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.

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.

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”

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.

My understanding is XFCE is lighter weight and simpler. Little to no animations, for example.

https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-cinnamon-mate-xfce/

I am extremely basic and I’m using the XFCE that came with Linux mint. I don’t need anything fancy.

Fine. Sometimes sad. I dated someone with a kid for a while and the good parts were good. But now I’m old so it’s kind of moot.

Right, and you shouldn’t ask a married monogamous person out on a date, either. Never came up for me but is worth keeping in mind! A lot of guys seem to struggle with “she likes me bro she smiled at me” -> “my guy she’s the cashier at work she has to smile at customers.”

You can just ask people out. You can just ask to kiss someone. I was in my mid 20s when someone told me the first one, and late 20s when someone told me the second one. Dating got a lot easier after each revelation.

Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like “the best metal from Colorado” or “a deep dive into acid jazz”. They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.

Also seeing who’s playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I’ll check out band B. I saw “Year of the Cobra” play with “The Well” and it was a good show, and I bought their album.

best solution could probably be good public transport in the city and self driving cars in the countryside.

You don’t even need self driving if it’s mostly just the countryside. That’s just not a lot of people and the resources required to get it working would be better spent on building mass transit and walkable areas in cities where people actually live (and thus where culture and economy actually happen)

Among other reasons, caps chill usage. A lot of user content would not get shared because “ehh I don’t want to waste my data for the month”

One of my friends wanted kids. She has a full time job in software and does side gigs like bartending. Can’t afford kids, so she didn’t have any. It’s sad.

Meanwhile the ultra wealthy have more money than they can spend.

Nationalize health care. Basic income. Public housing. Enforce existing tax laws. Tax or prohibit bullshit like “I’ll get a loan against my assets but that’s not technically income so I don’t pay anything”. Break up monopolies.

It’s not you. Google has been getting worse.

https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/google-search-is-losing-the-fight-with-seo-spam-study-says/

I live in a walkable city so I have a lot of options by just going outside on foot.

The park. Sometimes for a walk, sometimes for a bike ride.

Grocery store or something nearby. Get a snack or something for dinner.

Thrift store, though that’s a bike ride or train ride.

Library. Just browse the stacks.

Bookstore, less often, but sometimes it’s fun to see what they have.

Record shop, rarely, because I don’t have a record player but a few friends do, and I might see something they’d like.

Sometimes I just walk around without a goal. See what there is to see around here.

There was a (fiction) book I was called “all the birds in the sky”. I really liked it. Highly recommend.

One of the plot threads is a rich tech bro character that’s like “the world is doomed we need to abandon it for somewhere else. Better pour tons of resources into this sci-fi sounding project”. And I’m just screaming at the book “use that money for housing and transport and clean energy you absolute donkey”.

There are a lot of well understood things we could be doing to make the world better, but they’re difficult for idiotic political reasons. Racism, nimbyism, emotional immaturity, etc.