Those people aren’t a good match for you (or maybe anyone).

Sometimes I feel like I want to play a game that I’d run, but then I realize that’s the cliche “Go write a book”

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

“I will not trust any vaccine made by a capitalist” sounds like a satire of a left wing person. I can’t tell if you were making a joke or really hold an absurd position.

I see poe’s law is alive and well.

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.

One of the reasons I enjoy games with metagame currencies like Fate points or Willpower. I just don’t find it fun or interesting to lose due to bad dice most of the time. Especially if the bad dice just delay things instead of resolving them, like one time a D&D fight against some ghouls took like 45 minutes because no one rolled well. No tension or stakes. Just dice for an extra ten rounds. Absolutely flubbing a roll can be interesting, but I like when there’s more choice involved.

“I rolled a 0 to grab the thief? No, that’s stupid. I’m a Royal Bodyguard I’m used to acting fast. I spend a fate point and bump that up”

More generally “succeed at a cost” is just missing from D&D as a concept.

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”

I failed calc2 and am gainfully employed as a mid/upper level software engineer.

One guy at work really saved the day because he’s good at math, and made a very slow process much faster because he knows … uh… vector math? He did magic with numpy

My mom is also deeply paranoid and superstitious about the phone. I’ll be like “why don’t you delete this second weather app you don’t like that’s sending you all these notifications you ignore?” And she’ll be like “NO YOU’LL BREAK SOMETHING IT HAS TO TO BE LIKE THIS”

Jira , mostly. It kind of sucks but it’s what we use.

Sublime text for quick notes.

Some people like notion but I often find it redundant with jira, and it’s often write-only memory.

An unfortunate situation where I’ve had 8 dates with a woman that I’m really into, but she barely texts between dates and I don’t know how to interpret that. Like, when we’re together it’s all very affectionate and fun, but between dates it’ll be like 2 days before I get a response to “are you coming to my party on Saturday?”. She also sort of flaked on soft plans without a word once.

We talked about it back around date 4. She mentioned a guy she’d been seeing had gotten very integrated and then abruptly bailed on her recently, and she thinks a lot of texting can create a false sense of intimacy. And she doesn’t want to formalize into partners, but keep it at “we’re dating”.

But I’m like not texting certainly creates a sense of distance and disinterest, but I don’t know if it’s false.

So my plan is to look for someone else. If she comes around and wants to be responsive, I’d be happy. But this is stressing me out. It’s a bummer because she’s a lot of things I want and haven’t had in previous partners.

Edit: she texted me that I’ve been lovely and patient and kind, and it’s not fair to me that she’s been so checked out. She said she’s going to step back from dating and focus on her job, but hopes I find what I’m looking for.

On the one hand this is devastating because I could have loved her. On the other… well, there’s not really another hand. It sucks.

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.

Kid is lucky the racists didn’t murder him and say that he did something to deserve it.

I hope those racist almost-murderers are ruined.

I legit used Google sheets for my pandemic game and it worked extremely well.