I heard a discussion of the concept of an RPG setting where the world never made the jump to digital. The idea was to explore that alternative now based on a changed history. It included the idea of aliens that we’d only meet by having developed new technologies in the analog space, sapient, benevolent AI that only exist because of some different interpretation of intelligence in an analog space, etc.

The internet. We’d probably all be bettered off if we avoided it.

Expect violence.

Tons of stuff:

I have ~135 game apps plus some that are not exactly games but not exactly for productivity.

I have lemuroid and a pile of old console games.

I have a few sites for doing other little games, like daily Akari.

highlights:

Collapsus

Endless Sky

Pixel Dungeon

Luanti

Gladiabots

Mindustry

PartyHardGO

OpenTTD

Oxenfree

Revoltaire

The full set of games by Yiotro (a dev who puts it all out there for free, no ads, and lets you buy in if you like it)

Terraria

Underhand

Space Chem

A collection of puzzle games off of Fdroid just called puzzles. It has akari, sudoku, minesweeper, signpost, galaxies, towers, etc. All the games you might find buried in the back of a newspaper.

Stardew Valley

Tic-80

A pile of games from itch.io

Growing up? Stranger in a Strange Land

MIchael’s way of viewing the world felt so natural to me, and yet so different from almost anyone else around.

Most snakes are like fish. You don’t have them to snuggle, just to appreciate from nearby. Many, even most, can be handled perfectly safely, but it’s not about bonding with them like a mammal. They don’t want to kill you. That’s cats. Snakes just want you to leave the mouse and go.

If those are the options, I choose death.

Ask why.

Need to learn X? Ask why. Why you want to do it might point to a better way of getting what you really want. Asking why one does something in doing X will tell you how process relates to result, informing better decisions.

Did somebody do something wrong? Ask why. Whether it was because they misunderstood or were just an ass, you’ll know better what to do with them.

Wondering what happened? Asking why will usually get you the who, what, where, when, and how as part of the answer.

Probably these little lychee candy things I had years ago. No fruit flavor at all. Tasted as though someone mixed powdered blackboard chalk and sugar.

Wrong site

Plasma - a wildly programmable physics game where you can build just about anything in a fairly accessible manner. The devs eventually just made it free because it wasn’t getting much notice.

BPM: Bullets Per Minute - at some point everyone thinks ‘what if you combined an FPS with a rhythm game so you had to shoot on the beat?’ BPM is that, nailed. Others have tried but BPM got it right.

There isn’t really a natural ‘popular,’ and almost never has been. It’s mostly just what’s marketed.

What’s going to hit will be a bit dependent on where your soft spots are.

Kids: Grave of the Fireflies or Bridge to Teribithea or My Girl or The Cure

Romantic love: The Fountain

Existential trauma: Psycho-Pass (series) or A.I.

Dogs: Marley & Me or Hachi

Loss: Up

Also:

River

Works… until they die.

Making intentions known is necessary. Flirting is just one of the preocesses by which intention is established. In that way, it is not strictly necessary, in the same way that cake is not necessary, but food is.

Flirting is a process which intentionally leaves ambiguity because it lets people avoid embarrassment. Being rejected, in many cultures, is embarrassing. By attempting flirting, a person can show interest indirectly, and the other person can show interest in return or show disinterest with quiet cues that let the instigator pull back without having to do something as vulnerable as explicitly stating intentions or experience embarrassment at being directly rejected.

Flirting, like anything else, can also be used as a display of quality, the verbal/intellectual equivalent of peacock feather displays.

How necessary these elements are is entirely contextual. Some partners despise the pretense of it. Others view it as incredibly fun. Some are deeply embarassed by the prospect of rejection. Some are not bothered by it at all.

Check out iyashikei as a genre if you like anime. Relaxed and wholesome is kind of the whole bag.

If you liked Corner Gas, also check out Kim’s Convenience.

Here’s the fun thing about that question; it’s basically ‘Would you date someone you considered mentally insane?’ Whether you are atheist considering dating Hindu, a Catholic considering dating a Zoroastrian, or a Buddhist dating a nihilist, this is a person who has a fundamentally different understanding of reality. Here’s the real kicker; ‘Is someone who has a distorted sense of reality capable of giving consent?’ Can you even date them if you value consent?

Basically the only thing that really bothers me is a lack of epistemological humility, people pretending their views are objectively true.

I used to use purely Reddit. I stopped after the API nonsense. Now I’m purely on lemmy. I have no interest in any of the others.

The short of it is: western society has been pretending human behaviour is simple and easy to understand for ages, but can’t anymore, and that’s leading to a fight over how to think about it all.

Homosexuality was viewed as a choice. Gender was viewed as natural rather than cultural. Criminals were just evil. Addicts were just irresponsible. Etc. Etc. In the last century, the democratization of expression and the shift to individualism has shattered that illusion of homogeneous simplicity.

This combines with a primitive delusion of semantic authority (this word has a specific defined meaning, and it is the one in the dictionary/my head) so that people think the object is determined by it’s descriptors rather than the descriptor is defined by its context. People hear a word (e.g. man) and assume all the common entailments are mandatorily part of the definition. (e.g. penis, taller and broader than average, likes to have sex with women, likes to hunt/fight/sport, wants to be a father and provider, insert other cultural signifier of masculinity here) So, when someone sees a word being applied to someone, but doesn’t feel like the definition in their head matches, they feel it’s wrong. (e.g. He likes men. That doesn’t match my definition of ‘man.’ Could my understanding of the word ‘man’ be wrong? Of course not. They must be something else. ‘You there, stop calling yourself a man. You’re not.’)

The current battle is a battle to define what the next concensus will be for the definition of various words. Traditionalists want to go back to a more familiar way of defining things. (e.g. It had a penis at birth? Man. And he better act like one.) And they are willing to happily ignore the preferences of people who don’t feel like that definition matches theirs. Neogenderists (for lack of a better term) believe something is wrong with the gender concepts and want to change them, whether that means adding one neuter gender, adding 100 genders, limiting us to the traditional two genders but removing physical sex as a characteristic in favor of just the cultural elements/secondary characteristics, or seeking to abolish gender entirely. Some people are interested in making the language match people’s self-conceptions, some are not.

And all of this is still in flux. Who knows which group will be most prominent in 10, 20, 30, 100, or 1000 years? We could have a time in the future where people will die to fight for the idea that there are exactly four genders, ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ ‘human,’ and ‘steve,’ differentiated mostly by hair color, with entailments regarding preferences for spicy foods, appropriate toenail length, and room temperature, and that the people who want to dye their hair are transchromists. We’d all like to believe humanity would have the wisdom to avoid it, but looking around doesn’t inspire much hope.