Strahd himself is asking this? I'm star-struck!

Hm, but to try to answer this... I used to play a lot of EverQuest back in the day, and at one point upgraded to EverQuest 2. I was pretty open when talking to people online, even though I was a little kid, just chatting up random players while leveling and regularly inviting random people to groups just to have someone to talk to.

At one point I met some other player who was playing a rat man (Ratonga?) and he and I played for a while while chatting randomly about life or whatever. At some point I must've expressed confusion about how I felt about a male friend of mine, and this player very calmly and patiently explained same-sex attraction to me. I'd gone to a private Catholic grade school and never had much information about queer anything to this point, so it was a bit of a shock to me.

Thankfully, this player was so patient and kind with me, talking about their own identity as an adult gay man, how happy they were, what their life is like, and really helping me to understand that it's normal, it's healthy, and in many ways it's fun.

I think back on that encounter occasionally and I think about how genuinely impactful and helpful it was for me. We didn't talk for very long, but it left such a lasting impact on how I view myself. Without it, I may have lived with a lot of shame and confusion for a lot longer.

Sometimes I wonder where he is, and if he knows how much of an impact he had.

I had a few other interactions on MMOs that were similar, after this encounter, trying to find other people like me who I could look up to. Surprisingly, many people were very friendly to me and willing to talk about their lives and explain things. It was my very first interaction with the community, and it was all virtual through games. So many people helped me out when I was experiencing a lot of confusion. I wish I'd had that help in real life, but at least I did find it somewhere.

By "Lemmy app" do you mean "Jerboa for Lemmy"? Because I don't see any other apps on the Samsung app store. Maybe the official one is only for iPhone?

It'll be an adjustment to this new site, but I welcome the change. It seems healthier here.

When I click these links it breaks my Lemmy app and doesn't take me to the destination. Do you have any advice, or maybe an ideal app I should be using?

This is a bit obscure, but does anyone know any good German YouTubers? I'm trying to practice my language skills. :)

Yes to the language-learning one! I really need to have a space to support my goal of learning German. I'm already really missing that resource that I had on Reddit.

I'm not a very tech-savvy person. Could anyone explain very simply what this is and how it works? Does it download videos off the internet and plug them into a streaming service or am I misunderstanding this?

I feel like I keep getting little Elder Scrolls releases in the form of mods made my incredible, passionate mod developers. I find it so fascinating and wonderful to see people who care so much about making great content that they'll do it for free and it often turns out better than some professional teams could do.

I've been replaying Skyrim to teach myself German, but I'm also using quite a few mods, such as Inigo and Helgen Reborn. I also have some that take me to other lands. Some mods just increase graphics or change gameplay mechanics a bit. There's just so many amazing things people have made, it really keeps things fresh.

It'll be cool when the next game comes out, sure, but for now I can keep supporting mod creators and having a blast finding new things :)

You would HATE AI Somnium Files then, haha. I really like their flowchart, but I definitely see how others wouldn't.

Oh yikes! I feel very lucky that the German translation is competent. German has a pretty robust dubbing industry. And the German translation of Ragnar the Red is perfectly singable and I actually like listening to it to practice singing along! :)

I just looked up the video of the Japanese VA singing Ragnar the Red in Japanese and I feel so bad for that poor voice actor having to shove so many syllables into such short time.