I use Fossify Clock and I’m having the same problem.

You hate it because of the internet

I hate it because I’m Italian

We are not the same

This is great advice. There’s so much content to enjoy from the past 20+ years that I don’t feel the desire to immediately buy the new thing. You can usually get it for far cheaper down the line.

There are communities such as PatientGamers for videogames that preach exactly this.

Robert Silverberg’s “The man in the maze” is a cool science-fiction book based on the Greek play Philoctetes. Iirc it’s a very short story (maybe about one or two hundred pages), I don’t remember the exact length but I recall reading it in one sitting. It is a very character-driver story where the “maze” itself is an allegory about mankind, isolation and disability, but it is very much enjoyable as a casual read as well.

The protagonist (“man in the maze”) is an astronaut who has been somehow cursed to always radiate its emotions in such a way that others, even his family, find repulsive, so he self-exiles to a remote and long-dead planet to live the rest of his life in isolation. But when an alien species makes hostile contact with humans, he is needed again, as his “curse” is the only way to properly communicate with them and maybe convince them that humans are sentient beings and thus their equals.

From the article:

“Conversion therapy,” also known as “reparative therapy,” is a debunked practice that attempts to forcefully change the gender identity or sexual orientation of the patient, which has often been compared to “torture” by its recipients and health care providers alike.

I’m writing this because I was also making the same mistake. I read “Kentucky bans conversion therapy” and I jumped to the conclusion that a republican was banning gender-affirming surgery or something like that (also because I’m not American and I’m not familiar with who Beshear is: he’s actually a Dem politician).

I’m Italian. School explains all there is to know about sex and stuff, so I never needed the “talk” with my parents. I also had a bigger brother that would tell me everything way before the time lol

About drugs, I think I already got everything from TV? I certainly didn’t need my parents explaining to me that drugs are bad.

EDIT: For those curious about how/when SexEd is taught in school in Italy: I had SexEd in my 5th year of elementary school (10yo), 3rd year of middle school (13 yo) and again in high school (I think it was the second year, so 15 yo, and then in my fourth year as well, when I was 17 yo). My parents were required to consent to the school teaching us SexEd only in elementary school; no consent form was required from middle school onwards, it was mandatory.

And I think that drugs were discussed in school as well. I think in middle and high school, around the same time as SexEd.

Oversexualization. Panty shots, ass shots, boob physics, the same old jokes from the ‘80s about a guy “accidentally” groping a woman, guys peeping into a girls’ space, suggestive poses, barely-disguised fetishes (included, but not limited to, harems, incest and pedophilia).

It got to the point where a friend would recommend an anime, I’d watch it, and walk away halfway through the first or second episode because it was just unbearable. Friends would tell me to turn a blind eye, but why the fuck should I put up with sexualizing minors in a show? I’d rather spend my time doing something that doesn’t make me feel sick.

It also attracts the wrong kind of audience. Since the medium is so keen to produce oversexualized content, that’s all people look for and talk about. Any anime discussion thread degenerates into gross memes about “flat is justice”, “twincest is wincest”, people patting each other in the shoulder while calling the other “man of culture” for sharing their kinks, and shit like that. It’s so extenuating that, back when I was interested in the medium, I still actively refrained from interacting with fellow fans because I felt grossed out by them. Fun fact, I had a female classmate back in highschool who was interested in anime, and I thought that I could find common grounds with her, but no, it was the same thing, just reversed (she would only watch anime with sexualised boys).

The medium also forgot what its name stands for. I haven’t seen “animation” in “anime” in years. It’s just still frames and more still frames and whenever there’s an action sequence, the characters will constantly interrupt them to explain or think about the thing that I’m already watching and needs no explanation, or having flashback sequences, because it’s cheaper to animate. The fact that Ghost in the Shell and Akira from thirty years ago had better and more fluid animation than the shit they produce now is just sad.

Never heard of it, but it sounds like it was a great place. Sad to see it fail against established giants of the internet. I would’ve been interested in trying it out before the end.

I think this is a problem that multiple small realities like this (including Lemmy) are facing. There are people interested in them, but they don’t know them, so they can’t join.

Oh boy. Just one?

I guess I’d go with “signing up to a random online forum back in 2012”.

I was a very shy and introverted kid back then, without friends or social life to speak of. I would spend all my time playing videogames and reading books.

That online forum gave me a chance to speak to other people while staying “safe” in my shell. Without realising it, I slowly gained confidence and social skills that helped me make friends both online and irl, some of whom I still speak with to to this day. Thanks to one of the people I knew on that forum, I now have a job that I like.

I wouldn’t recommend online forums nowadays to fight depression/lack of social skills, as the internet has become a cesspool. Online chats are breeding grounds for political extremists. But in my case it definitely helped.

A close second would be having a girl in college confessing to me. I had never really thought about my sexuality back then: it just wasn’t on my mind, like, ever (which should’ve been a red flag, but whatever). She was really nice and wasn’t pushy at all, but I knew that I couldn’t leave her hanging forever, and I had to give her an honest answer in a relatively short time.

Well, long story short, I realized I wasn’t straight. At first I thought I was bi, then gay, but a few years later I understood that I am ace (again, should’ve been obvious by the fact that I literally never thought about sex for the entirety of my teenage years, but I’m dumb).

But seriously, there are so many important moments in one’s life, it’s difficult to choose only one or two. Watching nature documentaries with my brother as a kid turned me into a huge animal lover, to the point that I’m literally unable to kill a fly because it makes me sick. Thanks bro, those are some of my most treasured memories!

Oh don’t worry, they hate foreigners playing soccer as well.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/09/racism-in-football-are-italy-s-ultras-the-problem-or-the-solution

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240120-milan-s-match-at-udinese-halted-after-racist-abuse-of-maignan

The brothers Grimm for me. I don’t see many people discussing it online, but I enjoyed it. That scene where the horse eats a kid is still distressing to me years later.

From Wikipedia:

Hartashen Megalithic Avenue is a column of prehistoric megalithic rocks in Armenia. There are two columns of megalithic rocks which do not intersect and there is no road connection to this site.

Armenian academics have proposed that the megalith formation was built around 7000-5000 BC.[citation needed] There are two rows of basalt stones which are placed at an angle, and in each row menhirs are arranged in three rows.

There is no clarity about the purpose of these two column of menhirs and further research is under progress.

Europe is in a very sorry state lately. A lot of far-right parties are gaining ground and/or winning the elections. Italy has elected a far-righr politician, France and Germany are very close to electing one.

I feel like the 2016 US elections have had a profound influence on ours as well. (Not faulting Americans for how the situation evolved, of course; it’s our fault in the first place).

I don’t have a reference to how it was before, but I tried Beyond once and it was terrible. I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone to spend money on such a horrible piece of crap.

I have way more fun filling the character sheet by myself. I use Emmet Bryne’s custom character sheets and the Spells 5e app when I need to reference spells.

You are underplaying the struggles of civilians in a war zone just because they happen to live on the wrong side of the border.

Civilians have all the rights to not want war on their country, at their doors, no matter which side of the border they are, and they are allowed to lament the incompetency of a government that hides critical information from them in an attempt to cover up its failures.

The Ukrainians have the right to keep fighting, and I hope they win this war. Putin is a criminal and he must pay for his crimes. This doesn’t mean that civilians caught in the crossfire are being petty.

The CEO constantly starves the D&D team. They don’t have the budget they need to make a good product.

Respectfully, I disagree. I’ve seen much better 3rd party content from smaller creators who charge less than WotC and offer much better value. As much as I’m sorry for those who were laid off, the problem with the DnD team is not their meagre numbers, but their lack of care for the brand.

The DnD team (which consisted of both writers and playtesters) had ten years of consistent player feedback on 5e, and one and a half year of OneDnD playtest, and only did the bare minimum. You don’t need hundreds of people to write a rules update. Heck, it took me (only me, a single person with no collaborators or playtesters) a week to write a replacement for the 5e fighter, and I recon I did a fairly decent job. There were Monk revisions floating around that were miles better than the abomination that they attempted to push in UA6. Heck, I also wrote my Monk revision during that time, and it took me about two/three days at most. During the playtest, Crawford claimed that the Warlock’s Pact of the Chain was never meant to be as “spicy” as Pact of the Blade or Pact of the Tome, which is bullshit (it was clearly presented as an equal option to the other two); instead of rebalancing Chain and Talisman, they just folded the Pact Boons into the Invocation system and called it a day (again, lazy game design). I did that for my homebrew Warlock in about… half a week of brainstorming?

I could go on, but the point is, I would expect those who are paid to create content for the game and do it for a living to do better than what I can do for free in my spare time.

And according to RPGBot, after 10 years they still have no clue on how to make mounted combat work, despite Summon Greater Steed now being part of the Paladin class by default.

Yeah, I knew that all those people praising the new and innovative accessibility design of the books before they were even out were full of shit.

It’s WotC. We have criticized their books for over a decade now and they still don’t give a damn. I remember flipping through one of their adventure modules and being flabbergasted by their incompetence.

It’s not just cross-referencing, either. They actively made OneDnD more complicated to run for a number of classes, yet refused to add more depth to the system. Depth remained the same, it’s just more complicated for first time players. It’s disappointing how little they cared, they just rushed the product in time for the anniversary.

I really liked GI. No drama, no ignorance, great articles: quality journalism, which is rare today, and even rarer when talking about gaming publications.

I’m not much of a gamer myself now as I was in my youth, but GI was still one of my main connections to the gaming world that allowed me to keep in touch with the hobby.

It’s sad that the talent of all those people is being unceremoniously dumped like this by executives who only care about money. I wish them all the best.

Very cool. It’s easy to read and comprehend and seems perfectly balanced. I also like the formatting, in particular the levels of the features listed the way they are.

Lemmy is not very active in the homebrew department, but just to let you know, there is a dedicated DnD homebrew community:

https://lemmy.world/c/dndhomebrew

(Links to communities are very wonky in Lemmy, I hope I did it right)