Question of the week: Internet Outage!
It’s time for Question of the Week, which is designed to inspire interesting discussion of enjoyable topics.
This week’s topic – your home Internet goes out, which means you can’t use the Internet until the ISP gets around to fixing it. What do you do instead?
I realized that the question breaks down into two ways – if the Internet goes down while I’m working, or if the Internet goes down while I want to relax.
If the Internet goes down while I’m working, it’s not necessarily a huge deal. If I’m writing or editing, everything is downloaded locally. So I would just keep on writing and editing until the Internet came back up. If the Internet goes down while I’m in the middle of, say, uploading an ebook or an audiobook or setting up ads or changing my website, that is in fact super annoying. However, I usually work on multiple books at a time – right now I’m working on SHIELD OF DARKNESS, HALF-ORC PALADIN, and GHOST IN THE TOMBS. So if I’m working on an online task and the Internet goes out, then I’ll switch to one of the books I’m currently working on and make progress with that.
If the Internet goes down while I want to relax, I’ll read a paper book (I still have lots of those!) or watch a DVD. When OPPENHEIMER came out on Blu-Ray, Christopher Nolan rather famously said that you should get it on Blu-Ray so no evil streaming service could take it away. Obviously he had a financial motive for that statement, but he wasn’t wrong. So if there’s a movie I really like, I will attempt to get it on DVD or Blu-Ray.
The inspiration for this question was that I wanted to play STARFIELD, but the Xbox network services were down, and I didn’t feel like digging through the settings to get offline mode to work. So I wrote this blog post instead. 🙂
-JM
If the Internet is down, I have many things to do. During leisure and recovery time, I can read, play games and watch movies just fine without the Internet. Most of my computer games are old and do not require a connection in order to function. WoW is the only exception to that, and I keep that around as much to chat with friends and family who play it.
If I need to use the Internet – banking, ordering, directions, etc. – my phone can act as a hot spot, so as long as there’s phone service, I have (slow) connectivity.
I am lucky enough to live on an island where all the internet is via a fibre network and we have minimum connection of 500Mbit/s and we only have failures once a year at most and our phone network is about to change to 5G
Mostly I would listen to my son complaining that he cannot watch YouTube videos, then tell him that when I was his age we only had 4 TV channels. After that I would wonder when I became more like my parents.
I do have plenty of books, board games, dvds and offline computer games if it’s a long term outage.
My dad does the same thing, lol.
I usually download my study material and video lectures on YT beforehand, just in case the net goes out. Has saved me a lot of times.
This would be my day! Over the years we have amassed nearly 5TB worth of movies and TV shows from Tape Videorecorder, DVD Videorecorder and Online Videorecorder. Also we have a lot of DVDs. But my family rather streams, even if we have it offline already.
For Music we have a lot of CDs and MP3s.
We would have an outage, if a caterpillar would cut the cabel during driveway refurbishing. The last time this happened, before smartphones were available, I used a Mini WLAN Router as backup.
Now I just bought a 5G smartphone, which can act as a hotspot for up to 10 devices and has USB-Tethering for my router. I tested both modes and the speed was quite good.
My data was over for the day so I read one of your books! I often have these days and I usually catch up on more homework or read some book.
Have you watched Oppenheimer yet? I sadly missed the opportunity to watch it in the theatres, but I streamed it recently (on a legit OTT, of course, lol) and it was honestly well worth the hype! I read the screenplay before the movie for some reason and it added to the experience for some reason. Nolan’s screenplays always make for a nice experience!
Ps. I also found Barbie worth the hype. Didn’t knew beforehand what it really was about, and enjoyed it soo much!
I did see it in the theatre, and included it in my movie roundup for summer 2023:
https://www.jonathanmoeller.com/writer/?p=16647