It’s just like any other hobby, you have to see and decide for yourself! All I can say as a person who’s been playing video games for 27 years and loves them for both their mechanics and their artistic potential is that so far it has been time well spent!

To start, i’d first think about what kind of games tempt you most. You have a wide array of genres from which to choose, like cerebral real-time strategy or 4x games (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), narrative and player expression centric role-playing games, action-packed shooters, or agile and clever platformers.

Then, you can use storefronts like Steam or Epic and run general searches based on genres - I’d recommend sorting according to top sellers/most purchased, as score-based sorting isn’t always reliable.

At the end of it all, however, the most important factor is whatever tempts you in any way. Steam (this is what I use most of the time) offers Demos for a lot of games nowadays, so you should be able to try pretty much whatever tempts you! Be it flashy graphics, an interesting story hook, or just sheer bloodlust, everything is valid!

I’ll leave a list of games I think would serve as a gentle introduction to this hobby below - they’re also not resource intensive, so you should be able to play them on any consumer laptop (or smartphone, some of them!):

• Stardew Valley - management-like game, you have to administrate a farm. But there’s a lot of extra complexity I won’t spoil

• Cloudpunk - combination of cyberpunk delivery person simulator and role-playing game, I’ve found it both relaxing and gripping!

• Cultist Simulator - it’s technically a card game, but what you actually do is balance having a socially acceptable life with investigating incomprehensible forces and leading a cult

• Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic I and II - these two are meat-and-potatoes role-playing games with really solid stories, well-written and presented characters, a neat progression system which sees you unlocking awesome Force powers and/or other valuable perks, and the combat, I find, is the perfect mix of engaging and lenient

• Rocket League - this is as a taste of faster-paced action, basic multiplayer interactions, and relatively high-end graphis - it’s football with cars, but awesome!

As an extra note, you may notice I’ve left links from everywhere. That’s because you’ll have to select a game storefront (it’s a whole thing nowadays, but you really don’t need to interact with that side of the hobby if you don’t want to…). The storefronts share most of their libraries of games, but there are a few exceptions, so it’s best to check them all out before sticking with one. Some examples of such:

• Steam is the most popular and is good, but you can’t run games without running Steam, plus it periodically needs to connect to the internet. Things are fairly priced, the community features are nice, the community is ok, frequent sales. They also offer a no-questions full refund if you choose to do so within two hours of play time, so that’s a way to try out games without Demos.

• GOG (Good Old Games) is basically Steam, less meaty. However, the main strongpoint is that, beyond installing the game through their platform, that game then exists as its own independent entity, not requiring any periodic validation through an internet connection (unless the game itself is online), no shady 3rd party software installed alongside the game to “protect it from piracy,” etc. The games are as yours as they could possibly be in a digital-only environment.

• Epic wants to be Steam’s direct rival, so their storefront has many of the same features, but it’s not as popular within the community. I honestly have no opinion about them.

Other than that, all I can say is try to explore the hobby, check out gaming outlets, watch Lets-Plays on YouTube, and you can always lean on the online community for suggestions and tips! Also applicable to myself!

Slap them even without the million Euros! Slap them with luke-warm fish! Just slap them! Repeatedly!

Honestly, considering how much of a clown Alex Jones was, they have their work cut out for them if they want to compete at comedic levels!

Either way, this may be the best news I’ve heard all year, thank you!

I very much recommend it if you manage to find some!

I remember it being entirely unique as far as ice cream goes. I even remember it having a bit of that characteristic spicy kick to it.

Edit: tried looking around the internet for any clues as to kiwi ice cream producers, but I mostly found recipes for home-made (which is not a bad idea, ngl!). All I can remember about it is that it wasn’t pre-packaged - always got it served in scoops, on the spot. So, yeah… may actually be “extinct” :(

Kiwi. Don’t even know if they make kiwi flavoured ice cream anymore, as I haven’t had any in decades.

Yes, that’s my favourite aspect about it, the interactivity between the various instances and how distinctly unique each instance seems to have become in terms of ethos. It’s wonderful to see so many different ‘tribes’ and be able to interact with all of them!

Had a Facebook account I completely ignored (set it up for my first girlfriend and we exclusively used Yahoo Messenger) then turned into a music dump, then deleted. I honestly never saw the point of Facebook, not with apps like WhatsApp or even standard SMS evolving as they have, even back then (talking about the 2010s).

Had an Instagram account for about 3 months - surprisingly decent source of grotesque/morbid art! Again, saw no point in this, and Reddit felt superior in all ways.

Mainlined Reddit for a good couple of years, mostly during the Pandemic. By the time I got into it, one could feel its bulk, so to speak. Sure 99.7% of Reddit were the users, but even so, it felt as though subreddit quirks and in-jokes had ossiffied into tennets by that point. Loved it, but it felt constraining here and there.

Switched to Lemmy a couple of months after deleting my Reddit account when shit went down, and it’s all I’ve been using and plan on using. Unless one counts news aggregators as social platforms.

I love this scroungy, spit-and-duct tape feel of the fediverse, to be very honest. Feels like the days when we used to group chat on local network sharing apps, like it’s just the neighbourhood kids around. And it seems to not be dissipating even with the huge increase in users, which is a good sign. Plus the obvious lack of curation other than baseline moderation and/or personal grudges is always nice!

I look more like Johnny Depp if he were born in Eastern Europe and didn’t wear long hair=)))

Can confirm this, the amount of genuine attention I received while losing my mind talking about Warhammer 40k with dates is unbelievable!

Of course, you should probe a bit beforehand. I got lucky and my dates were pretty much all into fantasy stuff, so 40k wasn’t a huge leap, but there was no interest expressed in 40k other than specifically to hear me talk about it.

Edit: I know this is a meme subject, but I’m dead serious about it.

Thank you, always good to have more lists! Been reading up on things like this for a while, among other things, and I’ve already noticed some unfamiliar names in your post!

May whatever deity who may or may not be active hear you and decide that it’d be fun to watch!

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is having a massive attention crave panic because everyone switched to Signal.

We have the potential for far better, yes.

The real question is, will enough people want for us to get better…

This’ll also extend far beyond American borders. We’re all in for some… interesting times…

Grifters, rejoice!

I am becoming convinced that trying to establish a generally applicable age limit is the wrong way to go about these types of things, but instead we must focus on identifying the specific developmental markers which represent each phase and focus on those. We should teach parents to “read” their children’s progress and determine dynamically, based on both general data and individual empirical observations. Some children may not be ready for Social Media even at 16, while others who have more natural social inclinations may be hampered by a delayed introduction of these realities.

We’ve been treating the subject of children like they’re a bulk product, but they’re just as individually specific as any other human being. They just lack a fully defined brain structure and the contextualisation and understanding which come from life experience, but I doubt anyone could argue they don’t have a personality or cognitive uniqueness.

Note: I am not talking about the age of consent! That one should always be a thing!

Exactly, it’s like playing a video game. And no matter how immersive the game, reality always demands its cut.

Welcome to The Problem!

I believe our societal models are the reason. It’s not just that all people are self-absorbed and greedy, it’s that everything we have built for ourselves pushes us toward being just that, from start to finish.

We have slowly snubbed out true values, like a sense of justice (by this I mean fairness mostly, true Justice, not Electric Chair Jamboree), empathy, collaboration, soulfulness, all of the noble qualities of humanity, and have slowly replaced them with therapy shopping and a fixation with achievement in order to cover up that which is missing from within ourselves.

Then again, some are just… empty. Devoid of personal meaning, which is why they want to empty everyone around them in order to not be alone with that hole in their souls.

I’m here for this! I’m not sure if I’m too stoned, or not stoned enough to even be able to fully comprehend the question, but I’m 100% here for this!

I have 2.1k hours in Warframe and it seems that counter’s not gonna stop any time soon… Took a two-year break after some grind-heavy new content, returned to catch up with the updates and it’s all I’ve been playing for 5 days now.

Edit: on second thought, I don’t really know if the MMORPG classification fits Warframe, but I have no idea what else to call it, to be honest…