The honest answer is that we’re still trying to get The Agora running, and a backlog developed in the process. We are working on it, it’s just going to take some time to sort through the old votes. We’ve been focused on cleaning up the process so we don’t have this problem moving forward.

I enjoyed them all, but Asylum was my favorite by far. It struck a perfect balance between being a tight, contained experience, while giving you a great set of tools to deal with things as you saw fit. It was claustrophobic in a great way, and you felt like an apex predator when you figured out how to work within the constraints.

The rest of them feel excessive in comparison, both being too open and giving you too many tools to work with. I never felt like I could get into a “flow state” with them like I could with Asylum.

This feels like a gross overreaction to the situation. Sure, I don’t love the fact that TD has a tiny presence here, but I fail to see how that should be cause to defed a large instance. Especially when that community just popped up recently, only came to anyone’s attention in the last day or so, and (to my knowledge) hasn’t caused any real trouble other than the Agora mod vote thread getting a bit spicy.

I’m sure it’s something we’ll need to address internally, but it’s just one item on that list. And for now, it seems like a low priority item.

Consider this another vote for Ubuntu or any of its variants. They’re beginner friendly, and established enough that you’ll find plenty of resources written specifically for them. Linux Mint is another one I’d recommend for beginners, it’s designed to “just work” out of the box and be an easy transition for Windows users.

Then it’s just down to using it some. First and foremost, leave Windows installed until you’re comfortable with whatever else you end up trying. Whether you partition, or make a bootable USB drive, or even just a VM, use some kind of temporary space for practice. The terminal is a lot less intimidating when you aren’t learning in your main environment, you can go break things and see what happens.

So far, we have a captcha on account creation now and it seems to be working (from what I’ve seen, anyway)

It’ll be a tough balancing act though. Relatively frictionless sign-up has been great for us, and anything that deals with bots will also affect that. Whatever else we may end up doing will need to be carefully considered.

I do the opposite of taking care of mine, and they’re still going strong after 20ish years. Corcoran boots are damn near indestructible. They’ve only been semi-retired because I’ve moved other boots that are nearly as tough, but much more comfortable. Specifically Red Wings for normal wear, and Ariat cowboy boots for actual work.

I don’t even really think about it, I just comment if I have something to say. At worst, nobody reads it and I was shouting into the void for a minute.

But the Lemmy userbase isn’t massive yet, so those week+ old posts still see more engagement than you’d think.

If you want impressive, you have 4-6 seperate terminal windows that take up the whole screen collectively. The laymen assume you’re hacking the NSA or something if they see that.

9 was even worse for that, every fight drags on for ages. It’s the only one I struggle to replay.

For 8, it’s generally best to avoid combat anyway because of the way level scaling worked. Enemies get stronger much faster than you do, even with good junctions. And it seems like the devs knew this a, since Diablos is available so early and built for low-level play. It lets you reduce or eliminate random encounters (and very cheaply), lets you refine status magic that comes in handy at low levels, and its attack has great utility against hard targets.

The slower fights aren’t as big of a deal when you aren’t doing as many of them, they feel more “cinematic” instead.

Persona 3-5 and Doom 2016 win by virtue of being the only ones I listen to regularly outside of playing the games. Doom is probably at the top, the album version is just incredible.

Honorable mentions go to the entire Zelda and Mario catalog, especially LttP and Super Mario World. They’re the nostalgic sounds of my childhood and stuck in my head often, I just don’t go out of my way to listen to them.

The only reason would be playing games online, old firmware gets locked out a couple weeks after an update releases.

But there’s also no real reason not to if you’re already running CFW. As long as Luma is reasonably up-to-date, a system update can’t break anything.

The additions throw off some dyslexic readers too, I’ve always had an even harder time reading purpose-built dyslexia fonts. Comic mono is top tier for me, it still looks stupid but the readability is incredible.

Rockstar has been moving that way in general for years. They get so focused on the immersive and sim stuff, they forget that they made their name on over-the-top chaotic fun. Everything from GTA4 onward suffers for it, other than RDR1 that struck a decent balance between the approaches.

Not only is it 12 years later, but when the game does finally come out it’s going to be the usual Bethesda bugfest. And I’m sure that’ll be left to modders to patch, as is tradition.

But because it’s Bethesda, most people will eat it up.

Especially true when the name of the instance in question is exactly what people are going to be punching into a search. They got in on the ground floor, they’ll be just fine.

It’s a perfect use case for Patreon, PayPal, and similar services that are easier to set up than any of the things you mentioned. And the stability of fiat currency is a benefit when we’re looking at covering operating costs.

Crypto is fine as an option, but it doesn’t seem like a great fit for the primary.

I think the other way around is more likely. Their users having normal access in and out, but outsiders having limited access to Meta content. Going for the “exclusive club” vibe and making the users feel “special” will keep most of them in the garden.

While true, this only affects people who are hosting and running their own instance. And if they’re doing that, it isn’t that big of a deal.

Users that might struggle with the concepts are probably joining larger instances that are already federated, so the problem is solved as soon as they find the “All” button.

That game took one of my most hated mechanics (binary moral choices), came up with a concept for it I could have actually loved (the personas arguing), then botched the execution so badly that it felt even worse than a normal morality system. Impressive is certainly the word for Gollum, just not in the way the devs hoped.

YT ReVanced has Sponsorblock built in, it can skip those ads for you. It is community-run though, somebody has to have watched it first to flag that segment.

That said, I usually let those run to support the channel. The creators aren’t making much from standard ads, but I’ll watch the ones they actually get paid for.