Hope is the delusion that things will get better without our input.

Hope is the drug which numbs us in the face of unflinching reality.

Hope is that which wonders why the planet is burning after they put so much energy into believing it’ll be ok.

Hope is the reason we’re always late.

Philosophy aside, there has been no greater producer of disappointment in my life than hope. It has always left me complacent when I should’ve acted, it has always left me blind when I should have been looking for solutions.

We don’t need hope, we need courage! We need courage to face reality as it is! We need courage to accept reality as it is. And we need courage to change reality into what it could be!

At this point, with the sheer amount of data, I’ve structured things based on individual drives. All of my devices have the onboard SSD - I go for 1TB minimum. Call me old fashioned, but I still partition that one in two, one containing the Windows stuff and the essential 3rd party software, and a second partition which contains games, downloaded media, miscellaneous software, generally the stuff I use more frequently, but isn’t vital. It’s also where I store all downloads to keep the Windows partition clean and separate.

As for my external drives, I have one which I keep stuffed with game installs (2TB), and a second one which serves as my media library drive - music, movies, etc (1TB).

In terms of folder structures, I either use the default ones which come with Steam, for instance, or I keep it as simple as humanly possible (eg. Music > Artist > Album). Downloads are lumped in a single folder, wherein I may make subfolders for mass downloads of mods and such. Otherwise, Search & pray! With indexing turned off, because I like to hurt myself!

Edited to add sizes and: bought a second 2TB external which I plan on using as a back-up for my music library, some DRM-free games, and whatever movies may strike me as worth preserving.

Oh, always full shower and a change of clothes which have not had direct contact with the designated smoking area, yes. I also lean toward muskier/spicier scents, so that’s an extra layer of coverage.

My main worry, honestly, is with the neighbors. I’m not going full bordello, no noise past 10PM, no IMAX at home, etc. Don’t even much like having people over. But as sp3ctr4l pointed out a few comments down, self-righteousness is unfortunately prevalent…

I know it’s wrong and primarily unjustified to think this, but sometimes I feel that we’ve evolved not at all as a species. We’ve developed fancier stuff, but barbarism is alive and well. It’s just wearing an expensive suit now.

Hey, nobody says ushankas should carry the sins of humans! We can reclaim ushankas as a symbol of empathy and… uuh… general goodness, I guess!

I second this, coming from a person living in one of the former Soviet Bloc countries, we do NOT want that kind of comradeship again. Nonono. Textbook Socialism (a k.a. not Stalinism) with a basis in secular humanism and friggin’ empathy, yesyesyes!

“Luckily,” I cut it with very bad tobacco, so it probably stinks more like stale cigarettes…

OH, GOD, I KNEW IT!!! Everyone can smell it! EVERYONE! My anxiety was right!

Thing is, I genuinely like this album! Not for the music itself, but for what it is, a work born of spite and utter disdain*. I just think more people from the Upper Crust™ could do with listening to this.

In terms of who hurt me, at this point it’s completely irrelevant. There’s only so much mincing you can do to meat before it becomes indifferent to it.

It never has been and never will be about protecting the children, not with the full roster of diddlers they keep in positions of authority…

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!

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!

We have the potential for far better, yes.

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