I held my tongue but it was striking and incredibly depressing that the first night of hope I'd had in like 5 years was mortifying to them, and that odds are they'll never change for the rest of their lives.

I can think of a handful but they're def not a staple of game's formula yeah. It's all about luring you into a false sense of security with cozy computers and cleaning before making you obscenely paranoid with random events, cause it's hard to parse real threats from guests or curiosities sometimes.

It's wild this game is still free. So much content, presented in a refreshing way, and basically every actual jumpscare I've suffered in it has been a result of my own imagination and/or hubris.

There's a really good program called Affinity that used to be a one-time payment but then got bought by Canva and is now free, for now. I still use the old version but the new, free version is, like, fine.

www.affinity.studio

Fresh out of college in early-mid 2020, with the mobilization against COVID and then the George Floyd uprisings, was the most hopeful I had ever been that good things were possible, only for all of that possibility to be resolutely vaporized and memory-holed seemingly permanently...

This guy may have the widest gulf between “would like to read his dissertation” and “would trust him with a loaded firearm at a shopping mall” of anyone since the Unabomber.

then how come she visits me every time i see an aspirin commercial

Because it's the only way their worldview makes any sort of sense.

Fresh out of college in early-mid 2020, with the mobilization against COVID and then the George Floyd uprisings, was the most hopeful I had ever been that good things were possible, only for all of that possibility to be resolutely vaporized and memory-holed seemingly permanently...

This is a very specific and pivotal part of the culture war I've long tried to tease out but never quite managed to crystalize.

Same thing with, for example, the cultural outlawing of vegetarian/vegan diets in much of the country. Conservatives don't just want to silence or kill the pundits or their neighbors, they want them to be mandated by force to suck up to them and tell them they were correct and superior all along.

It's not enough to be prioritized for all possible social and economic developments, or that everybody else naturally has to be inconvenienced or even outright harmed for their own convenience, it's also that they have to be told their choices are the virtuous and correct ones at all times.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkO8...

Completely fair! I guess my point is that if I, a "lower-intermediate knowledge" person who is the "expert" for a larger friend group and organization, am too dense to figure out basic things....somebody needs to figure out some idiot-proofing and streamlining measures before widespread adoption.

Well that baffles me. I tried out Ubuntu, Mint, and a few other "easy" distros earlier this year, as I do every couple years, and I notably couldn't even install Firefox or access the settings without it throwing errors and requiring me to manually do stuff. Same as every other time I tried Linux.

Half the people I know IRL don't know what a USB stick is and would never be able to figure out how to make a boot disk. As for myself, the amount of command line fuckery required to do very basic things outweighs the inconvenience of Microsoft's ratfucking, in my experience.

The first thing I'd focus on is figuring out why it was abandoned and if it's even safe for people to be in there for long periods of time (could be hazardous materials, structural issues, anything).