I haven’t played the game(s?) they’re from but these are quite adorable!

One way is to just follow hashtags and see whoposts to them. Since hashtags are basically the de facto way to find relevant content on Mastodon, not just a marketing tool like on Twitter. And then once you see who posts interesting stuff, you can then add them to your follows.

There’s also some sites that list users by topics of interesting such as http://fedi.directory and https://communitywiki.org/trunk .

Another way is to check out instances that talk about things you’re interested in. There are several websites that list them but here is a shorter list: https://fedi.garden Check out their feeds and see who posts things you’re interested in.

Furthermore, you can follow a.gup.pe accounts, called “groups”, which work similarly to hashtags. Each a.gup.pe account is basically a repeater that boosts (i.e. “retweets”) every post that pings it, so that anyone following it gets that post. For example, I follow @climate@a.gup.pe, and every time someone pings that (it’s like including a hashtag), it’ll boost that post and I’ll see it too.

I’ve heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter…uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, “it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use”. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. Never verified this myself.

Tusky is definitely decent though.

For what it’s worth, I’ve found myself (and others) using “WRPG”. I’ve heard “CRPG” before but I feel that it’s even more confusing than the already-confusing geography-based labels.

JRPGs definitely did get dunked on sometime within the past couple decades. There was definitely commentary going around about how JRPGs were somehow bad because they’re too linear and tended to have too many similar story tropes/character archetypes and random battles were bad, yadda yadda. Some people even speculated that the genre was dying out. (That prediction obviously turned out to be wildly inaccurate.)

I guess it could be argued that some people did dunk on it for culture-specific reasons, especially for the anime art.

I’ve met such people before.

I disagree with them though, as the tropes and presentation of a game are more pertinent to genre labels, than is the nationality of its creators. There are many western-made JRPGs, and there might even be Japanese-made WRPGs as well.

Amusingly, Dark Souls seems to have spawned its own mini-genre, with people now calling games “Souls-likes”.

I’ve heard some people try to use “eastern RPG” instead, but I’m not sure it’s caught on.

For what it’s worth, “western RPG” (or “WRPG”) seems to have caught on; some people call this style “computer RPG” or “CRPG”, but I’d say that even more inaccurate of a label. So yeah, WRPGs and JRPGs.

And meanwhile, we also have action RPGs, which can be subdivided into games that are more similar to something like Diablo (action WRPGs) vs. games that are more similar to something like Ys (action JRPGs).

And then we have strategy RPGs. And then we have MMORPGs. And then we have dungeon crawlers. And then we have roguelikes, which are distinct from dungeon crawlers despite also involving going around a dungeon.

Okay let’s be frank here, “role-playing game” itself was never a great name to begin with in the first place. There’s the famous comment that if you’re playing any Mario game you’re playing the role of Mario. But rather, “RPG” is just the broad umbrella for games that are descended, however distantly it may be, from D&D. Kinda. (I’ve heard that at one point Zelda 1 was called an “RPG”, though obviously the meaning of the term has become a little more specific since then.)

You’re welcome!

I generally wash out things like takeout containers and reuse them.

Though I try to be careful to not use them for excessively hot foods. Which means not microwaving them, among other things.

I’ve also found that grease on plastic is particularly annoying to wash off, so I try to avoid using them with foods that are too greasy.

FWIW they can be useful as non-food storage of various trinkets, as well as plant pots and plant pot dishes, even they can’t be used for food.

You might already know this, but I just wanted to mention (for anyone curious) that one neat thing about what NYC did is that it’s actually one of the more famous textbook examples of ecosystem services.

Basically, at some point they actually calculated how much it’d cost to build a water filtration plant vs. how much it’d cost to maintain the Catskills watershed, and found that the latter was significantly cheaper, proving the notion that well-functioning natural systems can do things that are worth huge amounts of money, seemingly for “free”, so they’re well worth the effort to understand and safeguard such resources.

Here’s an article about it: https://blogs.edf.org/markets/2017/11/07/how-and-why-farmers-in-the-catskills-protect-new-york-citys-drinking-water/

And here’s an article about how policy approaches have changed over time. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2015/11/30/the-catskill-watershed-a-story-of-sacrifice-and-cooperation/