Our life is our time. What we spend our time on, we pay for with our lives.
Table of Contents
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Intro
It’s kind of crazy to me that the internet is such a modern construct. I say to my wife multiple times a week, “what a time to be alive” — usually because we just got a steaming box of french fries from McDonald’s for a dollar in five minutes, or a $5 rotisserie chicken from Walmart that exists because of a supply chain I can barely fathom.1
Or that we could send our embryos off to get genetically screened for chromosome aneuploidy2 and, for a bit more money, get a full genome sequence on each one.3
Or that our car can autonomously get us from point A to point B with zero interventions 99% of the time.
But aside from those economic and technological marvels is the internet — which has reshaped global culture in ways that make today almost unrecognizable from any era before it. Here are the slices of it I keep coming back to.
Discord
Humans evolved to communicate using sound waves. It’s a wildly efficient medium — speech costs only a few percent more energy than just breathing, and it carries more nuance per second than almost anything we can type.
All this to say: I enjoy talking with people, but there’s a particular joy in not receiving a phone call and instead just dropping into a voice room that already has people in it. Slack has huddles, other companies have their alternatives — I’ve enjoyed Discord’s implementation the most, especially when paired with the server system.
The cool thing about Discord is that anyone can spin up a server. I recently pruned my list down, but I’ve joined tons over the years — for learning new things about tech, hobby projects, web frameworks, video game automation communities, keeping in touch with long-distance friends through a shared favorite game, and most of all just to have a space to talk about things with people I enjoy talking to.
My favorite thing about it is the customizability and the bottability. I’ve spent many an evening tinkering with the Discord SDK to build bots that do everything from connecting my Twitch chat to a channel, running giveaways, to making a sort of OpenClaw replacement I can securely share with people. The best one is a webhook that fires whenever my best friend or I get a rare drop or level up in Old School RuneScape — it pings my phone, I can comment or congratulate from anywhere, and it’s hyperconnectivity I control. The opposite of social media, which demands more attention than I want to give.
March Madness
In high school, a few of my friends were sports-obsessed. Not that they had any skill in playing the sports — but watching the games and tracking the stats was the fun part for them. I never got into that, except once a year, when March Madness gave me an approachable way to participate.
For over a decade we’ve run brackets in the official NCAA and ESPN apps, and I love it way more than I should. I use a variation of the Polacheck method5 every year and consistently land in the top 10–20% of most pools I’m in — sheer dumb luck, probably. Although in fairness, it’s not actually hard to beat most of the people I’m playing against. Having grown up in a predominantly LDS community in Utah Valley, a lot of folks reflexively pick BYU to go far, and I genuinely can’t remember the last time they made it past the Sweet Sixteen. Last year was particularly heartbreaking — I had Houston winning it all.
The competition itself is called “4 for 4,” after the old Wendy’s deal that was the standing prize for whoever won. Wendy’s hasn’t done that deal in years, but the name stuck. So has the tradition of sharing photos, giving fun life updates, and ribbing each other about bad picks. The bracket is just the excuse — that little corner of the internet keeps us connected, and somehow gives me teams to cheer for when I otherwise couldn’t care less about college sports.
MMORPGs (OSRS, Mostly)
I was exposed to RuneScape as early as age 5, played it throughout my childhood and at friends’ houses, and eventually started a Group Ironman with one of my best friends. That account has kept us in touch through multiple cross-country moves.
What makes it work is the third-party client — RuneLite — which lets the community build plugins and tools the game devs approve. Webhooks for level-ups and rare drops, progress trackers, screenshot sharing, all of it. So even when we’re not in the game at the same time, we’re sharing the excitement of hitting 99 Fishing or pulling an enhanced crystal weapon seed drop.4 That’s made all the difference. A long-distance friendship needs reasons to ping each other, and a notification with a screenshot is a perfect one.
Minecraft
Minecraft is another one of those places that’s just always been there. When it was in alpha I remember my uncle installing it on our family desktop and I spent what felt like hours looking around for cobblestone with little black flecks in it — he’d assured me that was coal, and coal was what I needed to mine next. I never found any that day, but I spent a lot of time exploring, and I was hooked.
I played it with friends on Xbox after school. I played it on junior high computer lab computers, and occasionally snuck over to the console where the server was running to give myself command access and modify my inventory. But the best way I used Minecraft to stay in touch with people was a Realm we set up in college. I’d just gotten a Nintendo Switch and it turned out to be the perfect platform to pick up and play for a bit on a lunch break or between classes.
I also took the bus to and from campus. I couldn’t actually play on the bus — needed a steady connection — but I’d read through the wiki voraciously, planning out builds and learning how various new mobs and blocks interacted, watching YouTube videos on how to design resource farms and everything in between. Every month or two we’d pull an all-nighter at one of my friends’ houses and all play together, but most of the time it was just single-player asynchronous group play. You’d see evidence of other people playing on the same world as you but rarely interact with them directly. That felt like a part of the internet that was always safe and always felt like home.
Snapchat
When I was a teenager, Snapchat was all the rage. I’m sure it was also used for more unseemly and improper purposes — but for me, the killer feature turned out to be one specific person: one of my sisters made it the only way I could ever consistently get hold of her. Send her a text? Nope, wouldn’t hear back for a week or two. Call her? Coin flip on whether she’d answer. But shoot her a snap and she’d respond in a few minutes.
Because of that, my whole family group chat ended up on Snapchat. It also happens to solve a problem we’ve had forever: my family has always been split between Android and iOS, and Snapchat is one of the few platforms that’s genuinely OS-agnostic — no green-bubble drama, no missing reactions, no degraded video. Everyone just gets the same app.
For that same OS-agnostic reason, we’ve occasionally dabbled in the location-sharing feature too — handy for road trips, picking each other up, or just casually knowing whether someone’s home.
And honestly, I’ve come around on it — the platform’s gravitational pull toward sending pictures means I get to see my nieces and nephews fairly frequently, in raw unedited moments. Stuff I assume would never make it into a posted story or group text.
Honorable Mentions
Podcasts
A full list lives in my favorite podcasts post. It’s always been fun to participate in parasocial relationships — and the specific ones I’ve stuck with have shaped my worldview, hopefully for the better, pulling me toward science and a steady drip of trivia facts.
Goodreads
I’ve always been a reader, thanks to my oldest sister — she majored in literature, has a master’s in Library Science, and worked as a librarian for over a decade. But there are just so many freaking books out there. Goodreads is where I’ve found some good people to follow whose recommendations actually land. They don’t come off as braggy or “look how many books I’ve read this year” — just honest reviews that have pointed me to series I’ve thoroughly enjoyed.
Wikipedia and xkcd
Cliché picks, I know — but they’re cliché for a reason. I can lose hours on Wikipedia following one rabbit hole into the next, and xkcd is the one webcomic I’ve stayed caught up on for years. Both feel like quiet monuments to what the internet was supposed to be: smart people sharing things they care about, for free, because they wanted to.
The thread through all of these is the same: connection that I get to dial up or down on my terms. Voice rooms I can join or leave. Group brackets that ping me once a year. Game webhooks that fire when something cool happens. A family chat that fills up with candid, unposed pictures of my nieces and nephews — without an algorithm trying to keep me scrolling.
What a time to be alive — but also, what a time to be intentional about which parts of it you let in.
About This Post
A few friends and I decided to do a weekly blog challenge through the month of April 2026 — each week one of us picks a prompt and we all write something to it. Week 2 was my turn, and I went with:
What are your favorite places on the internet or favorite things about the internet, and why? How do they differ from the parts of the internet that you dislike?
Go read what the others wrote this week:
Footnotes
1. For most of human history, if you could eat animal protein regularly, you were participating in a luxury reserved for the wealthy or the fortunate. In the Year of our Lord 2026, you can walk into a store, spend four or five dollars that have been losing value incredibly fast due to recent inflation, and leave with 120g of cooked and mildly seasoned protein — made possible by vertically integrated supply chains, industrial genetics, automated processing, and a corporate pricing strategy that treats the product as a marketing instrument rather than a profit center. I know these chickens are raised somewhat unethically depending on your moral compass; there should be a better way, and if you want to buy free range I don’t judge you for it. But aligning your source of food with your moral compass is also a luxury.
2. Aneuploidy on Wikipedia — extra or missing chromosomes, the most common cause of failed embryo implantation and a lot of pregnancy loss.
3. Okay, a lot more money. But that’s relative. PGT-A testing was around $150–200 per embryo plus shipping. Full genome sequencing is roughly $2,500 per embryo. Considering humanity only fully completed the Human Genome Project in 2003 — and a single sequencing immediately after the technique was developed would have cost about $50 million — the cost of a small car to get the genetic code of ten potential offspring is, financially speaking, kind of approachable.
4. My Group Ironman friend and I were both grinding Corrupted Gauntlet hard in October 2023. The community often calls it the “red prison” because for ironman accounts it can be the longest grind in the game for a single item that’s huge for account progression. Attempts take seven to ten minutes each, and the drop rate for the enhanced seed is 1/400. Imagine our confusion and excitement when we both got the drop within sixteen hours of each other — I got mine at 3pm during a break from work, he got his around 6am the next morning. The craziest thing.
5. The Polacheck method is a bracket-building heuristic built on NCAA tournament data going back to 1985. Pick a 1-seed champion, build a Final Four of mostly 1-seeds plus a 2-seed (never all four 1-seeds — that’s only happened once), and use historical seed-vs-seed upset rates to fill in the rest. The motto: “it is better to lose with everybody else than to try to win it all on an early pick.”