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Comment by rTX5CMRXIfFG | Hacker News Reader

I would not have learned to play the guitar if I had a smartphone then, or if the internet was any faster than a dial-up. Now I have an outlet to make something beautiful out of my loneliness whenever it strikes.

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Internet ruined me for anything long-form. I'm old enough to remember the Before Times, but a lot of people aren't.

I used to read books voraciously and, while I do still read books, it's a pretty small number compared to what I used to do. I've been trying to pare my bookshelves of books I'm never realistically going to reread or read.

Funny enough, I've had the opposite experience. Easy access to books and reviews has me reading conservatively 10x as much as I did a decade ago

I suspect this counts as phone addiction, but I'm reading many books on Kindle with the All You Can Eat Kindle subscription. One thing I've become addicted to is the never-ending series of science fiction stories, for example, such as Backyard Starship, No Stress, Space Express, The Worst Ship in the Fleet, Homeworld Lost, and Frontlines (Martin Kloos, worth paying for). Then there are the numerous series by Alma T. C. Boykin. She's able to spin a story out of everyday life, drawing on history and mythology, while adding enough fantasy to hold my interest.

Some of them are good, while others are cheesy. There are also series I will not admit to having started and given up on when I realized how bad they were. You can thank me later when you realize how much of your life I've just wasted.

The rapid decline in writing quality caused by CNN and the death of print journalism and the quality book writers that used to come from that space has destroyed long form writing.

On the other hand, I would not have learned to play the guitar without the high-speed internet.

Well. I had the internet, video games, tv, extracurriculars, etc and still learned the guitar. Kids have a lot of free time if you don't overschedule them.

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