[Adelie]

⬆️ My (shy) girlfriend drew a picture of the Quest Master!
submitted 2 hours ago by /u/PM_ME_UR_SNICKLES to /r/drawing
⬆️ mahoushoujokae explains the difference between gamer girl and gamer boy bathwater
submitted 43 minutes ago by /u/faucetdad69 to /r/LivestreamFail
⬆️ Lamenolai joins Nabias and Jawan in shelter-in-place order
submitted 7 hours ago by /u/Antiviral_Antelope to /r/news
⬆️ Worth the hike. Sunrise, Tuun Mountains. [oc] [1920x1080] [ig: snuggleapingunetoday]
submitted 7 hours ago by /u/ckj0001 to /r/earthporn

The unthinkable had happened. Never, not in her entire nineteen years of life on God's green earth, had she event considered the possibility that this day would come - and yet here she was, sick of the internet.

Oh, there were cat videos aplenty to watch; there were still pages upon pages of stories she had yet to read. If she felt academically inclined, an entire library of lessons would welcome her, offering expertise in subjects ranging from elementary arithmetic to the linguistic nuances of tone sandhi. If she wanted to indulge in baser pleasures, there were hours of recordings of big-tittied anime girls whispering sweet nothings into virtual ears. Some internet celebrity was having a catfight with another internet celebrity. Some popular band just released their newest hit.

And not one of these things stoked even the tiniest bit of excitement - not even interest - within her.

[Adelie]

To say that she was sick of the internet was a rather twistedly apt description.

If not for the sickness rampaging across the continent and the enforced shelter-in-place orders issued to reduce disease transmission, she would certainly not have wasted so many days browsing Reddit rabbitholes, watching countless makeup palette review videos, and reading even the most garbage of fanfiction.

Or, well - at least she would've wasted less of her time.

Or, well - at least it would've been her choice, okay? A girl had the right to indulge herself, every now and then or all the time.

Whatever she had done or could've done, though, it didn't change the very simple reality in front of her - she was stuck at home, had been so for quite some time, and as far as she could tell, would continue thus for the foreseeable feature. And with the previously unquenchable wellspring of the internet dried up, she had no idea how she'd possibly entertain herself for the rest of her days.

[Adelie]

Even Elysium, the MMORPG she had played religiously for five years straight, barely held any interest for her.

Perhaps it was the flood of new players, no doubt spurred on by their own surfeit of spare time, who derived their entertainment from spamming local chat channels and sending her vacuous - and occasionally creepy -  messages; perhaps it was the server instability from too many users that kept kicking her off at the most inopportune times.

She'd log on anyways, of course - she wouldn't want to break her login rewards streak - but it was just to collect dailies and check in with her clan members before logging off.

[CLAN] Chi Squared: !!!
[CLAN] Chi Squared: ven check your DMs already

Not that she had to, considering that she had all of them on other social media already - including the messages that Chi was currently blowing up her phone with, and which she had been so blithely ignoring for the past ten minutes or so in favor of sentimental ennui.

[Adelie]

chi-korita: Vennnnnn.
chi-korita: Oh Ven, nearest and dearest to my heart, I am in dire need of your discerning eyes.
chi-korita uploaded image0.jpg [1.2MB].
chi-korita uploaded image0_final.jpg [1.1MB].
chi-korita uploaded image0_final_final.jpg [1.2MB].
chi-korita uploaded image0_flowers_final_final_final_really.jpg [1.1MB].
chi-korita: which one of these looks the best?
chi-korita: pls answer before i die from the virus

An extensive spread of screenshots greeted her as she opened her favorite chat app, each one showing a familiar website - Chi's pride and joy, the Elysium helpsite she maintained single-handedly.

It wasn't so obvious what these screenshots were supposed to prove, though. To her so-called discerning eyes, they all looked roughly identical.

Squinting a little, Ven leaned into her laptop to play this elaborate game of spot-the-difference. A single pixel here, a color shift there, a swap from one generic sans-serif font to another generic sans-serif font - she couldn't help but wonder if she'd actually received four copies of the exact same file and her isolation-addled mind was just filling in the blanks.

[Adelie]

For that matter, she couldn't be sure that Chi's isolation-addled mind wasn't playing tricks on her. Maybe this whole thing was just someone's idea of a sick joke.

...hahahaha. Well, anything to entertain herself, at this point.

vennnnn: chi
vennnnn: chi what is this
vennnnn: why did you send me four copies of the same file
chi-korita: Ha! You say that...
chi-korita: But in fact, each of these designs is subtly different!
chi-korita: And I need your help to decide which one to use!

Those words did very little to convince her that her friend had in fact not gone insane from being cooped up inside all day, and that this entire debacle was not the product of some vitamin C-induced fever dream.

If this were any other day, she might've ignored the whole thing - Chi would either recover her sanity eventually, or simply find someone else to look at her screenshot album. But truth be told, she was hungry for some degree of human contact - and at the very least, this was more interesting than rereading her favorite manga for the sixth time this week.

[Adelie]

vennnnn: okay okay
vennnnn: can we get in a call or something at least
vennnnn: it's been a week since i heard a human voice
chi-korita started a call.

"Has it really been that long?" Chi's voice sounded in her ears, a little distorted by network static - but she still sounded the same way she always did. A little tired, more than a little grumpy, but still putting on a welcoming front. "My god, it's really been a week since they cancelled classes."

"I know," Ven groaned, leaning back in her chair to find a more comfortable position to talk from. "It's so nice to hear someone's voice again, though."

"Yeah, I never took myself for a social animal until now," Chi said, laughing gently. "I never thought the day would come when I'd actually want to talk to people."

"Same here," she responded. "I never thought the day would come when I'd actually be sick of the Internet."

[Adelie]

"God," she continued, punctuating her statement with a long, exasperated sigh. "I really want to go over to your place right about now."

"Come over," Chi responded. "You'll just have to maintain a six-foot social distance at all times. You can sit on one side of the living room, and I'll sit on the other side, and we can just shout at each other across the coffee table."

It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but she couldn't help but feel just a little tempted. An actual, face-to-distant-face conversation? Eye contact? What luxury. "I'll make you dinner to repay your kindness," she offered, half-seriously - then realized the obvious punchline. "But you'll have to quarantine it for three days before you can eat it."

[Adelie]

"Oh no!" Chi exclaimed in mock horror. "My cereal will get soggy!"

"Hey, hey," she chided, matching her friend's mock horror with mock anger. "I can cook things other than cereal, I'll have you know. My pureed instant ramen soup is a delicacy recognized by even the most picky of gourmets."

"Ha," Chi said, but she didn't seem inclined to continue their game of back-and-forth quips and comments. "Honestly, though, I've actually got nothing to eat but cereal right now. I was thinking about making a trip to the store tomorrow, but going outside is ... well."

That - hadn't really been something she'd been keeping in mind, actually. Mentally, she tallied up how many groceries she still had left, and came up woefully short. "Same," she confessed. "Let's go buy groceries together - standing six feet apart, of course."

[Adelie]

"Sure," Chi responded, a little more readily than she'd expected. "But you might be out of luck anyways - I think grocery stores aren't allowed to have more than a few people inside at a time, so they're letting people in one-by-one."

"That sucks," she said. Her voice petered out into a bit of an awkward silence as she struggled to find an appropriate response, or failing that, another direction for the conversation to continue in.

That was the problem with this quarantine, really - not just the lack of social interaction, but the inability for what little social interaction you got to be meaningful. A conversation was meant to be back-and-forth, give-and-take, call-and-response, after all; you asked a question, the other person asked one back.

But no one had anything interesting to say. You'd ask someone Hey, what've you been up to? and they'd just say - they could only say - Not much, just staying at home. And you'd be like What a coincidence, so have I, and that would be the end of that.

[Adelie]

"So," she said, finally remembering a subject she could bring up to drag this conversation back on track. "Those screenshots - what was I supposed to look at, anyways? Because they really did all look the same to me."

"Oh, those," Chi replied dismissively. "I was thinking about redesigning the website, but I couldn't decide which one looked the best."

Scrolling through that set of images once again, Ven inspected them carefully and confirmed that despite Chi's claims to the contrary, they looked exactly the same. "Are you ... are you entirely sure you sent me the right pictures? I really can't tell the difference."

"I spent a lot of time on these," Chi said, feigned outrage creeping into her voice - at least, she was pretty sure it was feigned. "Don't demean the fruits of my inglorious labor like that!" Yep, definitely feigned.

[Adelie]

"Anyways, it doesn't really matter what you think of it," Chi continued - although that didn't really sound like the case, considering she'd just dropped another equally identical file entitled image0_final_but_like_for_real_this_time.jpg in Ven's inbox. "I sent these over to another friend, too, and he typed up an entire essay detailing the pros and cons of each design."

"Really?"

Before she had a chance to offer her opinion on the matter, Chi cut in. "Really. Five paragraph essay and everything." She paused for a moment, likely to glance over whatever literary opus she had been sent. "Oh my god," she said, almost cackling. "There's even references."

"Please tell me you can share this," Ven said. "You can't just tell me about something like this and leave me hanging."

[Adelie]

"Let me check," Chi said. A brief span of typing sounds followed, rendered intermittent by her microphone cutting in and out. "Please enjoy."

chi-korita: [6:38PM] debian: DESIGN AS COMMUNICATION, an in-depth analysis of CHI's user interface designs by MIRNY
chi-korita: [6:38PM] debian: Design is a conversation between designer and user - good design whispers, providing functionality without drawing attention to itself; bad design screams its failings and inadequacy. Such is the paradigm laid out in Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, a seminal work in the study of human-centered design that is studied in universities around the world, including our very own University of Barakka, Jawan. In it, Norman details seven fundamental design principles - structure, simplicity, visibility, feedback, tolerance, and reuse.
chi-korita: [6:38PM] debian: This essay shall analyze the four example designs provided by Ms. Chi Mirzakhani and their conformity with the seven fundamental principles of user interface design.

"Hmm," Ven mused aloud, skimming through the remaining paragraphs. They all continued approximately in this style, complete with quotes and citations just as Chi had promised. "I'd give it a six out of ten, I suppose."

[Adelie]

"That's pretty harsh," Chi said, a touch of genuine surprise showing in her voice. "I'm glad you weren't peer reviewing my essays when I was a mere underclassman." She paused for a moment, and Ven wondered briefly if she'd been too harsh. She'd given her honest assessment - but given that this whole thing was a joke, albeit an incredibly high-effort one, perhaps she was taking it too seriously. "So tell me, Professor Ven, where does this essay fail?"

"Um," Ven said, considering her options. "It's the kind of essay I'd expect from someone trying to hit a word count, you know? It's wordy and it doesn't say a lot."

"I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be wordy and not say a lot," Chi said. "Or at the very least, it's not like I can expect much more of it."

"A ridiculous answer to a ridiculous question," Ven said.

[Adelie]

Ignoring Ven's comment on the validity of the question she had initially posed, Chi continued, "Either way, it's better that what I would've written in twenty minutes, that's for sure. It's really a good thing I don't have to write essays any more."

"Speak for yourself," Ven responded, thinking about the surfeit of essays her professors enjoyed fostering on their hapless students. She was surprised, honestly, that there hadn't been more. Assigning a few term papers and leaving it at that seemed like an excellent way to deal with not being able to hold proper classes or attend lectures. "I'm actually supposed to be writing one right now, but well - I just really don't have the motivation to work on it."

"Ah, the sad fate of liberal arts students," Chi crowed. "Come join me in pure math, where we have no words, only numbers."

"Oh, come on," Ven said. "I saw your homework lying around, last time I came over. Your proofs are just as long as my essays, and there's no numbers - just the entire Greek alphabet! "

[Adelie]

"Okay, okay," Chi relented. "That - well, I can't really say that's wrong."

Pressing her advantage, Ven continued. "I'd say with 90% certainty that this was written by one of your fellow math majors." That didn't sound too harsh, did it? She didn't mean to pick a fight; she just figured that the natural course of the conversation was to joke about the perennial rivalry between liberal arts majors and hard science majors.

"Ha," Chi said. She didn't sound offended, thankfully - if anything, she sounded rather satisfied. The reason for that quickly became apparent. "Then you'd be wrong! He's actually a computer science major."

"Oh," Ven said. Something clicked in her head, between the name on the essay and the description. "Wait, is this that senpai of yours you're always talking about? The one you're always harassing for help?"