Kind of a hard question to word, but is there anything in your life you have recommended to other people but no one’s ever gotten into?
I love podcasts and have friends who still thank me for getting them into this one or that one. But I’ve never gotten anyone to listen to My Brother, My Brother and Me. I don’t know if the name is unappealing or the concept but people seem to bounce off immediately.
So what can’t you get people into and why should we check it out?
Linux
In case you didn’t already know you’re browsing Lemmy, this top comment confirms it.
Esperanto. A made up language that is really easy to learn and spoken to some degree by about 2 million people all over the world. I got into it when I heard that if you speak it you can stay with Esperanto speakers that just want to practice with strangers, for free. I traveled all over the world for free and met so many awesome people.
When I try to get anyone to learn it, they just won’t. They hear about that criticism of the language or another, or plain get bored. You can just start the Esperanto course on Duolingo for free, but nobody I know goes through, despite the benefits.
The moment I got interested in Esperanto, I wanted better so I jumped down a rabbit hole of ever more obscure languages until I realized what I had gotten into and stopped.
Also, and this probably applied to others, if I’m language learning, there’s two other languages I really 'should* be learning, but am not, so that makes me feel guilty.
I kinda understand the appeal but there are just too many other languages that have a real practical use for when I’m traveling and want to speak to regular people instead of a secret society.
Fun fact, William Shatner of Star Trek fame once starred in a movie filmed entirely in Esperanto.
Angoroj! Fun fact: I have the DVD! And it’s hilariously bad.
How do you locate other Esperanto speakers?
Esperanto has a special call that attracts other Esperanto users.
It also has a mating call, but that only attracts birds.
i find it cool in the sense of how it’s a portrayal of all languages being somewhat synthetic. how other conlangs have tried to play with language features is how i landed on Jan Misali’s YT channel (here’s his Esperanto episode).
esperanto per-se i haven’t learnt because… maybe because I wouldn’t have anyone to practice with, and the point of languages is communication? idk.
Duolingo maybe be a good start for the theory, how did you start getting practice? and more importantly, what’s this about rent-free Esperanto hostels? 👀👀
Discworld by Terry Pratchett. It’s got something for just about everyone and I have a few avid readers in my family but they keep putting it off.
I’ve had similar problems. I think party of the issue is that, IMHO, the first two are amongst the weakest in the whole series and are less inspiring. I keep trying to tell my daughter to start with #3, but she hasn’t done it yet.
Start with Guards! Guards! And the Vimes cycle and then move on from there.
Seriously. If they don’t get hooked on Vimes, I don’t see them enjoying anything in the Discworld series.
I did read the first one and liked it a lot, I wanted to continue the series but other stuff gets in the way and recently I’ve been more into gaming than reading 😭
I finally took the dive in audiobook form about 2 weeks ago
Yesterday I finished The Light Fantastic in one day at work while listening
On equal rites rn and I now see that all of my favorite inline creators for the last 18 years have just been repackaging Pratchet
And I love it
Does Privacy count? I always I try to encourage people to treat themselves to better privacy, to step away from big corpo platforms and use more Foss services. Doesn’t stick with a lot of em. 😔
Lemmy
Haha I don’t even usually try. I’ll answer honestly if people ask what site I’m on but I know its a bridge too far for most people.
To a lot of people Reddit is super nerdy, Lemmy is several levels above of nerdy in relation.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone outside of Lemmy where I feel their lives would be better if they used it. The only time I feel a want to yell about Lemmy is when people who are on Masterdon or the like blindly promote something on Reddit.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to get my friend to watch Stargate SG-1. They’re fellow nerds and love sci-fi, but the 10 season run is too daunting for them.
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Who was doing it with whose mom?
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It does, thanks!
I’ve watched the whole run twice now, and Atlantis, and Universe.
I have asked many a friend to play modded Minecraft with me.
Unfortunately, I am reminded time and time again that the Venn diagram of people I know who are interested in that and people with PCs who can run that is two circles.
Three separate times now someone’s invited me to a Create server and 2 hours later I’ve somehow instead ended up joining a 300+ mod modpack that takes roughly 45 minutes to load on my laptop, crashes and errors out every few hours, and dies within a week after someone uses some random mod to gain infinite diamonds or something.
I tend to burn a little slower than that, but yes. Post-scarcity is usually the goal and the game needn’t overstay its welcome.
The problem with modded servers is that the guy who’s done this 10 times is havingg a great time building a mega factory and outpaces or outshines (depending on versus or coop mentality) everyone else. You might be different but this is a very consistent experience for me.
Yeah, this is inevitable.
My limiter tends to be that anything I make has to do things not only efficiently, but fashionably. I like to be immersed in a factory that looks vaguely like a real factory, rather than laying down a bunch of minmaxxed spaghetti. So I spend a lot of time faffing about with where a thing should actually go and how do I hook it up in a novel way.
Casuals still can’t keep up and tryhards pass me by. Stuck in the middle, lol.
I respect the effort lol
The other thing I try to do that I didn’t think of in the other reply is not mixing mods together.
Most major tech mods are balanced for standalone play. They merely contain integrations with other mods as convenient curiosities. So when you mix overpowered machine from mod ABC that is regulated by some restriction, and combine it with machine from mod XYZ that trivializes that restriction, the progression collapses and it’s boring.
Some people like that. I try to avoid it.
Some might wonder what the point is in playing with all the mods if I don’t actually use all the mods. And my answer is I do, but all separately in parallel. I like being a botanist and a thaumaturge and a blood magician and an astral sorcerer and a pressure mechanic and a mekanism engineer all at the same time, but like… in shifts. When I get bored of one I put it down and advance another. I want to feel like I’ve mastered them all rather than cherry picked the best parts of each. I get all the variety but few of the problems.
All of this context switching means I waste a tremendous amount of time, but it does make the game last longer. But not too long.
Also, in coop, it pays well when players specialize. I do this magic, you do that tech, etc. Share one or two things in common, but also be different. You might end up wickedly out of power balance depending on which mods you picked to specialize in, but imo that’s not really the mark of success.
Good ideas
I’ve been trying to get a LAN party together with some IRL friends for a little bit, but we all are so different in experience level that even playing vanilla, we’ll inevitably have some people run rings around others.
My current pitch is that we all share one house and bolt different spaces of different styles onto the sides of it whenever we need a new space, share all resource except a small personal chest and the experienced players can only do specific tasks like going caving or into the nether if it’s as a whole group, so the newer players get to experience some of those parts fresh.
Doing things as a group is much more fun anyways. We always do that with the ender dragon but even something like caving is more fun with a few other people.
Have you tried increasing your RAM usage on the MC launcher?
CPU requirements are usually fine, but RAM can get out of hand rather quickly. I usually try to put at least 8 GB, although 6 works in most cases.
Unfortunately I have a laptop with no RAM upgrades so it’s cranked up as far as it can go lol
My friend and I tried this with sevtech ages. Too heavy, too much, too slow.
We switched to life in the village with iris shaders, and we’re much happier!
My favorite TV show Stargate. I’ve only been able to convince one person to watch it, and they loved it too. Everyone else says its to long since sg1+Atlantis+universe is 17 seasons total. Plus 3 Movies.
If anything there is not enough of it. Universe should really have went on for more seasons.
For sure. Season one wasn’t great, but season two was awesome. Felt like it was really just getting started when it ended.
Gormenghast, a series of novels which are “fantasy” but contain no magic. The setting is genuinely a fantasy setting, with massive, fantastical castles, all empty and decaying.
It’s the story of a royal family, and the heir to the throne, who does not wish to be an heir to the throne.
Also, that’s to say nothing of the third book, which sends you on a major twist and goes from fantasy to science fiction…
Underrated trilogy, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.
Also, Dead Man, a film by Jim Jarmusch. I’m not a big fan of Westerns, but this “acid western” is one of my favorite movies of all time. Somehow simultaneously a funny buddy movie and also a deep treatise on death and belief.
Gary Farmer gets to say his iconic line that I still love to hear to this day: “Stupid fucking white man.”
Farmer would go on to cameo in another Jarmusch film, Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai to repeat the same line.
I watched the Gormenghast miniseries on the Space Channel many many years ago and eventually read the books. They were interesting. Not something I’d want to revisit, but definitely weird.
I still have never seen the movie, but Dead Man has a great soundtrack by Neil Young. Guitar Solo, No 5 is my favorite track if you just check out one:
The soundtrack is one of the best parts of the movie, and you’re right, it’s great on its own.
I’ve begun watching & falling in love with something very recently that I think will fall into this category for sure. An old adult swim cartoon called Home Movies.
Made by a lot of the same talent before Bob’s Burgers was a thing, the humour is actually insanely clever and progressive for it’s time & it still feels fresh to me watching it today. Definitely have already had a few laughing fits where I had to pause the episode for a while to catch my breath and I’m only 4 episodes in 😂
For being a simpler sort of design, it also has some good background gags too. Not to mention the comedian guest stars – Episode 3 had Emo Philips which was a delightful surprise, but episode 4 has freakin’ Mitch Hedberg in it! Took me by surprise for sure but it was also a nice little extra thing to hear him say some fresh lines.
That’s all I have to say about it for now, but every night now my partner & I look forward to watching a couple episodes before bed :) it’s a great time!
You should check out the show that preceded Home Movies. Made by the same team, including most of the same voice actors.
Dr. Katz Professional Therapist was ahead of its time, in my opinion. It was my first exposure to H. Jon Benjamin (McGuirk) and Johnathan Katz (Eric Robbins) and Loren Brouchard. It is basically the same creative team starting at Dr. Katz and ending with Bob’s Burgers.
I have a real soft spot for Dr. Katz and Ben Katz.
EDIT: Completely forgot. Dr. Katz animation was done in “squigglevision” which was also used in the first season of Home Movies, but dropped for Flash animation, I think, in season 2 of Home Movies.
I will absolutely check this out, thank you! It’s this kind of recommendation that led me to rediscover home movies as well so I love that it keeps going lol
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It’s time to pay the price.
Yeah I don’t know how you would recommend Home Movies. It’s just good and funny.
Maybe you should watch a bit more first but I definitely recommend you and your partner check out OMG SONIC IS SMOKING?! [Home Movies/Sonic Parody]. I know nothing about sonic but this captures the essence of the show so well it feels as if the creators made a special webisode and just uploaded it there!
I have only managed to convince ONE person to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion, tragically, because it’s my favorite tv show of all time.
I started that once and found it very hard to follow. Intriguing though, and I keep meaning to go back to it.
Oddly enough the thing I’m going to recommend for this thread is the work of Joel Bocko, whose website and general web presence, Lost in the Movies, is superb and really not well enough known IMO.
I mention it here because he’s done quite a bit on Evangelion, so you might enjoy it :-)
Evangelion is not hard to follow. It’s just a fucked up story about fucked up people hurting each other and then the world ends.
I found it pretty confusing, but I’ll give it another go. I also have a slight suspicion that I might have accidentally dropped into the middle of the story rather than starting at the start.
It’s actually an allegory about Adam & Eve and the creation mythos 😅 The last episode of the Evangelion series is not the true last episode, there’s actually a whole separate episode that goes over what really happens
I think answer is kind of there in the premise - stop trying to get validation from others that your “special things” are special. I had to work on this with my partner, she was always trying to “sell” obscure, funny “special things” that we share to rooms full of others that don’t get it. In the process, she would hurt her own perception of those special things just a little bit each time. Don’t give away your “special things” to poor unfortunate people who don’t get it or don’t deserve them.
Lol its not for validation I just like telling friends about things I like and learning about what they like. I wouldn’t have a DnD group or anyone to talk to about Jojo if I followed your advice. I’m not repeatedly trying to sell things.
The question comes from people asking me for podcasts to check out, I always give them two or three, and the one that never sticks is MBMBAM. Everyone loves Time Suck though. Probably as simple as a catchier name.
Its just fun to me to think about from a marketing/pyschological perspective, why A is more interesting than B. In the end I still love MBMBAM.
Mbmbam is fantastic. Haven’t listened to it in years but that’s cuz I listen to the adventure zone mostly.
If you work on a computer for any appreciable length of time per day then you absolutely should build or buy yourself a split ergometric keyboard. You will never regret it, you will be faster at typing, your body will hurt less, you will be able to program it to do literally anything you want, and it will last longer than any other keyboard you can buy from major brands like razer or Logitech. I’ve only ever been able to get people to go into mechanical keyboards, but never ergometric or splits.
Mbmbam sounds like a talk radio channel on Omicron Persei VIII.
Their best show is “Women are from Omicron Persei VII, men are from Omicron Persei VIIII”
It’s funny how you can mention one of the most popular podcasts and still it’s true that a lot of people will just never get into it.
It’s been a long time since I checked in directly with MBMBAM, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop having a man-crush on Justin “Hoops” McElroy.
In that same vein but even more obscure:
F**kface
Genuinely the podcast that brings the most joy to me in my daily life. It is not obnoxious like Dynamic banter, it has elements of MBMBAM, but hasn’t fallen into the rut of following a formula (the movie + munch squads have gotten a bit too much for me recently).
I haven’t laughed like that since 2015-2018 mbmbam where they released so many bangers.
Mage: The Ascension - I’m super happy that TTRPGs are having a renaissance but there are so many systems out there and D&D isn’t anywhere near the best. You can imagine this like the board game revolution and how “Catan is like so amazing” when actually it’s a rather mechanically underwhelming and repetitive game.
D&D is a role-playing game with almost no support for social actions, it’s bizarre.
It takes an especially skilled GM to run M:tA. They need to be able to handle things getting very weird very fast. But it’s what makes the game and stories so great. Toon was like that too.
Opera! It’s so very very good and it’s such an acquired taste.
I feel like all of the arts are that way. You can either put yourself in the mindset to be receptive of them… or you can’t.
But I’ve had many enriching experiences by taking a chance on art forms and genres I never supposed I would like, including those I had some bias against.
