It’s just like any other hobby, you have to see and decide for yourself! All I can say as a person who’s been playing video games for 27 years and loves them for both their mechanics and their artistic potential is that so far it has been time well spent!

To start, i’d first think about what kind of games tempt you most. You have a wide array of genres from which to choose, like cerebral real-time strategy or 4x games (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), narrative and player expression centric role-playing games, action-packed shooters, or agile and clever platformers.

Then, you can use storefronts like Steam or Epic and run general searches based on genres - I’d recommend sorting according to top sellers/most purchased, as score-based sorting isn’t always reliable.

At the end of it all, however, the most important factor is whatever tempts you in any way. Steam (this is what I use most of the time) offers Demos for a lot of games nowadays, so you should be able to try pretty much whatever tempts you! Be it flashy graphics, an interesting story hook, or just sheer bloodlust, everything is valid!

I’ll leave a list of games I think would serve as a gentle introduction to this hobby below - they’re also not resource intensive, so you should be able to play them on any consumer laptop (or smartphone, some of them!):

• Stardew Valley - management-like game, you have to administrate a farm. But there’s a lot of extra complexity I won’t spoil

• Cloudpunk - combination of cyberpunk delivery person simulator and role-playing game, I’ve found it both relaxing and gripping!

• Cultist Simulator - it’s technically a card game, but what you actually do is balance having a socially acceptable life with investigating incomprehensible forces and leading a cult

• Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic I and II - these two are meat-and-potatoes role-playing games with really solid stories, well-written and presented characters, a neat progression system which sees you unlocking awesome Force powers and/or other valuable perks, and the combat, I find, is the perfect mix of engaging and lenient

• Rocket League - this is as a taste of faster-paced action, basic multiplayer interactions, and relatively high-end graphis - it’s football with cars, but awesome!

As an extra note, you may notice I’ve left links from everywhere. That’s because you’ll have to select a game storefront (it’s a whole thing nowadays, but you really don’t need to interact with that side of the hobby if you don’t want to…). The storefronts share most of their libraries of games, but there are a few exceptions, so it’s best to check them all out before sticking with one. Some examples of such:

• Steam is the most popular and is good, but you can’t run games without running Steam, plus it periodically needs to connect to the internet. Things are fairly priced, the community features are nice, the community is ok, frequent sales. They also offer a no-questions full refund if you choose to do so within two hours of play time, so that’s a way to try out games without Demos.

• GOG (Good Old Games) is basically Steam, less meaty. However, the main strongpoint is that, beyond installing the game through their platform, that game then exists as its own independent entity, not requiring any periodic validation through an internet connection (unless the game itself is online), no shady 3rd party software installed alongside the game to “protect it from piracy,” etc. The games are as yours as they could possibly be in a digital-only environment.

• Epic wants to be Steam’s direct rival, so their storefront has many of the same features, but it’s not as popular within the community. I honestly have no opinion about them.

Other than that, all I can say is try to explore the hobby, check out gaming outlets, watch Lets-Plays on YouTube, and you can always lean on the online community for suggestions and tips! Also applicable to myself!

I very much recommend it if you manage to find some!

I remember it being entirely unique as far as ice cream goes. I even remember it having a bit of that characteristic spicy kick to it.

Edit: tried looking around the internet for any clues as to kiwi ice cream producers, but I mostly found recipes for home-made (which is not a bad idea, ngl!). All I can remember about it is that it wasn’t pre-packaged - always got it served in scoops, on the spot. So, yeah… may actually be “extinct” :(

Kiwi. Don’t even know if they make kiwi flavoured ice cream anymore, as I haven’t had any in decades.

Can confirm this, the amount of genuine attention I received while losing my mind talking about Warhammer 40k with dates is unbelievable!

Of course, you should probe a bit beforehand. I got lucky and my dates were pretty much all into fantasy stuff, so 40k wasn’t a huge leap, but there was no interest expressed in 40k other than specifically to hear me talk about it.

Edit: I know this is a meme subject, but I’m dead serious about it.

Thank you, always good to have more lists! Been reading up on things like this for a while, among other things, and I’ve already noticed some unfamiliar names in your post!

May whatever deity who may or may not be active hear you and decide that it’d be fun to watch!

We have the potential for far better, yes.

The real question is, will enough people want for us to get better…

I’m here for this! I’m not sure if I’m too stoned, or not stoned enough to even be able to fully comprehend the question, but I’m 100% here for this!

Honestly, I wear a pair of old skinny jeans, the kind with a bit of lycra, bamboo-based socks because fluffy but not cumbersome, and T-shirt with thicc hoodie. This is in 21-22°C.

In anticipation of the funny looks, I’m super-serious about the jeans! They’re nice and soft at this point, and they do a pretty good job at keeping my legs from freezing off! Pretty much wear jeans all year.

And the biggest advantage is that nobody can tell I’m essentially wearing my equivalent for pajamas!

No amount of money could ever determine me to so drastically reduce the quality of my life, let alone my sleep.

Thoroughly agreed, that’s what I call everything not viewed as immediately societally productive. More of a sarcastic reversal of the main complaint I’ve received throughout my life while just living it.

It really does take a while… Had a 9-month breakdown during the Pandemic, that one was exclusively for mental health care. I literally locked myself in my apartment and did nothing but eat, sleep, play vidya, get high, and have weekly therapy sessions for the entire duration.

It took 8 months to stop being anxious about not being stressed out. Used to wake up every morning with that sharp fear that I’d missed my daily meetings, then it would slowly turn into an “oh, shit, I’m not being Productive” jumble of self-loathing and panic.

Nothing! I’m super-serious, and I plan on doing exactly that for the following 6 months (quit my job, taking a break to address burnout and reorient): nothing.

By that, I mean I’ll allow myself to get as much sleep as I humanly can, try to feed myself healthier food (and more regularly), develop my hobbies (mini painting, playing the bass, sketching, writing), re-establish a semblance of a social life by exploring the city and its options, spending more time with friends… Pretty much just living life. No goals, no quotas, no deadlines, no performance metrics, no side-hustle, no Work™.

The walnut tree. Its leaves are dense so it casts a cohesive shadow, perfect for shelter from the sun. I LOVE how it smells, especially when developing walnuts, and green walnuts are entirely unique in how they taste!

Thank you so much! Yes, thankfully those days are far behind me and only the scars remain.

Whoever said “suffering builds character” was talking out of their ass - it doesn’t, but it does reveal the character that was always there.

Honestly, I don’t know! I’ve chewed on this pretty much ever since I had it, but I couldn’t put my finger on any particular occurrence.

The closest I can come to explaining it is that it was my subconscious’ way of assimilating my fear of my family? I had a… complicated childhood amongst some very specifically toxic personalities and always had the instinctive drive to not be like them, because it was shitty behaviour. I also feared them, because, like… I was a baby. They could literally crush me if they wanted to, and I knew it - none ever got THAT violent or crazy, just to be clear, but they were very on edge pretty much all of the time.

Maybe it was just the fear of getting caught up in that, of becoming that, but expressed abstractly, shapelessly because I didn’t have the conceptual or contextual tools with which to shape it yet. And this is also sustained by the fact that that… thing felt very familiar.

Or maybe I’m reaching and this is utter nonsense, I have no idea!

I remember it as being my first dream ever, think I was around 1-2 years old when I had it, but everything’s very fuzzy timeline-wise up until I was around 5.

It was wholly abstract, I dreamt of myself as an amorphous mass of… something. I wasn’t panicked that I had no limbs or defined shape, and was fully aware of myself as said mass.

I was floating in a void, and a much, much larger mass of the same something of which I was made started drawing nearer and nearer to me, almost painfully slow.

I can’t begin to describe the sheer terror I felt when I realised I couldn’t retreat fast enough to not get caught. I was… moving my ass off away from the thing, and it seemed to just be strolling its way closer and closer - the fact that it seemed entirely relaxed in its pursuit somehow made the feeling of terror even worse.

Then, it finally caught up with me. The first thing which struck me was its size. To say it was towering over me is an understatement, the thing was incomprehensibly vast.

It was all over in a flash. The thing just… advanced “through” me, it simply assimilated me into its mass and I was gone. That was when I woke up. I still remember that terror, never felt anything close to it since.

Make’em take Trig courses daily, they’ll start passing notes in no time.

I don’t really have guilty pleasures, but I’d probably keep Pupil Slicer and HIDE for the third or fourth date…

Ooh, that’s the fancy kind, I’m generally too lazy to wait for toast.