What thing do you love that you can never get anyone else to check out?
What thing do you love that you can never get anyone else to check out?
Kind of a hard question to word, but is there anything in your life you have recommended to other people but no one's ever gotten into?
I love podcasts and have friends who still thank me for getting them into this one or that one. But I've never gotten anyone to listen to My Brother, My Brother and Me. I don't know if the name is unappealing or the concept but people seem to bounce off immediately.
So what can't you get people into and why should we check it out?
Esperanto. A made up language that is really easy to learn and spoken to some degree by about 2 million people all over the world. I got into it when I heard that if you speak it you can stay with Esperanto speakers that just want to practice with strangers, for free. I traveled all over the world for free and met so many awesome people.
When I try to get anyone to learn it, they just won't. They hear about that criticism of the language or another, or plain get bored. You can just start the Esperanto course on Duolingo for free, but nobody I know goes through, despite the benefits.
Gormenghast, a series of novels which are "fantasy" but contain no magic. The setting is genuinely a fantasy setting, with massive, fantastical castles, all empty and decaying.
It's the story of a royal family, and the heir to the throne, who does not wish to be an heir to the throne.
Also, that's to say nothing of the third book, which sends you on a major twist and goes from fantasy to science fiction...
Underrated trilogy, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake.
Also, Dead Man, a film by Jim Jarmusch. I'm not a big fan of Westerns, but this "acid western" is one of my favorite movies of all time. Somehow simultaneously a funny buddy movie and also a deep treatise on death and belief.
Gary Farmer gets to say his iconic line that I still love to hear to this day: "Stupid fucking white man."
Farmer would go on to cameo in another Jarmusch film, Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai to repeat the same line.
I've begun watching & falling in love with something very recently that I think will fall into this category for sure. An old adult swim cartoon called Home Movies.
Made by a lot of the same talent before Bob's Burgers was a thing, the humour is actually insanely clever and progressive for it's time & it still feels fresh to me watching it today. Definitely have already had a few laughing fits where I had to pause the episode for a while to catch my breath and I'm only 4 episodes in 😂
For being a simpler sort of design, it also has some good background gags too. Not to mention the comedian guest stars -- Episode 3 had Emo Philips which was a delightful surprise, but episode 4 has freakin' Mitch Hedberg in it! Took me by surprise for sure but it was also a nice little extra thing to hear him say some fresh lines.
That's all I have to say about it for now, but every night now my partner & I look forward to watching a couple episodes before bed :) it's a great time!
I think answer is kind of there in the premise - stop trying to get validation from others that your "special things" are special. I had to work on this with my partner, she was always trying to "sell" obscure, funny "special things" that we share to rooms full of others that don't get it. In the process, she would hurt her own perception of those special things just a little bit each time. Don't give away your "special things" to poor unfortunate people who don't get it or don't deserve them.
Mbmbam is fantastic. Haven’t listened to it in years but that’s cuz I listen to the adventure zone mostly.
If you work on a computer for any appreciable length of time per day then you absolutely should build or buy yourself a split ergometric keyboard. You will never regret it, you will be faster at typing, your body will hurt less, you will be able to program it to do literally anything you want, and it will last longer than any other keyboard you can buy from major brands like razer or Logitech. I’ve only ever been able to get people to go into mechanical keyboards, but never ergometric or splits.
Mage: The Ascension - I'm super happy that TTRPGs are having a renaissance but there are so many systems out there and D&D isn't anywhere near the best. You can imagine this like the board game revolution and how "Catan is like so amazing" when actually it's a rather mechanically underwhelming and repetitive game.
D&D is a role-playing game with almost no support for social actions, it's bizarre.
Death, Black Metal, Punk - heavy music is a channel for heavy emotions.
Open source, privacy, federation - Don't give up power over technology that interacts with you
Rope bondage, kinks - Bodies, minds are interesting when reacting
Squishing toasted bread before topping it - Un-squished toasted bread gets annoying edges very fast when drying
Me :(
Chipotle tobasco is some of the best hot sauce I've ever had. I honestly have no idea if they even sell outside of Louisiana, but if you ever get the chance, try it.
The denizens of Louisiana have such an elevated taste for spice that any time I even mention it to anyone here they say "oh that shit sounds basic, try this one" and I can't get anyone to actually try it.
It has a kick, but not as hot as a full fledged hot sauce. Nowhere near making you sweat hot. But the flavor profile is 👌
Space Team! It's a fantastic mobile party game to be played with people in the same room with you! You get a bunch of technobabble labeled dials, buttons, levers, knobs and whatever else while you gotta read the top of the screen to everyone else to keep your ship flying! They also gotta do the same. It gets crazier as you go.
Literally nobody will play with me. If you're in Cincinnati, hit me up for some Space Team!
Someone spent a while telling me Nier Automata was great, and it took a couple years before I got independently interested. My punishment is the same fate, of telling others it's great, and no-one trying it.
Same with Return of the Obra Dinn, which has a niche art style but a captivating set of mysteries.
I always struggled getting friends into Monster Hunter, until recently. I still primarily solo everything but I got my one Canadian buddy into it (Rise, he said World was too slow and clunky. I'll take the win either way), and we hunt together when we have time to. My friends are always like "doesn't look like my kind of game," and sure, sometimes you can get an idea of how you'll like a game from watching gameplay. But they never even attempt to play it to see how it actually feels. They just dismiss it and move on. Feels bad, MH is fun as hell. One day I'll have a full squad lol.
Awesome show. Can't get anyone to watch it
My favorite band is Elend, they're essentially unknown outside of the metal community in spite of not being metal in any way. (They are one of the only non-metal bands given an exception to be listed on the metal archives.) It's neoclassical, but at times absurdly violent and their first three albums have harsh vocals. (Note that "Weeping Nights" is more or less an alternate version of "Les Ténèbres du Dehors" where the male vocals have been removed.)
absolutely gorgeous shit with screams
(just giving youtube links so you can redirect to your frontend of choice)
The Swallows and Amazons book series. Written almost exactly a hundred years ago, about early teenage children camping and sailing boats, mostly on a lake in England. Simple innocent stories, no sex, no drugs, no guns.
Custom Roms I love how I can load custom ROMs on devices. I tried to talk my friends and co-workers into it but they seem really disinterested. I even took one of my older phones and showed it to them in person. They weren't really fascinated by the fact, that I got something different than Android or iOS on my phone. The only thing they liked was, how the lockscreen in Ubuntu Touch looked.
Schlock Mercenary. Amazing webcomic, by one of only like 2 webcomic authors that I'm familiar with that have the simple capability of putting out a comic on time (although this no longer applies as the story is finished) and is a fantastic story from beginning to end.
Yet, none of the friends I've ever recommended it to have been willing to read it
Destiny Potato. Their debut album is one of my all time favorites. It was released with pretty much no fanfare or PR, and while I'm usually disappointed by my Spotify recommendations, this is how I discovered them, and holy hell am I glad I did.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_m9V078hBuAWG4B0368meY3o-ToBdKLpng&si=zIwSPQRG3QRCLs0h
LSD haha, its insane and awesome, so many people should experience it before thinking they know themselves.
Demoscene stuff. Basically just digital art written for fun and to show off your coding skills. People have been doing it since the Amiga. If you've ever pirated software in the 90's to 00's, you've probably seen a realtime animation and mod-based techno track accompany the keygen - that's an example of Demoscene art.
I can't find anyone in the US, not even one of the nerds that works in tech with me, who gives a single shit about this stuff. There are parties and conventions all the time, none of them in North America...
I'm traveling to Germany at the end of March to go to a Demoparty just for the chance to meet a single other person who cares. It should be fun.
I made my own prod discovery service if you ever want to check it out: https://prods.page/ (Yes, I need to update it).
Virtual Reality has completely revitalized my long dead interest in gaming. I initially I got into it during COVID just to socialize but then I started being immersed in games in ways I never had and it's all I want to do now.
EverQuest. I know it's old now but even when I was playing in the early 2000s, I could never get anyone to play. I was the only one I ever knew in person who played. At that time the subscription kept people away. As time went on, it was the sometimes painstaking pace, older gaming conventions, and most of all, the graphics.
the netrunner card game. All my MTG friends are so used to the idea of lootboxes and I'd rather not play anything than gamble.
Myself. 😞
So what can’t you get people into
My weird fetishes
why should we check it out?
Uuuhh...
In reality, tabletop games, including RPG. There's even a local, free event that happens every 2 months, but out of everyone I invite, nobody shows up, not even the people who say "I'd like to play once". It really saddens me how many people reply with "I don't have the skill to play, it's too complicated", actually meaning "I doubt I can develop the skill I think is needed to play and I'm not willing to try" whenever I get excited about RPGs.
My recommendation is the work of Joel Bocko, whose website and general web presence, Lost in the Movies, is superb and really not well enough known IMO.
He's best know for his amazingly in-depth looks at Twin Peaks, including Lost in Twin Peaks (a podcast offering episode-by-episode discussion and analysis of the entire run), and the more thematically-based video series, Journey through Twin Peaks.
These are not so much in the "Try to crack the code" mode so much much TP coverage goes for - rather they are about appreciation and analysis of the show as a piece of TV/cinema; its themes and messages, its characters and plotlines, its direction and aesthetics, and its production, artistic vision and contemporary reception. They're wonderfully satisfying and well put together, and deserve much more attention.
He also does a huge amount of work on other cinema and TV, ranging from major blockbusters (usually in the form of him discussing major films he missed on initial release) to older genre movies to obscure arthouse cinema.
I can't recommend his work enough :-)
The Band Sweet as Swing. They make some great Vocal Jazz and this is actually one of my favorite albums but all the people to which I showed this didn't really like it.
For me it's sim racing and VR gaming.
All my friends care about is LOL and CSGO.
Most music reccs
Nirvanna the Band the Show
Throwing people
The Deathworlders