A half-thought-out thought about load times (Blaugust #5)

(Apparently there's some kind of official organization of Blaugust with a Discord or something? Consider this illicit Blaugust content.)

We were talking to Manifold Mindmesh a.k.a Many (cw: 18+-only content) the other week about loading times, and since that conversation, we've started playing with the metaphor of load times as public transit.

If we want to play FTL, for example, we metaphorically hop on a bus, wait for a goodly number of seconds, and then the bus drops us off in the game, where there's basically no load times we've noticed. One bus trip, of some time.

If Many is launching a new world of Dwarf Fortress, fae has quite a formidable trip ahead of faer as the system simulates a whole history before the embarkation fae will be playing.

And if we click a Twitter link ... we have a fair few seconds of bus transit to get to the page at all, and then an additional stop on the bus line every time we scroll down or up on the page. Anything off screen was yanked away and needed to be recovered if we wanted to see it again, and we had to wait for all of that.

And yeah, a long bus trip can be frustrating, but you can at least sleep through it or listen to a podcast or whatever. An incessant series of bus transfers gives you no chance to do that.