Is there anything you're into that no one or basically nobody is into?
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
A vehicle building/combat game called From The Depths is my current obsession, well past 1000 hours in it.
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Crypto, LLMs, and cars.
Yeah they're popular outside of Lemmy, but mentioning that your a fan of any of those things on here is a great way to get your inbox flooded with hate. Everybody on here hates those three things with a burning passion.
Only reason why I still have a reddit account is so that I can talk about these things without getting berated for my hobbies.
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I am the only person I know IRL who reccomends browsers to people in-person
Ok, I'll bite. Which one's your favorite?
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Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.
Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.
Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are "into it".
Now that's a proper special interest đ¤
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you know. That reminds me that I like minivans when essentially no one does. I mean actively like them and prefer them to other motor vehicles (although im not a big fan of motor vehicles)
Minivans are basically spaceships now, and everyone sleeps on them.
I love me a good Odyssey.
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Minivans are basically spaceships now, and everyone sleeps on them.
I love me a good Odyssey.
When it looked like dodge was going to be sold I was so hoping it would be picked up by a better company to make a more reliable caravan. the flip and fold are amazing and they did it with the roof rack to.
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That's just porn with extra steps!
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Depending on what she's into, there's tons of fun power metal bands that I feel are kinda like Powerwolf. Gloryhammer and aramanthe are two that I really like that are in the same genre
I don't know if I've heard one or both. Wife's real love is for Ghost, but that's hardly a "nobody else is into this" kind of band. I've definitely seen one of these in the Recommended For You feed
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
I tried to find an in-person calligraphy meetup around my area and mind you, I live in one of the bigger metro areas in the country. Couldn't find squat. Don't know if my Google Fu was weak or I just don't know what to actually look up but there's nothing specifically for calligraphy as far as I can tell. Also, I don't count online spaces.
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My wife discovered "Powerwolf" recently. Not death metal, per say, but I've yet to meet anyone else whose heard of it. Worse still, this lead her down a rabbit hole to Dwarf Metal and the accursed song Diggy Diggy Hole which has bored its way into my brain.
I got sent down a weird musical rabbit hole that started by letting my kid play some k-pop on my Spotify account. The AI DJ added "foreign music" to the list of tags I guess, and after finding a couple k-pop songs I liked, it bronched out into other genres & Landed on Melodic Mexican Metal, which I didn't even know was a thing.
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
Freestyle GunZ (fgunz.net) its an old game but it checks out.
BallisticNG maybe. Its like wipeout but very few players on steam, maybe 100 concurrent.
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
My favorite thing in the whole world is dropping LSD, and listening to obscure music or watching weird shit...
Dude I can't find ANYONE to hang out with me... I wave that flag in every social situation I find myself in. I really thought there would be more people into it.
Well, that or I'm completely unbearable to hang out with. If that's the case I just wish people would tell me.
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I got sent down a weird musical rabbit hole that started by letting my kid play some k-pop on my Spotify account. The AI DJ added "foreign music" to the list of tags I guess, and after finding a couple k-pop songs I liked, it bronched out into other genres & Landed on Melodic Mexican Metal, which I didn't even know was a thing.
The one upside of The Algorithm. Wish that kind of Internet was the norm
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I really like the souped up versions of mom cars that they make before there's a model year redesign.
My dream car is Mercedes R 63 AMG.
Also a big fan of Station Wagons, but that's not that rare among enthusiasts.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I low-key want a Toyota Previa so I can tell people I drive a manual transmission, AWD, turbocharged, mid-engine car... and then show up in a minivan.
(Although all of those features were available in various combinations, no individual car came actually came from the factory with all four of them at once. Unfortunately, you'd have to swap either the engine or the drivetrain to make such a super-Previa.)
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I got sent down a weird musical rabbit hole that started by letting my kid play some k-pop on my Spotify account. The AI DJ added "foreign music" to the list of tags I guess, and after finding a couple k-pop songs I liked, it bronched out into other genres & Landed on Melodic Mexican Metal, which I didn't even know was a thing.
A buddy of mine and I used to play this game where one of us tried to think of an absurd metal concept and the other tried to find a band that actually fit that description. The game ended the day that the challenge was Maori folk metal and we discovered the band Alien Weaponry. At that point we pretty much decided that there must exist a rule similar to the internet's rule 42 along the lines of "if there's a genre of music, there exists a metal subgenre influenced by it."
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
The design and building of authorization policy systems. And crypto (as in cryptography as the word originally meant) but that one tends to be slightly more common.
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Ok, I'll bite. Which one's your favorite?
If I was an Apple user it would be the Orion browser. There's just no downsides to it other than it being only available for Mac and Iphones.
Everything else i have to add disclaimers when talking about them. For example, I use Brave as my daily driver and I've had an easier time getting other people to switch to Brave than any other browser becuase having an awesome adbocker integrated into the browser itself is just that good. However, Brave is run by crypto bros, so it comes packaged with a crypto wallet and some AI bloatware. Thankfully there's a setting to turn the integrated crypto ads off, but the fact that those things are there at all is a BIG red flag. But it's an easier sell to normies because it's built on Chromium and works with the Google ecosystem in a way that Firefox-based browsers don't.
I would love to push Librewolf more, but it doesn't have a mobile version, and apparently installing UBlock Origin on your own is just too scary for the normies. So now wherever I meet a person and see they have an IPhone, the next words out of my mouth are "Have you heard of the Orion browser?"
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How to use game design for education around political and social issues and complexity science
Edit since a few people asked: I don't have good answers for this yet, but some thoughts:
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
- Some excellent examples include Wintergreen and Bloc by Bloc. Basically any storygame can, if you want it to.
- Games are basically a voluntary and temporary acceptance of an arbitrary set of rules, with an arbitrary goal that you strive to overcome. They often include metrics that tell you how well you are doing. To some degree, the same can be said about modern bureaucracies (albeit less voluntary and temporary), where the metrics might be KPIs or money.
- Games can satirise this in educational ways, e.g. this was the purpose of The Landlord's Game (the precursor to monopoly)
- This is another C. Thi Nguyen thing - really worth listening to his podcast episode on the Ezra Klein show.
- Some games show amazing emergent complexity. That is, complexity that isn't due to underlying complexity of the system parts, but emerges as a result of their many interactions, like turbulent eddies, or bird murmurations.
- Go/Baduk is an extreme example of this. 2 rules that have produced 3000 years of culture surrounding one of the most difficult and engaging games I know.
- Tak is another example that's a lot easier to learn (because it doesn't require building up a bank of pattern recognition)
- TTRPGs are also super interesting to me, because narrative is one of the tools that the human brain has developed to help understand complexity. I don't think they exhibit emergent complexity so much, but they bring in a lot of complexity via the players' life experience, and via the setting/world.
- Different game mechanics and story tropes provide different affordances - that is, they allow or encourage some behaviours, and disallow others.
- No one ever forments a revolution in monopoly, right? Why not?
- Affordances is an excellent frame for understanding how agency relates to systems, because all systems have attributes with affordances (and constraints). What are the affordances of a capitalist democracy? I think games are an ideal vehicle for explaining affordances easily.
There are probably plenty more links. I've been playing some of those games for years, but am still relatively new to some e.g. story games. And I'm just starting out looking in to game design..
edit 2: also, a plug for [email protected]
Woah. That sounds interesting. Care to elaborate?
- According to C. This Nguyen, games are the art of agency (in the same was as music is the art of sound). Agency is core to politics and activism, and the antidote to apathy and despair. I think (some kinds of) games can make you think in really interesting ways about how you can approach agency, or how it is taken from you.
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My favorite thing in the whole world is dropping LSD, and listening to obscure music or watching weird shit...
Dude I can't find ANYONE to hang out with me... I wave that flag in every social situation I find myself in. I really thought there would be more people into it.
Well, that or I'm completely unbearable to hang out with. If that's the case I just wish people would tell me.
Oh, thatâs just a risky proposition, thatâs all!
I would wager most people donât know themselves well enough on psychedelics to trust watching weird shit with someone who is also on psychedelics.
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.
Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.
What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?
wrote last edited by [email protected]This is a great topic! I have more than one kinda odd hobby.
I got a bunch of old newspaper comic strips of Mary Worth from 1947 and 1951 (almost two full yearsâ worth) that Iâm putting into ~3âx12â poly bags so I can read them more easily. I need to put them into a book of some sort.
I also got some color Sunday strips from 1951 but theyâre a crazy size so I may need to put those in a separate book.
I think theyâre so cool though! The strips have ads on the back from the time period.
