When people say to stop being political on here, it's not necessarily that they don't think politics is important and should never be discussed, it's that you should turn "off" once and a while and talk about literally anything else. Even Anne Frank wrote about other stuff in her diary sometimes, and her life was under threat by actual Nazis so I don't buy the "Everything's on fire so we should never shut up ever" argument. I'm not even asking you to change your mind, just to change the subject once in a while.
Part of this is Google's and YT's platform decaying, not just AI. Before AI, Google was infected with ads and listicles. Before any of that you had a million forum replies amounting to "Just google it!" (I am, wise guy, that's how I ran into your post in the first place.) If not that, then it was "RTFM" (Maybe if you had a technical writer write a better manual and not have the devs write it who don't realize there are people that don't have the intimate knowledge of this obscure software package that they do and thus don't bother mentioning stuff that's 'obvious' to them and literally no one else.)
And don't get me started on the landfill that is Stack Overflow.
Ah yes, Don Bluth, the man that introduced 90s kids to the concept of mortality. Poor Littlefoot's mom :( The Secret of NIMH was a favorite of mine. The book it's based on is pretty weird.
It's not for lack of personal time. I just have way more things to fill that personal time. Playing with my radios or messing with my homelab or building out grammar and lexica for my conlangs and so on. I think I've also discovered my tastes have changed. I don't want video games to frontload all the complexity anymore. How am I supposed to know what this or that class or race or stat does before even starting the game?
My vision being what it is a lot of games are unplayable now anyway.
didn't even know childlore had a name or academic interest associated with it. until last year. When I was a kid I always wondered who came up with things like JIngle bells batman smells or those paper fortune teller thingies or the candyman/Bloody Mary or the game Doorknob and so on. I never saw adults doing or saying those things, so I figured some kid somewhere had to have made them up at some point and it just spread from there.
Never played it but I've heard good things about Darklands along the lines of what you're looking for.
I wish I were young enough to enjoy sprawling RPGs again. I bought BG3 but I don't have the time to devote to it like I used to so it molders in my Steam library.
Attempted is the key word. The characters eventually got too detailed for me to distinguish. As I mentioned in another thread I tried finding braille resources for L2 learners but there don't seem to be any. Ironically if everything was in Pinyin I could probably do it, but moving to a new writing system when you already have one that you've used for millennia is a nearly impossible ask. Plenty of people have tried with English.
While it's true a language is tightly linked to the culture of its speakers by definition, a language's speakers aren't just their leaders. Russian represents centuries of cultural wealth, not just the misadventures of the last hundred or so years. It's not the language's fault that Putin invaded Ukraine. If you love learning languages for their own sake, do it. I made the same choice when attempting to learn Mandarin during the Hong Kong protests.
Find something you enjoy that you can spin as work-related. I learned about sqlite as a potential way to store the lexicon for one of my constructed languages and it ended up becoming relevant at work.
I've had similar luck with playing with raspberry pis and generic Linux stuff. I'm not just setting up a self hosted forum, I'm learning about reverse proxies.
News was always political, but I agree, it's exhausting, and it was exhausting back then.
As for the memes, do you really think "It's over 9000" was any more comprehensible. I spent way too much time overthinking why that meme was funny, like "Oh, it's because the power levels grow exponentially over the course of the show and 9000 is such a ridiculously low number when it's all said and done." But nah I think it was just random. Then I started laughing at it cuz hehe funny reference. And what even was YouTube Poop, I mean it was the funniest stuff ever wrought by man (HI BILLY MAYES HERE WITH LOTSA SPAGHETTI FOR DINNER!), but don't kid yourself, nonsense was the whole point. Let the young'uns have their 67's.
Some of it's legit though. YouTube is enshittifying, it's the natural course of things when you have investors to please. That's also why games are crap now. But there were lowest common denominator adult video games as far back as the Atari 2600, so that's nothing new. Not saying its OK, just that nothing has changed and is unlikely to change in the future. Look for the good stuff that is out there. I'm having fun with Megabonk.
I also agree short form content can be straight up harmful. I just found out the other day you can turn off YouTube history which stops the algorithm from feeding you anything. On mobile you just get a blank search bar. It'll still bring up shorts when searching but if you scroll five or six shorts deep it'll just give you a blank screen that says "recommendations have been turned off." I turned it off because I realized I'd get up from my desk at work to go to the bathroom but spend a whole minute looking for a recommended video to listen to before actually leaving the room.
I feel like that's asking for trouble. You can explain away "FBI surveillance van" because an ounce of common sense will tell you a government agency isn't likely to be so sloppy. But I could see a creepy Airbnb host who's just smart enough to be dangerous doing exactly this.
The most common is a tub with shower head