Mars Attacks! was very poorly marketed. I remember the commercials for it seeming tame and asking my parents to take me to the theater to see it and it fucked me up for a few good weeks. We didn’t even stay to the end, but I had nightmares about it that very same night.

I don’t have anything to add, I just want to say this is a phenomenal question, lol.

I want someone to drink mead out of my skull after I die and absorb my power. This is my fondest wish.

Social media is probably a very poorly or very narrowly defined term. Either they called out Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, etc by name or they gave some broad description of social media that could apply to everything from Facebook all the way down to somebody’s Vbulletin forum and this will be unenforceable for the vast majority of websites. Compliance is likely voluntary for the little fish in social media. I imagine that they aren’t even aware that Lemmy exists.

This is the only word I know of whose meaning can be redefined by majority consensus.

Case in point, my workplace wanted a bi-weekly committee meeting for our team to work on stuff over a zoom call. I asked what days these meetings would be held and they all agreed “Just Thursdays”. When I tried to argue that a bi-weekly meeting necessarily means that there must be two distinct dates per week, they all agreed that bi-weekly obviously means every other Thursday and that I didn’t understand what the word bi-weekly meant 😒

Hearing this word for the first time in the GoT audiobooks was a real surprise to say the least.

I liked the quote from Dr. Hibbert on the Simpsons:

“You know what they say, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”

“Oh ho ho ho, no… It’s made you weak as a kitten!”

When I first signed up for reddit, the upvotes and downvotes were not only separately tallied, but also showed the usernames of the most recent people who did them if you hovered over the button. Then very shortly after that they changed it so that it made votes private by default, and you could override it in the settings, but almost nobody went to check that box back on. Eventually, they completely removed that feature around the time upvotes and downvotes were combined into one. which along with vote fuzzing was one of the worst changes to reddit comments, imo.

Lemmy feels like old reddit right now, which is a great spot to be in. I don’t think you necessarily need public vote info, but maybe it could be enabled on a per-community basis? I can see some communities like politics not wanting to add additional drama to the equation while other more content driven communities might enjoy knowing who was giving the feedback.

A girl in college once told me I have “beautiful, horse-like legs”. I did martial arts at the time and my calves and thighs were very well toned, but I was actually a little self-conscious about them, and I had never considered horses to be particularly beautiful so I kind of took it as an insult after walking away from the conversation. It wasn’t until I relayed the story to a colleague a few months later that they told me it was probably a genuine compliment.

Whenever I think of the answer to this question, I always lament at how many film trilogies or games could have been absolutely immaculate duologies but were, for various reasons, sort of forced into a third installment through fan expectations, studio pressure, or just plain Hollywood/corporate greed.

It usually begins with a film or a video game that is an unexpected success, something that was written off by the execs that turned out to be not just a work of art, but a pop culture sensation. Star Wars, The Matrix, The Terminator, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, etc were probably never intended to have a sequel. Their original plotlines all tied up the loose ends nicely and made for a perfectly adequate self-contained story. Then the second film/game in the series comes out and it’s another well received installment. Maybe it’s because the second rides a bit on the coattails of the first, or maybe because the first walked so the second could run, it’s hard to say, but in every case the second always sets the bar too high. The third installment is typically the one that sours the soup, so to speak. I’d wager that even a really well written story can’t really live up to the expectations that fans have for the third installment of a well-beloved series. Having the perfect three-peat is a feat rarely seen accomplished, but nobody ever seems satisfied with just two good pieces of media with no plans for a third.

Bro, it’s a GoPro. You’ll get 20 minutes of 1080p footage and then the battery will die.

Future time travellers going back in time to the moment the first time machine was invented to figure out how that one worked because in the future theirs suck and are locked down to prevent abuse.

He’s got that casual action movie hero stance.

I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.

Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.

For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.

I mean, if you want an answer to that you could just stop using your smartphone for a few weeks and see what your brain comes up with. Here’s a short list of some examples that were popular when I was a kid and smartphones did not exist yet:

Magazines, the daily newspaper, books, going out and exploring, shopping at malls, doing a hobby or craft, personal projects, television, chit-chatting with friends or even strangers, video games, puzzles, play with your pets, exercise, play sports, sitting quietly and being alone with your thoughts.

I’m bisexual man, but I lean mostly towards women as my preference. Occasionally, I feel the pull to fool around with some guys, but nothing ever too serious.

I had just gotten out of a 5+ year relationship with a girl that I really liked, but the relationship was extremely unfulfilling sexually. She was a dead fish in bed and I had become bored with run-of-the-mill sex and I wanted to experiment a bit while I was single. I downloaded Tinder, set my preferences to any, and started swiping.

I was honestly just really horny and looking for anybody, male or female, who wanted a quick one night stand and I happened to swipe on a dude’s profile who had such a sexy butt pic as their profile picture that I was convinced it was a girl and didn’t bother to check. We talked a bit and he clarified that he was actually a guy, but that didn’t deter me. I agreed to meet him at a motel he was staying at for work and we could fool around a bit.

To keep a really long story short, I met the guy and he did not look as advertised in the photos. He was much uglier, and did not have a cute ladyboy body. Looked like a stereotypical redneck, complete with mullet and trucker cap. I was disappointed, but I didn’t want to be rude so I stayed. He offered me a drink, which I declined, and then he asked me to take off my clothes so we could start (he was already pantless when I walked in the motel room).

I then had the roughest, most uncomfortable blowjob in my entire life. He was really into giving head and deepthroating. I have climaxed once before during a blowjob so I know what a good one feels like and this guy was not very good at giving them. There was a lot of slobber and gagging involved which kind of took me out of the experience. Had to ask him to be more gentle and use less teeth a few times during the act. Eventually, mercifully, I came in his mouth and I went into the bathroom to wash up and I swear I could not get all the slobber and goop off of my junk. I went home after declining more sex with him, took a 45 minute shower, and tried to scrub my cock clean again. Took like a whole day for it to feel less gross.

He texted me the next day asking if I could “feed him another load” and I blocked him. Absolutely the worst sexual experience of my entire life that I didn’t want to repeat. Really put into perspective all the dead fish sex I had been having with my ex girlfriend and I realized that it wasn’t so bad after all.

Conquer half the world for spices.

Use absolutely none of them in authentic British cuisine.

Just the way His Majesty intended.

Holy shit… Are you telling me it’s not “gotta love those Starbucks lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane?”

I have a serious problem with understanding lyrics in songs. I look them up when I don’t quite understand what is being said and I realize I didn’t even fully comprehend half of the verses to begin with. It’s like musical dyslexia or something.

Well, we survived him once, we can do it again.

I’d still prefer to not get set back another decade by having him in office, and the danger of him never leaving office by way of dismantling all of the safeguards that prevented his coup in 2021 can’t be ignored.

If there are ways I can resist, I will. If there are people I can help just by reaching out, I will extend my hand to them. I won’t let Trump’s hateful rhetoric poison my humanity or turn me against my fellow man.

If things get bad enough, my girlfriend and I have a “bug-out” plan that we discussed and agreed upon that basically amounts to - withdraw everything from our financial accounts, sell everything that isn’t nailed down if we can or abandon everything in place, round up the family and buy plane/boat tickets to head somewhere that has low requirements for citizenship or will accept American petitions for political asylum if things get desperate enough. This is in the worst-case scenario where the U.S. descends into a full fascist/totalitarian state and there is a clear and present danger of us getting killed just for being political dissidents.

Ideally, we’d like to stay here and hope that things get better, but every year things seem to get worse and worse. The American Dream is dead and rotting, and we can just barely see a pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel for us to be able to achieve a life, but we’re both left wondering if we’re even going to be able to hold on to that if we do manage to seize it given how much the economy is backsliding each year.

tl;dr: the plan is to keep our heads down, but our spirits as high as possible, and always know where the closest exit is in case of an emergency.

The douchiest people drive these things, I swear.