I was wondering this as well because...pokemon came along...when? After my time, anyway, like late 90s.

And then kind of died down, I think, or at least wasn't a monstrous craze at least.

And now in 2016, does it mean that everyone who was super into them 15 years ago is all for it?

If I think about what I was super into at 10, the nostalgia doesn't go that far today.

I mean I see I'm late to the party here and everyone's already said it's real, but I was just surprised.

Around 2007, for some months there, the world was saturated with articles about Second Life. Eventually I saw an article about how it had come about as a result of hiring a new PR firm.

(Or has nostalgia changed? At least if I imagine giving 1940s kids something connected to that in 1965, it seems like they'd be like "Um, I'm a grown wo/man." But today hollyworld is all superhero movies.)

Bonus question: How long before we grow really sick of hearing about it?

> And now in 2016, does it mean that everyone who was super into them 15 years ago is all for it?

Almost embarrased to say, I played pokemon back in good old black-and-white gameboy days. Then I played Pokemon for a two-month stretch last year and was highly dissapointed there wasn't an app for it.

I've yet to download Pokemon Go, but that's only because I have 12.1 MB of free space left on my phone.

I wonder how common the use of "ain't" is today. I grew up in the rural US in the 1980s, and it was common. And today I don't hear it, but I live in a more... well, educted area. It throws me off when I see it in writing now.

I think it is just more common to say it rather than write it (I too have noticed this).

My take on it is that puzzles and games are doing things by hand, and the point of programming in general is to do things once and for all and save humanity the trouble of doing things by hand.

Not that there's anything wrong with doing whatever you enjoy doing by hand.

Or perhaps it's that if we apply our ingenuity to a computer program, we have something and the rest of humanity can have it as well. If we apply our ingenuity to a puzzle, we don't have anything in the end.

Here I start wondering why different people react differently to gamification, but I don't know. I did see earlier where people were going on about getting stars from github...

I don't follow PUA stuff and had to look up sigma. For anyone else: It's a term for the cool outsider/loner who gets the chicks.

The only band that mattered.

My thoughts exactly. And then "and what's wrong with that?" But then I realized this was about a silly video game. Oh well.

I've certainly wondered why they weren't interested in being more transparent.

The development is pretty transparent, if you know where to look. The ChangeLog.txt is the main place where development updates happen (especially the -current ChangeLog, but security updates for stable happen in the respective release's ChangeLog). There's also the mailing lists, and the key people in Slackware hang out on the linuxquestions forums and ##slackware (freenode).

I used to run it, and I'm not sure there's value in it anymore. They often don't stay on top of security updates, and compiling anything just got worse and worse.

The last straw was the fanboys at the linuxquestions forum. It was cultish and creeped me out.

Three negative comments on this submission, that's some impressive anti-cult thing you've got going.

Slackware doesn't do "security theatre" updates. Whenever there's both a credible risk and a reasonable fix, you'll see an update, and it'll be quicker than distros that are multiple steps downstream from Debian.

You know, I felt really troubled to have been using something for 20 years and realize things had changed and it was no longer right and no longer good for me. I felt like a fool for having stuck with it for quite so long.

I realize that sounds like someone talking about a bad marriage, and I suppose we can generalize usefully on relationships of whatever type.

I think we must end up with longer-lasting bad feelings about anything we used to value.

There's a slackware security newsletter that blasts out new patches news

I used it until a couple of years ago, but it often wasn't getting security updates and compiling anything for it was becoming more and more trouble. So I left and I don't miss it.

This is certainly a big issue. In the comments, I see of course how it's so vital for all of us, and yet our problems and our advice...varies because we're all different and it's hard to express what we are and what we love in two paragraphs. We can't help but talk past each other somewhat with strangers.

Maybe what is best to take away from advice is less the specifics and more to take heart that others want to communicate and share and help.

For my part, I'll say that "work" as such is not the place to seek meaning unless...unless it's right there for you, isn't hurting anything or anyone, etc.