Probably any game with a story. Voiced might be better, but written has advantages, too.

Might not want games with a lot of fictional words or idiosyncrasies. Like Baldur’s Gate 3 is really good and well acted, but you’d pick up a lot of less useful fantasy words.

Just looking at what I’ve played lately.

Guild Wars 2 is a great game. Lots of content. Most of it voiced. There’s also other players you can talk to, and some might speak your native language. It has some fantasy jargon.

Grand Theft Auto 5 would probably teach you swear words and other stuff you shouldn’t casually say. Be careful with that one.

My time at Sandrock was fun. That probably would give you some vocabulary.

Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like “{skill} is TRASH never use it” and when you do some digging you find it’s like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn’t work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.

DND is tricky to recommend. On the one hand, as far as RPGs go it’s mega popular. On the other, it’s a very specific kind of game and rather finicky.

Many people who don’t want to play fantasy dungeon crawling tactical combat would enjoy other genres, but finding those groups can be harder. One of my friends has no real interest in fantasy, but immediately was like “LET’S DO IT” when I mentioned a game of Vampire.

The tabletop game meetup I know of (in New York) is explicitly friendly to new players. One of the hosts said their first game ever was at the meetup many years ago.

Classic RPG. My half orc “beat with an ugly stick” master of time magick and backstab lives on fondly in my memory.

Also my extremely pretty elf, also a master of time magick.

One of the reasons I prefer playing on PC over other platforms is there’s usually fan made mods / cheats. Like, yeah, I could do something really tedious for four hours, or I could get a mod to skip it. This is my leisure activity, not an exam.

I try to be mindful that too much cheating can water down the experience. Like, if I was playing BG3 and just set everyone to max level from the start, I would probably have less fun, personally. But if someone just wants to do the story and have fun with exploding barrels? Not for me to judge.

(I do draw the line at multiplayer. Cheating against other people is rude as heck. )

Yeah. Often when I talk to people who say they “don’t have time” I wonder where their time is going. Often to watching TV. Sometimes podcasts. Social media is a big time suck.

But like if you have time to watch all of the office again this year, you had time to play video games.

A friend of mine realized they were just losing hours a day to Instagram. Delete that, and you have time for better hobbies. Play a game. Read a book.

Having children seems like a bigger factor. The only couple I know that has kids still has time. One spends it on DND, and other on TV and simple phone games.

You know how scam emails intentionally include mistakes because they want to filter out smart people? Same idea.

Reasonably smart people will see this and go “this is garbage”. The idiots will go deeper, and become loyal gop voters.

I think there’s a lot of very insecure people out in the world. The intersection of insecurity and toxic masculinity is pretty bad.

Single use plastic should he illegal for most things. Yes, it might be inconvenient to have to carry your own thermos or whatever, but filling the ocean with plastic is worse than inconvenient

I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, in my youth, it helped to actually go out and do the things I was worried about. When I spent all my time home worrying, I just got worse. Once I left the house, went to the party, went on the hike, whatever, I found the reality wasn’t anywhere near what I had worried about

Just remember that good relationships never end in breakups.

lol what. I’ve had several relationships that were good, and then we broke up. We’re still friends, but it became apparent that we were no longer good for each other as partners. People grow and change. That doesn’t invalidate the time we spent together.

You have a lot of life ahead of you. The feelings will fade. Don’t wallow. You’ll be fine.

When I was a youth I had a lot of big feelings about relationships and crushes and friends. The feelings were real. They certainly took up a lot of space in my head, but they weren’t really proportionate to what was happening. Everything felt big because it was new to me. I barely talk to anyone from that time in my life anymore. I live in a new city with new friends.

You’ll be fine.

Apologies for the direct question, but how old are you?

In a couple months you’ll find someone or something new and exciting, and laugh at how this felt like the end of the world. Just make sure you don’t wallow in a pit of depression. Go out into the world. Do your hobbies. Find new hobbies.

Also, consider using more line breaks for readability.

Privately owned centralized platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc, are a recipe for disaster. So I left.

I’m ~40, so I don’t date or spend much time with people in their 20s.

I have seen the occasional profile demanding a certain height, but I just skip on it immediately.

I wonder if it correlates with other attributes? I’m also very left wing so I don’t interact with conservatives much, for example. Maybe “I need a tall man and I’ll say it out loud” happens more there?

Recommendations for…? Just any music?

Caroline Rose’s new album is very good and very human: https://carolinerosemusic.bandcamp.com/album/year-of-the-slug

Tagged as “alternative psychobilly acoustic guitar alt-country alternative pop art pop folk indie indie folk indie pop indiepop rock n roll shoegaze Los Angeles”

“Use a different language” is a common defense of javascript, but kind of a weird one.

Yeah. My last job, a PR with commented out code typically wouldn’t get approved. Either leave it in version history, or stick it on a branch

Not to my face. But as someone else said, it’s rare for you to be told the rejection reason (for early dating). There are a lot of reasons for this, but part of it is people kind of suck at taking rejection. And on top of that, a significant portion of men are dangerous.

No one wants to risk the man flipping out, spewing cruelty, or worse. A gentler letdown seems safer.