The first time I ever heard of 15-minute cities was through conspircy theories (I like learning about them) and you're right that it is actually crazy. It's the exact same anti-vaxx crowd, who also believe 5G is harmful and similar "theories", lead by right-wing pundits and grifters whipping up outrage over nothing.

Wow, thank you! <3 Hal is a masculine name (and I pretty much go by it all the time) but if I say my name is Halley, people just tend to assume I'm a girl. I really thought it was a gender neutral name... I'm autistic so I can't tell as easily as other people lol. I guess my advice is: when you've picked your name, ask other people whether it reads as fem or masc! I know you're cis but it can still be really annoying for people to assume you're a gender you're not because of your name.

I wanted a science-based name because I'm a little nerd lol. I considered Kelvin at some point. In the end, (and I really can't remember why I specifically chose it) I named myself after Edmond Halley -- Hal as a nickname, as a reference to HAL 9000 of course.

Honestly, I sort of regret it, because Halley isn't as gender neutral as I thought and everyone considers it a girl name. I wish I'd been more out there and straight up decided to call myself Truck or Brick or something.

I'll add that if you can't find it on libgen, or if you're looking for comics and manga ie things that might not be on there, FMHY is a great thing to google ;) includes audiobooks if you'd prefer that to reading. Includes direct downloads as well as torrents.

That said, depending on what you want to learn, there may be a youtube video on it. There's tons on youtube for certain subjects like video editing or coding if that's what you're interested in.

Edit to add: if you'd rather buy a physical copy, ebay and AbeBooks are great sources.

I really think A Series of Unfortunate Events is so worth a read as an adult. It's fun, meta, plays with its presentation of words on a page. And towards the end the story dovetails into allegory and metaphor, which is a lot more than I bargained for in a children's book.

As others have said, ads. The app is also overrun with spambots posting links to scams to buy followers or ForEx or whatever they're selling. The algorithm is really, really bad, at least if you're an artist of any kind. IG was one of the first apps to attempt to steal TikTok's short-form video format, which means it's hard to get your content out there if you're just posting images. And there are a LOT of content reposters.

If you guys are interested in romhacks/fangames/Pokemon games with a little more meat and difficulty to them, I heartily recommend Pokemon Infinite Fusion. It's based on FR/LG, with a slightly different story (but it's still essentially Team Rocket doing Team Rocket things), with the big difference being that you can fuse Pokemon. Every Pokemon in the game is fuseable, giving you a MASSIVE possible amount of combinations. You can play it classic mode, like a regular Pokemon game, but there's even a randomised mode which changes it up so every wild encounter and trainer battle uses randomly fused Pokemon. It's great fun!

As for whether modern Pokemon games hold your hand too much, I dunno. I do recognise they're made explicitly for children, so I can't tell you how much is too much. In fact, I remember as a child being stumped enough that I quit playing Diamond halfway through because I thought the gyms were 'too hard'. I still enjoy the newer games (I don't care what anyone says, I loved SwSh) but I don't let their shortcomings get to me as I recognise they're children's games.

Ah, the old "what are you doing stepbro" comment. The definition of an overused, unfunny joke.

This is exactly how I feel. For as much (deserved) hate as Twitter gets, it was great for small communities. I've made best friends off Twitter who I still talk to daily. And it was amazing to connect to people like artists or game devs. Reddit is the same -- I won't lament the easy entertainment, I'll lament the absolute wealth of information that might be lost in comments and text posts if the site becomes harder to search. Google itself is already trash if you're trying to find real reviews of products or troubleshoot something, what happens when adding "reddit" to the end of the search no longer helps?

One thing I've really enjoyed were the Fnaf and Undertale/Deltarune subs for the theories and speculation there. I think either of those are too specific for an individual community but in the future I'd love to see the discussion on a 'game theory' type of community. I love seeing people analyse game lore and find all the hidden secrets in them.

These are visual novels, so some may disagree that they're games, but I really think everyone should play the original Ace Attorney trilogy. It has amazing, emotional storytelling, weaving threads until the final case of the third game where they all come together.

Splatoon! The new season is out, so I'm looking forward to grinding my catalogue and getting used to the new stages. This season features a lot of Nintendo game consoles for your locker, like the "Intended Entertainment System"... love it.