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