Smaller communities strike me as more “natural” to engage with, by which I mean, the human brain (or mine at least) seems better equipped to engage with small groups of familiar people than a sea of usernames I don’t know and have no real rapport with.

but when people say they create their own echo chambers Yada Yada thing, even though I would agree with that, it’s interesting to see how people who believe different things, are just amongst eachother.

I think being exposed to the cacophony of “sound” online had given a lot of people strange ideas about “echo chambers.” To me it’s extremely natural and obvious that most people would gravitate towards people they actually like and broadly agree with, rather than toss themselves into online spaces where they’re constantly at odds with the other users. Depending on one’s perspectives and political persuasions, finding those spaces can be fairly easy, or very hard.

The 1987-88 TV horror-drama series Werewolf. It’s basically just the '70s Hulk show but with a werewolf instead of The Hulk. Guy becomes a werewolf fugitive roaming the US, wanted by a bounty hunter (named Joe Rogan lol), pursues the werewolf the curse traces back to in hopes of killing it and curing himself, etc.

Fun fact, this show was a part of the FOX channel’s debut lineup when it first started airing.

Un-fun fact, this show is increasingly moving into “lost media” territory because of its general obscurity, and the fact that licensing disputes over music rights (such as using the song Silent Running in the pilot episode) prevent it from being re-published on modern media.

If you search for it on duckduckgo, it will likely give you an archive page where you can watch the whole series in considerably-worse-than-standard definition.

Frankly, it’s a series that I would love to see a reboot / remake for, because the basic premise (as well as the premises of various individual episodes) is solid, but the execution is plagued by sloppy writing and weirdly awful editing at times.

targeted at children, with microtransactions

I was right not to like it …

Whatever “Roblox” is. Whenever I see or hear about it, it strikes me as some sort of scam or something. I think it’s some sort of game engine? But seemingly way more proprietary than any other?

How much is supporting a genocidal apartheid state worth?

Bad because of its association with the SPD in Germany using it as an expression of “both sides” style anti-communism ( “we oppose all forms of authoritarianism, now off to snitch out Rosa and the KPD to the freikorps so they all get murdered!”), which helped usher in Nazism.

IMO, if a symbol has any significant popularity among western leftists in particular, it probably sucks.

I think the interactivity of games makes it hard to keep the right mood, pacing, atmosphere, etc. that horror stories rely on. Horror games are still developing their own language and tricks to manage the feeling of horror in an interactive setting (like the use of puzzles to draw attention and focus, then interrupting with a scare or threat of some sort once the person is mentally in “puzzle mode” and not thinking about the horror aspects of the game).

Also the genre is heavily influenced by trend-chasing, specifically mascot horror (like FNAF), PS1 throwback horror (like PuppetCombo’s games and their influence), and the general trend of games that seem like they were made to be “streamer-bait” first and foremost.

I literally do not know any of my neighbors, and that is pretty normal here. That’s a simple way to put atomization, I think.

Spider-Man 2 is still pretty good.

It didn’t really “scare” me, but I have to mention Kakurenbo, sometimes listed as Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek. It’s a 3D anime short film from the 2000s that I originally saw on Adult Swim, and I still love the atmosphere and vibe of it. A while ago I was able to just watch it on youtube, and I doubt it’s been taken down.

Glad they made an episode 2 (I haven’t seen either and have no interest, but I know people were very interested in the first, and I hate to see internet creative projects just die off in general)

I understand from the other replies that this is about “wokeness in games” type stuff, but what does DEI actually stand for? I figure ‘D’ is diversity?

The biggest issue I have when replaying Fallout NV is that the FPS combat, which is of course a huge part of the game, isn’t very good. It’s not even just the feel of the gun-play either, the levels are not made with tight enough collision boxes for the shooting to be good. Like shooting through the rails of a stairway, but oh no, that’s just one big block of collision, so your bullets just hit air.

I never got the “oh Caesar is such a compelling villain” stuff, like he always just seemed like a smug butthole who, yes, was more knowledgeable about certain things than his wastelander peers, but that’s not saying much when the point of comparison is people who had no education and mostly wouldn’t even know how to read.

Big O, Eureka 7

I really want one set in Mexico for some reason.

One criticism I’ve seen of the pink triangle (as well as the rainbow pride flag) is that they’re kind of symbols of western queer movements specifically, and their usage has sort of overtaken usage of other queer symbols from other cultures, even in those other cultures’ movements. I’m like half-remembering this shit, and I don’t know if this has any bearing relating to your use of it, or if it was even really a good point to begin with (I don’t identify as queer or anything LGBT, so my evaluation is hobbled by that).

Me too.

I replayed Psychonauts so I could finally play Psychonauts 2 without any hang-ups about not completing it. I had never actually beaten the Meat Circus as a kid, and this was the first time I cleared it. I think the difficulty was largely a product of being much younger and worse at games, but it was still the hardest and imo the worst part of the game (for being annoying and a bit clunky to play through). Either way, the game holds up very well all these years later.

Psychonauts 2 was fantastic. Just fantastic. Absolutely great game, and humorously it runs better for me than the first game, which freezes constantly (GOG versions for both). Gameplay feels better in basically every regard, story is excellent, combat is excellent (particularly for a platformer), voices and characters are excellent. 100%-ing levels seems less daunting than it was in psychonauts 1 as well, so I’m slowly pursuing that.

I’ve also been playing Dawn of War: Soulstorm with the Unification mod, which has finally been finished (I think?). That mod is like 3 or 4x bigger than the base game files because it adds so much fucking content. New maps, new factions, new gameplay modes, etc. Soulstorm is finally better than Dark Crusade (except the story, I still like DC more for that).

I use the Blocktube add-on for firefox, which lets you simply add the channel’s name to a blocklist (you could literally copy and paste all of the channel names from my post into the list and it should work).

Blocktube also has several advanced features that sound pretty cool, but I’ve never played with them so I can’t testify to their quality.