HL1 is the GOAT. THE GOAT!!!

I still hear the sound of the Surface Tension helicopter in my sleep and wake up screaming.

Merry Christmas! I don’t know about all of you, but I’m enjoying the holiday music today.

Lemocratic Party

Text may not be AI, image definitely is. Usually everything in AI images glows slightly, like here. And the placement of Tux in the sky has no rhyme or reason.

Comet! I’d hunt for those in San Fierro for races all day…

Why do they all look like this? They all make this face.

Back 4 Blood.

You know what, it’s not Left 4 Dead 3, but I love it. It feels like L4D meets Call of Duty. The card system really makes the game for me; building better decks to play higher difficulties with more chaotic corruption cards.

The corruption cards especially make levels so much more replayable than they already would be. Getting fog over a level or a different type of ridden mutation appearing spices things up nicely.

It’s also extremely beautiful at points. I love the graphical style. It’s colorful and a tad cartoonish at points, with some genuinely disgusting visuals and insane ruins thrown in for good measure.

I wouldn’t buy it for full price, but the $9.99 I paid for the full game + DLC was more than worth it, in my opinion.

He has got to only be saying this because Starfield DLC did poorly. The audience moves on if the game isn’t interesting. Personally, I buy all the DLC for games I enjoy. I don’t know many people that don’t either.

Does it have audio for you?

Bonanza Bros, Blast Corps, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Vampire: The Masquerade -Bloodlines, Cruisn World, LEGO Battles, NBA Jam

Bonanza Bros would be a great couch co-op multiplayer game in a world where we need more. It would benefit from some gameplay tweaks, and adding online play and 4 players would be big.

Blast Corps was awesome, I found it to be an extremely underrated Rare game. This game in an engine with simulated rubble and crazy explosions would be a gem. I also think changing the camera to first person should be an option at the very least.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days got its cutscenes remastered. I want the full game. It was dripping in atmosphere, and I loved the premise of scouting the new worlds. The graphics could use an upgrade, and the combat could be brought up to par with KH2. But, I love the leveling system and think it would barely need touching.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines is awesome and not super long. It’s extremely buggy, but luckily there’s a modder named Wesp5 who has spend YEARS creating an Unofficial Patch, to a point where all the cut content is restored and it’s essentially feature-complete. There’s a version that just patches the game, and a restored content version. I think he should be given a team and be allowed to curate content and rebalance cut mechanics for a remake. It would be magical.

Cruisn World is one of my favorite arcade racers ever. It has untouchable vibes, and I’d just like to see that with a nice sheen over it, maybe more levels and vehicles?

LEGO Battles is an RTS for the Nintendo DS. Put it on PC, nuff said.

NBA Jam is not very niche. I want a remake, and I don’t care if it’s up-to-date. It’s the best sports game period.

God forbid we… checks notes preserve games so we can play them?

Perhaps

It’s gotten worse over the years, don’t worry ;)

My top recommended movie right now is Freddy Got Fingered

It was the end of 9th grade, so I was 15 or 16. I read it immediately after To Kill a Mockingbird, which did not make it look good in comparison 😂

Asking questions is how most people show interest. That doesn’t mean it’s disingenuous. Conversations are not events where people take turns talking at each other, they’re back-and-forths.

On the flip side, have you thought about how disingenuous it can seem when someone says nothing while you talk, and then immediately afterward starts talking about themselves and their life at length? Most people don’t just automatically update everyone around them on everything in their lives, that’s why people ask questions and show interest.

This is probably the most concise and practical answer in this thread.

I just use the golden rule: treat others the way you want to be treated. I’m autistic, diagnosed in 2016. One thing I’ve noticed when hanging out with other autistics: they all want to talk about their special interest, and will go on for hours unhindered, but you can try to make conversation about something they don’t care about for 5 minutes and they don’t even pay attention. I’m definitely guilty of this, to a degree. I think that’s part of having autism. But the next time someone is telling you about something and you find you don’t care, consider what it would feel like if you were discussing your special interest with someone and they just acted disinterested the whole time. Doesn’t feel good, does it?

It’s important to realize that in conversations, most people don’t care about topics, they care about the person to whom they’re speaking. When you speak to someone, you’re signing up to have a conversation with them, not necessarily about something. For example, my fiancee is really into musical theatre, and I’m not. I don’t understand any of the terminology, or what even goes into a stage show. But I love her, and if she wants to talk about it, you bet your ass I’m sitting and asking questions because I know I’m going to end up telling her about Black Ops II Zombies lore for like 2 hours straight later. It’s not necessarily transactional, it just would be a terrible relationship if I only talked to her about my interests.

There is no social game. Well, probably to some psychopaths somewhere there is. But people ask you questions about things in your life because that is one of the ways people show interest in others. It’s nothing to do with gaming the social system - they are interested in talking to you, so they give you opportunities to talk about yourself, your interests, and what you’ve been doing. Sure, they probably don’t “care” about what they’re asking about the same way you do, but they’re not asking out of some cold, machine like formula that lets them climb up the social ladder - it’s just how being social works.

I’ll leave you with this thought: being able to listen to and understand the feelings of someone else in a situation you have no attachment to is empathy. Studies on empathy have shown that it is a skill that can be improved, not a static thing that’s rationed out to you in a certain amount at birth. One good way to work on empathy is to imagine yourself as the other person. So, the next time someone’s telling you about something you don’t care about, you could imagine being in their shoes. You may realize that they have something worth caring about after all, and though you may not care as much as they do, you may appreciate what they have to say just a bit more.

EDIT: I’ve seen the double empathy problem elsewhere in this thread. I would like to point out that empathy is literally all about trying to understand someone in spite of what differences you have. So don’t read that and assume there can’t be allistic-autistic empathy. Read that and acknowledge that it’s harder to empathize with allistics, and try to learn how anyway because that is empathy. Or don’t, idk. I’ve found the double empathy problem to be true in my life, and I’ve also found that building empathy toward allistics and all the things I don’t understand about them has done me a world of good and made it easier for them to empathize with me.

Oh, sorry, I wasn’t super clear - never met an alt-righter with a clean room, no matter what JBP tells them.

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It’s been quite a while since I’ve read it, so this may not be a fair assessment. But, I fucking hated The Catcher in the Rye. I wasn’t even required to read it for school or anything, I just did. Perhaps I just found Holden to be insufferable. I think that was the point, but it did not make it a particularly enjoyable or insightful read at all, save for the overwhelming supertext of DO NOT BE LIKE THIS GUY. The part where he hires a prostitute and just cries in front of her really stuck in my mind. That was when it really sunk in for me that someone read this book and decided that Holden’s views were so accurate that he had to go shoot John Lennon with a gun for being phony. Almost unbelievable.