It’s not you. I don’t find most games, even games I used to really splunk a lot of time into happily, much fun anymore.

I’ve been watching Yahtzee’s Extra Punctuation lately, and he his hitting on the same gestalt - most games, especially AAA games, are really boring now because they are really pretty much the same game repainted now. OK, that’s a bit of an oversimiplification, but I’d direct you to his several recent commentaries for the deeper insight.

I can remember when I loved the idea of playing online. After a couple of decades of it, I hate online games now (mostly because I despise online game players now). I still love playing a good co-op game with a couple of friends (but those good games in that class are a bit thin on the ground) and I still love finding a good, immersive single player to sit down with. But I don’t care for platformers, or side-scrollers, or jumper-puzzles, or Souls games - at least not anymore.

So what am I playing? Well, I am getting a hell of a lot of bang out of my buck playing small games on my iPad from Apple Arcade, believe it or not. I fire up Steam once in a while and look, chin in hand, at my large library of collected games on a fancy-pants Alienware monster gaming machine, sigh, and go back to playing Spell Struck (basically a Scrabble game) on my iPad, because at least it makes me think of good words to use.

Ten years ago, I would be jittery with the impending release of something like Starfield or Diablo IV. Now I’m like “No rush, buy it in 6 months or a year when it goes on sale and the bugs are ironed out.”

I have a hiking kilt from Mountain Hardware. It’s extremely comfortable (especially in this heat wave), I’ve had it for a while, but I’ve been wearing it a lot since I recently broke my clavicle and needed something I could easily dress into.

I agree with you, in general, on all points, but I also think that build quality matters, and I have yet to find a manufactured PC that isn’t a race to the bottom for the cheapest parts (and I own a high-end name-brand customized PC for specifically for gaming). But, for my day to day, work and general purpose machine, it’s Macs and will be for the foreseeable future.

FbL plays fast and fun. Some people will ding the Willpower system, but we enjoyed it (as it encourages players to “try harder” to gain Willpower). Combat is brutal and “monsters” are scary. We liked that magic was both powerful and dangerous to use. The mini-survival game aspects like travel and fortress building are fun and give players something else to think about rather than following quest threads.

Although we played FbL for about a year solid, we are not playing FbL right now - a series of unfortunate events have kept us from the table for almost 2-3 months now - and I will probably run a mini-campaign game of Forbidden Land’s “new” sibling game, Dragonbane, if a few weeks when we finally do meet again.

Nevertheless, I feel FbL is a good game we will play again someday.

Bang for the buck, Macs. Solid builds, last forever. I had a 2013 Air that I finally replaced this year with an M1. No PC I have ever had ever stuck around that long.

LoseIt is (or was last I looked) pay once, use forever and pretty good overall, but I found the crowd-sourced database highly inaccurate and/or unhelpful often. I moved to Chronometer about 6 months ago, which is subscription based, but has a large verified database of foods and a great custom food/recipe creator/importer. I would prefer a pay-once model, but Chronometer is sufficiently worth the ongoing expense, at least as long as I am a work-in-progress. When I reach my target, I’ll reevaluate.

Checks notes…

https://www.womenshealthmag.com/food/a19620919/how-to-pronounce-la-croix/

100% Legit video.