A place to start might be a friend or family member who is into video games.

Gaming hardware can be a little costly, so you may want to visit with someone and play a selection of games before deciding which direction you’d like to start in. I’ll also point out that video games are often the very most fun when shared with friends.

If my 30 year old woman friend came up to me one day and said “Hey I’ve never really played video games before and I’d like to give them a try, but don’t know where to start,” I think we’d talk awhile first to see if I can find what games are interesting to you. I see a lot of people in this comment section recommending Stardew Valley, which is a game I deeply like and respect though I have seen people bounce right off it, including someone recently here on Lemmy. So while I would recommend giving it a look, if you do bounce off it, don’t just go “video games aren’t for me,” maybe cozy games aren’t for you.

Some questions I might ask are:

Are you looking for a more relaxing or more exciting experience?

Would you like your play sessions to be challenging, contemplative, creative, or competitive?

Are you more interested in story, or gameplay?

How important are flashy fancy graphics to you?

Where will your gameplay sessions fit into your life? Do you want something to do during your daily train ride? Will this replace your daily television hour? Is it what you’re going to do all Saturday afternoon?

Do you see yourself playing games on your couch, at a desk, or on the go?

Do you want to enjoy games alone, or with friends? Will you gather in one place to play together, or play across the internet?

Do you have a genre of fiction you like? Are you into historical drama, sci-fi, fantasy, slapstick comedy?

How do you feel about horror? Both the psychological Lovecraftian existential crisis type, and the “oh god a 10 foot monster with 50 mouths for a mouth just jumped out behind a tree and roared” type?

Nah I guess I’m gonna build shit until it’s time for a dose of buckshot.

Lemmings of Lemmy: What’s your blood type and eyeglass prescription?

If you want there to be a lot of your species, the best thing to do is become delicious to humans.

I’ve been shaving with a DE razor for about 15 years now, and I haven’t found it any easier or harder to cut yourself with them than the modern “Mach 84 Spike TV Edition” cartridge razors.

I’m changing my vote in the Agora from “yes defederate” to "Hell fucking yes defederate.’

Excel?

“Normal people” sit all the way through ads and are having receptacles installed in their carotid arteries for Amazon to pipe petrochemical runoff directly into their blood-brain barriers.

Me? I don’t own a working television, I haven’t turned on a radio in years, and all of my digital devices run a FOSS operating system I installed on them with layers of ad blockers.

I like how the expression is starting to morph into “He drank the Well Actually It Was Flavor-Aid.”

You don’t need permission to make someone pissed off, you do need their permission to make them pissed on.

“Socialism is about leading horses to water whether they fucking drink or not.”

Positions and angles of attack can matter. Something that feels good for one girl does nothing for or hurts another. And it’s not necessarily a matter of “I like this position” because it’s about how your two bodies interact. It’s very possible you both like different things. I had a girlfriend fairly early on where we pretty quickly realized I liked this and she liked that, and we’d take turns doing the other’s favorite. Dynamics of sexual relationships became a lot less adult after high school.

Sex ed is often about how babby formed and less about erotic technique.

Do you use other social media? If yes, which services? What are your screennames and handles? What street did you grow up on? What was your Elementary School’s maiden name?

I’m sure it’ll piss someone, somewhere off. Literally everything does. Watch, I’m about to post “I’m sure it’ll piss someone, somewhere off. Literally everything does.” on Lemmy, and it’ll piss someone off.

Bing Hi there!

I’m willing to bet it uses something resembling an SQL database on the back end, so ignoring or deleting data or entire user accounts that signed up in November 2024 should be a matter of a query or two.

I would also like to point out that, much like the Republicans, you’re painting your enemy as both dangerously competent and hilariously inept, whichever is most convenient at the moment. “They have a database of menstrual data, they can use data science and pattern analysis to detect changes in a woman’s reproductive cycle and use that information to make decisions to harm her!” minutes later App developers are rock chewing morons, there’s no way they could detect a pattern of strange data entering their database all at once, figure out what it is possibly by googling the name of their app and finding a Tumblr post about polluting the app, and then cancel those suspicious accounts."

probably won’t be hard to spot all the accounts that sign up en masse, send 3 data points then stop forever because they got bored or forgot.

“A bunch of new accounts posting obviously worthless data joined about the same time. Disregard them.”

What is the actual goal here and will this behavior achieve that goal? Are we…

Adding a bunch of bullshit fictional data into a database that contains and will continue to gather legitimate data.

It strikes me that this would make the entire dataset less useful for legitimate medical research while not really doing much against targeted attacks. I could see some women’s health researchers using anonymized data from something like this, and noise from people vomiting into it in protest would destroy it for that use. Or, you’d notice a bunch of accounts all join at about the same time making nonsensical data and just ignore the data from the accounts that joined around that time. Meanwhile I doubt this will stop the Gestation Gestapo from correlating genuine data with the actual identity of its owner.

Are you going to try to input obviously fake data? Make an attempt at realistic data? Try to trigger a Gestation Gestapo death squad, trying to make the service useless via false positives?

Or run up the service’s data bills and maybe take up some of their cloud storage with fake data?

Start adding bullshit fictional data coinciding with women genuinely leaving the service

What would this accomplish that just having women stop using the thing do?

I’ve been trying to make that point for over a decade now. I think I get to unironically drop this xkcd. The alt text mentions diaspora, lol.