The steam deck be pretty popular these days.

My god I dread that day.

Makes perfect sense, but what a bummer.

Damn. I haven’t built a new computer in 10 years.

Are we seriously here now? DAAAAAAMN

I got old.

Go figure. It’s a big club and we ain’t in it.

Haha I didn’t even notice that it was you again. Man.

Keep rocking, bro. Thank you.

I know this probably won’t get seen much now, but man that game has a special place in my heart.

Starting with the original Zelda game, my mother and I always beat them together.

We were very poor, but she always did what she had to do to get us the latest Nintendo console. She worked as a dog groomer leading up to the release of the Nintendo 64. She would be gone for 12 hours at a time, working for below minimum wage (under the table) just to get us that console.

She got Ocarina of Time for my brother and I for Christmas. She was just as excited to play it as we were, but there was no way my dad was going to let us open a Christmas present early. We only got one big present to share, and two small presents. Sometimes if my dad had saved a decent amount, we’d get the large present (usually a game), and then we’d get something that we really wanted that we didn’t have to share.

I begged my mom, she begged my dad. He wouldn’t budge. In the weeks leading up to Christmas though, she broke. She came to me with her plan. We were going to open it every day when he went to work and play it until an hour before he got home.

By the time Christmas rolled around, we were in the forest temple. He didn’t play games so he didn’t have a clue.

It was so much fun sneaking that game out with my mom and my brother. It was so much fun. Seeing how big it was for the time, we literally couldn’t believe our eyes.

Is OoT my favorite game of all time? Not anymore. It is my favorite memory of a game though, and by a long shot.

Edit, for fun.

It meant so much to me that the only boxes I still have from my childhood are my Zelda and N64 boxes.

Sounds like you and me grew up in very similar environments. I was all over the place until I got my first computer with internet, I didn’t leave my room much after that.

The gangsters I grew up around were dumb white hillbillies with guns.

What the other commenter said about survivor bias is true though. Nearly everyone I grew up with is dead now but me and my brother. The only real difference I can think of is that my mom came looking for us if we were gone too long. If we didn’t get back when we said, my mom was on a warpath stopping at every place we frequented and screaming bloody murder. We were only brave enough to hide from her when we were drunk or high and we knew the consequences for that would be a lot bigger than hanging out somewhere later than we were supposed to.

That woman had such bad anxiety, I don’t know how she survived us kids. I really don’t.

We survived because she protected us though.

One night my brother and I snuck off to a party in the next town over. My mom showed up and dragged us both away and beat the hell out of us. A few hours after she did, some rival hooligans fired shots at the boys from our neighborhood, killed one of them and wounded another.

I might be alive to make this comment because my mom came looking for us that night. Christmas Eve, 2000.

Heeeey! Thank you. I’ll look into that.

This is me on many topics. I am so uninformed over the last year.

I love Lemmy, but I’m in a smaller bubble than I was before too. There are a lot less political opinions on here. People are outright hostile to anything that doesn’t fit in a narrow window, and though I mostly agree with what passes through that window, my idea of the world is off because of it. (Example, my wife uses Facebook. We both voted for Harris, but she was certain Trump would win. She was seeing what everyone was saying and I wasn’t. Imagine my surprise when she lost the election so terribly. My little bubble had me convinced he didn’t stand a chance.)

I try occasionally to open Reddit. I know that Lemmy hates stock traders, but Reddit is where you get the best info on that. I’m a stay at home dad who contributes entirely by trading so I need to look at what people are researching from time to time.

I just can’t stand the Reddit app. I can’t stand clicking on ads without realizing it because of how they blend it in.

I can’t stand the kind of greed that led to the decision that killed third party apps.

I miss it, but not bad enough to have a subpar experience on there. That, and I believe in a federated social media future. Tech companies are garbage.