A place to start might be a friend or family member who is into video games.

Gaming hardware can be a little costly, so you may want to visit with someone and play a selection of games before deciding which direction you’d like to start in. I’ll also point out that video games are often the very most fun when shared with friends.

If my 30 year old woman friend came up to me one day and said “Hey I’ve never really played video games before and I’d like to give them a try, but don’t know where to start,” I think we’d talk awhile first to see if I can find what games are interesting to you. I see a lot of people in this comment section recommending Stardew Valley, which is a game I deeply like and respect though I have seen people bounce right off it, including someone recently here on Lemmy. So while I would recommend giving it a look, if you do bounce off it, don’t just go “video games aren’t for me,” maybe cozy games aren’t for you.

Some questions I might ask are:

Are you looking for a more relaxing or more exciting experience?

Would you like your play sessions to be challenging, contemplative, creative, or competitive?

Are you more interested in story, or gameplay?

How important are flashy fancy graphics to you?

Where will your gameplay sessions fit into your life? Do you want something to do during your daily train ride? Will this replace your daily television hour? Is it what you’re going to do all Saturday afternoon?

Do you see yourself playing games on your couch, at a desk, or on the go?

Do you want to enjoy games alone, or with friends? Will you gather in one place to play together, or play across the internet?

Do you have a genre of fiction you like? Are you into historical drama, sci-fi, fantasy, slapstick comedy?

How do you feel about horror? Both the psychological Lovecraftian existential crisis type, and the “oh god a 10 foot monster with 50 mouths for a mouth just jumped out behind a tree and roared” type?

“Damn near” is a euphemism for “didn’t.”

I have size M shirts from high school that fit like an L on the rack today.

H’okay, so. Several years ago, some weird shit happened on Youtube.

Youtube is not designed for children under 13, nevertheless it became pretty popular for parents to just hand their children an iPad. There were creators that made a genuine effort to make healthy and wholesome children’s programming, but they were quickly outpaced by lazy jackasses who were just trying to make a buck.

The Youtube algorithm is designed to push content to achieve maximum engagement. It’s designed with adults in mind. The viewers are toddlers, who cannot read and who respond strongly to repetitive sounds and motions, faces and bright colors. So these lazy jackasses started churning out videos with as many popular keywords in the titles as possible, so you’d get “finger family pregnant frozen elsa kills hitler spiderman” Finger family being the name of a severely ear wormy nursery rhyme thing. The videos were designed to be baby crack, there were stories of kids screaming when their iPads were taken away.

This happened before the AI boom, but they’ve got a similar broken surreal uncanny idea cancer feel to them despite all of the videos being intentionally made by people.

There’s a surprising amount of modern Christian lore that actually comes from The Divine Comedy, the granddaddy of all ascended fanfic.

Get your daughter way from that kid as fast as you can.

| I don’t even understand if it’s an actual religion or one of those pay-to-level-up self-care courses.

yes, at about a ratio of 1 to 8. There’s a mythology that these people fervently believe in, but pay-to-level-up is the core tenet. Distilling this down a bit, they believe that any problem you have is a ghost of long dead aliens clinging to you, and with enough abuse they can be scared away leaving behind the pure human.

When first you encounter them they seem to be offering self help courses or books. “Having trouble quitting smoking? Buy our book, join our class.” For some these do genuinely help, if through no other mechanism than peer pressure. Then they pull out a bullshit device called an E meter and start talking about alternative therapies to realize your true potential, and then they’ve got you.

They are a high control group; they’re like Mormons on amphetamines. Your life is centered on the church, people are kept in line through threats of destroying their families and support groups. They’re particularly vindictive and are well documented to attack anyone critical of them.

Avoid these people with extreme prejudice, they are genuinely dangerous.

Men’s clothing sizes are a little dumb sometimes but I can usually take a tape measure to my waist and correctly order pants. Your guess is as good as mine what the difference between “boot cut” and “relaxed fit” are, and I would swear T-shirt sizes have shrunk since I was a teenager. As in, I can compare a Medium I’ve had since the Dubya administration to an XL today. But getting fitted for a suit, they measure me in inches and the clothing is more or less sized in inches.

Women’s clothing sizes have had two different ice pick lobotomies. Women come in a wider range of sizes and aspect ratios, women’s clothing is pretty much universally designed to fit tighter, but on the rack they’re given one meaningless size number. a 12 is bigger than a 10, who knows by how much, and there’s nothing on the girl you can measure with a tape to get that number, and there is no standard here at all. Why they haven’t revolted I have no idea.

Yeah I’ve got absolutely nothing for ya. Nothing works, you’ll never get ahead and it’s worse now than when I was your age.

True story, you’d have to sell those at the vegan commune or something.

But you can get decent flavor out of a round red tomato. I know, I do it every year.

Sort of. What that page describes is in the same building as what I’m thinking about.

The attitude toward nuclear weapons displayed by countries that haven’t ever nuked anyone are always fun to watch.

The thing I’m more nostalgic for was the time when everything had to be a glistening amorphous translucent blob, a bit like the Cingular Wireless logo or the MusicMatch Jukebox logo. And I’m in that era where you can just play MSN messenger sounds and you’ll get an OH MY GOD out of me.

Finally, an actual comic strip.

Long shelf life and/or physical durability. Alton Brown made this point in an episode of Good Eats by clamping a supermarket tomato in a bench vise.

Amateur radio operators are indeed allowed to transmit analog NTSC television in the UHF band. It’s most commonly done on the 70cm (440MHz) band, and a normal everyday 90’s television is all you need to receive the signals. You’d tune to what would have been cable channels 57 through 61. The use cases for this have decreased in recent years; for example you used to see hams using amateur television to send video signals from RC aircraft or model rockets, now that’s done with compressed digital video over something like Wi-Fi and doesn’t require a license. But, it’s still legal for hams to do.

Here’s how I think about it:

I deleted Samsung Health from my phone not long after getting it. I started realizing that it’s a VERY network intensive app, it wanted a lot of questionable permissions, etc. I fully see the purpose of a Health & Fitness app in the lives of everyday people, I think it can be of legitimate help for encouraging people to exercise and whatever, the health features of that app were definitely developed with the same attitude a hunter baits a trap. It was what they begrudgingly did to get me to step in it.

I ditched Samsung Health because I had visions of them selling that data to my health insurance provider who would then use it as an excuse to make my coverage worse and therefore more profitable. So I’m pretty sure if I was a jew in 1930’s Germany I’d delete Synogogr from my phone.

Elsewhere, I’ve seen women tweet or Tumbl or whatever about refusing to discuss their periods with their doctors. “When was yoru last period?” “It’s regular, that’s all you need to know.” Where’s that energy when it’s a cell phone app?

Businesses are greedy. They’re going to squeeze the turnip from every angle they can think of to get every drop of blood out they can.

Consumers are rock chewing stupid. They will choose fancy branding and ease of setup every single time because most of them are allergic to learning how the things in their houses work. People will sign their rights away in EULAs they don’t even bother to read because it’s too boring, they’re not going to stop watching Longmire or Stranger Things just because they added commercials.

We live in a world where fascism is on the rise. The Republicans want to jail or kill women who have abortions or miscarriages. Here in the smart phone age, women often use apps to track, record and predict their periods. These apps upload this data to a server somewhere and store it in a database. Wouldn’t the Republicans love to get their hands on that database to see if they can find women they can jail or kill? The solution: Get on Tumblr and ask men to download these apps and start uploading junk data to them, because getting women to switch to FOSS software that doesn’t upload their data to devices they don’t control is considered too much to ask. They won’t learn how to manage their own software and data to literally save their lives. They’re absolutely not giving up Netflix.

Captain Disillusion explains it way better than I ever could.

Nah I guess I’m gonna build shit until it’s time for a dose of buckshot.

Lemmings of Lemmy: What’s your blood type and eyeglass prescription?