I actually can’t tell if the whole “this is urgent you need to hurry” in an open world game is a new trend or not but I see it everywhere too.

Earliest I can think of is Skyrim. Everything was a big emergency. Finish one quest and the character dialogue was like “Another dragon attack! You need to get to this next quest right away! Hurry!”. But it’s supposed to be game designed for screwing around. I can’t help but feel it’s influenced this trend.

Playing Oblivion re-mastered I’m realizing Oblivion wasn’t this way. The stakes were high but much more of the dialogue was like “Ready yourself, take the time you need, and we’ll talk next steps”. There’s important stuff to handle but exploring dungeons was treated as you getting prepared to handle the big bad.

Impending dragon attacks in Skyrim, missing son in Fallout 4, turning into a mindflayer in Bg3. These feel urgent, not conducive to exploration and meeting everyone and crafting potions and shopping for deals on weapons.

All that being said I had the same problem in Bg3. Didn’t long rest enough in the beginning because of it.

Ayy you got the reference!

I started because I wanted to grow Thai holy basil which I was struggling to find in stores, extended to different varieties of kind of pricey hot peppers, then a few flowers to keep it looking nice. I’ve had a few bad seasons over the years that made me almost quit but at this point it would feel weird to not have a garden to take care of.

The maintenance can occasionally be a pain but it’s sometimes nice to have a good reason to get up early. It only becomes too much work if I get greedy and take on too many plants at once. I try to keep it to a small and manageable amount, and choose plants that don’t require a lot of care.

Going for a walk is an essential activity for me to reset. Riding my bike has a similar effect. I’ve started leaving my phone at home.

Reading as well. Something light-hearted if I’m seeking joy.

I have a small garden on my balcony. It’s not successful right now but it’s enjoyable to watch something green grow.

So far:

Work, during which I’m kind of procrastinating.

Tonight my wife will be at the gym so I might finish a garden project.

Then dinner and tidying up.

Followed by video games and then bed.

I’d reckon my day will be about 30% what I want to do which is just slightly above my usual average.

Replaying Bg3 makes me realize how pointless poisons are most of the time.

Anyone beefy who I might like to debuff or DOT is inexplicably immune to poison, blindness or falling asleep. Not even just bosses, feels like anyone I can’t kill in two rounds with Lae’zel is immune to these poisons I lovingly made.

Some elixirs are cool though.

Rimworld

Stellaris

FTL: Faster Than Light

Crusader Kings 3

XCOM: Enemy Within

Honorable mentions:

No Man’s Sky, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas.

I work in IT infrastructure (not AWS but something like it) and the reality is that there are a few blocks like AWS and Cloudflare out there. That doesn’t really make things less concerning considering if they were actually pulled it would cause a lot of problems.

So to be clear, if something managed to completely disable or “control” AWS it would be disastrous, and AWS is under attack from multiple vectors including AI Agents, including their own INTERNAL AI Agents. In December 2025 Amazon’s internal coding AI agent Kiro decided the most efficient course of action to resolve a minor bug in AWS Cost Explorer was to completely rebuild the production environment, causing a 13 hour outage for Cost Explorer while engineers manually rebuilt the environment.

The thing is, in the picture you posted AWS is this fragile single block holding everything up, when in it might be more useful to think of it conceptually as say, a major highway. Would it be a disaster if terrorists were able to suddenly destroy/control all of I-75? Yes. Is that feasible? No. Kiro caused a really bad traffic jam in one segment of one highway, it didn’t destroy the whole thing.

A highway can experience traffic incidents and recover. Major jams could be intentionally caused by bad actors or poor maintenance, and highways have to be altered, upgraded and maintained to limit the situations that can completely shut down segments of it.

But the concern is more that key segments will be impacted, not the entire thing.

That’s more of what people in my field are concerned with, and there’s efforts to try to lock those key segments down and account for potential threats. How well that’s being done is a different story.

It is an essential aspect of being Linux users that we claim our preferred distro is the absolute best and others are garbage not worth using. It’s in the terms I’m pretty sure.

I do it periodically. My phone contacts are restricted to friends I speak to frequently, family, certain work contacts and a limit of 3 people I don’t really talk to anymore but am leaving the door open for.

It’s like a monkey’s paw. I felt like I was spending too much time online a few years ago and slowly the internet has been giving me more reasons to not use it.

Creating nonexistent patterns in an attempt to understand it. There was a cluster of hand killings near a small town in Kyrgyzstan and there’s no way that could just be random chance.

Right now allergies, I’m under-caffeineinated for how little I slept because I had to work last night, and I have unnecessary emails in my inbox.

More generally I feel the time I have to dedicate to the things I would like to do and the time I have to dedicate to work and tasks have reached unsustainable levels.

If I bought a lot of stuff or I bought something age restricted like alcohol. The person who watches the self checkouts is always really busy so if I need to wait for them to come look at my ID I’m going to be there a minute.

My cat does this when I’m drinking tea and his response is some mix of disgust and concern.

Not super thin crust but not thick either. Heavy on the cheese, topped with mushrooms, anchovies and basil.

For what it’s worth when I went to Japan I did think “man, people who are really into anime would love this”. Especially Tokyo and Kyoto.

There was anime stuff everywhere in Tokyo and I saw some really interesting temples and stuff in Kyoto.

Weak to slop and they don’t seem to have an internal “okay that’s enough I should put my phone down” voice.

Even young people I know who are on their phones a lot have some concept that it’s time to look up and forward, but endless content seems irresistible to the brains of boomers.

I learned a trade before I realized college was a better fit for me and I do think there’s a bit a “grass is always greener” phenomenon when it comes to people thinking about the trades.

There are plenty of hardworking, skilled welders who have pretty unpleasant, low-paying jobs and originally intended to get a lucrative oil rig job but couldn’t seem to get an offer. Ironically the ones I knew talked about how they were learning python on the side.

The trades have their own problems.

Is it part of the aesthetic to do it poorly? I’ve noticed the paint often seems be chipped or applied unevenly and I’ve never felt comfortable asking if that’s an intentional, stylistic choice.

The way it worked for me:

Go out of my way to make things better -> get promotion and pay raise -> go out of my way to make things better again -> no promotion or pay raise -> do the absolute bare minimum -> big pay raise

Maybe they thought I enjoyed improving processes just to do it and saw it takes money to keep me doing it once I stopped.

Or maybe the forces that determine whether I get more money are beyond my understanding.