I had lots of time to play games, but not a lot of money to buy games.

Now it’s the other way round.

If I could bring back anything from back then, it’s boxed PC games that can be resold and traded. Covered a lot of my gaming needs from second hand shops.

Railway and train modellers, of all scales. To their credit, a fair fee people are becoming more open, but especially modelling clubs are often run by old white men with questionable politics and problematic behaviours. They will sneer at anything that’s not steam, or at people who run modern instead of vintage trains, or who don’t get a train model exactly right the way the original ran that one time in the mid 50s from Bumfuck, Idaho to the middle of nowhere. They have little patience for newbies who might not have internalised all the lingo, or who might need something explained in simple English. If you build something that is not an exact replica of a real world location, they’ll say you’re not doing model railway, but merely toy trains. And then these same people go and wonder why they can’t attract new people to the hobby.

I don’t have a lot of comparisons to dubs in other languages, but most german dubs I know are average at best. The biggest problem is that they often pick voice actors who just don’t suit the character or the original actor. The stilted reading/talking is another issue, which is also often present in original German productions.

As an older metalhead, this makes me a bit sad, but I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. The metal scene I joined in the early 90s did have its tolerance problems specifically against other music genres, but I never knew it as particularly gatekeepy, at least the circles I socialised with and the concerts and festivals I went to. There were some people who though you weren’t a real metal fan if you didn’t exclusively listen to metal, but they were a minority. Nobody had a problem with me not particularly liking Slayer or Motörhead, and there was no requirement to have long hair and be covered in leather and/or band patches.