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Re:Ask HN: Is getting online still fun? by yesenadam on Saturday November 10, 2018 @04:55PM (#18423730)
Yes, I have a lot of fun! Apart from being able to instantly download any movie/series, book, journal paper that I want[0] (and I do a lot of that), I have friends in a lot of countries that I chat with on FB, in English and Spanish. (I started learning Spanish after meeting Latin Americans online. Finding teachers was super-easy thanks to sites like livemocha and lang-8, which I was only on for a few days because immediately I found an amazing teacher who became a dear friend.)

I used to play online chess a lot until recent years - it's very addictive, also I chatted with people from many countries during/after playing them, made one very close friend from that. (One of the most recent people I played/chatted with was a blind pianist in Iran, not sure how blind people can do that!) Nowadays just watch commentated chess tournaments online, a format that didn't exist 10 years ago. I prefer to watch commentary in Spanish; then I can improve my Spanish at the same time.[1]

[0] I grew up on a farm pre-WWW, and every day I marvel at how different things are now. Like I watched that Rob Pike talk on Unix history yesterday, and it took me about 10 seconds to find and download the Ken Thompson paper on regular expressions.

[1] There are unexpected effects, like: OMG I can't stand writing names of languages with Capital Letters, it seems soo weird. (Spanish doesn't use capitals for that, or a lot of other things English uses capitals for.)

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