The 90s had a lot of good in them but I gotta admit I’m a bit tired of this nostalgic mindset people have about the past.

Sure, a lot of things are not going well today, but at the same time we have made amazing advancements in multiple areas where I’m sure most of you would regret going back to the 90s and not have them.

Advancements in medicine and science as well as social advancements in the form of a better understanding and acceptance of mental health issues. Being gay and trans today is also a lot easier than it was in the 90s. We hold sexual predators more and more responsible for their actions today than we did back then. More people today are aware and concerned about fixing the environment than they were in the 90s where you got to hear things about the ozone layer and then that was it.

Smoking is on its way out. Similar with alcohol. At least in my country. It is less nad less socially acceptable and more and more people turn away from those vices, which is amazing.

In my experience, more and more people raise their kids with respect for the child’s emotional well being. My generation were barely seen as humans when we were children and I see more and more people around my age raising their children with the respect they didn’t receive themselves when they were little. It is bound to create some more robust people in the future who have a healthy sense of self and who believe in themselves.

There are so many good things in the world right now, but if you only look for the bad and start romanticizing a past that wasn’t really as perfect as you think it was, then you’re, in my opinion, living wrong.

It’s okay to appreciate things from the past and miss them, but this “the world was better” bullshit is just very counter productive and in many cases objectively untrue.

Glad you did as well. It was painfully unpleasant and dull to get through. My friend and I genuinely didn’t enjoy ourselves once except for maybe when a heavily pregnant character decided to do parkour and be in active combat for a good part of the game. My friend and I are both women and we kept joking about how this game was clearly written by a man who doesn’t know any mothers in his personal life. It was so dumb.

I distinctly remember them claiming that you had the choice to spare the dogs, but they would viciously attack you and blow your cover every chance you got so you literally didn’t have any other choice than to kill them sometimes. Then there were the plot related actions where the story took your choices away from you and forced you to kill a dog and torture a woman to death as Ellie.

And the ironic thing was that they claimed they wanted you to feel bad for killing people in the game and had the npcs yelling out the names of the people you killed, but I literally felt nothing.

Meanwhile when I played the first game and got to the hospital scene, I was so fucking devastated because I didnt want to kill the fireflies. Up until that point you had mostly killed zombies and deranged people who were directly putting you and ellie in danger. But the fireflies felt different. I was so devastated making my way to Ellie. The game did a fantastic job showing how Joel was crossing a line in his humanity in order to protect the one person in the world that gave his life meaning. It was at once a very beautiful and very tragic climax to a story about humanity in dire circumstances. So beautifully made.

Ain’t gonna sit there and cry over some random dog or some dumb npc named Jason when I’m forced to plow down hundreds of them while rarely if ever getting to attack zombies becuase they’re barely present in the game by comparison.

If you want to treat human lives as precious in your game, don’t make your player kill them by the hundreds the whole time. Fuck man. I sometimes wonder if Druckmann really wrote the first game at all or if he just took credit for some underling’s work because I struggle to believe that the same writer who wrote this emotionally complex game is also the same writer who pooped out its sequel.

Sorry for long rant. I just really hate that stupid game.

It is so insidious when they do that with any piece of media. Use minority groups as a shield against well deserved criticism. It’d just been a thing in entertainment for so long that I kinda ended up tapping out and focusing on indie stuff more.

I literally cannot imagine creating something that is so incompetent, so shit and then using trans people as a shield to avoid taking responsibility for me delivering a shitty product.

Worst part is that I think it was almost deliberate. It just felt so hateful and like every decision was crafted to specifically hurt the fans and, as you say, gaslight them by accusing them of hating minority groups. So fucking disgusting. If you look at the teaser scene that was published way back before the game’s release, where Abby is getting hanged, she is suspiciously more feminine looking. Why did they change that? To piss off the gamers.

They also made every single ad seem like Ellie was on a revenge rampage because of Dina’s murder and that Joel was either going to join her or that his “ghost” would be by her side as her mental health tanks.

My friend and I had a lot of theories about the story of the game back when those teasers came out.

And then they go and create the most cruel, mean spirited murder scene of a beloved character that everybody already expected to get a send off in this game and afterwards they act smug and/or like victims when the fan reactions roll in.

They knew what they were doing. It was so gross. Joel’s murder was probably one of the most physically disturbed reactions I have jhad to a piece of media because it felt like personal hatred directed against the player. Like, where the fuck did that come from, asshole? All I ever did was enjoy your game.

Are there some asshole fans out there who fit the stereotype of a sexist gamer? Of course there are, but the vast majority of fans are just normal people whose only crime was to get invested in a story, a world and its characters and we all got punished for it.

To me, that is behavior from a creator that I will never support and too many creators in the hollywood/LA sphere have had this gross attitude towards fans for too long. When you treat an entire fan base with disgust because of what a small minority does, you are no longer a professional who deserves their time and money. It literally is the equivalent of going to a restaurant and the chef going up to your table and spitting in your food because he had a few shitty customers the other day. Like good fucking luck bringing new customers to your restaurant in the future.

Haven’t played that game, but I will take your word for it!

I played that game with my best friend and we hated every single second of it. To me, this is the game version of GoT season 8.

I still find it incredible that Druckmann stuck to his guns and copy pasted this terribly executed storyline into the second season of the show. Idiot learned nothing. I’m glad I decided to skip the second season and just enjoy the first season as a stand alone. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey did a great job as Joel and Ellie, but I sincerely doubt that even they could save the used toilet paper that is the script for Last of Us 2.

Strong Last of Us 2 vibes.

That game had such an interesting setup and completely fucking fumbled every single second.

The idea of a split story arc where two hurt people are hunting one another for revenge and how it devastates the both of them in the end is so cool, but then it’s written with the emotional intelligence of a five year old and completely fucking missing the concept of subtlety and earned pay offs. Everything is forced, everything is overly mean spirited to the point where you just kinds hate everybody and roots for no one. You’re literally forced as the player to torture and kill several people and animals throughout the game.

And when you finally get to the climax there’s a lame as fuck “revenge is bad mkay” message tagged on to the end. It rings hollow and it isn’t earned. Such an immature script trying to tackle such an interesting concept.

It really shows you that there are no bad ideas, only bad execution.

That, and more energy. I swear something got fucked up at the factory when they made me. I’m a terrible scandinavian. I am prone to pretty intense winter depressions and I’m not a fan of the cold either. I have been so far down the dumps during the winter seasons that I have blacked out entire months and have no memory of what I did and my spouse is like “yeah, you basically spent two months sitting in the same corner of the home when you weren’t working, just looking gone, dude.” And when I have winters where I feel like I did pretty good and didn’t get depressed my man still goes “yeah, nah. You were depressed af. Just not vacant this time”.

On the flipside I have been giddy like a kid walking for hours in flip-flops in Mediterranean mountains, getting slow cooked by the summer sun. I remember last time I was visiting Greece with my parents and we walked all morning until noon to get to a nice little beach across the mountains and a couple of locals saw us coming and were fucking horrified that we had come all that way on foot, lol.

I actually like that the sun doesn’t set until like ten in the evening where I live. It also starts rising at 3 in the morning. I love it. I prefer this to depression season the other half of the year xS

I remember having a discussion woth someone many years ago who vehemently insisted that mental illness didn’t exist until the late 1900s and that nobody were mentally ill nor dealing with disorders before psychology was invented. His conclusion was that mental illness and disorders were made up by psychologists to make money off of people.

Some levels of stupid are so severe that you just can’t do anything but sit and stare in disbelief after awhile.

Oddly topical

I hate that one because I hear both of them at the same time Dx feels like pure insanity.

It was always black and blue, but I’ve always found it fun to switch back and forth between which color combination it was. It was also a fun phenomena, but I don’t like that it was ten years+ ago now. Time moves a bit too fast.

I’m glad to hear that for your father! ❤️ my dad has also been a little project-machine gun since he retired. He is always doing something, which is awesome to see.

Personally, I know that if I was given all the time in the world like that, I would wither and feel completely hopeless. I don’t have a drive to start things if it is only for myself. For me, working is a relief because I’m needed by others and I feel a purpose.

One of my saving graces with being born into a time where retirement seems to become a myth for my generation and younger, is that I really like working. I look to my mom who has failed at retiring 6 or 7 times at this point and I just know that that will be me if I live that long. I dunno if I could ever sit back and be like “I have done my part, now I get to chill until I die”.

I would honest to God become suicidally depressed, and holy hell am I glad my brain is wired like that because feeling the opposite way in this current state of the western world must be a nightmare. If you hate your job and hate working and just want to be able to retire someday but you most likely never will due to the state of the world, I feel so fucking sorry for you. That sucks.

Sounds like too much work, honestly. People on youtube can’t be fucked to click on links to other websites. It would also be a terrible business model for someone who aims to make content creation their job.

If it is just for shits and giggles, then I don’t think youtube or your suggestion is that big of a deal. Then it’s just a hobby that people can do when they feel like it.

What I was talking about were those people who decide to make a career out of it. That is hell. There are a select few who get lucky where it doesn’t destroy their lives, but for most, it is just an unforgiving and soul destroying endeavor. I cannot imagine letting myself become essentially an ad-prostitute where I earn my money by blabbering on about sponsors every video and probably not know for sure if the company I advertise is good or turns out to be some corrupt scam or a cult some years down the line - making me look like the tool I am. I cannot imagine having to produce x amount of content with advertisement in it to uphold my end of whatever contract I have with a sponsor - essentially being their puppet until the contract runs out. And maybe I was an idiot who didn’t understand lawyer-speak and now I have committed myself to be their mouthpiece for seven to ten months for free because I signed that shit. Everyday turning on the camera and dance like a monkey for my followers while my sponsor gets free advertisement.

And then gradually being recognized and getting weird people following me, finding facts about me I don’t know where they got them from. Shit like that. And the pay is still nowhere close to being worth all that stress because you’re also constantly paranoid about demonetization and being basically having no privacy anymore. Even if you try and cover all your bases, people will find out who you are and where you live and with whom. The more you try to hide, the more persistent they will be.

Like I said = hell.

They are all Troy Baker anyway xD

Working for youtube as a content creator sounds like my personal hell. You’re basically a slave to your channel once you decide to make it your full time job.

I know the year most Disney movies came out. Not all of them, but probably more than I should know. Generally, I know the year of release for most movies I have seen.

When it comes to remembering useful things, I might as well have dementia.

Very true! It does feel like playing tetris with that little box sometimes, haha.