Easiest way to start hating your new hobby is visiting it’s subreddit.
It’s obvious for video games because you can assume anyone that wants to be active on a specific game sub is probably a try hard that talks about the meta, or max DPS builds, or other annoying stuff. But then you visit something like the carbon steel pan subreddit, or grilled cheese, and you’re continually assaulted with this idea that there are only specific pans and oils that are correct, or that your grilled cheese isn’t actually a grilled cheese because it was cooked too close to an open pack of salami.
I can just imagine the person writing that with a smug grin on their face, nodding slowly as they finish with a “you don’t deserve to own them” and feeling all good about themselves.
Video game communities suck, and it makes playing them worse.
You play an FPS and everyone uses the meta gun at the time, then it gets nerfed and they use the new meta gun. Same with RTS and any other multiplayer game. Somehow StarCraft 1 pulled out a perfect rock paper scissors balance, but nothing else really has that so meta is what people do.
And because everyone is so busy grinding and min maxing, that’s what the game developers design for now, and it sucks the fun out of games because you just grind hours to get some new items to have the best items in the game.
Occasionally game communities are good. The Chivalry 2 subreddit had a bot that would use GPT to answer questions and then on every post go on about how the polehammer is the best weapon in the game, which was so over the top it made fun of the whole meta idea. The Breath of the Wild communities doing crazy rube Goldberg machines are always fun. And I’ll never not enjoy the weird hellscapes people create in the Sims.
You play an FPS and everyone uses the meta gun at the time
This is why I miss arena shooters (Quake, Unreal Tournament, Halo, etc.) being in vogue. There are no loadouts, no inherent differences between players, you’re all equal, and any weapons, ammo, grenades, powerups, vehicles, whatever, must be picked up from the map itself. This map doesn’t have a lightning gun/rocket launcher/banshee? Well tough shit, you’re going to have to do without.
These are games where you must fight with whatever comes to hand, no matter how much you dislike it, and that leaves almost no space for a meta. The closest thing that can exist is a general consensus of “for this situation, these are the weapons you want to have, and these are the weapons you really do not want to be in this situation with”.
OMG, this was what killed overwatch for me. I’m disabled and can’t play games that require fast paced precise and concise actions. So Symetra was my jam. I tried other characters like torbjorn but the all had the same problem. Some 13 yo genji prick would hop circles over my head while my health ticked away and I shot sporadically around at the sky before I inevitably die. But not Sym. All I had to do was backpedal and keep that grasshopper mf’er in my general view. And pop. Pulling him into a doorway with 6 kill lasers was the best feeling the in the world. But that enabled me to be useful to the rest of the team. I occasionally did good enough that I ranked in the top of the match, but I was almost never carried.
And then they nerfed sym because, “nOt EnOuGh PrO pLaYeRs PiCk HeR!!¡!!” No more walking shield. No more turret web. No more over shield for the team. No more wide lock on gun. They turned her into just another precision shooting player. She had a Halloween bag of tricks and they swapped it for a tooth brush.
Last time this happened to me was when I said I liked an experimental musician’s youtube channel cause he has a lot of content about his process etc. Got reamed in the comments by a salty user cause the musician once featured a product in a video made by a brand that it’s popular to hate, yet used by many musicians. One of the most reddit things ever.
The same subreddit heavily discouraged me, in classic reddit style, from getting a product once. I did anyway following my intuition. Then a year later it became the most recommended product for that purpose.
It’s a weird accepted fact that everyone despises, dismisses, denies and disregards but otherwise believe is true
It’s so widely accepted by anyone who has read a bit of recent history over the past 50 years that all evidence points to the fact that they were complicit in assassinating their own president in 1963.
People on Lemmy like to argue and I’m taking a strong stance on something here. With those two things in mind, I’m expecting some level of push-back. (Which, admittedly, has yet to materialize.)
My most recent job wants me to buy a new laptop “so my Webcam will work”
It works fine. I taped over it when I got it because I never had planned need of it. Anything requiring video can be handled on my phone.
Why do they NEED me to get a new laptop?
So the managers who don’t use their cameras can see my face during their boring ass bullshit “I’m so important look at me and crave my input” team meetings every week.
No. If you want to see me, you can come talk face to face, or stare at a picture you would have had to cyberstalk to find.
Funny thing is, in my training I’ve had to do other team meetings with other people in the company, and nobody mentioned my lack of camera.
If it’s “job critical” like you claim, then you need to put that requirement in the job listings and On-boarding. Since I’m 48 hours away from my final training with a physical person, and I have yet to see anything that makes me think it isn’t just a manager trying to flex their tiny iota of tenuous power.
I wouldn’t say either are ruined. They just attract some fucked up people. I don’t think any media should be judged based on what kind of person obsesses with it and how they express that obsession.
With those two, you can even laugh knowing the people who make/made those shows don’t think highly of those fans.
I got that sense from the new Star Wars trilogy, too, especially ep 7 where Kylo is an obsessive Darth Vader fan who wore a helmet for no reason and wasn’t nearly as effective as his hero was (he loses a lightsaber duel to someone who hadn’t ever used a lightsaber before and his most destructive action in that movie is throwing a temper tantrum and destroying one of his own rooms).
Looking at VTuber fandom out there. Two weeks ago, a famous female VTuber called Ironmouse (who, BTW, has an immune disease and cannot leave her house) won an award, and you know what the fans of other candidates did? They sent her death threats.
I only saw hate from people outside the vtuber community, specially on tiktok since people over there already went through a hate wave of vtubers after a popular male one made a concert without having a 3D model. Several people going “who?” afther she won in the live comments.
VTuber fandom has the extreme opposites. By just being in the Hololive community I’ve seen people being absolute gems and creating content that everyone loves (Kay Yu, Kanauru, 2ManySnacks)… and on the other side people gatekeeping everything, way too parasocial fans, thirst everywhere and extreme tribalism.
If you stop at top comments/posts it’s usually a great experience, you just have to learn to stop scrolling when the toxicity begins.
This is a little random but I just gotta get it off my chest lmao.
The other day I walked into a small restroom at school and saw two there was one stall left open. I couldn’t see inside the stall, as it was parallel to the doorway I was standing in. Anyway, I walked over to the stall and nearly ran into the guy who was standing there peeing with the door open. Of course, the guy heard me approach and looked over his shoulder at me like I had two heads, and I retreated, embarrassed.
Anyway, if that guy is reading this, I’m sorry lol. Believe me, it won’t happen again. You’ve instilled a deep fear in me and I will forever approach bathroom stalls slowly and carefully, leaning forward just enough as I approach to see if anyone is lurking inside. It won’t happen again. It won’t.
I did this to help get over weed-induced anxiety. Smoked a bit at uni, started getting bad anxiety most times, so I stopped smoking. Whenever I felt weird while sober (dizzy, spaced out, over-caffeinated), it Pavlov’d me into getting anxiety. Staring into the mirror and getting that weird dissociation gave me a controllable environment to get used to strange perceptual shifts.
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