Ribbonfarm Is Retiring

Having access to wikipedia on a phone everywhere you go is what killed the bar conversation. No longer did you have to compare notes and argue over beers to remember trivia.

And in that same way, no longer do people have to ramble on into the aether in blog form to work through some shit. Now they can do that with ChatGPT and actually get responses to their thoughts in real time. And most of the time it's agreeable in tone.

Tech continues to change the world.

Maybe that isn't what is contributing to this particular blog dying, but I bet it's contributing to the larger community of blogs dying, which has probably created some inertia.

On the other hand, the smartphone has enhanced the culture of watching TV and movies at home. It is acceptable etiquette in my house for any viewer to pause the show and read out the results of a web search about the writer, director, plot, history, concepts, etc. related to the flick at hand.

Oof, you consider that an enhancement? If anyone paused something we were watching to read something off a web page, I'd lose my patience real fast.

My partner is often on her phone intermittently while we're watching something together, and even that bothers me. It seems quite sad to me that people can't put their phones down for even a half hour to watch an episode of a sitcom.