bastion

Yes. It's a scalable hobby, and can run from virtually no cost to why-are-you-burning-money. But you can do a lot in gaming with little monetary investment.

There are lots of budget indie games that are lots of fun, and if you find out you like gaming and want to try more fancy titles, you can always upgrade hardware.

Minimal entry: your current pc. Install steam, and buy/try what you like, returning it if it's too slow/doesn't work.

Light entry: get familiar with your pc's ram size, hd/ssd size, cpu speed/type, and graphics card. Use that to ensure your pc can handle the game by looking at the game's minimum requirements.

Medium-heavy entry: Upgrade things.

• ssd if you don't have one. The difference between that and spinning disks is night and day. If you wished things loaded faster, get this.
• 8 gb graphics card in the $150 range, amd or nvidia-based. Get this if you want a smoother experience / if you can notice individual frames happening. You don't need the most expensive tech to play most games that are out there.
• Genuine XBox or PS4/5 controller. These standard controllers are generally pretty solid and durable. $60ish
• new cpu ($$$, and may not even be an option): most games won't be processor-bound. But some are cpu-heavy. Get this if you really want to upgrade overall, or have a particular title in mind that needs it. Or..
• Low-mid range gaming computer ($900 ($600-$1500)): wait until you want to do a pc upgrade, and get a low-end gaming computer. I recommend Lenovo LOQ or Legion. Lenovo in general has provided laptops that don't fall apart on me, and that's not something I can say about most computer manufacturers. That said, keep them long enough and you'll have to replace the keyboard - but that's every laptop out there that I've run across.
• or: go crazy and buy everything all the time at the moment it his the market because it is a game or has "game" written on, near, or associated with it (not recommended)

Yes. All a part of the plan.

True, but your post did kinda read like this:

Auto-updates are a hell-no for me.

There was a perfectly good user interface for updates. Then Ubuntu decides "wait.. What if we made updates compulsory and effectively random and skipped the UI. The user can do system updates whenever they want, because those don't matter for security or something, but these apps must be updated whenever snap determines they must."

Oh, snap!

People think that problems shouldn't exist, and that the authorities should have fixed it, and it's killing their motivation to live.

There is no authority. There is how you want to live your life, and who you want to be. We are in the anarchy. You live your live according to your principles, and that works for you or doesn't. We all want and can sometimes even have a nice situation, but underneath it, nature is metal - and we haven't "grown out of it".

This is it. But put the turd in a bag, with "your house, my choice" written all over it, so that even a scrap can be read, and launch it.

Don't tarry, conceal identifying features, and if he starts getting guarded, wait until that passes, or organize a flash mob via an anonymized medium to increase impact and reduce casualties.

Well said.

Absolutely.

All fair.

This was my thought as well.

I prefer pots, tbh.

Yeah. The Democrats really screwed the pooch on that one. He's a solid candidate, and has stood on his moral stance from before the Democrats recognized the issues that are now popular.

Sorely needed, sorely missed.