I distinctly remember my last time in a Circuit City. I don’t recall the date, but I’m going to say it was circa 2006. I had purchased a Nintendo Wii at one of CC’s competitors but the competitor did not have any suitable Game Cube controllers. So I went over to Circuit City to see what they had since they were essentially in the same shopping complex. In a surprising turn of events, they actually did have Game Cube controllers in stock, they had the style/brand I was hoping for, and the price was actually reasonable.

They had dozens of employees out in the various sections of the store, at least one per department. There were a plethora of customers. However, they had literally 1 cash register open. The line was backed up into the aisles. I am pretty sure I waited 45 minutes just to check out with this one single item, and that’s only because the customer service manager came over after about 40 minutes and offered to check out anybody with only 1 or 2 items.

Might be a complete surprise to the former corporate overlords, but for some odd reason I decided never to go back after that.

That’s the thing with teenagers. Some days, mostly at random, they simply wake up and choose violence.

Put them in the sinks as well. It’s very hard to aim at the height they place them most of the time, so these would be extra incentive to really get up on my tippy toes and fire in the hole rather than splish and splash all over the counter top.

For me it was the original Resident Evil on the Playstation.

It was the first time I saw live-action digitized full-motion video on a gaming system. I know there were a lot of FMV (Full Motion Video) games in that era on other systems, but I didn’t own those other systems and I didn’t know anybody who did. So, it was all new to me once I played a Playstation.

Resident Evil was also the first time a video game had ever given me a jump scare. Early in the game a zombie doberman bursts through a window unexpectedly and I was hooked! I loved introducing my friends to the game, specifically so I could see their reaction when the dog shows up. So much fun.

Honestly seeing and hearing Super Mario World on the Super Nintendo was kind of wow, too. The graphics boost compared to the 8-bit systems I was used to was incredible. And the sound quality compared to the other 16-bit systems I’d played (Genesis and TG-16) was a leap above. The experience probably pales in comparison to modern games, but back then there was wow factor to it.

To young me, Street Fighter 2 Turbo was pretty wow as well. It was “literally” the same as the arcade version to child me. I could not believe the home version was so close to the real thing, because prior generations of game systems like the NES couldn’t come close to that level of performance.

If it hadn’t been for hydrogen, oh. I’d been married long time ago. Where did you come from, where did you go? Where did you come from hydrogen, oh.

I can’t speak to growing or shrinking in terms of number of users and I try not to bring “feels like” into this since that’s subjective. However, anecdotally speaking, I’ve been noticing signs of a down turn over the past month or two. Perhaps just a seasonal thing, perhaps due to some other cause such as the upgrade to 0.19.X.

The most telling thing to me is that I’m seeing fewer comments during my active hours. One of the ways I browse for active discussions on Lemmy is to sort by "New Comments’ and switch to the view that shows comments instead of posts. So, I do the sort/filter, view the results, looking to see if there are any interesting comments or topics.

Historically speaking, other than a weird bug that would seem to pin some slightly older posts to the top of the list, everything on the first page would be somewhere between seconds to several minutes old. It was incredibly unusual to see anything over 5 minutes old on the first page and also very unusual to see any of the same comments if I refreshed the page.

More recently though, it’s more common to see comments that are 5+ minutes old on the first page of new comments list. It’s also much more common for me to reach the bottom of the page, hit refresh, and then see some of the same comments in the list after it refreshes. And I don’t exactly speed run through this page – I check out the post titles, if it’s an interesting topic, I’ll often click through and read more in the post, sometimes I’ll even respond to comments directly, then return back to the new comments, etc.

As I mentioned, it could just be a seasonal slowdown. Perhaps the 0.19 upgrade results in a slowdown or backlog of things that show up on the new comments list, I know other things have changed like the fact that I can no longer view anything except the first page of results. Others have suggested there are fewer posts/posters, but that what gets posted “feels like” it’s higher quality, but I’d counter that with the fact that what I “feel like” is that’s not actually the case based on what I’m seeing in the new comments list.

Like that other comment asked: We are you living in Japan in the 90s?

I’d buy that for a dollar.

I get paid for my posts. In fact, because of Kellog’s Morningstar Farms faux vegan corndog nuggets and my willingness to mention their superior taste and nutritonal profile compared to inferior faux vegan cordog nuggets, I am left with far more time to post stuff on social media. I’m not saying Kellog’s Morningstar Farms faux vegan corndog nuggets will solve all your financial problems the way they have solved all of mine, but they’re a pretty tasty distraction. Move over non-vegan corndog nuggets, there’s a new nugget in town! At least that’s the thing I am contractually obligated to work into everything I post online, including this comment!