28 days ? Luxury !

Surface mail – which was LOADS cheaper than any other kind of mail – might take 3, 4 or even more months internationally. Some packages would arrive within a week, others took 6 months. You would see an ad in a magazine – White Dwarf, Dragon, Dungeon, Miniature Wargames or other – send your SASE, perhaps even a bill or two – which would not get stolen by…certain postal service hires….-to get a catalog. A few weeks (?) later, this catalog would arrive in your mailbox and you would drool over all the purty pictures or even just lists, compose an order form or cut the pre-printed one from the catalog, go to the post office, get a rather complicated form for sending money internationally, pay the appropriate amount at the counter and send your order form off simultaneously. The aforementioned time span later, you’d get your stuff – after paying import tax at the customs office.

Slow, yes, but no need to down-,up-,cross- or backload anything, no need to ‘upgrade’ every 10 days just to keep the puter working, no need for passwords or verification codes, no hackers stealing your identity, no endless streams of inane ads, no AI fakery at every turn, no products becoming insanely expensive OOP ‘collectibles’ within a year of their release….

I miss those days.

As for people’s behavior, the internet – which I tend to think was created as a trap and enslavement device from the start – has put MASSIVE amounts of power into the hands of a very few people, precisely the type of people who should have never had ANY power at all. It has also made it possible to present rare, oddball weirdness as normal and common and given people who would never have the guts to say what they’re saying online in real life the power to do so. Unless, of course, what you’re saying goes against certain ‘official’ narratives, in which case you will be hounded, banned, deleted in the fiercest way possible. See ‘trap’ and ‘enslavement’ , above.

That’s a function of the internet – anti-social media in particular – that has been very deliberately engineered to drive a wedge between people, to wit, people of a certain rapidly shrinking demographic.

Others, while also victims, are collateral damage.

I won’t go into details – you either already know them or you don’t – because that gets political and leads to hounding, banning, etc.

What I will say, stating the obvious, is that it was a lot easier to communicate, and do so civilly and intelligently, with others, in real life meat space, before the existence of computers and the internet, or at least before cyberspace achieved a stranglehold over all aspects of daily life.