Is the resident Lemmy population becoming too easy to troll?

Hello lemmings are you all left wing because you are CIA and racist? Also if you go outside you will not hate car

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In no particular order, here are some games I’ve enjoyed most in the past decade or so (and found most interesting to shill to my friends):

• The Roottrees are Dead (online sleuthing game, with a cool but slightly campy story, wears its Obra Dinn influence on its sleeve a bit too obviously for some people)
• Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (Cities Skylines for people who understand economics are more than just dollar signs and tweets, it’s more like Factorio than SimCity)
• Hacknet (Learn basic command line stuff in a game about hacking)
• Duskers (atmospherically amazing game about controlling distant drones in hostile environments. Genuinely chilling)
• Chants of Senaar (language deciphering game)
• Outer Wilds (le le le dae hidden gem for a reason)
• Dyson Sphere Project (more Factorio)
• Satisfactory (you guessed it, more Factorio, but very different environment than most of these games)
• Factorio
• Shapez (minimalistic Factorio, with a less minimalistic sequel)
• Nomifactory (Minecraft modpack that was formerly known as Omnifactory. It’s more Factorio.)
• Curse of the Golden Idol (finally a good retro adventure mystery thing)
• Return of the Obra Dinn (immaculate game.)
• CHR$143 (Zachlike-ish)
• Kerbal Space Program (my next obsession)
• INFRA (one of my favorite games of all time, I’ve written about this extensively, a sort of urbex walking simulator with incredible atmosphere, deep deep lore, amazing world building, and light puzzles, that goes on for about 40 more hours than you expect it to)
• Hexcells Trilogy (puzzles)
• Hexologic (similar puzzles)
• Baba Is You (puzzles that make you think you’re an idiot)
• NaissancE (I don’t know how to describe this, I think it’s free)
• Manifold Garden (you dreamed about this game when you were 8 years old, decades before it existed)
• The Big Con (be gay do crime 90s)
• Death Stranding (this game is so boring, I played it for 200 hours and got every achievement, I love it, it sucks)
• The Forgotten City (this started its life as a Skyrim mod and still has that baggage)
• Mostly Intense Monster Defense (PvZ homage)
• The Witcher (1) (CRPG with a cool world. Needs a few mods to cut down on tedium. Pretty different from its sequels but it has a special place in my heart)
• Binary Domain (absolute schlock, but from a previous era of gaming. Not necessarily a good game, but cool to see from a historical perspective.)
• Cultist Simulator (needs an eternity of patience but I promise there is something in there)
• SLUDGE LIFE (SLUDGE LIFE)
• What Remains of Edith Finch (I fucking love walking simulators with good writing and cool art)
• Promesa (obscure walking simulator, it’s barely a game, I love it)
• CUCCCHI (check above description, same guy. Artistic showcase of a painter called Enzo Cuccchi. I’m not a modern art guy, but seeing these works contorted into worlds to walk through… a unique and interesting experience. Soundtrack is someone’s once-lost old experimental tracks and it absolutely slaps)
• Please Touch the Artwork 1 and 2 (one of them is free, funded by the Belgian public art fund. Weird and cool)
• Betrayal at Club Low (part of a series of games by Cosmo D, this one is different from the previous few. The first, Off Peak, is free, but it’s also the least polished. Astonishingly excellent music, there’s some cool lore in this series. The art style is a bit out there but this guy’s stuff is gold)
• Engare and Tandis (mathematical patterns puzzlers, I promise they’re so cool)
• What the Golf? (An actually good mobile game. I mostly played it with a controller on my TV lol)
• Cities Skylines (my beloved)

And then they give a passionate interview about how the original Jeg Spiser Pis short film from 1993 informed their entire creative journey, before immediately going on to direct Mario Movie Minecraft 3 starring Dwayne the Rock Johnson as Sheep and Tilda Swinton as Cat Bowser 64 ft. Ariana Grande burger

I have watched a fair few nigh incoherent French movies with a plot that is simultaneously either the most complex or most banal story ever written (that doesn’t get resolved at the end). You could find me at the one specialty cinema in Beirut every other weekend before it completely collapsed financially in 2020 back when our economy did the funni

I get that a lot of this is turning people off but this is shockingly accurate of a lot of mid arthouse stuff. It’s like trash TV but for movie tryhards. I love it. For the French ones, I almost feel like the experience is worsened by my grasp of the language.

Since then I’ve all but stopped watching movies and even series and have moved to games full time. There’s so much more genuinely fun weird interesting shit.

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I know Lemmy is mostly populated by computer touchers (I’m one of them) but Pep Guardiola is probably one of the most recognizable human beings on planet earth

Hm. Interesting how negatively coded this scene is when I hear people talk about their own “that one dream public bathroom”.

I distinctively remember mine having knee-high cloudy water, but it was very dark. My innate “understanding” in the dream is that the water is some kind of natural feature, not sewage. I don’t remember the sinks, tissues, cleanliness or of the bowls, or anything, just the incredibly weird layout and flooding, and the weird lack of privacy due to the doors and walls of the stalls being higher to accommodate the water.

US style stalls where you can conveniently park your XXXL truck under the divider aren’t a thing here.

I have friends who have actually emigrated to the US who have been begging me to go, telling me I’d love it. Cultural melting pot and all. My English is pretty good and I have a lot of cultural exposure to US things. It’s strange, but even as the US has done stuff I very strongly disagree with, I still have some admiration for a lot of American things. That’s soft power baby!

These repeated calls to move have dried up very suddenly in the past year and some of them have left.

I’m from Lebanon where we’re taught from day one to leave the proverbial crab bucket and go figure out a living somewhere where life is (theoretically) better.

The most realistic big international city with decent pay I can move to is actually Dubai. And I go there a lot for business - just like the US, there’s some good and some bad. There’s a lot of (valid) complaining about such places in communities like Lemmy but frankly Dubai just is the melting pot world city that is accessible in my part of the world. Many of my friends have been rejected for immigration because of financial reasons (or for being from the wrong religious community…), ending years-long processes to move westward. As if it’s their fault their bank savings lost more than 99% of their value in 2020-2021. Compared to those who moved to the Gulf who basically got a work visa in their email after getting the job and flew out the week after. Do you know how hard it is to even briefly visit another country with a passport as weak as ours?

But honestly moving anywhere feels like an impossibly immense decision. My friends in the Gulf are less enthusiastic, they don’t say I’ll love it, they say I’ll be paid enough to afford moving somewhere I’ll love after five years. Sometimes I feel like it’s inevitable that I move there. But that’s how I felt about the US in like 2015. So who knows.

When I was a kid this is what American cities looked like in movies. A completely different world than the one I lived in. It’s almost comforting to see again.

I feel like cities in general are shown less as glamorous places to be now.

Driving leisurely through a nice lush valley? God what a marvel of engineering this crumbling manual 1994 Kia shitbox is. Driving is so calming. Radio off, windows down, I want to hear the birds and the terrible engine. I don’t even care that second gear doesn’t bite anymore. This is nice.

Driving in start stop traffic? God I hate how we’ve defaced our planet, our home, just to enrich these blood sucking oil companies. The Ottomans and the French built railroads and streetcars here during our servitude. And what did we do with that silver lining? Tore it all out to sell more cars and petrol. For shame. All of these people’s lives are measurably worse from wasting their lives on the road.

Driving at a normal speed in a normal area with people driving around me at normal speed, pedestrians, street lights, traffic cops, nobody is crashing, I’m not crashing, I’m barely even thinking about doing it? bro what tHE FUCK WHAT

Here’s another one, professionally voice acted for maximum effect.

Extremely underrated game, even after it received popular sequels. I’m shocked nobody talks about the original Witcher game. I played it way after it was released in around 2017 and found it refreshing, like a slightly more modern classic RPG with actual classic game design, plus a few quirks (combat stances and so on).

The enhanced edition looks perfectly fine. I think I’ve hit the stage in my life where I care more about graphics looking cohesive and how the art style serves the game’s vibe than I care about garish post-processing and needlessly complex models and textures.

TW1, visually, has a sort of dreamy fantastical blandness with bursts of really cool visual interest. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that serve the concept of a video game well?

I’m now thinking of that classic post from the old site that shows someone’s painstakingly cursive-written note of the entire text of a bluescreen (the old bluescreen with a lot of characters on screen) for tech support.

And thinking of a slightly more tech inclined grandma who doesn’t quite get all of it having a problem with a torrent and just reading the infohash/magnet link to the ISP’s support call center.

Punchline Situation is Diabolical

@SomeDude • 8 hours ago

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I think I was being obvious about holding my nose and using outdated words to imply my own distaste for how it’s still thought of around me.

In my culture, properly cooking okra is a rite of passage/test of a good homemaker (I hate that word). Kind of as a difficult task to separate the men from the boys. (Well not specifically men and boys. You know what I mean.) It reflects on how you were taught to cook and manage a household as well, so it’s a test of the household you came from, in a way.

Simultaneously, okra occupies the same cultural context that my child self saw for broccoli in western cartoons. The unpleasant vegetable your mom makes you eat. Only I never found broccoli to be foul at all, and my parents don’t like okra so I never had to eat it lol

I could maybe see connecting it to Home Assistant to deliver a silent notification, instead of waking everyone up at night for example.

This is the only use case I could possibly think of for networking a microwave. An enhanced mute feature.

Huh. The image was very weird to me, but I’ve played some version of this as a kid. Team one makes this structure against a wall, team two send people to jump and crawl forward, the goal being to break the “bridge”. I can’t even remember what we fucking called this game, this was in Lebanon in the late aughts/early tens.

There’s something about how most teenage boys are wired that made it feel exceptionally badass when your team was on the bottom and you didn’t crumple when it was the turn of one of the large gentlemen on the other team to jump.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately, especially after watching a video by an internet funny man I enjoy (Eddie Burback) about him locking his phone away for a month (not a feasible strategy for most people.)

I also enjoy pretty much anything online much more on the desktop. When things started pivoting to app-only it felt very weird at the time - the phone access was always the clunkier secondary backup nice-to-have.

That said, 80% of my browsing happens on my phone. It’s less fun and it’s more mindless, but that’s the truth. I think I’ll hit a point where I find my phone just too magnetic but as a dopamine crutch it’s cripplingly convenient.

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.