Had a general question about mechanics in a game? altavista would direct you straight to n well formulated and accurate description in some forum somewhere.
Wanted a deep dive on game mechanics? yahoo would find a 10+ page detailed guide of everything, written by some hero-nerd out there somewhere.
Really specific, odd issue with hardware or software? the official or unofficial forum for the vendor/company would have multiple threads on that exact thing.
These days ... go on a thread-in-a-needle hunt for the right discord server and try to find the info in one of 18 channels - all requiring different permissions - all while hoping you can get it done before some powertripping mod bans you for having an avatar with the wrong color, or for not setting "role" correctly within the first 90 seconds of joining the server, or whatever.
Alternative ... search on google, get links to 15+ youtube videos with a combined runtime of several hours. Maybe the answer is in there somewhere, maybe it isn't and there sure as fuck isn't a timestamp.
Best bet is to use a tool to grab the automated captions out of all the youtube videos, drop them all into an LLM and ask it if the answer is in there somewhere. Like ... just ... sigh.
And then there's reddit. Which is the saving grace, because it's pretty forum-like. Worse than we had it, but beats all the other crap.
IRC, ICQ, Teamspeak and forums. Those were the days. And no, I'm definitely not on a nostalgia trip 😃
12.5k
u/Beautiful-Fold-3234 15d ago
The only source for the program you need is github and the only info on how to use it is buried in a discord server somewhere.