On-Together: a twelve hour review
Hi! If you've reached this post, just know its part of a series of posts for Blaugust in which I take accountability for my time every day for the month, or at least until school starts. This is not my normal blogging rhythm of two posts a month or so about more substantial topics or places.
Moving on!
Quilt Progress
Almost done! I need to add some borders and then quilt it to backing, but the top is almost complete! I'll use a non-potato camera to photograph it when I'm done, don't worry.
General Goals
Today was arm day! I am slowly getting better in my form and I can move up in weights for certain exercises now. I ate a combination of kale salads and Costco pizza, so that seems fine (the pizza is gone, so now we'll eat better tomorrow.
I Marie Kondo'd all my clothes! I emptied my closet and dresser! I washed and sorted some of my spouse's clothes for donation and added in some of mine that need new homes. It feels great to pull open my dresser drawers and have them actually open all the way and not be filled with stuff that never fit me.
I also deep-cleaned and rearranged the gecko habitat and water changed all my medaka tubs. I have a lot of baby fish in buckets and parents laying eggs - there's a lot going on there I can report on tomorrow.
On-Together
The simplest way to describe this game after two days of compulsive use is that it's an Animal Crossing chat room with a pomodoro timer built in.
Some people work more efficiently while body-doubling. I definitely do IRL, as my beloved work wife is happy to tell you (I will fight for consenual use of the term work wife all day, I am also her work wife, our work-love is valid lol). Does it work here? Hmm. There are lots of servers to join, all with the same maps, and they all have a different vibe. I gravitated towards a bigger, chattier server - Cozy Corner - somehow finding it by fiddling with the voice chat filter to "on" just to see if people were... really using voice chat in a productivity coworking app?
And they are. But what has me hooked on this sweet little game - in which there is very little to do besides fish, change outfits, run your pomodoro timers - is the old school chat room vibe, now augmented with both a discord for the whole game (useful for bug reports etc) and with server specific discords where people are having watch parties and sharing cat pictures. It makes me more aware of what Gen Z culture looks like in practice as an old millenial who literally just downloaded Discord yesterday to troubleshoot some Linux glitches. Online friends are so much more normalized now that I almost feel jealous as someone who was chronically online in 2002.
The way the chat room takes place in a constructed space reminds me of my first real chat home after AOL, WolfHome. I found that as a fifteen year old through a forum I had found through DeviantArt, and I think I made my first PayPal account (through my poor mom I guess?) to pay for WolfHome after it required subscriptions to keep it running.
It's funny that the kind of place-based chatting we managed in 2002 was such a disaster for Meta. From Polygon's review of On-Together:
Since its release on January 19, On-Together has reached a high of around 2,000 concurrent users — but GigaPuff, its creators, say that the release and its previous demo have serviced around 60,000 people. Perhaps these don't sound like massive numbers, compared to the millions sold by blockbusters. But to put this into perspective, one 2023 investigation found that Meta's attempt at the same thing only had around 900 total users over the course of a week. Presumably, that number only got smaller as time went on: Meta plans to shutter its services altogether in February. It's also a higher concurrent peak than live-service games with the backing of small armies and hefty budgets, like Concord and Anthem. It's certainly more than any of its developers ever expected.
There is a part of me that's a little jealous of what's available for young weirdos now, although I can't imagine being a kid or teenager on Discord or growing up among the algorithms.
Anyways! Back to On-Together. It cost ten bucks in the Steam store, lacks major features on Linux (like a desktop overlay where you just see your little character or a table full of your new "coworkers" and a timer in the corner of your screen). There are no in-app purchases, but there is a ticket system you use to buy outfit pieces (there's a GaiaOnline element here). Tickets come from either focus sessions or fishing, and it is very easy to just dick around, chat, buy little hats, and somehow end up in a discord sharing dog pics.
And yet, I got so much done today. It's nice seeing what people are working on - art projects, fitness, reading, computer-touching - and doing a kind of parallel play, with pomodoro focus time with little social or fishing breaks in between. I definitely had more screen time than I'd like to see, but I spent no time on news sites or reddit/bsky/mastodon other than a five minute break this morning. I didn't touch my browser basically all day. My attention was fractured, but fractured between my projects and a single game, not my projects and a thousand tabs.
Anyways, I anticipate that I'll keep using the game and stick to my chatty sweet server I found. If it's too distracting, I'll find a quieter. I anticipate that after school starts I'll use it for art coworking. I've done Zoom coworking groups run by artists and really loved them, this is a better fit for me. Nothing matches IRL parallel play with your friends (I get that from a weekly art night and occasional puzzle night at my house), but this will do.
And if you have this game come to Cozy Corner or invite me to your server! Would love to NOT distract you, I promise.