Yeah, I think it’s partly a coping mechanism and partly just the current drama that everyone’s aware of, which makes it safe common ground to make jokes about, as well as pretty much the only thing most people can be fairly sure they have in common with others on a platform that is pretty new to them. A week or so ago Mastodon was pretty full of Titan stuff. Things will move on again.
It’s usually at about this point that I resort to tearing at things with the teeth of an (unimportant) key. Sometimes works.
The standout example of this for me would be Qube. I was having a bit of a difficult time when I first bought the game and that soundtrack lured me in and getting through to the end just became a total compulsion. I was a lot calmer by the time it was over, too.
Kairo had a bit of a similar effect on me, except that the very last jump in the whole game just would not work, spoiling the zen. Quantum Conundrum also got a full playthrough in one sitting but tbh I think that was because I wasn’t enthusiastic about coming back to it another day.
I kind of don’t want to be excited about it because a lot of component parts of the game seem to exist in other games, plus I don’t really play that many Bethesda games, but by the time they got around to “oh yeah and here is a mecha ship design” it was pretty clear that I was going to end up buying a copy of this weird No Kerbal’s Dangerous Sky crossover thingy.
I think in part there’s an essential misunderstanding of current events at the core of Reddit’s behaviour (not yours, I mean - spez/investors/etc).
Historically the rule was supposed to be ‘if it’s free, you’re the product’, which is to say that our attention (and profiles and demographics) were on sale to advertisers. The big recent development is someone figuring out, or thinking they’ve figured out, how to monetise us a different way - specifically, by using the things we create as training data for AI. A sensible organisation would continue to balance these two possible cash flows and, since both really require user retention to remain profitable in the long run, seek a middle ground. But the perception is that there’s more money in the training data than there is in the user attention, so they focus on maximising that and spit on the users. The obvious consequence is that they lose users and their source of training data dries up.