Good job Gordon, pressing right click and all, I can see your M.I.T. education really pays off.

Well I can’t answer the other parts, but for games: The games industry has been going through a massive upheaval from ~2022-2025 has seen a staggering number of layoffs, games being canceled, and studios being shuttered. We’d be seeing a lot more games right now if they hadn’t been axed over the years.

In the indie game dev side, its sort of* an indiepocalypse where battling for a smidgen of spotlight on Steam is brutal - and even financial “success” doesn’t mean you’ll have enough to follow up with another game. Also because of the above publishers aren’t funding many AA games so its hard to get those going to.

*Its a little different for niches and certain genres so this is a generalization.

I’m assuming your age but I think its normal when people hit early adulthood to start drifting a direction and possibly start losing contact. At least for a few people, not everyone.

That being said, there’s a lot of unnatural disconnect lately due to stress and such and I think people tend to ‘replace’ them with parasocial or low effort social media relationships instead. Basically if you’re overwhelmed you can get some socializing in on Facebook or Instagram or the Ask Lemmy section of the fediverse and it feels like communicating but its actually leaves you wanting more but with less energy than before.

There’s also a possibility they’re dealing with something they haven’t been able (or wanting) to talk about.

The things that have worked for me are low bar meetups. That is, not a lot of time or effort to join. Like hey I’m jumping on XYZ game tonight, who’s down. Or there’s a new coffee shop near your house, want to check it out, etc.

Just take those exact characters, give them different hair colors, match the personality to the hair color, boom you got a slice of life show that has a strong first season but then fades in quality and takes a weird turn in season 2+3 before a mediocre season 4 that fans try to justify but everyone really hates.

So is he a stick figure and she isn’t, or is he just standing there naked?

More than I’d care to admit.

Chairs. You can sit on the ground or on a mat by a low table, as many people have done for centuries.

Without much velocity/pressure from the barrel, the pellets are only getting propelled from the primer alone. This short would throw the pellets in a wide area but it would likely be Nerf gun ranges.

Its more about the velocity. A barrel is needed to ‘shoot’ a shell. If you took a shotgun shell and hit a hammer onto the primer to set it off, well it would be a mess of pellets, but it wouldn’t fire with lethal velocity.

I’m actually going to be ignorant here but I don’t really know what’s up with the bunny ears and maid dresses. I presumed it was a fetish but I never really looked into it.

I’m no expert but as I understand it, a longer barrel adds more velocity/pressure to a firearm. Cutting a barrel that short would probably put the velocity in the range of ‘kind of sucks’.

NAL but I don’t think this is illegal, though it is a pretty large red flag that you’re going to get lowballed.

Similar here - The grip League of Legends has on people is terrifying.

I got a handful of houseplants that I’ve kept alive for years (one close to a decade) and I’m not sure its really done anything for me.

I initially read this as ellie-fien-no and missed the joke until I reread it.

This little drummer boy who would just NOT stop playing

343/Microsoft should have let Bungie’s “ending” for Master Chief stay - Where chief saves earth but gets put into indefinite cryo as he is forever lost in space.

It would have put him full circle (as he was a superweapon waiting in cryo when the series started) and it would put him into a state not unlike the halos themselves, which I think was Bungie’s intent.

There are a lot of stories and things to explore within Halo’s universe and I would like to see more of those than bad-guy-of-the-week that Chief has to stop.

This is likely not the case but I feel obligated to note that if you use Steam’s Proton and store games on an NTFS drive, its given me quirky problems in the past.

Mine was day ~75.

The RNG finally started to loosen its grip around day 60 because it started giving me items and rooms I had never seen before that, as it turns out, were pretty essential.

The RNG beat me up too. I will say that there’s a handful of permanent upgrades that either allow you to mitigate some RNG or give you buffs so you’re not as reliant on it.

I think their goal was to make it so you’re not hardlocked on a single puzzle so that you kind of wander into the manor without a specific puzzle to solve and see what you can solve/find as your tools for that run expand.

This kind of makes hours 0-10 kind of miserable because you don’t know what puzzles there are and you don’t have much you can do to avoid RNG so you’re just wandering and hoping for the best, but it does get better after that point.