even around the game people are good provided you aren't broadly exposed to it via tiktok/twitter/reddit/twitch. Some of the smaller genshin discords have been really helpful and sweet and full of good people. But honestly I think there's just a critical mass where communities like that kinda blow up so that's not a genshin problem so much as that's a "so many people in one place at one time" kind of problem lol
Tbh the genshin community isn't necessarily toxic, genshin is so large that it's genuinely difficult to pin down an entire genshin community. There's the twitter genshin community, the tiktok community, different content creator's communities, etc. It's not a monolith just because the game is so gargantuan. The social media communities tend to be horrible but like, i watch a small genshin tiktok-er and theorycrafter and his discord and related communities around that have been genuinely lovely and actively elevated my experience with the game. I think it's important to look at how, past a certain point, specific communities dont really exist? and that's not just a genshin thing that goes for anything, different communities sort of splinter off and it's hard to hold the whole thing to task ig
In any case, FFXIV is a weird pull because in my time playing GW2 I have many friends that have gone to ffxiv and come over to guild wars from it and almost always I hear nothing but good things about the broader community. It might have a bit of a toxic positivity vibe to it at times but I think the broader community seems to be pretty good? But uh. Valorant's gotten pretty bad. I love the game and the people I've met through my time with the game, and the community was quite good around the beta but it's just at a point where it's just. fueled by ego and weird horny tiktokers, it's not a great time lol
People that espouse the values of the fediverse often forget that people use these sorts of non-federated tools to engage with community, and sometimes a shitty thing can have good communities. Like how do you expect an artist who accepts commissions regularly from their followers to support themselves on mastodon when Twitter is right there? How do you expect communities around games, just as a single example, to universally migrate to matrix?
These alternatives are better for myriad reasons, certainly, but the moral posturing reducing engagement with these platforms to being the only moral consideration to keep in mind, which is an incredibly narrow understanding of how people use these social media platforms. It's like people that were mad at "any mods not privating their subreddits" during the reddit protests not acknowledging that places like the substance abuse subreddits perform a public good and it's almost like engaging with these platforms isnt just engaging with the platform, it's also engaging with the people there
Currently airing threads would be awesome, or a "ones to watch" thread so people can talk about what they're watching, either from the season or just in general for recommendations. I used /r/anime a ton for finding out what was worth keeping an eye on and I'd love that here
Importantly, you recognize the divide in those two things so clearly there is one for you, but if you were questioning it the same way OP is and the divide were less clear accordingly, I'd say that divide wouldn't really matter much
Yeah this is how I feel. I don't think that stopping this merger is going to make triple a games a much less hyper-capitalistic hellscape but I feel like forcing a change of hands might mean better conditions for the abk devs, because from what I've heard from friends that have worked at Microsoft's studios they've got a decent track record for employee care. Nothing remarkable, mind, but if it gets the devs away from toxic hypermasculine leadership and also gives them more security to make better games, I'm willing to nod the merger along. ABK's games have long had a human cost that I'm not super keen to see them continue to pay yknow
I have a couple, but not a ton tbh. Most of the long-time friends i was talking about are from school and stuff aren't friends from online and those are separate groups for the most part, but they dont really bat an eye at it when those groups do overlap for whatever reason. But the friends that I've met online I do hang out with in real life frequently and they call me pixel in person, not really a huge issue haha
I want to echo this, it makes sauces so creamy and luxurious, makes your pasta genuinely have the mouth feel of like high quality restaurant pasta. Heard about doing this in a j Kenji lopez-alt video and I swear by it now. Also has the benefit of coming to temp faster (less water means you need less heat to boil it) so stuff tends to move faster in the kitchen
Haha me too. it's funny, I decided to switch to this tag on my 15th birthday which is also coincidentally when I got involved in the gaming spaces I spent the most time in, and also when I kinda started really questioning my gender more aggressively, so going by Pixel let me fit in more and also let me sort of avoid the conversation about gender, because it wasn't a name, but the more time passed the more it was absolutely a name lmao
its funny, I go by pixel which I didn't pick with the intent of it becoming my name but when you're in gaming spaces for long enough your tag kinda becomes your name, as it were? Like I still use my "real" name in my day-to-day but just about everyone just calls me pixel outside of my family or very very long-time friends, and it's "weird" enough that it kinda reads as an enby name in the first place lol
One day, after school, I decided to tinker with the Mac systems at my school, and in that process I learned that Mac has a virtual drive that it uses as a setup medium that it doesn't clear, it just un-mounts, when you finish installing. So I just re-mounted the setup drive on the computer from the command line, restarted, booted in like I was setting up a fresh new computer and gave myself an admin account on one of the computers in our lab. Didn't really do anything nefarious with it, but it was a fun little experiment regardless
Garbage isekai sounds so fun, that's the kind of media I'd watch with friends if I had a group of people that were interested in watching garbage lmfao. I love watching Mother's Basement on youtube and i get my fill of garbage shows from him but I am ever tempted to jump into the garbage heap myself
Mushoku Tensei is so interesting to me just because like, it's a gross show about a gross person in a cruel world but like, the way it's rendered just feels correct for that kind of drama for the show? Like rudeus is AWFUL and it's interesting seeing him thrust into this awful world that he thinks is a dream, and watching him sort of implicitly realize that he's not going to get much out of a second chance to be someone he's proud of unless he seizes it. It's not a show I can recommend really easily but I think that it's so brilliantly written and I'm always excited for more
This season I'm watching Mushoku Tensei season 2, which is absolutely peak, and Jujutsu Kaisen season 2, which I'm VERY excited for. I don't know what else is coming out this season to look out for? Would love recommendations of upcoming shows to keep an eye on
even around the game people are good provided you aren't broadly exposed to it via tiktok/twitter/reddit/twitch. Some of the smaller genshin discords have been really helpful and sweet and full of good people. But honestly I think there's just a critical mass where communities like that kinda blow up so that's not a genshin problem so much as that's a "so many people in one place at one time" kind of problem lol