I wouldn’t discount how having that access to cartoons probably made them more friends on its own.

School may have been a long time ago for some of us, but I don’t think buddying up with the kids who could get you access to things has ever fallen out of style.

I’m with you on it, because my completionist tendencies saw me trekking between one too many copy-and-pasted side dungeons in the 50 hours I gave Elden Ring before I couldn’t take it any more and never came back to finish the game.

It’s not like the moment-to-moment combat is any less fun than the games that came before it, but since the game lets me indulge in my worst tendency of finishing every optional thing before progressing things it just felt like a meaningless checklist slog.

It’s definitely a “me” problem, but it’s just one reason why I tend to prefer a more focused experience than a sprawling open world.

Somewhat paradoxically, I consider immutable distros to be a net improvement for power users and a bigger hurdle for casual users.

Mostly that’s because immutable moves the pain in the ass to the setup part of the application/OS life-cycle, while theoretically eliminating the kinds of issues that crop up months or years later when something stops working, or when a custom config used to get it working originally breaks something else as things relying on it mature over time.

On the other hand, mutable distros make setting up new software a breeze (in most cases, anyways) with far more under-the-hood tinkering available and have a significantly lower barrier to entry as a result, but become difficult to manage when the user no longer remembers all the customizations and dependencies they have introduced.

So really, there will still be pains in the ass either way. Just kind of a choice on which kind of issues the user would rather predominantly deal with.

The number of replies in that last thread that were outright dismissive or hostile to the very idea of your collection was frankly absurd. I’m glad you were able to explain why you find value in managing your collection the way you do.

People seem to be so afraid of wasting time, or making a bad purchase regardless of how minimal the functional loss might be. But as you say, there are worthwhile experiences of fun and/or artistic merit waiting to be found for thise willing to take a risk.

I can say that I enjoy the Final Fantasy series just for the fact that I respect they are always trying something different with each one. This has the end result of me not getting on with several of them, but critically, someone else does.

I just find it kind of beautiful that a series is willing to experiment with itself to such a degree, and that at this point there really is at least one game in it for just about everyone.

All it really means is that I have to accept that not every game has been made with me as the target.