Jtskywalker
I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn’t get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.
I think that feeling is why it’s still my favorite PC game.
Dumb question but wouldn’t the game using your preferred pronouns actually add to the immersion?
Yes. His rant about immersion makes no sense. Also ranting about “current day” over and over again as if California invented gendered pronouns in 2020 and they wouldn’t exist in the future?
It seems to me that he is so caught up in the culture war news cycle that he is unable to understand that these things exist outside of that and his brain is unable to process the word “pronouns” without thinking of Steven Crowder. Like some kind of twisted pavlovian response.
It’s not really the time. It’s more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.
Sure, it’s easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it’s there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.
Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.
The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.
Similar situation here. I was raised home schooled for all of my education. Got a GED, good score on the ACT, got a 4.0 in the community college where I got an associates degree. The problem is parents who homeschool because they don’t want their kids to turn “woke” or be “converted” by exposure to the fact that non-straight, non-cis people exist. A lot of the time, the emphasis is only on indoctrination, and there is little or no actual education involved.
I have been to homeschool conferences - there are some good resources there, and a LOT of really pretty awful stuff like this article mentioned. People like the author are so incredibly impactful, even if they don’t realize it. They may never see results but those seeds matter. Even if the parents don’t get it, the kids will.
At a conference last year, there was a speaker talking about parenting difficult children (Kirk Martin with Celebrate Calm). He was presenting very much a solid gentle parenting approach (though he didn’t call it that) that is very contrary to the culture of a lot of homeschool groups. He spent a lot of time unpacking his experiences as someone who grew up with really strict physical discipline, the impact it had on him, his experience being a parent - kind of leading people on a journey from where they might be to where they should be as parents.
He also spent a bit of his talk on how the Bible doesn’t teach us to raise our kids to fight in a culture war and just really pretty clearly calling out a lot of the toxic far right christian-nationalist talking points. Sure he made a lot of people uncomfortable, but those thoughts will stick with them.
After his talk he was spent over an hour talking with people outside of the conference room answering questions. His next talk was packed as well.
Anyway, all that to say - I know it can take a lot out of someone to deal with people in those environments, but it is absolutely impactful and so desperately needed.
Yeah that’s what I’m talking about.
I have habits that I don’t have to think about and then one day they’re just gone and I have to start over. Usually it happens by having a sudden realization that the thing I did for months without thinking about it has not been done for several weeks. Then to rebuild that habit I have to start over again.
This is missing step 5 - a few months later I forget that I have a habit and have to start over from scratch
Every. Single. Time.
I made a website for my wife with a list of a ton of reasons why I love her and each time she taps the screen it shows a new one.
So… that is a thing you can do for the cost of a domain name and some cheap hosting.
That is my biggest gripe with modern windows. The OS itself is pretty decent, but WHY am I paying at minimum $100 and seeing ads all over the start menu? Even with a vanilla MS sourced USB there are so many bloat apps. It didn’t used to be that way.
I set up a PC for recording in a sound system and got a fresh install of Windows 11 on a custom PC and it was still super bloated with garbage games and a video editor that watermarks footage instead of the perfectly functional basic software they used to have.
I am in the process of repairing and setting up an old macbook with Linux since it stopped getting Apple updates. When I get a new laptop I will likely go with Linux there as well.
