Me too. My favorite memories come from Unreal Tournament on Dreamcast. I had this terrible, ancient LCD projector that overheated and turned off over and over again. It had to be opened, so to block the light I stuck a black sheet over it and stuck a fan in the window.

We had a huge screen that honestly was probably barely visible, and we had a blast.

Bro, the Counter-Strike devs put porn in the game. I’m surprised they were all able to get away with it.

Huh? Oh no, dude it’s easy. Hold alt and press f4 and it brings it up. Then just browse it with the s and d keys.

Bahahaha! Half the lobby is gone!

Yeah because a magic border makes it so that things don’t affect all of us. Isn’t that wonderful?

I legit don’t understand how anyone can think so small.

If a fire starts in a city where everyone has your attitude, how long before it all burns down?

Whether we like it or not, borders aren’t magical lines that protect us from the damage done behind one of those lines. Humanity is responsible for the wellbeing of humanity. No silly little line is going to change that.

Imagine the consequences we’d still be suffering (yes, we. All of us) if the US hadn’t joined in WWII.

I honestly don’t understand how anyone can think of their fellow humans as parasites. We’re all in this together. One big ego with enough support can destroy all of our lives and throw us back into the dark ages.

We have thousands of years of history to guide us. Look into it.

Oh nooooooo! The poor tax payer helping secure the planet he lives on. How tragic!

I did it on starryai. I don’t think you can use it without an account these days though.

I made a lot of Donald and Putin porn to shock the local magats. I never posted it, just showed them on my phone.

Turns out that if you use some languages other than English, even the shittiest AI wouldn’t filter out the words haha.

Доналд Трамп Путиннің пенисіне микрофон сияқты ән айтады

I haven’t seen them in nearly 20 years. It’s embarrassing how Star Wars obsessed I was as a teenager. Like, holy shit embarrassing. I “photoshopped” images of myself with light sabers and everything.

Fuck it. I’ll show you guys. Man. I shouldn’t.

I thought the one was gone forever, but my sister wasn’t going to let that happen. She said when I posted it to MySpace she knew I’d be embarrassed one day and delete it so she printed it off. Haha. What a dick.

Damn. Here goes.

I liked the last two but that was the best of the bunch.

Me too. I personally think it was brilliant.

I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.

I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.

My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.

I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.

Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.

I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.

I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.

It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.

I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.

It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.

I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.

I was docking the Steam Deck and playing GO, but 2 doesn’t really run that well on there.

I still play the hell out of Source though. My brother and I did nothing else one summer growing up. I spent all of my 20s playing CS:Source and WoW.

I wish I had time for either these days.

Yeah it definitely is. I’m older than her though and we discussed it. I could end up kicking the bucket or our relationship might fail and she wants to plan ahead for the unknown.

We’ve got a few more weeks to talk about it, but ultimately I might end up getting a vasectomy too just to have it over with. I have plenty of kids.

I have two adopted and 5 biological, so I’m good at this point.

Hell, I was good 3 kids ago really. Haha

I wouldn’t trade any of them for anything in this world though.

My wife’s gynecologist has asked her if she wanted to get her tubes tied during all three of our pregnancies. It didn’t offend us, we have the kids we want now and she said yes this last time.

I appreciated him asking. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s on that list.

You’ve tied my head up in knots with this one. Haha

As to the argument above yours, fostering a space for Nazis to grow their movement is scary. I get that some segments of society think that posting gay porn is scary too, but gay porn never led to death camps for anybody.

I think all ideas are worth discussing, because if they’re hiding in quiet corners there are no voices of reason to refute them. It’s hard to take that stance nowadays with the internet working the way it does. Algorithms feeding information to people just because that information gets engagement is frightening.

I had a conversation with my neighbor yesterday about how he got interested in the whole furry thing. He said that initially, he read the critical comments online, took them seriously, thought it was funny, so he engaged in harassment of furries. His engagement led him to more furry videos. He began to like some of the people he was engaging with. Fast forward to now and he’s got fursuits hanging in his closet and everyone he hangs with is also a furry.

It got me thinking about how a lot of kids end up going down these rabbit holes online. Not that I consider being a furry a bad thing. My daughter is into that stuff and I support her being herself. His example just made me think of how other people fall into extremism online.

I struggled with my back being numb and tingly for 3 years over a pair of shoes wearing like this. Nearly drove me insane and a decade later I still have issues from time to time.

I seriously have a boiling hatred for computers now because I couldn’t even be a little bit mean. I’ve snapped a few times when people blamed me for problems years after I worked on their stuff, but mostly I just got trampled on and robbed at every turn because I didn’t want to upset anyone.

By the time I was mean enough to demand payment and things like that, I already hated it.

My daughter is passionate about computers, so nowadays if I so much as want to tweak something a little bit I let her do it unless she don’t want to. I don’t want to burn her out too.

Your dad sounds like the childhood hero of mine who got me into computers.

Severe ADHD prevented me from ever learning to code, but I became damn good at repairs and things and just general understanding of computers because he was available to ask questions at almost any time.

He went to school auctions every year and got me a pile of hardware to learn from. He never asked for anything in exchange. All around great guy.

I heard him on the phone a few times dealing with the people who he worked with though. Good god he was mean. I couldn’t imagine him being that way with me ever, but he was brutal when it came to work and money.

A dude called him one time while I was sitting there, he listened for a few minutes and he said, “I’ve got a 14 year old kid here, he’s been doing this stuff for about 2 years. I’m gonna let him walk you through this for the 10th fucking time because you’re a goddamn idiot and feeling like a fool when you hang up the phone with a grown man isn’t teaching you any lessons. Maybe get a pen for this one because if I have to remind that a child walked you through it last time, I’m not going to be so fucking friendly.” I was so nervous, apologized multiple times, when I was finished walking him through it he took the phone and said, “now don’t you feel stupid? 25 years and this kid just schooled you.”

He told me, “you gotta be real with idiots or they’ll bother you with stupid problems every single day of your life.”

I wish that lesson had stuck haha, it just wasn’t in me to be mean. As a result, a hobby that I was passionate about all of my life is something I avoid like the plague now. People ruined it for me by bothering me constantly.

I can’t believe it’s been a year. Damn. I really didn’t think I’d make it. I half worried I’d go crawling back.

My last two comments, one year ago were, “Memmy for Lemmy. Been happy all day.” (though voyager is my app these days) and, “Thank you. I already love it. I hope this is where all of the old heads go.”

That was a response to my introduction to lemmy.world.

I meant it when I said I was leaving. I wasn’t 100% sure I could make it after using Reddit for so long, but here I am.

I’d like to, that’s for sure.

I’m almost out of certified classics to play though and this loot box, cosmetic, buy this, buy that, always online crap don’t appeal to me.