Those people aren’t a good match for you (or maybe anyone).

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.

“would you rather have nothing to eat, or poison?”

If you eat nothing, maybe you can figure out a better solution with your remaining time. If you eat poison, you’re probably going to be too sick (or dead) to improve things.

Trump is poison.

Also Biden did improve some things, so it’s less “nothing” and more “some crackers”. Sure, a full meal would be better.

t’s not stupidity, it was a clear option between something the American people know does not work, and something that might work.

There is no reasonable expectation that Trump would “work” for anyone outside of some very wealthy and grifters. So, yes, voting for Trump is stupid.

Accelerationists can fuck off.

Satire is dead. Unfortunately, this guy somehow survives despite his best efforts to get sick.

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.

Yeah I don’t think anything will change until disruptive protests happen. Like, republicans resigning from office because they’re afraid.

Unfortunately, the far-right has almost all the money and guns, and a lot of bootlickers. And no one wants to throw their life away by shooting some red hats senators or billionaires.

There are too many idiots and bootlickers in the US for progress to be easy.

This is very plausible. And an argument for why we shouldn’t have the ultra rich. No one should be able to do such a thing.

I recently got scolded for saying we shouldn’t work nights and weekends for free at work. (Everyone is salary).

The boss was telling me it demoralizes my coworkers to say that. And it “doesn’t hurt me if they decide to put in extra time”.

The most naive theory of labor, or just lying?

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”

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.

Politics are complicated.

People are fucking stupid and care more about in-group good-feels than reality or policy.

Many Trump supporters like feeling like they are part of a larger group. That’s it. That’s really, deeply, stupid. Like, dogs are smarter than that. But they see the symbols and the faces and feel good about themselves.

Some people are deeply racist or sexist and such, but a lot of people just want to feel like they’re part of a group.

My parents were strict in many ways, but the ones that bother me were the ones that didn’t have a sound reason behind them.

Like, “You have to be in bed at this time so you can sleep enough to feel ok in the morning” was fine. So was “Do your homework first, then go play so you don’t have to worry about it, and you don’t get surprised by it taking longer and you run out of time”.

But sometimes they’d be like "you can’t play video games but you can watch TV ", and that felt weird. I think they were just more comfortable with tv because they knew it.

So I guess my questions are, do you explain your reasons and motivations?

Do you ever back down if your child makes a compelling argument?

People are stupid and value in group solidarity more than anything else.

The only way forward is to make them feel like a member of a better group, or violence.

I blame the people who voted for trump, personally. I’d be happy to watch the leopards eat their faces, but unfortunately we’re all stuck with them.

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.

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.