Is the game different on Switch 2 or is it the exact same game? I’ve been holding off on getting it for the original Switch because I wasn’t sure if I was going to miss out on better performance, customisation options, online features or whatnot.

Most of the hobbies I unexpectedly enjoyed had something in common: I learned about them in real life rather than online.

Online hobby communities seem fun to participate in, but they suck the fun out if it very quickly because you’re immediately interacting with and comparing yourself to people from all around the world who live and breathe that hobby.

You suddenly find yourself in the midst of a dedicated community where you’re a nobody. The pride and sense of identiry you felt about being the only one in your social circle who could do The Thing is gone, because now everyone does it, and everyone is also better than you. You get overwhelmed with tips, tricks, a whole roadmap of how to improve, and tons of inspiration everywhere that just suck the individuality out of the hobby.

For instance, I really, really enjoyed sewing recently. I took an old pair of jeans and a terrible flannel shirt and crafted custom bunny ears for a hat I had lying around. I was so proud of myself! I even figured out on the fly how to make them look more thick and organic – I used some cotton pads I usually use for my make-up to stuff them.

It also felt really good to show off my spontaneous little crafts project to everyone I know. Nobody else had sewn stuff before, so I felt like I truly came up with something cool and unique! It was part of my identity for a brief moment, something that I came up with.

Then I briefly checked sewing communities online to see what others were doing – big mistake.

I was so proud of my ears and was planning on finding inspiration to work on similar projects in the future, but suddenly I felt like I was on step 1 of a 300 step ladder to climb to “get better” at sewing. Even though I wasn’t comparing my own to others’ work, it suddenly felt like a chore: I would eventually have to ‘graduate’ to new stitching patterns, good quality fabric, more complex projects, I’d get helpful tips and techniques, fun projects to put in a ‘backlog’.

It made it all feel so exhausting.

If I had not figured out the trick with the cotton pad stuffing on my own, I would have probably read it somewhere online captioned “if you’re just starting out, here’s a hack” and it would have felt like I was settling for something suboptimal someone else came up with. It would have been utterly unrewarding. No creativity involved, just copying what others laid out for me.

It’s like a cogitohazard. If you want to enjoy a hobby, block its online communities. Don’t look it up. Try to invent it from first principles. Learn about it yourself.

Perhaps you should spearhead an initiative on turning existing letters into digraphs.

For example, ‘x’ should probably be ‘ks’. ‘w’ very much yearns to be ‘vv’, and ‘m’ looks like ‘nn’. ‘Y’ is obviously just ‘ie’. ‘q’ is a failed letter – make it ‘kh’ like in all the bad science fiction. In fact, all the harsh consonants like ‘k’, ‘t’ and ‘p’ should be digraphs: ‘gh’, ‘dh’ and ‘bh’.

Do ieou lighe mie eghsannbhles?

To be fair, there’s the Red Sea on the other side, that connects a lot of the oil-producing countries to the sea too.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a great article covering this exact question:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Strait-of-Hormuz

Long story short, the strait is not just the only access point to Kuwait, but also a chokepoint to almost all of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and so on.

There is of course the Red Sea, that too allows sea access to some of the countries mentioned above, but that features its own chokepoint strait, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That strait is already a conflict zone because of the Houthi conflict. It’s also closer to Israel, and it’s partly under Iran’s control too.

And there’s too little infrastructure on that side to divert enough oil from the countries in question compared to the Hormuz side.

Hmm. How would I check that? Did my instance defederate?

Edit: Apparently we’re federated. Still can’t see any recent posts, though.

Is that one still active? The most recent posts I can see are two months old.

Reminds me of trying to place fences in Planet Coaster.

I totally want to get it now.

I found that my taste in bass-filled, rhythmic electronic hip hop music is much more mainstream than I thought it was. And that’s nice! Gives me many more options.

I discovered this song via our uni radio recently:

Dominik Hartz & Frank Lotion – Turbofresh
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWCrkLTrMTk

I spotted my girlfriend at the time on Grindr. That’s certainly a situation.

I wonder if there’s horse oil for snakes.

She’s doing well! Sunday was spent mostly as a lazy Sunda. We’re going to go to the store tomorrow to try and find her a new denim jacket, and she can hardly wait.

I always used to enjoy staying up late too, but the older I get, the more tired I become around my regular bedtime.

It’s not just sleepiness, but genuine exhaustion that I cannot ignore that leads to awful symptoms like paranoia, eye strain, derealisation or anxiety. I just physically can’t stay awake longer.

My father is declining, my father’s declining, my fathers are declining, my fathers’ declining.

Aye, 'tis my father’s declension.

Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?

None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.

Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn’t modded it to shreds and hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.

I’d say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending “it’s a kid’s toy” type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.

I went back to using in-game communication and social features and I can’t believe we stopped doing it. It is so much more immersive to hang out in, say, a guild hall to chat with whoever happens to be online, than to be available 24/7 in an outside app.

I would also want to add that many of these terms are regional and subculture-specific.

In the specific part of Germany I grew up in, a ‘joint’ was any smokable rolled cigarette-like object with cannabis in it. Nobody used any more specific words like ‘blunt’.

Then talking to people one town over, they looked at you as if you were from the moon if you called anything a ‘joint’ that didn’t have tobacco in it. To them, a ‘joint’ was exclusively a mix of cannabis and tobacco, and a ‘blunt’ was cannabis-only.

Then there’s people who add weed to pre-bought cigarettes, people who insist on using leaves, filters and no filters, tobacco or no tobacco, and so on. Most of these terms are really regional.

what a notification to receive!

glad it was on this post, LOL

I came here to suggest Urbek City Builder too. It could be right up their alley.