What thing do you love that you can never get anyone else to check out?

MacedWindow@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 175 points –

Kind of a hard question to word, but is there anything in your life you have recommended to other people but no one's ever gotten into?

I love podcasts and have friends who still thank me for getting them into this one or that one. But I've never gotten anyone to listen to My Brother, My Brother and Me. I don't know if the name is unappealing or the concept but people seem to bounce off immediately.

So what can't you get people into and why should we check it out?

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Linux

I think the thigh high socks requirement scares people away 😓

The uniform used to be knee-high socks, cargo pants, scraggly beard and bald spot. It's still evolving.

In case you didn't already know you're browsing Lemmy, this top comment confirms it.

Esperanto. A made up language that is really easy to learn and spoken to some degree by about 2 million people all over the world. I got into it when I heard that if you speak it you can stay with Esperanto speakers that just want to practice with strangers, for free. I traveled all over the world for free and met so many awesome people.

When I try to get anyone to learn it, they just won't. They hear about that criticism of the language or another, or plain get bored. You can just start the Esperanto course on Duolingo for free, but nobody I know goes through, despite the benefits.

The moment I got interested in Esperanto, I wanted better so I jumped down a rabbit hole of ever more obscure languages until I realized what I had gotten into and stopped.

Also, and this probably applied to others, if I'm language learning, there's two other languages I really 'should* be learning, but am not, so that makes me feel guilty.

I kinda understand the appeal but there are just too many other languages that have a real practical use for when I’m traveling and want to speak to regular people instead of a secret society.

Fun fact, William Shatner of Star Trek fame once starred in a movie filmed entirely in Esperanto.

Angoroj! Fun fact: I have the DVD! And it's hilariously bad.

How do you locate other Esperanto speakers?

Esperanto has a special call that attracts other Esperanto users.

It also has a mating call, but that only attracts birds.

i find it cool in the sense of how it's a portrayal of all languages being somewhat synthetic. how other conlangs have tried to play with language features is how i landed on Jan Misali's YT channel (here's his Esperanto episode).

esperanto per-se i haven't learnt because... maybe because I wouldn't have anyone to practice with, and the point of languages is communication? idk.

Duolingo maybe be a good start for the theory, how did you start getting practice? and more importantly, what's this about rent-free Esperanto hostels? 👀👀

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Discworld by Terry Pratchett. It's got something for just about everyone and I have a few avid readers in my family but they keep putting it off.

I've had similar problems. I think party of the issue is that, IMHO, the first two are amongst the weakest in the whole series and are less inspiring. I keep trying to tell my daughter to start with #3, but she hasn't done it yet.

Start with Guards! Guards! And the Vimes cycle and then move on from there.

Seriously. If they don't get hooked on Vimes, I don't see them enjoying anything in the Discworld series.

I read the Colour of Magic (Book 1) and started the second one, but I wasn’t very hooked by it? I mean it was funny, but maybe I just didn’t like all the fourth wall breaks.

You can watch the 2 colour of magic movies instead.

They are pretty good and feature Sir Terry Pratchett himself.

I'm currently reading the Color of Magic right now and it is...painful. I know, I was warned, but I ignored the pleas. Now I'm kind of stuck reading this book that feels like it was written by a snarky 8th grader on a bus ride home after school. I truly hope the books get better.

What sort of warnings did you get? All I ever got were recommendations about random Discworld books that weren’t the first ones.

I really just can't get into fiction books but I definitely wish I was every time this series comes up. It sounds pretty cool

I'm the opposite. I only read fiction, both scifi and fantasy and everything in between, because why read something else? I love imagination possibilities of authors that can put something crazy in, something you simply can't get in non-fiction literature. Why read "boring" stuff that can (have/did) happen to everyone in normal life?

I know I'm exaggerating, but I hope you know what I mean. And I highly recommend Discworld.

PS: I believe Discworld is not for everyone because it's British with their style of humour baked in. If you don't like Monty Python, Red Dwarf, IT Crowd or other British shows, you probably won't enjoy Discworld either.

Because there are very worthwhile texts to read that improve ones knowledge about oneself and humanity and the universe, which in turn allows oneself to make better decisions and have a better mindset.

Reading fiction still helps a little with that, but is mostly "just" entertainment, which of course is also worthwhile.

Well, I do read quite bit of articles about history or technical progress, but not really whole books. IDK why, it just feels different for me and while articles are ok, I feel like book is too much. So books are almost exclusively fiction for me.

When I was young I only read fiction, but as I got older I realized reality is incredibly complex and disturbing and found non-fiction far more interesting. So much of the past remains relevant today and there are no shortage of times real people have not only imagined but also implemented ways to exploit each other and their environments, for good and for bad, often in ways that do come across as utterly crazy, so it is hardly a boring category. These days I would rather make sense of the world I am in than some fictional universe. I do like British humor though.

Aside from the accurate list you posted, I felt similarities as well with hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

Yeah, that didn't cross my mind, but it's definitely true!

I did read the first one and liked it a lot, I wanted to continue the series but other stuff gets in the way and recently I've been more into gaming than reading 😭

I finally took the dive in audiobook form about 2 weeks ago

Yesterday I finished The Light Fantastic in one day at work while listening

On equal rites rn and I now see that all of my favorite inline creators for the last 18 years have just been repackaging Pratchet

And I love it

Does Privacy count? I always I try to encourage people to treat themselves to better privacy, to step away from big corpo platforms and use more Foss services. Doesn't stick with a lot of em. 😔

If you can't see it, it doesn't exist. /s

They'll try and make it sound like it was a reasoned decision to give in, but if there was a little eyeball looking over their shoulder they'd 100% be freaked out.

well obviously, but a disembodied animate eyeball would freak anyone out regardless of what it was doing

What is the practical, measurable impact on my life of big corpo knowing my info? Seems like a lot of ass ache for without any measurable benefits beyond some principles stand big corpo doesn't care about. It's not like Big Corpo isn't getting your info. Using Chrome and a VPN on the Google spy drone in your pocket isn't hiding anything from Google. If Big Corpo wants your data, they will get it. They are better at getting it than we are at hiding it. The only solution is legislative, not individual nerds putting up knee high fences and feeling morally superior about it.

What is the practical, measurable impact on my life of big corpo knowing my info?

Just off the top of my head: spam, scam calls, phishing emails, credit agency hacks, every data aggregator in the world having a psychological profile on you, malicious actors who want your money having access to enough information to have a chance at getting access to your bank account. But at least advertisements will more likely be things you want.

Oh and don't forget it's not just big corpo, it's also several nations spying on you. Sure you might not be doing anything wrong now, but take it from a political refugee: if they ever want to control you, all they need to do is criminalize something you did in the past and then they already have all the evidence they need. Isn't "justice" fun?

If Big Corpo wants your data, they will get it.

That's a very silly assumption to make. Just because they have better data aggregation abilities than your average person doesn't mean they're omnipotent.

They are better at getting it than we are at hiding it.

This really sounds luke you're devolving into an All Or Nothing stance. Just because my online presence necessarily leaves a data footprint doesn't mean I should just give up and let them have everything they want.

The only solution is legislative, not individual nerds putting up knee high fences and feeling morally superior about it.

Excuse you, mine's a chest high wall.

Ignoring the assumption that legislation would ever act against the will of capital... As we've seen with the Right to Repair movement: societal change stems from the sustained pressure applied by groups of dedicated individuals. Legislation doesn't just pop into congress because one of the representatives was visited the night before by the three ghosts of privacy past, present and future in the middle of the night; it comes from representatives that either belonged to the movements or were successfully lobbied by them.

Also if someone suggesting you should care about your own privacy and/or well-being feels like an attack against your morals, you should start asking why and who taught you to feel that way about it. I don't feel like a better person than you, I feel a lot less paranoid and stressed all the time and I would wish that for everyone

Lemmy

Haha I don't even usually try. I'll answer honestly if people ask what site I'm on but I know its a bridge too far for most people.

To a lot of people Reddit is super nerdy, Lemmy is several levels above of nerdy in relation.

I don't think I've ever met anyone outside of Lemmy where I feel their lives would be better if they used it. The only time I feel a want to yell about Lemmy is when people who are on Masterdon or the like blindly promote something on Reddit.

I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.

Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.

Three separate times now someone's invited me to a Create server and 2 hours later I've somehow instead ended up joining a 300+ mod modpack that takes roughly 45 minutes to load on my laptop, crashes and errors out every few hours, and dies within a week after someone uses some random mod to gain infinite diamonds or something.

I tend to burn a little slower than that, but yes. Post-scarcity is usually the goal and the game needn't overstay its welcome.

The problem with modded servers is that the guy who's done this 10 times is havingg a great time building a mega factory and outpaces or outshines (depending on versus or coop mentality) everyone else. You might be different but this is a very consistent experience for me.

Yeah, this is inevitable.

My limiter tends to be that anything I make has to do things not only efficiently, but fashionably. I like to be immersed in a factory that looks vaguely like a real factory, rather than laying down a bunch of minmaxxed spaghetti. So I spend a lot of time faffing about with where a thing should actually go and how do I hook it up in a novel way.

Casuals still can't keep up and tryhards pass me by. Stuck in the middle, lol.

I respect the effort lol

The other thing I try to do that I didn't think of in the other reply is not mixing mods together.

Most major tech mods are balanced for standalone play. They merely contain integrations with other mods as convenient curiosities. So when you mix overpowered machine from mod ABC that is regulated by some restriction, and combine it with machine from mod XYZ that trivializes that restriction, the progression collapses and it's boring.

Some people like that. I try to avoid it.

Some might wonder what the point is in playing with all the mods if I don't actually use all the mods. And my answer is I do, but all separately in parallel. I like being a botanist and a thaumaturge and a blood magician and an astral sorcerer and a pressure mechanic and a mekanism engineer all at the same time, but like... in shifts. When I get bored of one I put it down and advance another. I want to feel like I've mastered them all rather than cherry picked the best parts of each. I get all the variety but few of the problems.

All of this context switching means I waste a tremendous amount of time, but it does make the game last longer. But not too long.

Also, in coop, it pays well when players specialize. I do this magic, you do that tech, etc. Share one or two things in common, but also be different. You might end up wickedly out of power balance depending on which mods you picked to specialize in, but imo that's not really the mark of success.

I've been trying to get a LAN party together with some IRL friends for a little bit, but we all are so different in experience level that even playing vanilla, we'll inevitably have some people run rings around others.

My current pitch is that we all share one house and bolt different spaces of different styles onto the sides of it whenever we need a new space, share all resource except a small personal chest and the experienced players can only do specific tasks like going caving or into the nether if it's as a whole group, so the newer players get to experience some of those parts fresh.

Doing things as a group is much more fun anyways. We always do that with the ender dragon but even something like caving is more fun with a few other people.

My friend and I tried this with sevtech ages. Too heavy, too much, too slow.

We switched to life in the village with iris shaders, and we’re much happier!

Have you tried increasing your RAM usage on the MC launcher?

CPU requirements are usually fine, but RAM can get out of hand rather quickly. I usually try to put at least 8 GB, although 6 works in most cases.

Unfortunately I have a laptop with no RAM upgrades so it's cranked up as far as it can go lol

Is Minecraft heavy now?

When you cram it full of tech mods it is.

If you don't have at minimum 4 GB of RAM to dedicate to the game alone, you are not going to be able to load the packs I want to play. And yet, this is apparently how much RAM a lot of people still have in their PCs total in the year of our lord 2024.

I also have a lot of friends using underpowered netbooks as daily drivers, which will quickly be CPU-bounded in a game like modded Minecraft.

Minecraft, especially modded Minecraft, is almost an anti-game. Unlike nearly every other big game, where it's a neat and tidy compiled package that stays in its lane memory-wise, loads relatively quickly, and only makes you ask questions about how many pretty settings your GPU can handle and what FPS you'll get doing it, Minecraft instead is a bloated, memory-hogging dumpster fire written crappily in Java (many of the mods are, anyway) that runs like a dream on integrated graphics but can bring nearly any processor you might have to its knees on single thread performance.

It amazes me that my laptop, which would have been sold alongside phones with keyboards, still has more RAM and pixels than some people, and an appreciable number of cores. The GPU is caca and increasingly unsupported though.

Are there any mods that are surprisingly economical? CPU-heavyness is pretty much just the genera - Dwarf Fortress has long been the same - but coding your thing well can make a huge difference. DF itself just got multithreading, and apparently some of the sorting tasks were implemented very naively before.

pretty sure ATM9 recommended minimum RAM is 10GB...i have it at 12GB.

but i also run it at about 100fps and view distance set around 16 with shaders...

My favorite TV show Stargate. I've only been able to convince one person to watch it, and they loved it too. Everyone else says its to long since sg1+Atlantis+universe is 17 seasons total. Plus 3 Movies.

If anything there is not enough of it. Universe should really have went on for more seasons.

For sure. Season one wasn't great, but season two was awesome. Felt like it was really just getting started when it ended.

The Walking Through The Stargate podcast has an experienced gate walker taking his friend through the serieses one episode at a time. It's fun to see the newbie perspective.

Wtts.space

Gormenghast, a series of novels which are "fantasy" but contain no magic. The setting is genuinely a fantasy setting, with massive, fantastical castles, all empty and decaying.

It's the story of a royal family, and the heir to the throne, who does not wish to be an heir to the throne.

Also, that's to say nothing of the third book, which sends you on a major twist and goes from fantasy to science fiction...

Underrated trilogy, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.

Also, Dead Man, a film by Jim Jarmusch. I'm not a big fan of Westerns, but this "acid western" is one of my favorite movies of all time. Somehow simultaneously a funny buddy movie and also a deep treatise on death and belief.

Gary Farmer gets to say his iconic line that I still love to hear to this day: "Stupid fucking white man."

Farmer would go on to cameo in another Jarmusch film, Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai to repeat the same line.

I love Dead Man. That is a great movie by a great director in Jim J.

I watched the Gormenghast miniseries on the Space Channel many many years ago and eventually read the books. They were interesting. Not something I'd want to revisit, but definitely weird.

I still have never seen the movie, but Dead Man has a great soundtrack by Neil Young. Guitar Solo, No 5 is my favorite track if you just check out one:

https://youtu.be/tThoCkzEr_s?si=AnREMldp8g5nFiZZ

I've begun watching & falling in love with something very recently that I think will fall into this category for sure. An old adult swim cartoon called Home Movies.

Made by a lot of the same talent before Bob's Burgers was a thing, the humour is actually insanely clever and progressive for it's time & it still feels fresh to me watching it today. Definitely have already had a few laughing fits where I had to pause the episode for a while to catch my breath and I'm only 4 episodes in 😂

For being a simpler sort of design, it also has some good background gags too. Not to mention the comedian guest stars -- Episode 3 had Emo Philips which was a delightful surprise, but episode 4 has freakin' Mitch Hedberg in it! Took me by surprise for sure but it was also a nice little extra thing to hear him say some fresh lines.

That's all I have to say about it for now, but every night now my partner & I look forward to watching a couple episodes before bed :) it's a great time!

You should check out the show that preceded Home Movies. Made by the same team, including most of the same voice actors.

Dr. Katz Professional Therapist was ahead of its time, in my opinion. It was my first exposure to H. Jon Benjamin (McGuirk) and Johnathan Katz (Eric Robbins) and Loren Brouchard. It is basically the same creative team starting at Dr. Katz and ending with Bob's Burgers.

I have a real soft spot for Dr. Katz and Ben Katz.

EDIT: Completely forgot. Dr. Katz animation was done in "squigglevision" which was also used in the first season of Home Movies, but dropped for Flash animation, I think, in season 2 of Home Movies.

I will absolutely check this out, thank you! It's this kind of recommendation that led me to rediscover home movies as well so I love that it keeps going lol

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I have only managed to convince ONE person to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, tragically, because it's my favorite tv show of all time.

I started that once and found it very hard to follow. Intriguing though, and I keep meaning to go back to it.

Oddly enough the thing I'm going to recommend for this thread is the work of Joel Bocko, whose website and general web presence, Lost in the Movies, is superb and really not well enough known IMO.

I mention it here because he's done quite a bit on Evangelion, so you might enjoy it :-)

Evangelion is not hard to follow. It’s just a fucked up story about fucked up people hurting each other and then the world ends.

I found it pretty confusing, but I'll give it another go. I also have a slight suspicion that I might have accidentally dropped into the middle of the story rather than starting at the start.

It's actually an allegory about Adam & Eve and the creation mythos 😅 The last episode of the Evangelion series is not the true last episode, there's actually a whole separate episode that goes over what really happens

Mbmbam is fantastic. Haven’t listened to it in years but that’s cuz I listen to the adventure zone mostly.

If you work on a computer for any appreciable length of time per day then you absolutely should build or buy yourself a split ergometric keyboard. You will never regret it, you will be faster at typing, your body will hurt less, you will be able to program it to do literally anything you want, and it will last longer than any other keyboard you can buy from major brands like razer or Logitech. I’ve only ever been able to get people to go into mechanical keyboards, but never ergometric or splits.

It's funny how you can mention one of the most popular podcasts and still it's true that a lot of people will just never get into it.

It's been a long time since I checked in directly with MBMBAM, but I don't think I'll ever stop having a man-crush on Justin "Hoops" McElroy.

In that same vein but even more obscure:

F**kface

Genuinely the podcast that brings the most joy to me in my daily life. It is not obnoxious like Dynamic banter, it has elements of MBMBAM, but hasn't fallen into the rut of following a formula (the movie + munch squads have gotten a bit too much for me recently).

I haven't laughed like that since 2015-2018 mbmbam where they released so many bangers.

I think answer is kind of there in the premise - stop trying to get validation from others that your "special things" are special. I had to work on this with my partner, she was always trying to "sell" obscure, funny "special things" that we share to rooms full of others that don't get it. In the process, she would hurt her own perception of those special things just a little bit each time. Don't give away your "special things" to poor unfortunate people who don't get it or don't deserve them.

Lol its not for validation I just like telling friends about things I like and learning about what they like. I wouldn't have a DnD group or anyone to talk to about Jojo if I followed your advice. I'm not repeatedly trying to sell things.

The question comes from people asking me for podcasts to check out, I always give them two or three, and the one that never sticks is MBMBAM. Everyone loves Time Suck though. Probably as simple as a catchier name.

Its just fun to me to think about from a marketing/pyschological perspective, why A is more interesting than B. In the end I still love MBMBAM.

Mage: The Ascension - I'm super happy that TTRPGs are having a renaissance but there are so many systems out there and D&D isn't anywhere near the best. You can imagine this like the board game revolution and how "Catan is like so amazing" when actually it's a rather mechanically underwhelming and repetitive game.

D&D is a role-playing game with almost no support for social actions, it's bizarre.

It takes an especially skilled GM to run M:tA. They need to be able to handle things getting very weird very fast. But it’s what makes the game and stories so great. Toon was like that too.

Opera! It's so very very good and it's such an acquired taste.

I feel like all of the arts are that way. You can either put yourself in the mindset to be receptive of them... or you can't.

But I've had many enriching experiences by taking a chance on art forms and genres I never supposed I would like, including those I had some bias against.

Getting into Klaus Nomi has made me reconsider my stance on opera, but I have no idea where to begin

A good way to begin is to watch a popular classic favourite opera like La Traviata or La Boheme, with subtitles, and review the plot summary ahead of time

Here is a link to a pretty good one. https://youtu.be/WZywmSJkKYE?feature=shared

Bebop and cool jazz.

Bebop is my shit. Can confirm, no one else likes it around me.

I like Charlie Parker but that's all I know of bebop. I also own a replica of one of his suits from the 40es

Death, Black Metal, Punk - heavy music is a channel for heavy emotions.

Open source, privacy, federation - Don't give up power over technology that interacts with you

Rope bondage, kinks - Bodies, minds are interesting when reacting

Squishing toasted bread before topping it - Un-squished toasted bread gets annoying edges very fast when drying

Squishing toasted bread? Like, flattening it more?

I imagine they've got a toast mallet.

No, no. It is very important that the toast gets squished evenly, so it would need to be a spatula.

I can sort of see it, I guess. Never tried it with toast, but it's my go-to for a grilled cheese sandwich.

I do get a joy out of the flatness of a good grilled cheese. Getting a good toast on the edge and pushing it down while its on the grill to flatten it.

The series, Futureman.

It's a time travel action comedy and it is probably my favorite series of all time. It was on Hulu but has been removed. I think it's disk only now.

“You never go rat-hole to rat-hole”. Loved that series. Wolf + cocaine killed me every time.

My wife would see me watching it and just ask “Futterman?” It was a fun show

I must suck at selling anime because I've never got one person into it. But several of them got into it because of someone else later on.

What did you try to start them on? You've gotta get them hooked with the visual style first to get them used to the medium, so I always recommend stuff that would be more familiar to them. Stuff like March Comes In Like A Lion; Much more true-to-life and no sudden "surprises" like we know certain shows can do at particular moments 🙄

It's been so long I couldn't tell you. Though, I remember i didn't have them watch anything. I was just describing it to them.

Space Team! It's a fantastic mobile party game to be played with people in the same room with you! You get a bunch of technobabble labeled dials, buttons, levers, knobs and whatever else while you gotta read the top of the screen to everyone else to keep your ship flying! They also gotta do the same. It gets crazier as you go.

Literally nobody will play with me. If you're in Cincinnati, hit me up for some Space Team!

It is such a fun game. I love it too. If you are ever in Vancouver, Canada let me know. I'll play with you

If you ever want a fast track to the no-fly list, play Space Team on a airplane!

Jokes aside, I forgot about this game and it's great fun. I need to remember it next time I am in a room with a few friends.

Chipotle tobasco is some of the best hot sauce I've ever had. I honestly have no idea if they even sell outside of Louisiana, but if you ever get the chance, try it.

The denizens of Louisiana have such an elevated taste for spice that any time I even mention it to anyone here they say "oh that shit sounds basic, try this one" and I can't get anyone to actually try it.

It has a kick, but not as hot as a full fledged hot sauce. Nowhere near making you sweat hot. But the flavor profile is 👌

I sometimes steal bottles from Chipotle when I go there as I never see it in stores and it's so good. I literally am willing to commit crime for that hot sauce.

I prefer a lot more kick, and found a chipotle habanero sauce. But yeah, chipotle is best jalepeńo. Smokey goodness!

I can buy it in Iowa. It's good stuff.

My second favorite tobasco, the lime one being my actual favorite. But it's never in stores so I always settle for chipotle, since it's great too and the burn is tolerable for a non "heat-head" such as myself.

Someone spent a while telling me Nier Automata was great, and it took a couple years before I got independently interested. My punishment is the same fate, of telling others it's great, and no-one trying it.

Same with Return of the Obra Dinn, which has a niche art style but a captivating set of mysteries.

Chrono Trigger.

I've started and stopped it a number of times over the past 20 years or so, and I'm finally playing it all the way through right now. At least one of those times was because I thought I HAD to fight Lavos through the bucket and thought I was expected to grind until I could defeat it lol. This time, I've found it really remarkable how tight it is and how well it still holds up today. Even though Sea of Stars came out last year, it feels like Chrono Trigger could have been released alongside it and it would only feel a bit more dated in some respects.

Still haven't played Sea of Stars, but grew up with Chrono trigger. How well does it compare?

It's heavily inspired by Chrono Trigger...heavily. It's got dual-techs, the writing feels very similar at times, the equipment has predictable scaling as the story progresses, and lots more. The dialog is a bit saccharine for my taste; I've far preferred Chrono Trigger's. Chrono Trigger has pleasant and supportive characters, but it hasn't ever felt over the top. Sea of Stars also has some modern niceties, like timed presses for defense and offense, some interesting spell-boosting mechanics, it's very pretty at times, etc. And it plays on jrpg tropes at times in a fun way, and didn't feel like it overstayed its welcome. Since you love Chrono Trigger, my best guess is that I think you'd have fun with Sea of Stars. It won't blow your mind by any means, but I don't think you'd regret spending time with it.

A lot of things but from the top of my head: boardgames, Space Engineers, RimWorld, Frasier

I let my wife try to get me into boardgaming. That meant I spent six months playing ten minutes of boardgames at a time before the rest of the table ganged up to eliminate me because I was the weakest player. Thirteen years later I still want nothing to do with the hobby, the culture and 90% of the people who are serious about it.

Well that sucks, if you ever get in that situation again, but I doubt you will, ask to play a co-op game.

Prime opportunity for their partner to get mad because they're shit at the game. I know some couples are like that

If your partner is going to bully you while you are trying to learn a game, they are a lousy partner. It isn’t cooperative games that are the problem. I have a partner and several friends who all love cooperative games and are patient with anyone new to the game, I’ve never had issues with them being a jerk to newcomers. The more people you can welcome into learning and playing a game you like, the more likely you will have someone available to join you when you feel like having a game day. The best person to get into a game you enjoy is your partner who you likely spend most of your time with anyway, they are the number one best source of having someone to play with so long as you have some overlapping interests in games.

You need a group that plays games like Pandemic, where the whole table is working together - although some games in that genre do include saboteurs.

I got to the point with my friends where I'd refuse to play some games like you describe, very long games where you can get screwed over early on and never have a hope of recovery.

My current favorite is Terraforming Mars, where everyone is cooperatively terraforming the planet but also trying to outperform the other corporations. It's less about actively attacking each other and more taking advantage of opponents weaknesses and missteps.

When this conversation started at dinner with boardgamers after Der Spiel in Essen I asked the waiter to bring me the appropriate knife to saw my own leg off to escape the trap.

What he needs is to spend his leisure time doing activities he likes.

I somehow doubt different board games fall into that category.

Those kind of games seem fun, but I'm also just talking about a small game every once in a while, something like one or two rounds of MtG, Machi Koro, Claim, Sushi Go. The light stuff, not the stuff that takes hours per game.

I love and talk a lot about factory games (Factorio, Shapez, Factory Idle,…) but I don’t think any of my friends would ever get into it. But I don’t really care.

You might check out Satisfactory. It's pretty neat

I didn’t like it personally. It seemed like a dream come true but the third dimension from a player perspective makes it annoying to build anything and generally confusing I find. Will see how Shapez 2 handles the jump to 3D.

Satisfactory doesn't have the same swing as factorio.

Techtonica is a lot more factorio like.

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Quake Champions. I consider it the best shooter I’ve ever played but, most people wanna play the popular games

Used to play q3 back in the 90's and this is the modernized version. I don't play shooters anymore, but I would definitely recommend this one to anyone who still appreciates the old-school arena format

oh yah, quake live was cool as hell too.

I tried to get warsaw to be a thing with my friends to similar effect.

My favorite band is Elend, they're essentially unknown outside of the metal community in spite of not being metal in any way. (They are one of the only non-metal bands given an exception to be listed on the metal archives.) It's neoclassical, but at times absurdly violent and their first three albums have harsh vocals. (Note that "Weeping Nights" is more or less an alternate version of "Les Ténèbres du Dehors" where the male vocals have been removed.)

violent, harsh vocals

violent, no harsh vocals

beautiful sad music

absolutely gorgeous shit with screams

(just giving youtube links so you can redirect to your frontend of choice)

For me it's getting people to play KOTOR, I know it's old but it's just sooo good and the story is so great, and please just play it. Pretty please.

You're forgetting the other major hurdle, Taris. Getting past that first planet is a slog. It's definitely my biggest barrier whenever I try to replay it.

I can't get it to run in wide screen (wqhd) on my PC so I never really started the game beyond the menus. I you have a fix I'm a taker

Are you playing the original KOTOR or the remakes by Aspyr? They redid them so that they no longer crash on start and you don't need to change or add patches.

It's available on mac, switch, android and iOS. Apparently a new remake is still possibly coming soon too.

The one on Steam, I'm not sure. I bought it years ago, I think it's just called KOTOR. Do you mean it's supposed to work ootb on modern systems ?

I always struggled getting friends into Monster Hunter, until recently. I still primarily solo everything but I got my one Canadian buddy into it (Rise, he said World was too slow and clunky. I'll take the win either way), and we hunt together when we have time to. My friends are always like "doesn't look like my kind of game," and sure, sometimes you can get an idea of how you'll like a game from watching gameplay. But they never even attempt to play it to see how it actually feels. They just dismiss it and move on. Feels bad, MH is fun as hell. One day I'll have a full squad lol.

Hello fellow Monster Hunter! Similar experience, but it gets worse as someone who really likes Monster Hunter Frontier - because not even die-hard classic MH players will touch it, because of the perception that it's "too anime". It's sad, because honestly it's a great time, no other game in the series has Frontier's level of variety.

Heya! I actually haven't played Frontier! Mostly on account of the fact that I don't actually have the means to play it, otherwise I would certainly give it a go. From what I've heard others say about it, they said its challenge stemmed from having to claw your way through, and it wasn't comfortable as their hands would cramp lol. Oh really? Variety in quests? Weapons? And I don't think there's anything wrong with some anime flair, though tbf, I wouldn't ever touch God Eater for that very reason. That one is too anime for me.

I would still try Frontier though. MH has easily become one of my favorite series. I'm still slowly getting through MHGU also but there's just sooo many quests, holy shit.

Did you ever try Wild Hearts, btw? Sucks it flopped bc I still to this day wanna try it. Looks so fun but I've seen and heard all the things lol.

Hey mate, I'm doing a quick response rn and will return at some point to properly write up a lengthier response!

The claw can happen in Frontier if you're running the default controls - I've been playing in Portable mode though, which uses the Tri Classic Controller scheme, although my experience was it's a pain in the backside to figure out how to change the controls if you're not used to Freedom Unite's menus (Frontier was based on Dos)

As for the variety, Frontier boasts something like 188 unique monsters including subspecies, rare species and other variants. Each of these has their weapons (to no one's surprise). In addition there are two unique weapon classes that haven't appeared in any other games - the Tonfas which are basically very short dual blades that punch and give air time, unique buffs and a powered-up explosive attack, (think a proto-Insect Glaive), and the Magnet Spike which is the most unbalanced thing I have ever had the pleasure of using in a video game - it simply melts most G Rank monsters. Further, the game has an extra layer of difficulty above G Rank called "Zenith" which includes fifteen unique variants of existing monsters, which has similarities with Deviants from GU. If Frontier does appeal to you, I recommend you track down PewPewDojo's discord, they can get you set up with a private server.

Can relate to your comments about GU, it's a massive game and honestly even after playing it for nearly four hundred hours over the span of the last five years I'm still discovering new stuff.

I've always been intrigued by Wild Hearts tbh, never had the chance though (it came out during my thesis and just kinda slipped by). I really do need to try it though.

No prob, buddy, respond at your leisure!

Aaah, okay I gotcha now. Man, so you're a real MH vet! Even got Freedom Unite under your belt. That's pretty cool honestly! The oldest one I've played was MH3U I believe, the one on 3DS. Back then I didn't give it the time it deserved to properly learn it so I gave up on it. Gave World a chance super late after it released and been hooked since, so I'm trying to make my way backward the best I can. From the MH titles I have played, MHGU is definitely my favorite one, though. I really dig the style of the game, the use of arts, the animations. Still taking some getting used to, weapon control wise. I keep attempting to pull off combos that I can't, hahah. As I said, it's really just the sheer amount of quests. It's got more than any game I've played so far, certainly.

Oh dude, really? ~188 monsters? That's a massive roster, I love that, and the inclusion of yet another difficulty is amazing. I would love to see that kind of variety in modern MH, that's insane. And yeah, I heard about those! Wasn't the Magnet Spike kinda like Gunlance? I'll have to look up some footage but that's awesome, and I'm truly hoping that Capcom will bring those back, or something new entirely to the weapon selection in Wilds. I love most of the current weapon choices but I'm itching for something new to use, can't lie. Both sound like they were exceptionally fun to use though. Thanks for that rec, man!! Most definitely appreciate that.

Oh, I can believe it! I love that about GU myself, there's always something new to find out and it blows my mind every time.

If you do, be sure to let me know! It's on sale rn and I'm very tempted but I'm on PS5 and still debating if I wanna do that to myself. I'd been keeping up with it since release and they didn't give it the patches they should've.

Also, love the MH talk, dude! Would love to continue this in DM's. Maybe we can even team up sometime if you're on PS5!

Halo.
Can't motivate anybody to play it :(

Edit: What a great typo.

Have you been recommending the MCC ? imho that's the only thing worth playing (as opposed to Infinite)

I tried to motivate my friends into halo of any kind.
The f2p part of halo infinite makes it attractive to try out at all.
But even playing part of the reach co-op didnt catch with them.

Oh well. I tried :(

I guess they have to be into both scifi and shooters as a prerequisite

Shooters: Check
Sci-Fi: (I think) Check.

I think one of my friends played Destiny. The other (irl) friend was thr one I played Halo 2 on the og xbox with.
I would say Halo is pretty unique both in types of play and art style which makes it harder to sell vs Overwatch or Rainbow 6 Siege.

Travelers

Awesome show. Can't get anyone to watch it

Sounds like a cool concept but I see it’s by Netflix and has 3 seasons. Did they axe this show early, like so many others, or did they only need 3 seasons to tell the story?

I watched the first season and liked it, but something started feeling really artificial about the tension? Not sure, it was a while back

Have you watched Timeless? Sorta similar concept

The Swallows and Amazons book series. Written almost exactly a hundred years ago, about early teenage children camping and sailing boats, mostly on a lake in England. Simple innocent stories, no sex, no drugs, no guns.

Oreo cookies with orange juice.

Is it...is it...actually good? I feel like it can't be.

Orange and chocolate is a classic combination. I like it.

So is orange and cream (dreamsicle), you might be a genius

I'll try anything once. Next time I have Oreos and oj in stock I'll try it

Karaoke. Found out nearly two years ago that I actually quite enjoy going to a pub, getting on the mic and singing to an audience.

Very few of the people I know are into it

Try travelling to japan. There Karaoke is BIG.

It's big in every East/Southeast Asian countries, even muslim countries like Malay and Indo. If Japan's too expensive, travel to Thailand.

The Marvel Cosmic period starting with the Thanos series written by Starlin, ending with Thanos Imperative (edit: or Annihilators, I guess), with all the amazing stuff in between, especially Annihilation.

Where's the reading order? Is there a lot of series hopping?

It's more of a string of events accompanied by a whole bunch of miniseries, most of which are needed to get to know the characters (or their new interpretations) and make sense of the story.

The rough idea is that it started with the eponymous Thanos 12 issue series, where the later 6 issues directly lead into the Annihilation event and its sequel Annihilation Conquest. Nova (Richard Rider, who is the led character) got his own series from that (Nova vol. 4) and a team that forms the basis of Guardians of the Galaxy forms in Conquest. Those two series ran concurrently and tied to the subsequent cosmic events War of Kings and Real of Kings. The whole cosmic run was somewhat tied up in Thanos Imperative and Annihilators miniseries and basically ended.

The the GotG movie happened and Bendis started writing it and it just wasn't the same. There might be good stories after that, but I lost interest at that point.

The good thing about this whole thing is that it's taking part far away from Earth and thus is not tied up with the mainstream Marvel continuity in any major ways (Annihilation takes place during the comic Civil War) and the bulk of the characters are forgotten or unpopular characters given modern interpretations and put in a different context than usually, so you don't really need to know much about their history, since their characterisation is being built up, almost from scratch in some cases. And it's awesome. Like the Super Skrull fighting in a war against a galaxy-ending threat and being super powerful instead of jobbing to Fantastic Four like he usually does.

Schlock Mercenary. Amazing webcomic, by one of only like 2 webcomic authors that I'm familiar with that have the simple capability of putting out a comic on time (although this no longer applies as the story is finished) and is a fantastic story from beginning to end.

Yet, none of the friends I've ever recommended it to have been willing to read it

Yeah, it's amazing. Definitely my all time favorite comic series.

Custom Roms I love how I can load custom ROMs on devices. I tried to talk my friends and co-workers into it but they seem really disinterested. I even took one of my older phones and showed it to them in person. They weren't really fascinated by the fact, that I got something different than Android or iOS on my phone. The only thing they liked was, how the lockscreen in Ubuntu Touch looked.

Hell yeah. Gonna do this as soon as I have a backup phone in case something goes wrong

LSD haha, its insane and awesome, so many people should experience it before thinking they know themselves.

Demoscene stuff. Basically just digital art written for fun and to show off your coding skills. People have been doing it since the Amiga. If you've ever pirated software in the 90's to 00's, you've probably seen a realtime animation and mod-based techno track accompany the keygen - that's an example of Demoscene art.

I can't find anyone in the US, not even one of the nerds that works in tech with me, who gives a single shit about this stuff. There are parties and conventions all the time, none of them in North America...

I'm traveling to Germany at the end of March to go to a Demoparty just for the chance to meet a single other person who cares. It should be fun.

I made my own prod discovery service if you ever want to check it out: https://prods.page/ (Yes, I need to update it).

Destiny Potato. Their debut album is one of my all time favorites. It was released with pretty much no fanfare or PR, and while I'm usually disappointed by my Spotify recommendations, this is how I discovered them, and holy hell am I glad I did.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m9V078hBuAWG4B0368meY3o-ToBdKLpng&si=zIwSPQRG3QRCLs0h

If I'm taking one thing from this thread, it's that I'm most likely to click on something called "Desiny Potato".

Unfortunately they changed their name. Their second album was released as Sordid Pink

EverQuest. I know it's old now but even when I was playing in the early 2000s, I could never get anyone to play. I was the only one I ever knew in person who played. At that time the subscription kept people away. As time went on, it was the sometimes painstaking pace, older gaming conventions, and most of all, the graphics.

I don't have any recommendations but boy oh boy I'm excited to start going through all these and kick off my Not Like the Other Girls phase (as a 30 y/o man I feel like it's long overdue)

Dude I just can't get my friends to do anything other than OSRS

Wanna swap friends? Mine keep torturing themselves with league lmao

Unfortunately I do love those guys when they're not drowning our discord call with "RANGE!!! MAGE!!! POT NOW POT NOW!!!" so I will have to decline your offer. I wish you all the best in your pursuits.

Virtual Reality has completely revitalized my long dead interest in gaming. I initially I got into it during COVID just to socialize but then I started being immersed in games in ways I never had and it's all I want to do now.

the netrunner card game. All my MTG friends are so used to the idea of lootboxes and I'd rather not play anything than gamble.

I keep recommending Beau of the Fifth Column to people for balanced US and global political talking points. No one even tries it.

Added to my list. Plan to watch on my next chance (Wednesday)!

Dostoevsky. Kava. My girlfriend refuses to watch Yu Yu Hakusho with me

Kava. I thought it was the way I was describing it. But they'll go straight for hard liquor that tastes like shit.

Haha! That's pretty much how it's described in the red mars trilogy. Idk if I'll ever try after reading those books.

yeah kava doesn't really taste good but i think it's much a cleaner buzz than alcohol. both work on the GABA receptors. i wanna try GHB one day because apparently it's also like alcohol but cleaner - but I have no idea where I'd go about getting it and I wouldn't wanna go searching for it

My recommendation is the work of Joel Bocko, whose website and general web presence, Lost in the Movies, is superb and really not well enough known IMO.

He's best know for his amazingly in-depth looks at Twin Peaks, including Lost in Twin Peaks (a podcast offering episode-by-episode discussion and analysis of the entire run), and the more thematically-based video series, Journey through Twin Peaks.

These are not so much in the "Try to crack the code" mode so much much TP coverage goes for - rather they are about appreciation and analysis of the show as a piece of TV/cinema; its themes and messages, its characters and plotlines, its direction and aesthetics, and its production, artistic vision and contemporary reception. They're wonderfully satisfying and well put together, and deserve much more attention.

He also does a huge amount of work on other cinema and TV, ranging from major blockbusters (usually in the form of him discussing major films he missed on initial release) to older genre movies to obscure arthouse cinema.

I can't recommend his work enough :-)

Nobody in all my gamer friends play Starfield like I do. Thank God for online communities.

isn't it a single player game? i talk to my friends about games we don't both play all the time, that's what friends are for.

Yeah it's single player. I just mean I have nobody to discuss this game with that I know in person.

So what can’t you get people into

My weird fetishes

why should we check it out?

Uuuhh...

In reality, tabletop games, including RPG. There's even a local, free event that happens every 2 months, but out of everyone I invite, nobody shows up, not even the people who say "I'd like to play once". It really saddens me how many people reply with "I don't have the skill to play, it's too complicated", actually meaning "I doubt I can develop the skill I think is needed to play and I'm not willing to try" whenever I get excited about RPGs.

Indie games and indie musicians.

Most of my friends have the mentality of "if it's not popular, it's not worth checking out, regardless if it's actually good or not". And I hate it.

Let me know how you feel when one of those indie musicians get popular and your friends act like they've been listening to them for years.

For me it's sim racing and VR gaming.

All my friends care about is LOL and CSGO.

The Band Sweet as Swing. They make some great Vocal Jazz and this is actually one of my favorite albums but all the people to which I showed this didn't really like it.

Star Trek. Every friend I have only knows about Star Wars.

At least Lemmy is the home of the trekkie! But I feel it everyone I know IRL wants to talk about Star Wars movies and Ashoka and not what is the best episode of TNG lol.

Power metal. Most people seem to think it’s too cheesy.

What is considered power metal nowadays? Helloween? Manowar? Or something completely different?

Gloryhammer comes to mind immediately. Battle Beast, too. And offshoots like Brothers of Metal and Unleash the Archers.

Well, never heard of any of these. I kind of stopped listening to this sub-genre in 90s, same with heavy and speed, it's all too "whiny" and "high-pitched" for my taste and ears if you get what I mean. Singers usually push really hard and guitars are either constantly soloing or shredding too high and that makes me uncomfortable nowadays.

But the best part is, there's so much to pick from these days everyone should get satisfied.

I was into it some time late 90's, and it was quite popular then. But it kind of died off and disappeared.

It’s interesting that 90% of these comments are just TV show recommendations (or other forms of entertainment). I would have thought that lemmy would be a little more anti-consumption :/

Yes, they're relatively easy-to-digest suggestions, hence perhaps a frustration at the root of the OP's question surrounding the attempts to draw your peers into something you enjoy.

Because of course Skydiving (for example) might be amazing, but you bet your ass I'm not looking into doing that all by myself lol