I know that the normals are probably really fucking itching to get back to their faggy get-togethers, but I'm really enjoying not being dragged out to that shit by my mother.

Merry Christmas to you and all, such as it is. >>1188 Perhaps you'll get to enjoy it next year too, considering the current developments. I personally missed the family gathering somewhat, mainly because I could usually eat to my heart's content, while nobody longer expects any kind of conversation or engagement from me.

I'm still here but I don't really know what to say.

I was planning on wishing you guys a merry Christmas a couple of day ago, but my brother came to visit us, so I spent the day taking care of his children. Anyway, happy belated Merry Christmas. I hope you're all doing well. >>1190 Don't worry, you're not the only one.

>>1188 It's been a while since I saw one of your drawings, mage. I'm glad you're still drawing.

I take this thread to wish everyone a happy new year. I hope this year brings you nothing but good times.

I'm mainly a lurker but I figured I'd wish every mage an hopefully good year.

>>1197 >>1198 I too wish every mage here a good year. Thanks for forcing me to post as I've been lurking for the past month or so

It's that time again. If any mages are still here I hope you have the merriest christmas you can, such as things are.

>>1948 I'm >>1198 and I'm still here. I wish everybody a merry christmas and a better year than this one.

>>1948 Merry christmas to you too mage. Meant to say it last year too, but missed my chance.

>>1952 >>1949 Man, only two left. I hope it went alright for you

>>2013 Make it 3

>>1952 I still come here everyday and just read the new ramblings from that crazy guy and nothing else. I don't know why I still do it, there's no point at all.

>>2040 I do the same. So, there are five or six people here, right?

Add me to the count, haven't posted anything in a while but i check almost every day.

>>2040 I'm here too. I haven't posted since the uboachan schizo found this place. Waiting for someone to clean up the board but reporting the posts seem pointless.

Coming here everyday make me feel like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead, going to the mall and repeating the same absurd motions just because it was what I used to do when I was alive, even if makes no sense anymore.

>>2075 I can’t deny that Tower isn’t in a good shape right now, but I want to think it’s only a temporary thing.

Here as well. These select few boards that I browse every few days or so inevitably border on dead most of the time. I think it's partially because there has been so much consolidation and expansion of mainstream culture across the internet. The amount of people who maintain a powerful individuality in this day and age has likely waned, or at least they have a decreased ability to express themselves now compared to how it was in the past in general. There are not "most fringe groups." There are most fringe individuals.

>>2084 The massively accelerating consolidation of the internet over the last decade has been pretty shocking to say the least. The whole ecosystem has become so centralized, flattened and dull. These days there's a smartphone-centric "there's an app for that" attitude to the web. Talk in the Discord(tm) app, obsess over e-celebs on Twitch(tm) app, vlog on the Tik Tok(tm) app, etc, etc. Living in centralized controlled tech-fiefdoms, while old communities turn necropolises surrounded by wastelands of automated SEO garbage. Even you want to it's hard to actually find unique websites or communities, search engines don't even turn up non-popular sites anymore without extremely specific queries. Heck even magicchan has gone from being a stand alone website to a virtual board hosted by someone else. Everything is trending towards pre-packaged algorithmically tuned single serving meals of content, dished out by a few big players. I honestly miss the old days of janky personal sites, blogrolls, macromedia, unselfconscious niche forums, in jokes, and all the rough edges that came with that stuff. I don't know what the internet is going to turn into going forward but I don't like it. I'm too old and paranoid for this shit. Just another old man set in his ways bitching about the state of the world while it leaves me behind. I ended up as much a cyber hermit as much as a real one.

>>2085 I can't say I can't relate to this. I don't even understand the language or the mindset of modern internet. It feels completely alien. Sometimes I wonder if it's actually just me, who's getting older and weirder, because real life produces a similar effect. Whatever is left of real life, not too much. But there was a time, years ago, when some places of the internet felt a little like "home". All that is gone now. I always used internet as a replacement of the life I didn't have. Now I don't have a replacement so there's an high degree of isolation, but I'm not sure it's necessarily a bad thing. Or maybe it is the symptom of a bad thing, the complete inability to adapt to our current world.

I check here every day but I'm so inactive that I just have nothing to say anymore.

>>2085 I think one of the confusing things is that a lot of younger people don’t just vlog on tiktok, tiktok is their primary interface with the internet. They start to communicate in that format and get their information from there. Seeing the Norman generation raised on this stuff from birth is hard to understand.

>>2090 It's interesting because that's almost going back to oral traditions. They're not communicating with strangers by text, but with people they can see and talk to.

>>2085 It was only shocking if you weren't paying attention. You aren't looking in the right places by which I don't mean niche imageboards like this one. Have you checked out the Gemini protocol? >>2086 I think there's a case to be made that you actually become more normal again with age.

>>2112 You're right I haven't been paying attention. I guess the last time I really surfed the net was in 2015. To my mind that was just a few years ago, but it's been seven whole years. Almost a decade. I really let things get away from me. Tiktok for instance. I only realized how completely social dynamics have changed when I noticed people openly filming me with their phones for tiktok. Maybe it's just bias towards thinking the past was better, but I feel like that kind of thing didn't used to be socially acceptable at all. People were up in arms about "glassholes" recording them. Now you're regarded as unreasonable if you don't want to be filmed. I find the idea that strangers are recording me and my shame to laugh at with other strangers across the world utterly abhorrent. To think those like myself who have already been misfortunate in life are to be further used as objects of ridicule by people who have had blessed lives fills me with a dark rage. But like I said, I'm just an old man who's been left behind. These days I'm trying to get off the net as much as possible. My skin has grown too thin to really handle being on the interwebz.

>>2128 Indeed, slowly the elders are pushed to the corners of the internet by the ever growing new population. Imageboards are dying to the profit of social media and other mediums. At one point, we will be alien to the interwebz world. I also abhor having phones pointed at my direction. Hope I made someone smile at least. The ride does end after all.

>>2086 I can relate. Internet was for me a replacement of the social life I didn't have, it felt like I was part of something. After some couple of months where I was relatively internet free, I tried to get into some old imageboards I used to browse and they are either dead or totally inactive. The only decent ones I could find is this one and wizchan, maybe folks moved to discord but this medium is way too fast and ridden with random buzz words to have decent discussions. And the people are way too integrated with each others to let you have a shot at being part of the group. Sometimes I feel a tremendous loneliness.

>>2086 A transition I have noticed over time was the emphasis on privacy and the panic over youths being addicted to the internet replaced probably in only around 1-2 decades with the exact opposite trends. Nowadays, people use their names online all the time, and my father has criticised me for using my phone so rarely. People used to think of it as aberrant for someone to be addicted to computer usage.

>>2167 >my father has criticised me for using my phone so rarely Mine has insisted me to get one for years, in an almost obsesive way. It's crazy, because when I was a teen he criticized me for spending too much time in the PC and he was always complaining about how bad it was to spend time in front of screens while having a TV in my room or a portable console was out of the question. Now I'm an awful person because I don't want to have a shitty mini pc in my pocket all the time. Sometimes I used to eat fast because I was in a middle of a conversation in IRC or messenger and got yelled for it, now my father eats with the phone in the table while chatting. It seems like I'm critizing him too much but it's not really his fault, standards of what is right and wrong change drastically and there's little to do about it but to adapt.

>>2168 >>2167 I'm in the same boat. My mohert told me that I should buy a new phone because mine is too slow. Funnily enough, the only reason I bought one was because she tricked me into doing it (she told me that she wanted a new phone, and when I gave it to her, she said it was for me). Anyway, it's kind of weird how easy old people get used to smartphones. My mother never learned to use a regular computer, but she quickly learned to use her phone.

>>2168 >>2170 >Mine has insisted me to get one for years, in an almost obsesive way. Oh man, this reminds me of something that my father did years ago. I had a simple Nokia phone that I barely used, and when I went there to visit he decided (without asking me or anything) that I would get some new $600 iphone, so he and my mother made up a story that they were going out to "get brunch" and I had to go because they had decided I had to go, then they dragged me to some electronics shop at a busy mall and just refused to leave until I picked it out. I kept refusing and he scolded me, right there in the shop. It went on for ages. I kept going away and when I returned to ask when we would be going home, he'd start again. It was unbelievable. He has an iphone himself and has no idea how to use it. I simply can't understand why he would care what kind of phone I have. >It seems like I'm critizing him too much but it's not really his fault, standards of what is right and wrong change drastically and there's little to do about it but to adapt. I try to think reasonably about them because they're my parents but I have no doubt that if I had to keep living in that house I would have killed myself by now. These days they just sit around watching netflix all day, and he spends all day running disk defragmenter and virus scans on his PC because he has a paranoid delusion that a specific woman he doesn't like (who probably hasn't thought about him in that entire time) is hacking into it.

Not sure where to post this but a few weeks ago I found a wallet at night while walking home from the train station. I always had this fantasy of findig a wallet or a suitcase full of money, but it barely had any cash in it so I just went through the guy's stuff to find his phone number and texted him. The next day I gave him back the wallet, and he insisted on taking me to an ATM and gave me a reward, I kinda felt ashemed to accept that much money but I'm not gonna refuse anything free. I also found out he is a boss somewhere and he told me anytime I need a job just let him know and he will hire me instantly. It's manual labor in a warehouse, but it still pays like 3x of what I could realistically get as a 30 yo NEET with zero work experience. So now I have a way out but I have no idea what to do. I'm skinny as hell with a terrible back and this job could kill me lol, but this may be my only chance. Kinda feels like I was given a chance by the universe to avoid a terrible future, but I'm still not sure if I have the power to go through with it.

>>2173 You have to take what fate gives you. In my experience everything works in the most random way until an impossible chain of events that changes the whole situation just happens. I don't believe in anything, but if I had to believe in something, it would be luck.

>>2173 What >>2174 have said makes sense. It sounds too good to pass up. On the other hand, did that guy see your body type? I mean, if he knows you aren't exactly a muscular man, I doubt that he will give you a physically demanding job. Maybe he has something different in mind for you.

If anyone still visits here I hope that you have a merrier Christmas this year than last year and that next year will be better than this year.

>>2297 Merry Christmas to you too

>>2297 >>2298 Merry Christmas, guys. And I hope all of you have a nice New Year.

>>2297 >>2298 >>2299 Merry Christmas.

Hope the new year is treating you all well. Live with purpose.

>>2306 I wish I could. I wish I wasn’t pressured to work shitty jobs when I was younger and took the time to try to build a skill or create something so I could live with purpose. The other day I drove 7 hours to go to my favorite theme park and I took some psychedelics when I was on my favorite ride I thought why would I ever want to kill myself when this and life is so beautiful. One day back at my job and I want to die. It’s not even a bad job it’s insanely easy but I get talked to every day for taking care of my medical condition and they watch my every movement and I just want a source of happiness in my life.

>>2307 That resonates with me, it describes most of my life. But at some point work polutes your free time too, and you want to die everyday. I also use drugs to deal with that.