• It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).

Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.

Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.

Yeah, sports is a great analogy. Just because you don’t like basketball, doesn’t mean you won’t like soccer, and just cause you don’t like turn-based RPGs, doesn’t mean you won’t like 2D platformers. It’s all about finding what you vibe with.

Lots of good advice here, but I would just add, start with your interests and work out from there. You like puzzle games? Portal is a great physics puzzle game, so you might like that. It’s also a 3D platformer, so you’ll find out if you like games with a lot of running and jumping. It’s also technically a first-person shooter (not in the sense that you shoot enemies, but you do shoot a portal gun at walls), so if you don’t like that aspect of the game, you’ll know that FPSs aren’t for you.

Doesn’t have to be the type of gameplay either. You like designing things? Maybe try the Sims or Animal Crossing. Like horror movies? Maybe start with something simple but creepy, like Limbo. Detective stories? Something like Strange Horticulture might be up your alley.

The most important thing is to look around and see what catches your interest. Read some reviews, watch some gameplay footage, and find something that’s right for you. Don’t just say, “I’m going to do video games now,” and buy a Call of Duty or Dark Souls because, “gamers,” like them.

Sooner or later, you will get trapped somewhere forever. Over the course of an infinite lifespan, the odds that a building collapses on you or a tunnel caves in on you basically become 100%. Someday, you will fall into the hole that you will stay in until the sun explodes, and then you will drift in the void until the heat death of the universe.

I mean, the point of a mermaid isn’t that it’s a sexy looking fish, it’s that other than its tail, it looks like beautiful human women. In some stories, sailors don’t even realize they’re taking to mermaids because their tails are underwater. Also, mermaids were generally considered bad omens or malicious entities, and when they did seduce humans, it was usually to kill them, so it’s not like the folklore was very pro-mermaid sex.

I don’t know where my Dad got them, but they were pretty much all Apogee games, so he might have order them directly. I was really young, 4 or 5, so I didn’t really ask for them. My Dad would just install them for us and create directory shortcuts so we could load them easily. Part of how I learned to type and read was spelling out, “keen4” and either getting the game to load or, “Bad command or file name.”

Commander Keen: Marooned on Mars. My Dad had an IBM machine that booted up in DOS, and he installed a bunch of games on it for us. I played every Commander Keen game (including Keen Dreams), Wacky Wheels, Oregon Trail. Sim City, and Sim Ant on that machine (although I think I needed to boot up Windows to run those last two).

I still get emails from my dormant account, and according to my Gmail, the sender is, “X (formerly Twitter),” so I don’t think we’re done with that yet.

More importantly, >!they just gave up on their relationship because one of them was leaving the country? For what, less than a year? After all that, they just threw it all away because they didn’t want to deal with FaceTime for a couple of months? Bet they felt real fucking dumb when the pandemic hit.!<

Since no one has said it yet, original Ghostbusters.

Thank you! Like, this isn’t how foriegn influence campaigns work. Believing the jerk you’re arguing with is a Russian agent might make you feel like you’re in a Tom Clancy novel, but the odds are it’s just a dweeb with multiple accounts. Foriegn influence campaigns make sock-puppets to repeat the same 5 talking points on as many communities as possible, and maybe have a few canned replies. They don’t fight with the same person in a 20 reply thread over the course of 2 days.

Same. I can’t tell if the content has declined or I’ve just outgrown it, but it went from my go-to my, “eh, if I’ve got time.”

Anole > Iguana > Alligator

Mouse > Rat > Opossum

Armadillo > Pangolin