Seriously, why the fuck has advertising become so incredibly insidious and pervasive in recent years? I can't go anywhere on the internet and not see ads or a warning to turn off my ad blocker or message telling me to subscribe to view the content. Worse, I can't even be out in public in the city without having another fucking ad shoved in my face. I was recently walking downtown at 1 am or so waiting on an uber and really enjoying the cool night air, not on my phone or anything, just enjoying the moment, and I saw an insanely bright billboard advertising something.

I feel like ads are just starting to really wear on me. I'm sick of consuming and being told to consume and being manipulated in the death throes of capitalism.

Edit:spelling

Oh man, how could I have forgotten to mention archive.org??

My favorite thing on there is the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group who maintain a huge archive of radio shows produced between 1920 and the 1960s (and some from later years as well such as CBS Radio Mystery Theater).

I've been listening through the most well-known shows for about the last 10 years and I still haven't even listened to them all and there are dozens of other more obscure shows!

I can count on one hand the number of games I've finished in the last 4-5 years. Off the top of my head

• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
• Spider-Man (PS4)
• Red Dead Redemption II
• L.A. Noire
• Middle Earth: Shadow of War

Games I stopped playing:

• Horizon: Zero Dawn (PC)
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Disco Elysium (I know. right.)
• DEATHLOOP
• Spider-Man: Remastered (PC)
• Assassin's Creed: Odyssey
• Divinity: Original Sin II
• Dying Light 2
• Half Life - Alyx
• Boneworks
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (I think I did complete this game once when I was 14 or so)
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance
• Fallout 4 (I did complete the story to this a long time ago but I wanted to give it another go a couple years back)

Same here! I have a monthly donation going, and the $2 is well worth the hundreds of hours I've spent on it.

I prefer it. The concept of federation has been hard to wrap my mind around, but I think the issue with current-day reddit is that many communities became so large that interactions between users and even interactions with posts that are more than an hour old almost completely dried up (or at least that was my experience) which made the website a lot less interesting as a social platform and more of just a time-wasting doomscrolling link aggregation platform.

Yes, same here. I have the last mission (I think, "Meet Hannako at Embers") in Cyberpunk still to do and I pick it up and do a handful of side quests every few months. Maybe I'll finish it, eventually.

Regardless of the perceived merit of your post I think we would all just appreciate a little more participation here.

Yeah that's definitely how I am. I can tell what's coming and so I maybe just lose the "need" to complete the game.

I did that with Morrowind finally last year and just had an amazing time playing through it all the way.

RDR2 is actually one of the few games I have finished in the last few years.

Yeah same here. I have found myself playing almost entirely sandbox games these last few years. Where there isn't really and end goal (or at least one I'm not required to complete) and I just get to build something or manage resources, etc.

Sounds awful. I am pretty sick of just not being able to spend a single moment without being advertised to.

True, but modern advertisement is almost always intended to deceive. Shitty mobile game ads that don't even show the actual game's content, advertisements for complete scams to get rich quick, etc. It's all some ploy to get people to go download some app so it can collect your data to sell to advertisers or effectively steal your money by misleading you.