Slay the Spire is excellent. It’s a deep game that’s easy to play sort of mindlessly if you’d like. Lots of replayability.

I appreciate your thoughts here, but I wonder if you’ve ever played Disco Elysium? To me, that game comes closest to approximating the storytelling prowess of a novel while also retaining player agency in significant ways. I pitch the game to people as “a point and click mystery game crossed with an existential novel.”

To clarify, you’re suggesting that you’re okay or at least sympathetic to people who suggest jailing your former colleagues because you think your colleagues should employ more diagnostic caution? You’re understanding of or even supportive of laws that outright ban gender affirming care because some professionals make professional errors? I’m not in the field, I’m not suggesting your experiences are invalid, but I would suggest you consider the downstream consequences of your sympathies. Gender affirming care may or may not be appropriate for any given case, but I absolutely believe that for some youth it can be life saving. Obstructions or bans can therefore cost lives.

I also find it interesting how vehemently Musk, Peterson, and others will come out against gender affirming care while remaining silent on issues like the overuse of prescription drugs as a means to treat youth struggles. We give kids mind altering drugs to treat their behavior, often without considering other treatment pathways, and usually without consent. This seems to be the same sort of issue, no? And yet Musk and Peterson are focused on the gender issue instead. Does that not suggest that those you are expressing sympathy for here are not also politically motivated rather than motivated by genuine concern for a child’s well-being?

You’re likely thinking about Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. I played it and a sequel (Call of Pripyat) recently on semi-modern hardware, but YMMV. I loved Stalker back in the day.

I haven’t personally tried it, but I’ve also been watching Chernobylite on Steam with interest. It seems like it may be intended to be a spiritual successor to Stalker. It’s been on sale recently, too.

Unfortunately, I think Paramount just pulled Prodigy episodes from their streaming service.

This is such lazy trolling. Try harder.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t true throughout the entire US. Wait staff in Washington, for example, get paid the full state minimum wage, and the minimum wage act explicitly requires that tips be paid to employees rather than retained by the restaurant. Of course, actual practice or compliance can differ, but there are a few states with better laws than the norm.

As I understand it, your copy of that community will no longer update. There is a cached copy of the community on the Beehaw server, so you’ll see it and can seemingly post, but you’re posting to a copy of the community rather than the live community, and your posts will only be seen by other Beehaw users. To circumvent this, you’d need two accounts (or an account on an instance federated with both Beehaw and Lemmy.world, maybe?)

I definitely find the “scene” or “vignette” to be much easier to focus on and do effectively. On longer works it’s so easy to get bogged down in the details and the bigger picture setups, so doing the short stuff is good practice for just blasting words onto the page. I saw your other comment where you mention that you sometimes spend too much time on single sentences, and I am definitely prone to doing the same. I figure that if I can get comfortable with writing the shorter stuff, it’ll help me stay focused on the longer.

I’m in a similar boat. I found that concentrating on short stories was really helpful to build my confidence in my prose. I am currently bouncing between two novel ideas, with maybe 15k words on one, and about 10k on the other. I ended up not liking my first attempt (the longer) and plan to go back to the table and do world building again before making another attempt. On the second, I am slowly writing it out, but it is painstaking work.

While I haven’t solved this problem, I think what you and I need to do is the same: just keep writing. Don’t edit as you go. The more you build it out, the more you’ll feel connected to your characters, and the more you’ll want to explore them in other situations. Get your ideas on the page, and eventually you’ll be able to figure out what you specifically don’t like. And then you can start again or start a new project with that in mind.

Wishing you the best!