Keeping up with these bitches as always work. It was fun enough, this group wasn't prone to more self destructive drama that he had seen as endemic to these kinds of small online friend groups. The server admin was someone who was hardly online, the group was small, and didn't have any moderation issue or people trying to cause shit. That by itself was kind of incredible in his experience. Yolo was in his second year of college. He started college with a naive belief that he'd be able to be more social and get some real life friends now that the people would be a bit more intelligent, than the status quo of his public school life. He was wrong. It was the same drama bullshit from high school the same tedious pandering and pleadings. He hated it, and soon into the first term gave up all attempts at bridging the gap between his natural tendencies and what the median socialites preferred. Not like they would ever accept him even if he did perfect his act. Not like the act would ever get easier. Or be worth it. It was just an exercise in pain. There were a couple of people in some of his engineering classes who he could have conversations with about topic mater, but they were into competitive gaming and stuff like that. He tried to get interested in it for a while and while he could see the appeal of the technical proficient maneuvers, the focus of the hobby in the group seemed to be personality based, and that was just painfully boring. These days Yolo spent most of his time alone in his room. Watching childrens' cartoons from Japan about being witches and friendship and working on some pet projects with a pretty obscure operating system from the 2020's 計画Ix. The friends he had online, and he did consider them friends, were more like the friends in those shows. They weren't deceitful, even if they weren't always exactly honest. Their intentions were clear to see and all they wanted was to have a fun time together. Bullshitting about things they liked. Sharing their interests. They didn't always have the same interests and everyone moved at different speeds, Cyber was especially fast, picking up something new every few days, and burning through it as fast as lal could. It wasn't that lal didn't truly find the things interesting, it was just lir ability to see the heart of something quickly then lose interest after uncovering it. Lal kept all the things lal learned with lir. But very few things were interesting enough to stick with to the point of mastery. It will probably be hard for lir when lal eventually needs to start working. Well being honest he knew he would have his own problems with entering any kind of workforce himself. Lal was still a middle school student if he recalled correctly, his own proximity to needing to leave academia probably made him think of this stuff more than lal ever did. The other members of their chat group were less online these days. Back when the group started they were all hype about cataloging and talking about the content from a certain content creator, but that hype had died down. There were only 12 members in the group, and of those, 5 had logged in in the past month. Only himself, Yuki and Cyber were on more or less daily. He sometimes wondered why he bothered. Well it was fun he reasoned. Cyber always was talking about the new things lal was reading about, either for school or on lir own. Lir enthusiasm for new topics was fun to take part in. It prompted him to do his own research about things from time to time, but it was nice too see someone less jaded. Still horribly depressed about the inevitability of things, how nothing ever seemed to change, but still finding joy in novelty. He rarely was enthusiastic or hopeful, or found joy in much of anything. Yuki was similarly jaded. She had more life experience than he had, and would often be a voice of reason. She had been married, had a child at one point apparently, and basically threw most of it all away focusing on removing the things in her life that didn't help her. She had previously been working in industry doing some kind of maintenance of enterprise software, adding features clients wanted, but essentially rage quit the work force some years ago because in her words "There's nothing new under the sun, I hate reinventing the wheel" he followed her premise but didn't know if he agreed with her conclusion. He hadn't known her before all that, apparently she wasn't really on-wire that much before she quit, but it's not as if she seemed terribly happy in her current situation. Yolo's current project of interest was getting some unwired radio setup. He was frustrated with all the bullshit of the proprietary solutions. Advertisements were the absolute worst. Nothing took him out of his rhythm like some bullshit thing about fast food, or auto insurance. Previously he had been using a really nice unwired app, but they had gone the way of everything it seemed and got purchased by some huge mega-corp and have incrementally made their product worse by the day. Previously it was possible to put his library on their platform and stream it to any device he wanted easily without any problems or ads, but now the app stopped working if he turned off the device's screen, it blasted him with ads every 10 minutes (if he was lucky), sometimes it wouldn't load at all, some of the songs were blocked because of content id, it didn't matter if the files were owned by him or not, if the company decided he couldn't listen to that song for whatever reason then he was fucked. looking into other solutions he found he could probably pretty easily just keep copies of his library on any device he wanted to listen from, but that solution was kinda shit. It was overly redundant in terms of storage, and didn't allow an easy way to add new songs, or sort, organize, create playlists. Honestly he'd settle for just having a personal radio he could tune in to on any of his own devices, but ideally he wanted to be able to send commands to the radio and change the song, or playlist that was currently playing. Ugh. Yuki and Cyber were talking their usual semi-lewd greeting game again. It didn't bother him really, but he found it kinda weird to see pseudo-sexual roleplay between a woman in her 30's and a teenager... He didn't think they did anything in dm's beyond that but even if they did, he supposed it was their deal. He tended to not go along with it, and voice his minor disapproval, as to not really let it progress too far out of control where he could see it at least. Maybe he was too much of a prude. Yuki for her part seemed not to see age as a factor in her relationships with the other's in the group. She never talked down or censored herself, where Yolo was constantly hyperaware of those kinds of things. When they spoke in voice chat it was too obvious the age and personality of the people in the group and that influenced how he interacted with them. Cyber seemed to enjoy either playing along or purposefully messing with Yuki and/or Yolo by pushing things sometimes. Maybe lal was just a bit horny being in the midst of puberties hormonal storm. He knew that lal spent the majority of lir time alone at home, and likely didn't have much in the way of release for that energy. .