I would bet there are a lot of people on these forums that have put themselves into a position to have this happen to them, be it at work or playing a game. Sitting for long periods of time is fairly dangerous, the fact that a lot of people dodge that bullet is luck not brains.
I’m guessing you never sat in a chair for longer than an hour or two though right?
I work in a healthcare system with two hospitals, one of which is a regional hospital which means we get cases from other community and smaller hospitals. Maybe I am desensitized to this sort of thing.
I can say with 100% certainty I have never sat in a chair for more than a couple of hours without moving, shifting, drinking, checking the mail, whatever. There was a woman who died in a long airplane ride from a blood clot in the leg that was all over the news for having not moved too… this stuff is not as rare as you think.
40 hours without eating / getting up is pretty stupid.
Here’s a regulation - no one can stay more than 24 hours in an internet cafe without a minimum 1 hour break. I’m sure the number of people impacted would be incredibly small.
It’s hard for me to believe two people can die in tragic garden shear accidents in a place the size of Denmark. You obviously have a murderer on the loose with a green thumb.
Or maybe the plants have something against her. If someone is aiming to cut off your limbs with a garden shear, wouldn’t you do something as well?
Is it to early to ask what happened to his gear?
Statistics have always freaked me the hell out - We can predict pretty much with a +10 -10 certainity how many will die each from driving accidents for instance… People taken as a whole are apparently really easy to figure out.
As for garden shear accidents - its freaky, and thats kinda my point. Freaky stuff happens all the time.
Think about how many people die watching TV each year. Must be hundreds of thousands.
What I don’t understand is how the people in question can ignore the warning signs from body and mind. I mean, it’s not like you don’t get CLEAR signals telling you it’s probably best to take a break.
Maybe the real cause is that they have some kind of block preventing them from being properly warned by their biological systems.
I don’t think we can compare freak shear accidents with this case. In one case, it’s an accident, in another case, I think sitting down for an extended period gets increasingly risky. It’s just stupidity rather than negligence/freak accident.
Asimov knew this…
Yeah, I am more and more convinced that psychohistory could actually work.
It is the same as when a footballer dies on the field.
Pressure, heart disease that is unknown, death.
Noone dies from not eating for 40 hours, unless their food intake was already was poisonous/erroneous (I.e. food imports from mainland China)
I doubt that he died from starvation, but not eating might have been a contributing factor to a stress-related heart-attack.
If you’re overweight enough, you can sit in a bed for a year without eating and you won’t die. You might feel like you’re in hell until you get used to it, but you won’t die. There have been many old, frail people in history who can and did sit for longer than forty hours without food, water, or sleep, sometimes because they had to, sometimes because they chose to, but never to score points by running through a virtual maze like rats, smashing piñatas and hoping for a reward, as if their life depended on it. They were working towards something more real, and it sustained them and gave them life. Literally.
The ones who die are the ones who either don’t realize or don’t care that they have been losing their life for a long time. Some people do realize it, and are more or less explicitly living for death. That’s when they start straining for an ephemeral kind of virtual immortality. At that point their life is already gone, and the only question is how long it will take for someone or something to administer the coup de grâce. How does it work? You forget what life is and rationalize your own death until you lose all awareness of what is happening around you and within yourself. Your core hardens, your heart fossilizes, you stop caring about reality so much and forget how to take it seriously or why you even should, your life narrows down to a point of light on a screen, and then the point of light is taken away. Probably at random. Repeat until cardiac arrest. You always knew you were going to die for real some day. You tried not to think about it or what it meant, so it snuck up on you. Boom. Heart-shot.
Have you ever felt a pang of real dread at the possibility of something bad happening to your achievement in a game? I have. It was never enough to stop me from playing. I could stop any time I wanted, but I didn’t really want to stop. When I did stop for a while I would always come back. There were too many chumps that I knew I could beat. They didn’t deserve the success they got when I wasn’t around to show them how bad they were. I just liked being right, but it was almost as though I enjoyed culling the herd.
There are a non-trivial number of programmers who look up one day and realize that they never want to work in front of a computer again as long as they live. It’s not because they found a scientific study that proves computers and/or video games are correlated with heart disease. Their decision to quit and do something else can be rationalized in various ways (and almost always will be, given the nature of people who get into programming), but at bottom it’s just a sense that hardcore = dead, along with a sense of not being personally ready for that. Perhaps they realize that they are stealing other people’s lives by devising “user experiences” that amount to virtual tar babies, soma, or just cruel and unusual punishment (how much of you life is wasted trying to get some complex and finicky piece of software to do something useful? how much time do you spend working to pay for a stack of games that you hope will make you happy or at least distract you?), and destroying their own souls in the process.
Call it the voice of conscience. It’s not a rational thing. It’s the ones who don’t listen to that sense and wait for a comprehensive rational explanation that are in trouble. In a way, it’s like the movie Suicide Club. The director couldn’t figure out why his friend committed suicide. You can’t figure it out rationally, but the voice is there. You either do what it takes to hear that voice or you don’t. If you don’t, you’ll eventually follow a trail of sentimental cruelty until you’re holding hands and stepping off the roof with everyone else (because it’s by far the easier way). If you do, you’ll wake up and realize that something is trying to kill you and it’s time to start running away as fast as you can, whether you understand what’s happening or not, whether anyone else you know realizes it or not (because many won’t).
Some fates are worse than death. Most people only want to look down the food chain and laugh at the dumb sheep. The harder core look UP the food chain until they see the reaper, and then try score immortality points by pushing as many sheep off the roof as they can. They see the reaper as a force of nature, they seek to become a force of nature themselves, and so they become more and more like animals, losing the ability to see anything beyond the reaper. They have forgotten that El Diablo is a liar, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and that no one can beat him at his own game.
That’s one heck of a first post.
Wow… not only damning gamers but also damning all kinds of programmers. Agreed, one heck of a first post.
My question is did he get up at some point while writing that post, or was it the last thing he wrote before he died sitting at his chair?
I think he’s really showing that he has… layers.
Maybe that’s why I cried just a little while reading his post.