My point though is that you talk about all of that as if it’s some sort of chore.

To me, it’s a lot of the fun.

I rarely even get to the point of having to stop and weigh choices in my inventory, since every time I come across something new, I have to stop and check it out and try to figure out what it is and what it does and what sort of advantages or disadvantages it might have. I enjoy that. So all along the way, I’m figuring out what I want to or think I should keep and what I want to or think I can get rid of, and not because a finite inventory demands it, but because that’s part of the point of playing in the first place.

Broadly, you’re asking if other people actually invest the time and energy to sort out how to play complex games. I’m saying that we not only can and do, but that that’s a lot of the point. That whole process of sorting things out is a lot of the reason that we play in the first place.

Yeah - I just jump in and wing it.

At the risk of inviting the internet’s wrath, when people talk about the difference between serious gamers and casuals, this is the sort of thing they’re talking about.

“Serious” gaming involves a particular set of skills and interests, such that the person is willing and able to just jump into some complicated new game and figure it out. And it’s not just that “serious” gamers can do that - the point is that they want to. They enjoy it. They enjoy being lost, then slowly putting the pieces together and figuring out how things work and getting better because they’ve figured it out. And they enjoy the details - learning which skills do what and which items do what, and how it all interrelates. All that stuff isn’t some chore to be avoided - it’s a lot of the point - a lot of the reason that they (we) play games.

You talk about your inventory filling up and then just selling everything, and I can’t even imagine doing that. To me, that’s not just obviously bad strategy, but entirely missing the point - like buying ingredients to make delicious food, then bringing them home and throwing them in the garbage.

The way it made me really think about how truly expansive space and time are really made me think that “that’s not impossible to think that there is a 11th dimension being that has some agenda that we cannot understand.”

Absolutely.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about making the leap from recognizing that such a being could exist to believing that such a being does exist. That, to me, is so bizarrely irrational that I can’t even work out how it is that people apparently actually do it.

This seems like a weirdly unnecessary way to not quite manage to duplicate what lemmy has been designed to do.

How do I make it just work with just my original account?

You go to the community list for your instance and do a search on the URL of the community you’re interested in. Then (assuming that your instance is federated with the other one) your instance will create its own mirror of the community, and you’re done.

Yeah - I don’t even really understand how all of that works. I see that people apparently sincerely believe, but I have no idea how - what it is that goes on inside their brains that allows them to make that leap to actually believing.

I don’t know that it does, but I can see how it could.

One way that neurodivergence can manifest is as a relative inability to simply assume things - a relatively outsized need for clear evidence on which to base a conclusion. And religion is notably devoid of actual evidence.

Digital, no contest.

I’m an old guy and I’ve been buying and reading books for most of my life. I own thousands of them, filling up shelves and stacked on tables and cluttering everything, and that’s even with the bulk of them in boxes in my garage. I love them and I love being surrounded by them, but they’re a chore and a burden.

And I have a collection of almost as many ebooks, all in a few GB on a tablet.

So ebooks win on space and convenience.

As far as the actual process of reading goes, they’re pretty close to the same, but ebooks have a bit of an edge. I have no issues with a screen, so words on a screen or words on paper are pretty much the same. Physical pages though are bound along one edge and flexible and generally at least subtly curved, while a screen is perfectly flat and evenly lit. Also, on a physical page, I’m stuck with whatever typeface is there, while with an ebook, I can scale it to whatever I want or even change the font or colors or whatever. so ebooks win there too.

And while I’m reading an ebook, I can search the text for any term or character name or phrase, so I can refresh myself on things or find a particular passage or whatever without laboriously thumbing through the pages, and I can switch over to a browser anytime to get background for anything or just look up a word.

And when I finish or drop an ebook, I can just tap the back arrow to go to my shelf, or switch over to an app or browser and go online, and find another one.

So… yeah. I really don’t think there’s one single thing that physical books do better than ebooks, other than serving as decoration - filling space on shelves.

Statelessness is held to be necessary because, in the simplest terms, power corrupts.

If we institutionalize authority - if we create a structure in which authority is vested and positions within that structure that are held by specific individuals - then sooner or later (and history has shown that with communism it’s generally sooner) self-serving fuckwads will capture those positions, then bend them to serve their own interests and the interests of their cronies and patrons, to the detriment of everyone else.

And yes - there are practical problems with not having institutionalized authority.

But the thinking of those who advocate for statelessness is that those problems can be, and would be, solved if people had the opportunity. But first we have to get the self-serving fuckwads out of the way, and the only way to do that is to not have institutionalized authority in the first place.

Lemmy isn’t a platform at all. It’s a piece of forum software.

The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There’s well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.

And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.

You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you’re trying to pretend you’re not defending.