Some Yahoo

Gaming is why I have no real friends (real friends are the ones who will be at the hospital when you get in an accident). Gaming is why I have not written my novel. Gaming is why I never pursued my photography. Gaming is why I have strained relationships with my family. Gaming is why my bills get paid late. Gaming is why I have missed opportunities at work. Gaming is why people don't take me seriously. Gaming is why I can't hold conversations in public (I have nothing real going on in life). Gaming is why I never finished a class to get my skills up - and therefore lost out on job opportunities. Gaming is why I am a social outcast. Gaming is why I can't afford anything, Gaming is why I stayed too long at my parent's house. Gaming is why I am over 30 but act like I'm 15. Gaming is why I never commit to do fun things with people. Gaming is why I never give back to my community by volunteering. Gaming is why I have not read enough books. Gaming is why I am overweight. Gaming is why real life seems boring to me. Gaming is why I never put more than 30 minutes effort into doing anything. Gaming is why I don't seek and crave responsibility. Gaming is why I fail. I have learned to hate gaming. Respond with your gaming is why's

Sadly, image (as you call it) is the one way we have of quickly finding people to be interested in, to date, or just hang out with. If it weren't for these superficial clues, you'd have to date every girl to find a girlfriend, you'd have to talk to every person to find friends. Image is just how you present yourself to the world. Maybe you can't judge a book by its cover, but there are a lot of books, and you can't read them all.

I so understand. For 1 whole week I have been fighting a database problem where everything works OK when I am debugging, but on the test server it can't connect. If only Microsoft would tell me WHY it can't connect, it would be great. I took a lot of photography classes in high school, would you like some assignments to help you pass the time?

I seriously hope there is a time difference - because 26 minutes is not enough.

I sometimes find it helps when I am loading YouTube (or previously, a game) when I should be doing something else, That moment when I am clicking that icon, or typing youtube.com is the key. I sometimes whisper to myself, this is the moment I am effing up my day. I can isolate that single decision. Then sometimes I go forward anyway, but many times I decide to get back to whatever conundra I am attempting to unravel. Try it yourself, when you are attempting to escape into the mindless consumption of entertainment while your plate is still full of tasks. Let me tell you that it is way moe satisfying to relax with a few videos as a well-earned end to the workday than it is to end the day 4 hours behind, and having to explain to everyone what you've been spending all your time doing.

So years ago a little old lady who was not related to us put in her will to give my wife her Schwinn exercise bike. It is kinda big and our house is small, and we had people in all the bedrooms, so it languished in the garage. Yesterday morning at 6:30 am I went for a walk, but because it was a hot day, I was drenched in sweat before I got home - and it was not a long walk, only like 0.6 of a mile. So, because my daughter has moved out, I got the Schwinn out of the garage and set it up in the spare room. The idea is that on these 100F+ days, we can still get some exercise in the comfort of the air conditioning. Besides I have a little dog and I don't want to fry his tiny paws on the pavement. I had to spend time figuring out the blasted thing - it's not very intuitive. But once I got it going, I was able to do 3 really small sessions on it: 8 minutes, 15 minutes and 15 minutes. I have always been a fan of more quick sessions than one agonizingly long session. Anyhow. I usually like to go for a walk when I get stalled at work (I work from home), but I think this is going to make it even easier to get in the sessions I need to lose this lard ball that has collected on top of my hips. And why am I posting this here? Because one of my former main triggers to start gaming was when I got frustrated or stalled on projects. Now I am replacing that with something proactive and positive. Also I can catch up on my podcasts. Cheers.

Yummy. That's even better!

I gotta tell ya, it worked for me!

Remember how I said I am an old dude so he wasn't a teen or anything. In fact he was 57. He was grossly overweight, not a gamer, but he did spend almost all of his time on the computer alone in a dark room. His idea of video gaming was virtual chess, and something I think he called "civilization". He was depressed most of his life, he ate about 3 times as much as he should, and was closing in on 400 pounds. He never married, and though he had a few girlfriends, they always eventually friend-zoned him. He had a heart of gold. He bought most of the furniture in my living room when we were a struggling young family, and he bought us a car "just because the Plymouth Voyager minivan we had was kind of a rattletrap. He loved to take us to dinner. He usually paid because he had no family and he knew we were struggling. We almost always got together and did something on weekends - usually involving Chinese food or pastrami. He wore bib overalls to weddings and funerals. He had weird taste in movies and music. He hated all things Microsoft, and really had no idea why everyone in the world would not use Linux. He was well over 6' and looked like Hagrid from Harry Potter. I have heard him say "codswallop" in an English accent. He opened every phone call or voicemail with either the words "Hello, my friend" or for women, "Hello, beautiful". On Memorial Day Sunday I got worried that he wasn't returning my calls, and I went to his rented house and found him dead of an apparent heart attack. Guys, our lives are long and our problems are mild. I urge you to be kind and if at all possible, get a little exercise. Thanks.

Cam has a great video on How to stop mindlessly browsing the internet. You can watch that one guilt-free at least.

Cool. DIY tech projects. Have you seen this channel? It's fun to watch, but I bet it's even more fun to do the projects. I was playing around with film-making since I was 14 years old. I had a super-8 film camera with no sound LOL. https://www.ebay.com/i/152597978406?chn=ps

WTG Dweems. I would suggest that you also stop GTA during your detox, just so you have adequate time to work on other areas of your life. I'd hate to see you just switch 40 hours a week with 10 games for 40 hours a week of GTA. Let us know how it's going. cheers.

@Justin Whitelock Well said: On day 1 of my detox the first thing I did was tell my wife and daughter what I was doing and why. It felt a little humiliating - I am a grown man after all, but with them on my side I knew I would have a hard time failing. All it would take is one of them walking by my office and seeing me gaming to know I had failed. And while telling them was humiliating, failing in front of them would have been unbearably humiliating.

Game quitting moments - those seemingly insignificant decisions that when you make them, you know you're setting yourself up to fail. That moment when you decide to quit gaming... but leave all your games installed just in case you get bored. but you leave your console out and your controller where you can easily get it - just for after you get the problem under control. but you decide to instead cut down your game time to 10 hours a week, then 8, etc.even though you know you won't quit for the day if you're... in the middle of a raid waiting for a friend winning generally having fun frustrated and wanting to end on a win but you turn down the chance to spend the evening with people, wanting to rush home. you know you'll end up at the console. you always tell people you're doing homework, but you're a solid C- student. but you know you'll be alone in the house tonight, and there is that new raid with the magic titanium breastplate! Look, you don't need Vulcan-like control of your mind at all times to keep yourself from gaming. All you need is to recognize those moments when you normally let the weakness win, and give yourself an exit strategy for them. Trying to quit slowly? Imagine a crack addict trying to "taper off", but in a house with ready access to tons of crack. You're going to fail. This is a bad approach. Leaving your games installed for when the problem is under control? It's like putting a pile of diamonds in front of a thief and telling him he can steal them when his kleptomania is better. You know that to win, you need to uninstall and put the console in the attic. Or on Ebay. Declining invitations from people to do stuff? Even a night with your weird Aunt Bess volunteering at the church toy drive is better than a night of mindless button-mashing. Go places. Meet people. Your impact on society and culture is ultimately all you leave behind. Alone in the house? Avoid if possible. You know that when you're alone, your cravings come out. It makes it 100 times harder to resist because there are no big consequences for failing. Tell your parents, brethren, sistern what you're trying to do and ask them to not leave you alone at home during your detox. Just for 90 days. If they love you, they'll want to help. It's not weakness to ask for help, think of it as proactively trying to make yourself better. If that doesn't work, think of it as grouping up to beat a really heinous boss. All it takes is enough mastery to win in those precise moments when you know you'll make the decision to eff up. It doesn't take 24 hours of willpower, NOBODY has that, just 3 minutes to walk away from the decision point where you find yourself messing up.

For iPhone... Settings: General Accessibility Display Accommodations Color Filters: Tick Grayscale. Optionally, from Accessibility, click Increase Contrast and Darken Colors. Note that for some reason, screen snaps still come out in color.

Go here. Get the free community version of visual studio. It's free forever, not just a trial, and it has most of the features of the full version. You probably also want to go here. That's the database software. Before I teach you anything about programming, I need to set your mind straight about a few things. Error messages are good. They are there to teach you how to fix your errors. There is very little you can do with Visual Studio that will destroy your computer or get you arrested for anything. Any gamer knows that no software over 100 lines of code is bug and error free. You can build a better mousetrap all you want, but that just improves the mice. Embrace the imperfection and move on. Note: even Visual Studio crashes now and then. Computers are dumb and logical and doing a task 1 million times will always choose the same solution. Programmers don't really need to know and understand the intricacies of how computers do things. It's like most drivers couldn't fix a broken timing belt in their own cars if they had to (extra points if you know that cars have timing belts). So, to a computer, everything is data. The machine is data, the hard drive is data, the mouse is data, the keyboard is data. YOU are data. It all boils down to numbers and letters to a computer. Also, typically a computer program doesn't store or process any data it doesn't directly need. You may be 18 years old, 5'10" tall with brown hair and green eyes, but if the program doesn't need to know that, it usually doesn't have it. I will leave you to play with your new software until next time, when there will be windows and buttons! (Note that I do this in my spare time, don't expect a book in six weeks.) Like this if you like it. If there is low interest maybe I will do this on Skillshare.

Start small. Walk the dog. Walk around the block. Park in the far end of the parking lot. Take the stairs. I have a .6 mile walk I try to do 2 times a day. It's tiny but it beats rewatching old TV shows on streaming.

The longer you go, the easier it gets. Just envision gaming as flushing hours of your life into a toilet. If it helps, imagine a super disgusting grungy video game toilet. I know life seems endless, but like the number of weeds in your lawn, the number of your hours is finite. Now imagine you've probably tossed tens of thousands of hours away on these games. You could have learned a foreign language, or mastered watercolors, or written a novel. The difference between those things and games is that you get to keep all the accomplishments. Every video game in the world had a launch date, a life cycle, and they all will end someday. There will be no exceptions. Someday there will be too few subscribers to keep the servers up, or the consoles will go obsolete, or something. Even WOW and Eve Online. When they close, all your accomplishments evaporate. If you had written a book - even the dumbest first book from the worst author is more of an accomplishment than anything you can do in a virtual world.

Death is not what's important. Many people make their lives miserable trying to live an extra few days or weeks at the end. They avoid tasty foods, and fun activities, and they keep out of the sunshine. But what is a life if it's been robbed of its... well, life? Live well. Pursue dreams. Make every day a step towards something, but realize that this day is a gift too, not just part of a slog towards death. Death is less of a tragedy than not living. You own your life. Enjoy it!

Welcome! And sorry to hear about your fiancee. I hope it's something she can recover quickly from.

Way to go! I think you'll find that getting all that time back makes accomplishing a lot more doable.

OK, I must admit that in the past I went to electronics school. Studying electronics is what taught me that I wanted to be a programmer. I'll offset the electronics talk so if it bores you, you can easily skip it. Bipolar (not THAT kind of bipolar) transistors - the thing that there are 10 million of in your CPU - have this little problem with something called thermal runaway. As they conduct electricity, they warm up. The warmer they get, the better they conduct (they have lower resistance). This increases the current that flows through the transistor. Which makes more heat. Which reduces the resistance and makes more current. You may think this will never end, But in truth, as long as you're not flirting with the edge of the transistor's capabilities, this effect is minuscule and usually harmless. However, when you are near the full capacity of the transistor, This can cause the chip to overheat and release it's spirit to the world in a puff of smoke. This is an example of a broader concept called runaway systems where a bad thing makes things worse and worse until it all crashes down. Incidentally, field effect transistors don't have this problem, because when they get hot, FETs increase in resistance. They're not indestructible, but they at least work toward saving themselves and their circuits instead of always looking to explode. So much for the esoterica, As it turns out, gaming effects our lives in a similar way. you had a bad day so you escape into games where you essentially waste all your time (no accomplishment in any game will help you in real life) so you miss out on your life you have no real friends you sucked at school you sucked at work you got no sleep so your life gets darker and darker. so you lose friends so no one seems to understand you or care about you. so you escape into the game world even more. repeat until you wise up. It's not a question of if you should have quit gaming, it's a question of how much of your life are you going to sacrifice on this altar? A year? Ten years? Twenty? You see, you never get that time back. You aren't improving yourself in any way. Your language skills, personal skills, cognitive skills (the ability to focus, think and reason) are getting put on hold until you work on them. That's why gamers are widely known as nerdy social misfits. Contrary to Hollywood, gaming will not make you a super smart computer programmer or hacker. The Big Bang Theory guys are depicted as always gaming, but in real life they would have had to focus for 10+ years in a super hard college to get where they are. There would be little time to achieve that level of competence if they spent all their time in World of Warcraft. So, how much of your life are you going to sacrifice on this altar? Imagine yourself at age 60, at 400 pounds in a darkened basement playing games and watching porn all day. You'll have that massive life-ending heart attack alone in a faded black tee shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals, having not seen the eyes of a loving wife or beautiful children. You will not have sailed the oceans or dived the great coral reefs. Even if you do experience some of these, you'll not have had the time to become excellent at them. All because you chose in every moment to focus your energy on gaming. Life has much better. It's harder, and there are no respawns, but the rewards are so much better.

The life you're escaping is the unproductive, useless life of a gamer. As we focus on the things that give real happiness, Real life doesn't need as much escaping. If you find you cannot live without escape, then draw, paint, write, sing, play music. You don't have to be a professional on the first day, just start. Write a story in 2 paragraphs, then write one in 2 pages. When you start liking the results, get some feedback and use it to get even better. (Note that this is the advice of a crazy person, take with a grain of salt.)

Have a funeral. Your gaming identity has died in glorious battle. The war is over, the good guys won (unless you're a bad guy, then ... you get the idea) and the soldiers have gone back to their real lives. That's what you're doing.

Basically you have learned early that gaming is a dead end. I would confide in 2 or 3 friends what you are trying to do, and if they are not going to support you - well you don't have to ditch them, but you should probably demote them to acquaintances. Real friends would want what's good for you.