Wait, Verlan is l’envers, stromae is maestro… Is this Verlan thing just like Rioplatense Spanish’s Vesre? (Vesre basically means revés i.e. inverse)

EDIT: Just looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out this phenomenon happens in a number of languages: Riocontra in Italian (riocontra -> contrario), Podaná in Greek, Šatrovački in Serbia, Totoiana in Romanian.

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I also think there is something to it just being the 90s or so and not having much choice.

Absolutely. I enjoyed and played a lot out of King of Dragon Pass back in the day. Yesterday I sat down to finally play its spiritual successor Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind. From what I remember from KoDP it plays exactly the same (at least during the first hour). Yet I couldn’t force myself to keep playing it. Same way nowadays I can’t seem to get hooked with genres I used to play a ton as a kid: RTS games like Age of Empires II and Warcraft 3, life sims like The Sims, point & click graphic adventures like Monkey Island, traditional roguelikes, city builders, etc. Other genres I try to get back into and I do manage to play a ton of hours of but I’m never able to finish like when I was young (e.g. JRPGs)

When I try to play many of those games I tend to feel kinda impatient and wanting to use my limited time to play something else that I feel I might enjoy better. A good modern 4X game with lots of mod support like Stellaris or Civ6 instead of RTS games which have always felt a bit clunky to me. Short narrative games like Citizen Sleeper or Roadwarden instead of longer ones I’m not able to finish. Any addictive modern roguelite, especially if it features mechanics I particularly like (like deckbuilding and turn-based combat). If I ever feel interested to play a life sim or a city builder nowadays it has to feature more RPG elements and/or iterative elements and/or deckbuilding and a very compelling setting to me. And so on.

It feels like many of the newer genres (or the updated versions of old genres) are just more polished and fine-tuned than genres that used to be popular in the 90s and the 2000s. They just feel better to play. And to be fair in some cases they might be engineered to be more addicting, too. Like, I did finish Thimbleweed Park some years ago but I feel like nowadays no one is going to play witty point & click graphic adventure games with obscure puzzles if they can play a nice-looking adventure game filled with gacha waifus.

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When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.

In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.

At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They’re still quite active in BS to this day.

I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.

I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don’t trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.

starts*, but yeah

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I already checked the list someone shared in some other thread, but many of the accounts that cover games there are inactive.

As a non-American he seems decent enough going by headlines in the last couple years but then it turns out he was a Republican governor? What’s with that?

Hope they are being looked after. Not all old people are saints and there’s probably always a % that will take advantage of kids

I don’t care about Reddit (or about growing Lemmy) as much as the average post I see in Lemmy, but if you wanted to migrate people from the former to the latter this is one of the easier ways to help do it. It’s one of those small quality of life things that are asked for periodically. If Lemmy had it it’d be mentioned in Reddit every time people are pissed with the site (which is every day for most sites, including Reddit). It’d be free mouth to mouth word of mouth (being ESL is funny sometimes) publicity for Lemmy

But if that logic held wouldn’t religion tend to increase instead of decrease?

+1 for jumping to Suikoden II. If you love it you can check III and I

EDIT: I tried the BoF and Wild Arms sagas years ago too. The one that stood the most to me was BoF4

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No, I’m genuinely asking. Having read more books doesn’t make you better in any way, it just means you sank more time into them. But I guess I understand how some would see my comment like that, since there’s a lot of snobs and elitism among readers (at least, among the vocal ones)

I tried to import my books from Goodreads but it gives me a ‘413 Request Entity Too Large’ error message. I could import them to Storygraph a couple of weeks ago with no problem though. Does anyone know a way?

What are some good venues to discover indie games? I’ve been checking YT channels like Wanderbots and Splattercatgaming and the only subreddit I still go back to is GameDeals but I’m sure there’s a lot of places to get to know about new and old indies of specific genres

Mmh… I’d say King of Dragon Pass but the truth is that every half a year I see someone talking about. In niche circles but still. Let me check my Playnite list (only the ones I rated 5/5)…

Ok. At first I thought these ones would qualify: The Lion’s Song, one night hot springs, Tacoma, missed messages. But I’m pretty sure I just haven’t read in the right places, they are pretty big game in narrative indie circles I think.

Oh, I got it. These are my highly rated games that I don’t think I have ever heard (much less read) someone talk about:

• No-One Has To Die: A short scifi puzzle/visual novel.
• The Last Door: An Edgar Allan Poe inspired point-and-click adventure.
• Don’t Escape - 4 Days to Survive: A survival & mystery point-and-click adventure.
• Rebuild 2: A management survival game set in a zombie apocalypse. The creator who is called Sarah Northway I think went on to make I Was a Teenage Exocolonist which I haven’t played yet.

Now that I think of it, small RPG Maker games would also qualify. I really liked Dhux’s Scar back in the day.

By the way, if you want to discover lots of small games that no one knows daily there’s YT channels like Wanderbots and Splattercatgaming that dedicate themselves to try certain genres of indies. It really makes cognizant of how many games come out every week.

My go-to for like 5 years has been StudyGE. It’s just a Geography game, but for the rare ocassions where I have nothing else to do and I don’t have Internet in my phone I go to it.

There’s also the trivia game Dilemo, though that is in Spanish and I think it might have some ads, it’s just that it serves them so infrequently that I’m not even sure if I hallucinated them. Like I think it only serves ads when you have been playing it for long-ass sessions, and I usually only play for a few minutes, so.