But then again, startups probably aren’t considering the geo-political implication of country TLDs and that in 5-10 years any specific nation might simply stop existing.

But presumably you don’t just stare at the wall. “Humans need something to do” is mainly bound to not just sitting around twiddling your thumbs. It’s the reason we get bored, the brain is annoyed at not having anything to focus on.

It doesn’t have to be literal work, just something you find engaging, be it going for a run, tending to houseplants, or completing your entire video game backlog.

And of course there is variation between humans. Some people cope well with having little to do, others always need to do something they find productive.

“boomer” as a term is here to stay and a moving target

Kind of like how “Millennial” for a while meant ‘teenager’ despite the oldest Millennial being 40.

I’ll be sad to see it go, but it has been a great run so I cannot complain

I mean, it isn’t meaningless, just culturally subjective and lacking a rigerous definition. Berries are a set of specific fruit, which fruit being included being determined by the culture in question base on percieved similarities and historic uses. We use it to quickly bring up the specific group and whatever vague characteristics we percieve them to share.

So, the definition for berries that you seek is simply “the fruit people you’re interested in would point at and identify as a berry”, which is a vague definition and not rigerous at all, but most people would in fact think of the same thing you do if you say “I put berries on top of my cake”. If I ask my wife “hey, on your way home swing by the store and buy some berries, any type will do”, she will not bring a watermelon. She in fact will buy what we both agree are berries, and so the word has useful meaning.

You’ll find most classifications humans have do this too. The real world is really good at refusing to fit into the neat boxes we made to classify it and the things in it, and yet we can still use them fine enough as long as we don’t get lost in semantics and wondering if a hot dog is a sandwich or cereal soup.

Are grapes not considered berries in the anglosphere? In Icelandic they literally are named “Wine berries” and considered as such.

Sharks don’t really pee. It gets stored it in their body tissue instead. Part of the preperation of shark is essentially pressing it for weeks to bring out the ammonia and let it break down into something that won’t kill you. Doesn’t taste good, but won’t kill you.

Or GameMaker if you are doing a 2d game, or Unreal if you don’t mind the learning curve. Plenty of other options beyond Unity.

Icelandic would like a red-headed word.

I personally am a fan of jet-lagged, the game. Sam, Ben, and Adam from wendover productions/Half as interesting compete in various travel-based games across the world.

Absolutely, I’d personally never use Discord as I’d use Lemmy, but some people sure are trying even if it is very counter-intuitive.

Its not that strange: people use what they are familiar with. Most people have a Discord account these days and migrating over there is as easy as clicking an invite link. In contrast Lemmy is relatively unknown and untested to the general audience, and is a step higher on the hassle scale, even if it is a similar service to Reddit - not counting the usual fediverse complications.

People are drawn to go as far down the hassle scale as possible, the fewer steps between them and their goal the better.

Not that a lot of communities did successfully migrate over here, partially or not. Lemmy is a lot more active now than when I started looking into it during the initial API struggle in June.

I’m going to give you the advice I usually give new Gamemaker users who come to the engine expecting to make their dream game in a week but quickly realize that isn’t happening. You’ll have to adjust it a biy for renpy but the core idea is the same:

Start small: smaller than you thought possible. Start by making pong. Start by making asteroids. Learn how to do collision and movement by making a platformer where the one goal is jumping over a single ledge. The goal is to break your learning down to tiny, incremental steps, so that you are only learning one new thing or mechanic at a time. As you get more confident and start to get a feeling how to think like a computer and solve problems that could arise slowly expand to slightly more complicated projects, move from pong to brick breaker, to pacman, to something else small but has a few more moving parts.

Ask questions (find f.i the forum), look up tutorials, and do not be afraid of experimenting, of breaking things, of taking projects others made and changing things to see what haooens, of really asking “why” things work the way they do.

So, just take a bit of time. No need to be afraid of failing, programming is a skill like any other, it takes time to learn, you are going to suck for a bit. People learning the piano sound awful the first few months, and then suddenly with practice and diligence they start sounding kind of ok, then good, then actually really good. Same with cooking, knitting, writing, painting, building, and programming. All things that take time and effort to get good at. You wont make your dream visual novel today, nor tomorrow, but you will make something, and something is a lot better than nothing.

I play a lot of the classic games on Cardgames.io. Spades in particular is a favorite, albeit I also really enjoy an Icelandic game called “Manni”.

My family played a lot of what I later learned to be a variation of Shanghai rum, a contract rummy played with three 52 card decks. It takes a while to get over a full game, but it was always a good time.

While it has problems of its own, instances could pool and share that knowledge. The first time an instance talks to a different insta ce it could just ask “hey, what other instances are you aware of?”. The main issue there is just instances obsessively sending exponentially growing lists of instances back and forth.

But no, that is the main bane of federated social media, discoverability without a center of truth

Maybe they are just thinking about those with a really bad internet connection, who will need the month to download the 125gb game.

Its just a really time consuming game. I’ve spent 9 hours playing a game we made it 4 rounds in (in fairness with a few new players). I personally like it, but you really do need to have the patience of knowing you are likely spending the day and probably not finishing regardless. A bit like Talisman.

Mastodon I’ve found has a bit of a discoverability problem, but there are ways.

1 ) Start off with your local timeline: these are all the people that are on your instance as well. If you’ve chosen a “specialized” instance most of these people will have something in common with you: mastodon.gamedev.place for instance is filled with indie developers, mastodon.art is full of artists, and so on. The more general instances like mastodon.social have a lot more activity, but there’s no implicit link between people on it. It’s a trade-off: the more specialized of an instance you’re on the easier it is to find people like you and build a tight community, but the smaller the instance. The more general the instance is the more activity and people are on there, but less of it is relevant to you.

2 ) Go search up some hashtags of topics you like. For instance if you like baking go see what’s on #baking. If you’re interested in pictures of moss #mosstodon is great fun. If you like pokemon #pokemon, and so on and so forth. You can naturally follow hashtags themselves, but you can also try to use that to find people you may enjoy following - after all, if someone is posting baking pictures and you like baking maybe you’ll enjoy following them!

3 ) Go snoop out other instances. Some Mastodon clients allow you to directly view the local feeds of other instances, but you can always just go straight to the page of said instance. Find a few specialized instances for topics you like, scroll through the local feed for a bit, and follow people that look interesting to you.

4 ) Google: when I joined Mastodon I just googled a few people I like or followed on other platforms and saw if they had a Mastodon. There are also plenty of “Who to follow on Mastodon” articles out there.

5 ) In the “explore” feed you’ll find posts that are trending on your instance: often at times there are some good users there to follow, albeit it can get a bit “samey” if there’s a big news story going on.

Optimally instances should have a tos or privacy statement, but out of the box you can expect a web server to collect your IP (if for nothing but know where to respond to your requests), a log of your requests, and any content you generate in using the instance (comments, votes, posts). login data (email, username, hashed password) are also stored to let you log in at all.

any other data will depend on the instance in question, how it is configured, and who is running it.

I feel that given the current trendyness of AI and large language models it seems prudent to mention Façade, an interactive play that used AI and language processing to let the player “speak” to the characters and influence tha narrative. It was very janky and you could break it rather easily, but the concept was solid - the technology was just a decade and a half away.