For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.

The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.

I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.

I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.

(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)

I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.

This is Wyoming we're talking about. Wyoming is where Matthew Shepherd was brutally tortured and murdered. I wouldn't stop, either.

It took me a lot longer than I'd like to admit for me to figure out that this was a reference to SNW, and not someone trying to push a far-right conspiracy theory. I think I need to take a break from the internet for a while.

Maybe it's time for a DS9 rewatch....

I’m a 15-year user of Reddit. Lemmy right now is very similar to very early Reddit. Reddit’s users were more technical back then, too. I’m betting the early adopters of places like this are usually the technical types.

Another nice thing about Lemmy is that a lot of the low-effort, casual users on Reddit haven’t gotten here yet. Interaction here is definitely a lot more pleasant.

Oh, man. Can you imagine the misery of being appointed to this post? Literally half of the government would hate and despise you and would look for ways to undercut you just to have an extra talking point while they stand in the hall talking to Fox News. And to top it off, what could you actually do to affect change? I sympathize with the poor workers of this office.

Laws like this are designed to be deterrents. You don't need to catch very many offenders with checkpoints as long as you can create enough fear about the consequences of breaking the law to keep people from traveling to get an abortion.

The ad is designed to keep the abortion issue talked about. Have you noticed how Republicans have gone radio-silent on abortion? They don't want it brought up. This is a smart move.

I had to get all the way in here to realize that this woman's remains weren't buried in an Amazon package. I really need my morning coffee.

Right now? Silo. Every damn episode of that first season was perfect. In a few months it will probably be Star Trek Lower Decks again.

Here's one I witnessed in an office about 25 years ago. Some engineers filled a plastic 35mm film canister with a bunch of the waste paper from a three-hole punch. That's basically the little white circles of paper. Then they took a can of compressed air and, with the cap mostly on the canister, slowly filled the canister with super-cooled air from the compressed air canister. Then they fully sealed the cap and went to talk to the mark. They placed the canister nearby -- on the mark's desktop computer, I think. Just out of sight. To avoid arousing suspicion, they stayed and talked to him for 30 seconds or so. Then they walked off to go back to work (and watch the prank unfold from a distance).

That little canister sat there for a while, with the super-cooled air slowly warming to room temperature. As you know, the molecules of cold gasses are very close together, and they start to expand outward as they warm. So when this canister got warm enough, there was enough pressure inside to pop the lid off and distribute the little white paper circles in a perfectly random pattern in a circle about six feet around the mark.

It was glorious.

Those of us who are of a certain age have seen this happen before. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, some big companies like Compuserve and Prodigy and AOL became service providers and offered customers access to their own content, as well as a "gateway" to the internet. They weren't the only service providers, but they made access to the internet much easier for less technical people, and they had reach. AOL is infamous for its mail marketing campaign where they blasted copies of their software to everyone on CDs.

That brought a whole new segment of the population onto the internet who didn't have the same culture or capabilities or interest in building a high-quality community. Usenet forums were particularly impacted. Longtime users coined a term that is still used today to describe this phenomenon: Eternal September. Why September? Because prior to all of this, the only time the forums had to deal with inexperienced, uncouth users was in September, when a new batch of first-year college students got access to the internet and found their way to Usenet.

Right now Lemmy is peopled with the high-quality user base that wants to improve the community. Threads threatens to (and will) open the floodgates of people who may not share those interests.

You just know that John Oliver is sitting at home right now laughing his ass off at the memes, and then screaming into a pillow because he can’t talk about it anywhere due to the writer’s strike.