To tune out and reset my mental and emotional state: Most anything by Paleowolf

To restore hope and interest in seeking good things from life:

• Rainbow Connection by Kermit the Frog
• Glorious Dawn by Melodysheep
• Nightswimming by R.E.M. (This one can be risky though, sometimes it makes me feel even more nostalgia-sad.)

The goofy answer: https://alvinisemo.ytmnd.com/

I loved 8! I got so into the characters and their stories. I was always excited to see more Laguna & Co. I remember downloading the Eyes On You song, probably off one of those sketchy P2P music sharing services.

Vagrant Story takes place in Ivalice as well and is the only game I’d say I love as much as Tactics when it comes to sheer vibe/atmosphere. The opening gameplay sequence is amazing.

Yeah dude, Tactics was incredible. Art style, music, gameplay, story, just the vibe, man. My only beef is that it had the typical FF ending feeling of getting too sort of “out there”. Went from a very human story to the typical third act of oh now there’s some big weird big bad I have no emotional investment in to pose a more serious threat I guess.

Agrias remains one of my all time favorite characters.

Screw Algus.

How dare he?

Man, I miss the golden age of point-and-click adventure games. My brothers and I played through so many together. PC Speaker version of the MI1 soundtrack for maximum nostalgia: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=_cfPw3IL1sk

We had Shufflepuck Cafe on our Macintosh Plus. Loved that game, but also infuriating

Was pong on the Telstar, along with Tennis and i think two more similar super basic games? That’s what we had

Holy smokes, I forgot all about that thing! Seeing a picture of it brought out some ancient archived memories

I loved this game! I’d send swarms of armored cars against my brother.

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. I only discovered it fairly recently and it has already become my go-to read whenever I’m looking for some peace and simple natural spirituality with a generous side of denouncing the absurdity of modern culture and overaggressive “progress” and development.

Boy, the trees are really sneezing today.

Thanks, I learned a new meme today!

I can see where you’re coming from. I think you might be conflating the idea of what I consider worth taking the effort to block a Lemmy user over with what I might personally consider good ideas or opinions of inherent value. If I see a single post spewing genocidal rhetoric I’m not going to block the user and think that my blocking them is somehow going to make a difference in the underlying issue. I might want to see future the responses to their post (hopefully arguing against it), or I’ll just scroll past it.

Now if I’m seeing that user consistently posting that same kind of thing as I browse around Lemmy, sure, I’ll block them even if their posts are written in the most tactful and respectful way possible, because at that point it’s become repetitive clutter that I don’t want to constantly see while browsing Lemmy. The user blocking part comes in when something has become a consistent annoyance or frustration, because I find it’s not worth the effort to block every user who posts something awful the first time I see it rather than just moving on.

Because you have primed yourself to ignore anyone who disagrees with you with any degree of vigour.

We might be experiencing some semantics issues. I don’t equate angry or frustrated posts to inflammatory and trollish posts. I’m talking about when people are smugly trying to “own” or “dunk on” someone, or being excessively rude and accusatory (I can imagine some situations where this might sometimes be considered justified), or baiting a reaction trap. And I’m generalizing, not arguing a hard unbreakable rule. I agree there’s nothing wrong with getting angry or frustrated about important issues that are a real problem, and I admit some of my most frustrating interactions have been with people who use the approach of “I’m being civil (in my argument for something awful, like genocidal rhetoric) and your angry response means I win the argument by default because I am being ‘reasonable’ while you are not.” I really do get frustrated by that rhetoric playbook tactic. So I do think I see where you’re coming from.

I do agree we’ve had different experiences, and that none are universal. I was caught in an “echo chamber” that almost had me voting in support of California’s Proposition 8 (ban of same-sex marriage) back in the day and had I not been willing to listen to opposing views going against what I had been raised to believe in, I might still be trapped in that environment that I still see some of my old friends and family stuck in.

(TL;DR: I’m blocking users I feel are significantly cluttering Lemmy with trolling or annoying posts of no substance, not ones that have different ideas than my own. Acknowledging different ideas and perspectives is good.)

I feel like we’re already being hurt by algorithms and whatnot only sending us what we want to hear and filtering out opposing views or ideas. If someone disagrees with me or has an idea different from how I already think, I should know that someone is out there who thinks differently than I do. Maybe I’ll even learn something or come to appreciate a perspective I hadn’t considered before. It can be interesting and even enlightening to see differing viewpoints, and that’s part of what’s so fun to me about the Internet. We can easily see there are all sorts of people out there with different thoughts and ideas.

We’re all bound to lose our cool sometimes, but if I see a poster consistently being inflammatory or trollish, I don’t find value in trying to digest that kind of exchange. Some people may enjoy watching the setting of the bait and seeing others walk into the trap of engaging. It’s just not the type of content I’m into and I found it was becoming increasingly common so I started blocking users that I felt were consistently producing these kinds of situations.

That makes sense, thank you for the insight.

What’s with the the fact that some words are randomly bolded?

Yesterday evening I was feeling the same way, so I started blocking users that are clearly posting inflammatory or aggressively brigadey content (note: not to be confused with things I don’t agree with. It’s about tone and tact, not content), or things that I find annoying to see over and over like the same trollish meme and emoji images. After only an evening of doing that, my Lemmy experience has been worlds better. I did notice a particular instance being the trend which makes me look forward to instance blocking, though at the moment I’d prefer to still do so on an individual user basis.

I’m still on my Blizzard boycott that started with the Blitzchung thing. Family and friends have tried to get me to drop it to play with them a few times, but a boycott doesn’t seem like it has much purpose (or effect) if you just drop it after a while when nothing has changed.

Coming out of lurker mode just to sigh at you for this.