometimes just look like bad oil paintings, but it's fun to play around with.
Look at some of the shots below.
It can take selfie photos though, which is cool I guess, but man, I can hardly make myself out in these photos. It has fun filters since it's designed for kids (It can even play MP3 files Lol).
Check out the videos on this thing too.
It's a fun camera. I had fun using it. I will continue to have fun using it but I don't think I'll be keeping it for too long, or IDK, maybe I'll collect garbage cameras too because they're kinda charming.
I like it, it brings the fun back to taking photos again. Photos remind me of the 2000s when chinese phones and cameras take the same kind of quality of photo.
Side note, I wanted to get the Charmera and just take photos of stuff when walking around.
Should I get one?
-A
2026-07-30 10:08:00
We're in a post-ai time. At least, it feels that way. There was a time when nobody was talking about it, and now it's everywhere - saturated feeds, ai music, ai photos, vibe coding. I'm completely sick of it. I know it's being pushed as inevitable and the next stage in human evolution because some socially awkward, bored, power-hungry billionaires are trying to reshape the world as they see fit and make even more coin. Only one thing is inevitable, and it's not ai.
Should it generate dismay in artists? Possibly. Generative ai is a global grift where copyrighted stuff has been ingested for free so billionaires can sell it back to us. Ai is a way to absorb human skill and produce dependency for profit and control. I'm aware of productive uses of ai-type systems, but this proliferation of large language models, chatbots, art generators, and anthropomorised llms is an insincere scam designed to funnel money and power into the hands of a few.
So, let them soak in the ai slop. Let them be saturated with hallucinated facts and garbage. The only positive I see is that artists might create their own cottage industry and shun ai in favour of authentic connection. As for me, I cannot abide it. I do art for myself. Those who view art as outcomes to be sold are blind to the time, the failures, the struggle, the learning, the journey, the story, and the human connection that's also part of art. Depending on ai not only serves profit motives, it also shortcuts the art journey to get to the end product to be sold.
I read about one person who'd always wanted to be a music producer and now he's using ai music generators to make music. So, what had he been doing for the last decade? Why not just take time to dig in and learn? Of course, ai is the convenience machine that reduces sweat, toil, time, and failure - all the roughly textured stuff that provides meaning in life to people who understand art.
Let them soak in the slop. Let them marinate in the urine of spiritless billionaires. Let them smoothe their brains and hollow out their eyes. Let them become dependent idiots who feed uncaring tech-lords. Let them short-cut their way to meaninglessness.
RSS feed. Find me on Mastodon and Bluesky.
2026-07-30 07:40:38
A few days ago I booked my flights to not only attend a professional event, but also visit and stay with one of my best friends next month. This will be the sixth time that at least one of us has traveled to hang out with the other.
We met each other online six years ago via Reddit (and to some degree, Instagram back when I still had an account) simply through shared interests. Never in my life did I suspect I would befriend someone online to such a degree that they feel like a true brother to me.
I liked Absurd Pirate's post because it made me reflect on my own online friendships, which are so important to me.
First of all, I don't consider just anyone who talks to me as my friend. There's a solid difference between acquaintances and friends, and there are other platonic dynamics that exist somewhere in between those two labels. I certainly have both online and in-person contacts with whom I look forward to interacting on occasion either via phone call or at a café to catch up. And while I don't doubt that these folks care about me and vice-versa, I don't feel any sense of urgency to communicate with them (and again, probably vice-versa). It's okay if we don't really chat outside of those one or two times per year, and I tend to not seek help or guidance from them. They're something more than acquaintances, but at the same time not quite friends.
As Absurd Pirate notes, online friends have quickly become the norm. Still, I've noticed that it's still kind of strange to some that many of the people to whom I'd reach out first if I found myself in an emergency or a sticky situation are just that—online friends. And not online friends in the sense that one of us moved away from each other, but rather that we met somehow via the Internet, and the potential of us interacting in person would otherwise be more or less zero if not for the digital world introducing us and growing that desire to hang out in real life.
I without a doubt agree that online friends can be just as "real" as those who are physically near you. I've shared some and listened to pretty personal shit with online friends. And maybe that's why my online friendships can often be "realer" than my IRL ones. Like many, I find it easier to be vulnerable when I'm behind a screen. I think that relatively greater openness as well as the number of niche communities on the Internet help open more opportunities to kindle such genuine friendships.
In addition, there's generally a lower chance that the friendship develops out of convenience alone. Don't get me wrong, many in-person friendships are born this way and can turn into the most meaningful lifelong connections. And most people looking for real friendships generally aren't so shallow. But when I'm chatting with someone online who lives far away and they know I have no favors to offer them physically or financially (not to say this is impossible via virtual relationships, but you get what I mean), then I feel more secure in that they want to get to know me purely for who I am or at least spend time together via a hobby that can be practiced virtually.
My online friends and I know who each other's in-person friends are. We help each other navigate tricky professional or social situations. We check in on each other when we're going through tough times. We make sure to call or at least message each other regularly, and we begin to worry when we don't hear from the other person for a couple weeks. We share art with each other. We exchange foreign languages to better connect and help each other improve at a hobby important to us. We send each other notes and small gifts in the mail. We discuss our goals and aspirations in life.
I don't even do all those things with some of my IRL friends.
My online friends are spread across countries: the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Azerbaijan, and Russia. I've actually been lucky enough to meet most of my online friends in person, even if only once. These are some of my favorite memories, and I'm always waiting for the day we can finally hang out in person again.
I think each of my friends knows me in a different way, whether they are online or IRL. But some friends definitely know me better than others, and those tend to be my online ones.
It's not that I struggle so much to befriend others in person. However, as someone who often feels a disconnect between herself and the immediate world around her, I value very much what my online friends bring into my life, be it an interest I cannot reasonably pursue in my current city or an entirely different but refreshing outlook on the world.
That being said, I'd love to host all my online and IRL friends together at a dinner party someday. Because they're all my "real" friends no matter what.