SpaceCadet2000

Never knew I needed Kaylee in a Star Trek mini dress, but here we are.

Actually even further than that, even back in the 80s it was apparently used in certain subcultures to distinguish (drug) “addicts” from “normal people”.

The original meaning of the word as I first heard it back in the late 1990s was to refer to the vast majority of “normal” people who don’t have an interest in or deep understanding of technology and internet culture.

I don’t think it was originally meant as an insult, but more as an acknowledgement and reminder to ourselves that the things we were into and cared about were a niche thing and not exactly the norm.

Nowadays, I’ve heard it applied to just about any niche interest or hobby, for example: people who are not into mechanical keyboards would also be “normies”, and worse it’s being thrown around as a direct insult to people, in the same vein as calling someone “basic”.

sh.itjust.stopped.working lol

I’m about your age (48) and game. I don’t think there’s a cut-off date as such, but it’s a little bit of several things.

There is certainly a generational angle. When we were growing up in the 80s and early 90s, playing computer games was definitely not an activity targeted at adults, and gamers were generally seen as geeks and nerds. This changed of course, but other people who grew up at the same time as us but never got into games may still hang onto that image.

Gender also plays a role, women our age are a lot less likely to have ever been into games. My girlfriend for example has no problems with it but she never gamed herself and doesn’t really understand it. If I think of female friends and acquaintances, I know only one woman who games as well, but she’s already 8 years younger.

There’s also the fact that many men do in fact grow out of gaming as they get older, start to have more responsibilities and less free time and when other interests and hobbies start to compete for that limited free time. I notice that in myself too, it’s a lot less important to me now than it was 25 years ago.

Then there’s the slightly uncomfortable fact that many women simply find it unattractive when a man lists gaming as a hobby, and see it as a red flag, perhaps because they associate it with certain stereotypes of people who are obsessive about it and whose whole personality revolves around gaming, perhaps because they have previous bad experiences with it, or perhaps because it’s something they simply can’t relate with. Maybe gamers are to women what “horse girls” are to men? :)

I think the best way to handle it on the dating scene is to show that you’re a functioning adult with a well rounded personality and a variety of interests, who just happens to game as well. At the end of the day, you have to have enough common ground to start a relationship with someone.

I unsubbed from most of the default reddit subs and from the subs where the mods didn’t seem to care about the protest.

For the future, I intend to limit my engagement to a few subreddits related to the war in Ukraine, because that’s something I follow closely and care about a lot. The communities on lemmy/kbin just aren’t active enough yet to stay up to date.

Wow /r/nosleep … that brings me back to 2011. Loved reading it until the quality inevitably turned to shit.