Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.

Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.

All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.

If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.

Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.

Lots of options.

Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.

Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.

I get the impression that some people have such decision fatigue, asking them to do something seemingly trivial is akin to asking someone without limbs to pick up a spoon.

People’s brains don’t work good.

Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.

That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.

I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.

A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.

I knew a journalist who said she used it for work. Apparently that’s just where a critical mass of people refuse to leave.

But also she’d send me stupid memes from Twitter.

Never used Facebook much. Nor Myspace before it. Seemed like it had some obvious pitfalls that everyone else was ignoring.

Used Twitter for a little while, but it was just making me mad. Then horrible guy bought it, so I deleted the already abandoned account.

Instagram also seemed like a source of feeling bad, so I never used it much.

I left reddit recently. It had some good content but the ownership sucks. With general Internet search getting bad, losing reddit sucks. Like, I searched yesterday for how to disable a setting in some app, and landed on some AI slop website that told me to write a letter to my local news station.

So this is all that’s left for me. It’s frustrating that most people don’t give a shit and will just move on to the next private platform. I had a friend who was generally smart and successful, but she just didn’t give a shit about this kind of thing. She wanted her easy entertainment, so she was on all the major platforms. Mastodon “didn’t have good content” so she didn’t use it.

as an almost maximally privileged person (cis straight etc), i want my whining fellows to shut the fuck up. Just stop. Stop taking up all the god damn space. Just be quiet. It’s okay not to be included in every scene all the time.

Your point about not assuming people are straight by default is valid. But I mostly just want some cis-het folks to stop embarrassing me by being fucking insufferable.

A dark souls kind of slow paced combat game, but built for co-op. Except I don’t have any friends who are on the same skill level and schedule.

More broadly, I really want more games that you can play co-op in where the players are vastly different skill levels, but it’s still fun. I don’t know how to solve this.

I can imagine like a game where one person is playing dark souls and the other is playing candy crush, and they interact somehow. Like making matches in one give estus in the other, and killing bosses gives stuff.

Basically I want to play games with my frienda that don’t play the same games, somehow.

I don’t think I understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps some examples would help.

I do think some people hold themselves to too low of a standard, though. There’s a song I like that has the line "I don’t want you to romanticize falling the fuck apart ". I think some people are just like “well, I ghosted my friend and didn’t do my tasks at work and didn’t feed my cat but life is hard am I right? No other way I could be. Time to go drink alone and watch TV”

My mom is also deeply paranoid and superstitious about the phone. I’ll be like “why don’t you delete this second weather app you don’t like that’s sending you all these notifications you ignore?” And she’ll be like “NO YOU’LL BREAK SOMETHING IT HAS TO TO BE LIKE THIS”

Jira , mostly. It kind of sucks but it’s what we use.

Sublime text for quick notes.

Some people like notion but I often find it redundant with jira, and it’s often write-only memory.

It was okay.

Didn’t really like the ending(s). I think one of the lead guys was like “cyberpunk can’t have happy endings”, so I guess they never read Neuromancer.

Gameplay was so-so, but I fixed some egregious problems with a mod. People who thought it was going to be life changing were living in a dream land.

Played the games. Not interested.

A new story in the setting could be good

Retelling the game sounds bad. Conveniently, the reasons why are nicely outlined in the article.

What about the people walking around with armbands hats, signalling they’re enthusiastic members of the party?

Guild wars 2 is the only MMO that didn’t bore or annoy me.

• feels like a real video game. You can jump and dodge and stuff
• much quality of life stuff is free and baked in. Deposit most stuff to the bank from anywhere, craft from the bank, etc
• minimal gear grind. The tier you can buy for cheap is good enough. The next tier is a small improvement.
• generally helpful folks
• lots of different stuff to do.

but I doubt it would change anyone’s vote.

The hypocrisy is annoying. A non Democrat has something mildly spicy and it’s all pearl clutching and condemnations. A republican assaults a woman and it’s “oh well she had it coming”

The right wing seems to have “in group” as the primary condition for judgement. Everything else is secondary. That is a horrible moral framework.

If we’re doing quotes, this Sartre one is good:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity

Basically they often know they’re being absurd, but they don’t care. They use language for power and effect, not truth.

I switched to linux because windows 10 is going end-of-life, and I can’t upgrade to windows 11 even if I wanted to.

It’s been fine, other than some trouble getting mint to dual boot the first time.

Most of the time, people change their minds when they see the source as coming from their in-group. If your professor respected you, they’re more likely to listen to you. If they see you as some damn hippy out-group, it doesn’t matter how many facts or studies or testimonies you have.

It’s kind of a fundamental problem with humanity.

They could be. They chose not to.

It’s not that hard to be a decent person. Listen to other people. Respect their boundaries.

Time spent with friends and partners.

Wrapped under a blanket with someone I was really into, playing a game together, watching a show, or just talking, was really nice.