This is still going? I remember this from such a long time ago. I used to love this series a lot

I'm looking into this technique! I'm going to definitely try this method out! I wonder if I should get an app/website for it or get a physical timer that ticks.

I've never heard of this tea, I will have to try it!

Ahh, lucky!! I'm very envious!

Ooh, these are all really good ideas! I may borrow some of these! :) Especially the string lights, fake plants, and blanket! That sounds so nice.

I should also get some little photos of loved ones that I can look at; that's another very good idea!

"Stray Gods" is an incredibly beautiful game. I was turned off by the playstyle at first, but then I embraced it and got really invested in the characters and the story. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys Greek mythology and/or fantastic stories about interpersonal drama and enjoys games with tough dialogue choices.

The soundtrack also!!! It's a musical game and the songs are all SO BEAUTIFUL. I teared up a few times.

I agree with most of what you said. I think it's important to be conscious of where our money is going and to be comfortable discussing that with others.

About FF14 and Yoshi-P, however, I've actually heard the opposite about his opinion on trans people and NFTs. I heard from my friends (and upon a quick Google search I just did) that he expressed sympathy towards trans community members and that he was trying to keep NFTs out of the game? If you've heard otherwise, can you please share the information? I was going to resubscribe to play with my friends, but if you know something, I'd love for you to share it.

I will also check out those companies you mentioned near the end, such as KO_OP and Supergiant!

I really admire your response here as you put my thoughts and feeling about this more eloquently than I could. I really want to incentivize the good work people are doing, and while my dollar going somewhere else might not mean much to EA or Blizzard, it means a lot more to smaller groups who are trying to do the right thing with less resources. It also just feels nice to spend money on something good :)

I really appreciate this response. It balances the want to do good and make ethical choices with the reality that I can't do everything perfectly. It's important to do the best we can and also leave room to enjoy ourselves :)

Thank you for your response. I also think it's good that people are becoming more aware of these issues and doing what they can to address them.

I also think your point about FOMO is a good one; it becomes much less frustrating when I look at my backlog of games I've already purchased and have thousands of hours left to play. There will always be new games, and they won't always be made by people that make me feel uncomfortable.

As others have stated, you make a good point about indie game devs. Jonathan Blow is one that my partner brings up regularly. I didn't know about Ion Fury or Kovarex but that's disappointing. It's hard to keep track of it all, but when I find out about things like this, I'll do my best to consider it when making future purchases.

I appreciate your thought-out response. I'm going to respond as best I can to your points.

I struggle with moral/ethical conundrums in all areas of my life. The current discussion is games, but I really do consider the harm I might be causing any time I buy things. There are some harms that I cannot avoid, such as the purchase of gasoline (my current income is low and I cannot afford a greenee car). Others, such as food purchases, are limited in what I can do... But I try anyway. I have an app for telling me about ethical sourcing by company/product which I use at the store. Clothing, sadly, tends to be unethical no matter what, unless I make my own clothes - I sadly don't have the time or money to do so.

With video games, which are themselves a luxury, I have so many choices of what to play that I feel I have much more ability to decide what not to play, based on how I feel about where my money is going.

I should also acknowledge that I don't think any of these games/developers will suffer as a result of me not purchasing them. Developers/programmers also do not make income based on sales, and layoffs happen after the release of many major AAA games, simply because they don't need that large team anymore (I don't agree with this practice at all, and I think it's horrible to do to people who already don't make enough for their work, but it's relatively industry standard). The gaming community is also waaaay too large for any kind of boycott to be effective. I'm just trying to be mindful about my purchases based on my own feeling.

I think you raise a fair point about indie games. I think it's a good reminder to me to look into those as well. As long as there's no major publicized controversy surrounding an indie company, however, there's no information I can use to steer me away from it. But, I appreciate your reminder not to blindly purchase indie games just because the company is "indie."

Overall, I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me. I will be considering your points as I move forward.

Sorry to concern you! If anything I'm on the complete opposite side of the gaming politics pendulum.

The comments in here aren't... what I was expecting from this community. Feels like I'm back on old internet. Ironically, the comments themselves seem to be perpetuating the heteronormativity brought up by the post.

I notice it's mostly people coming in from other communities saying things like "The population is small, so we should only have to see it as much as we see it now (basically never)," which reads as "You barely exist, so continue that way." This ignores the real world current statistics that people are increasingly feeling safe identifying as LGBT+, so we don't actually have a number of where that percentage will plateau. It could be significantly higher than the outdated 5% I'm seeing bandied about in here. It's already moved towards 8% of total USA population, with nearly 20% of Gen Z identifying LGBT. If that holds, then that's quite a lot more than the 5% everyone keeps saying.

Regardless of how little we supposedly matter based on a number, it's insulting to see people outside the community telling us how we should feel about our own experiences. That's not something they get to decide for us.

I just started Habitica thanks to your suggestion! I hope it helps me to foster good habits :)

I think I will absolutely look into these, thank you!!

Before I worked at a library I took them for granted too. They're such incredible resources for the community and they do so much more than lend books. They do community outreach, activities, events, many have video games and board games, movies, etc. You should check out your local branches sometime! 😊

Not anything major on my end, but my library does do occasional displays of queer material (among other materials) all year round, which I'm always appreciative of.

I may have to look into treatment for my own anxiety issues. For me, they're quite annoying and get in the way of my relationship and my enjoyment of everyday activities that should be fun, like video games and going to hangout with friends.

As someone who works in a library, as long as speakers follow the policies - which mainly focus on being non-profit, etc. - they are allowed to speak. As for the books, libraries order books based on what is popular, what is educational, and what is wanted by the area a particular branch is in.

The intention behind this is to ensure everyone has access to as much information as possible, regardless of what side it's on. Libraries are a place for people to get unhindered access to information and resources.

As my coworkers and I like to say, "A library should have something in it to offend everyone." It's a silly way of saying, we don't ban books and we don't limit access to books. Any books, from any author. To do so would go against everything we stand for.

As for shelving the terf books in the LGBTQ section, that may have more to do with the Dewey Decimal code of those books than it does with personal librarian choice. If its code is 547.6, it'll go with other 547.6 books, for example, regardless of the point it is making.

Can anyone explain this one to me? I'm not sure I'm following it.

Wow this song is absolutely beautiful. I'm glad you shared it so others could hear it. I think I'm going to start listening to this on my high-anxiety days. It's so calming.

This is such a fun mix of styles! I really love it; thanks for sharing! 😊

It has been so helpful reading everyone's responses to this! I really appreciate how everyone has been responding with their own advice and insights! I'm going to be going through all of these and writing down main points and creating an actionable plan out of them. One main point is it sounds like I need to be really getting into hobby groups/volunteer groups; I absolutely will be doing this.

I also really appreciate people providing their own experiences with this feeling. It makes me feel as though I'm not as alone with this. Adulthood is hard! But it doesn't have to be lonely, and that's something I want to really work on.

Finding Lemmy has been really wonderful; it feels so much friendlier than the other place.

Thank you, everyone. <3

I appreciate this feedback! Strangely, my D&D group has not yielded these kinds of friends. I still really value these friendships, though! We just aren't particularly vulnerable with each other. Maybe I'll make a second, separate group.

I've been learning German. Maybe I'll look to see if there are any local groups for German-learners! If not, maybe I'll make one!

Oh yikes! I feel very lucky that the German translation is competent. German has a pretty robust dubbing industry. And the German translation of Ragnar the Red is perfectly singable and I actually like listening to it to practice singing along! :)

I just looked up the video of the Japanese VA singing Ragnar the Red in Japanese and I feel so bad for that poor voice actor having to shove so many syllables into such short time.

I agree! I can't wait to watch more of it. My coworker got me started on it, and now I'm intrigued to see where it goes. The premise is very interesting to me; hopefully, they can keep delivering on it being interesting and mysterious!

Hmm. I wonder where I can go for that. I'm in a German-learning discord channel but it's HUGE and that's intimidating to me. I'll give it another shot though!

When I click these links it breaks my Lemmy app and doesn't take me to the destination. Do you have any advice, or maybe an ideal app I should be using?

Yes to the language-learning one! I really need to have a space to support my goal of learning German. I'm already really missing that resource that I had on Reddit.

You would HATE AI Somnium Files then, haha. I really like their flowchart, but I definitely see how others wouldn't.

I feel like I keep getting little Elder Scrolls releases in the form of mods made my incredible, passionate mod developers. I find it so fascinating and wonderful to see people who care so much about making great content that they'll do it for free and it often turns out better than some professional teams could do.

I've been replaying Skyrim to teach myself German, but I'm also using quite a few mods, such as Inigo and Helgen Reborn. I also have some that take me to other lands. Some mods just increase graphics or change gameplay mechanics a bit. There's just so many amazing things people have made, it really keeps things fresh.

It'll be cool when the next game comes out, sure, but for now I can keep supporting mod creators and having a blast finding new things :)

This is a bit obscure, but does anyone know any good German YouTubers? I'm trying to practice my language skills. :)

Strahd himself is asking this? I'm star-struck!

Hm, but to try to answer this... I used to play a lot of EverQuest back in the day, and at one point upgraded to EverQuest 2. I was pretty open when talking to people online, even though I was a little kid, just chatting up random players while leveling and regularly inviting random people to groups just to have someone to talk to.

At one point I met some other player who was playing a rat man (Ratonga?) and he and I played for a while while chatting randomly about life or whatever. At some point I must've expressed confusion about how I felt about a male friend of mine, and this player very calmly and patiently explained same-sex attraction to me. I'd gone to a private Catholic grade school and never had much information about queer anything to this point, so it was a bit of a shock to me.

Thankfully, this player was so patient and kind with me, talking about their own identity as an adult gay man, how happy they were, what their life is like, and really helping me to understand that it's normal, it's healthy, and in many ways it's fun.

I think back on that encounter occasionally and I think about how genuinely impactful and helpful it was for me. We didn't talk for very long, but it left such a lasting impact on how I view myself. Without it, I may have lived with a lot of shame and confusion for a lot longer.

Sometimes I wonder where he is, and if he knows how much of an impact he had.

I had a few other interactions on MMOs that were similar, after this encounter, trying to find other people like me who I could look up to. Surprisingly, many people were very friendly to me and willing to talk about their lives and explain things. It was my very first interaction with the community, and it was all virtual through games. So many people helped me out when I was experiencing a lot of confusion. I wish I'd had that help in real life, but at least I did find it somewhere.

By "Lemmy app" do you mean "Jerboa for Lemmy"? Because I don't see any other apps on the Samsung app store. Maybe the official one is only for iPhone?

It'll be an adjustment to this new site, but I welcome the change. It seems healthier here.

Just another gay fella joining the fediverse.