The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.

Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)

Every time I see this, I can’t help but feel like it works better without the third panel. Showing it happening dulls the comedic impact of the final panel. Anyone who doesn’t know what Kirby is about isn’t going to understand the comic anyway, and anyone who does doesn’t need the third panel to understand what happened.

And really, they’ve never been easier, with the advent of gaming laptops and the Steam Deck and etc. - no more having to lug a desktop PC, mouse, keyboard, CRT monitor, and a box of cables and find room in your friend’s garage to set it up.

Did you read the article?

The protesters yelled slogans including “Free, free Palestine.”

If they had been chanting ‘Stop the Genocide!’, then I’d agree with you - it would have been an anti-genocide protest. But they weren’t; they were chanting pro-palestinian slogans, so calling it anything other than a ‘Pro Palestine’ demonstration would have been misrepresenting the situation.

I don’t know where you get the takeaway that they’re talking about you, or that you are in any way involved in what happened here, unless you were specifically there. This isn’t about you, or any other anti-genocide protest; this is about a very specific, pro-Palestine protest.

I was talking about what they’re calling me

What? Are you in the wrong thread?

It’s assumed that you already have a pear tree; the partridges are just being installed into your pre-existing tree. Don’t be greedy. Mature fruit trees are expensive.

One brother is on an Xbox One is on a PC One is on a steam deck with WiFi hotspot.

That’s going to be the limiting factor.

Are you specifically looking for something to play against each other? There’s some pretty good options for co-op games with crossplay, and that might make for a more friendly experience, but if you’re in the mood for something competitive, options are a little more limited.

Some potential options:

• Destiny 2
• Monster Hunter Rise
• The Ascent
• Borderlands 3
• Warframe
• Remnant 2

If you all had a PC, you’d have a lot more options. Maybe two of you should consider going in on a Steam Deck for Brother #3 for Christmas!

That honestly doesn’t look like it would be bad to use. If you’re holding it close to your chest, that seems like it would have your hands in a more natural position, so it’s probably ergonomically better, for some people.

So what you’re saying is, tips are bullshit, and it’s really just a shakedown? Got it.

Not only WoW, but most old MMOs were built around being social experiences. The really old ones (Everquest, most notably) were basically chat rooms with games attached. The gameplay was very slow, and you relied heavily on other players to progress, so you spent a lot of time just chatting with people, either in zone chat or in groups or in guilds. Over time, you started to recognize the same names showing up in the same places, or as you progressed, the same players would be progressing at the same pace so you’d keep seeing them as you moved from zone to zone.

It was also a lot easier to build friendships for otherwise socially awkward people. You had an immediate common interest and common goal (advancing in the game), so you had common ground to talk about, and a common activity to enjoy together, but during the downtime, conversation would often shift to other things - where you lived, how old you were, what your hobbies were… so you’d get to know people ‘outside the game’, too.

Nowadays, WoW and other MMOs are much more fast-paced, and much more solo play oriented. There’s still group-required content, but it’s very action-heavy; you don’t have a lot of time that you’re just sitting around chatting, and groups are much more short-term things. 15 or 20 minutes, whereas once upon a time, it was 3+ hours as standard.

I met my oldest friend in an MMO about 24 or 25 years ago… we accompanied each other to a few different games over the years, and now we aren’t playing anything together, but we still talk. I flew across the country to attend his wedding a couple years ago. Similarly, I met my wife in WoW. Our first “date” was killing bugs in Silithus together. We’ve been together for about 18 years.

Old (as in, early-late 2000s) MMOs generated a lot of friendships; this isn’t at all an uncommon story to hear from people who played them at that time.

Every time you look at the app, they share the time you’re seeing with every other user, it’s a privacy nightmare!

You’re the hero the internet needs.

Yeah, and at that point I’ll also just wait for a 50% off sale, whereas I would otherwise have been a day 1 purchase.

I feel like this happens a lot, honestly - there’ll be a game I’m really excited for, and either it’s got some shitty DRM, or it’s a timed Epic exclusive, or whatever else, and then a few months later when I could be playing it, I’ve mentally moved on to other things and I end up just buying it much later on deep sale if at all.

There’s a lot of games coming out all the time; if I get past that initial hype period around launch without buying a thing, it’s 50% or more off, or I won’t buy it at all.

It’s really a shame, because I was super excited for MH:Wilds, but the confirmation that it will include Denuvo killed my enthusiasm completely.

Vampire Survivors’ genre has been coined ‘Bullet Heaven’, literally the opposite of bullet hell. The fact that it has the tag on Steam is kind of meaningless. Monster Hunter: Wilds’ Steam Page has the Dating Sim tag, but I’m willing to bet I won’t get to romance a Rathalos.

“[Horse Armor] must have been [sold] in the millions, it had to be millions,” Nesmith said. “I don’t know the actual number, I probably did at one point, I just no longer remember that. And that was kind of a head shaker for us: you’re all making fun of it and yet you buy it.”

And that right there is the reason why the industry is absolutely saturated with this shit now. If people had just chilled the fuck out when this shit was first introduced, made sure it was an absolute flop from a sales perspective (not only for this one, but for others that were released back then, too), we might be in a better place now.

Kbin and Kbin

This sounds like a lawfirm name you’d see advertised on TV.

“Did your post get unjustly deleted? Unfair moderator actions? Admins getting you down? Call Kbin and Kbin for a free consultation TODAY!”

The geography is also a huge contributor. To protest something on a national scale needs significantly greater buy-in from the country as a whole than protesting something on a national scale in a European country. We have a huge amount of land area over here and with the exception of major cities, we’re very spread out.

Spain is one of the larger European countries, and is about 500k sq. km, as an example. The US is about 9.1 million sq. km.

Protests happen on local scales but they don’t make national news, only the really massive ones do, and those require a lot of coordination and time investment from the participants just to show up.

It’s all just framing, no? You could frame all of your examples of protesting to “improve something” as protesting against something, and vice versa.

Protesting for improved living conditions is just protesting against poor living conditions. Protesting for higher wages is protesting against low wages. Protesting for lower tuition costs is protesting against high tuition.

Protests by definition are an action objecting to a thing. What are you seeing happen in other countries that’s so different to what’s happening here, when you don’t selectively frame it as “for” a cause rather than “against” a thing?

This is kind of up to the individual community, not the instance as a whole. An instance theoretically could make a general ‘No memes on any community on this instance’ rule but it would be awful to enforce, and it’d be easier to leave it up to communities.

That said, I think Lemmy is a long way off from having the userbase or popularity to create that problem, and the absence of karma or any analogue really narrows the impact. Personally, I’ve seen significantly less low-effort content here than on Reddit, with the exception of a few specific communities that exist for that purpose specifically.