'78 also; Gen X for life! (I refuse to ID as a Xennial, no matter what my childhood was like.)
So, I wonder if that's a factor of "American Mall Culture" and what I had access to in suburbia. I didn't experience a "big" bookstore (e.g. Borders, Barnes and Nobel) until I went away to college, I pretty much frequented the malls stores (e.g. Kroch's and Brentano's, Waldenbooks, Crown Books, etc.). I remember those smaller stores having the small novel section (D&D, Vampire, etc.) and maybe an equal-sized section of TTRPGS, but I don't have any more active memory of that. There was a small "local" books store in our vacation town, and they had a wider selection of TTRPGs--I would get a Dragonlance adventure every trip. I don't remember the FLGS having a big novel selection, and the FLCS was more comics-and-cards and not really RPGs. By the late 90s, I was in college and there were multiple game stores (RIP Bear Productions and Fantasy Realms), Borders, Barnes and Nobel, and three campus bookstores.
Kind of the reverse here!
Like, culturally, I've got infinitely more in common with Millennials than Gen X, I don't have the basic cynical attitude assigned to Gen X (not that I'm not a cynic, but if I am, it's in a rather different and less broad-spectrum way), I don't like the same films or music as them (Nirvana being a crossover), or where I do, I don't like them as much, I don't have nostalgia for the same things as them. I think part of this is that I only became me really in my later teens, by which time I was already on the internet and it was too late for me to not be one of the first "Internet People" lol. Whereas I have friends who were a year or two
younger than me even but are basically more Gen X in their tastes and note in all cases, they weren't really internet nerds until at least the 2000s, if ever.
Also, this is a UK-specific thing, but in the UK, and I'm sorry to say this to UK Gen Xers, but it is factually, demonstrably, provably true, Gen X contains Gen TERF. TERF Island is TERF Island primarily because of Gen Xers. A few older Millennials are TERFs too, as are some young Boomers, but only really weird Millennials are (at least in public life), kranks, wannabes, try hards and pick mes. I dunno what was going on back then that caused this but it's weirdly common even when other social views are more progressive. One might observe that virtually everyone in charge of Britain's various institutions/establishment right now is in that age range which, ain't great for trans people or really anyone who doesn't like bigotry.
I tried Dungeon Crawler Carl. I did. It just did not resonate with me.
I'm of the school that liking LitRPG is still the confession, not disliking it! If Carl is by some margin the least-worst, as we are informed, god help us.
If a show or game or book or comic series or whatever has a delay to "when it gets good" I am OUT. No, I will not play 20 hours of a bad game in order to get to the good game. i do not have that kind of time.
There are very few games that hard-demand you play 20 hours of bad to get to good.
There are, on the other hand quite a lot of games where either:
A) You have to play 4-6 hours of what are essentially boring tutorials before they get good. Worst case I can think of is FFXII which has like, 12 hours pretty much
minimum of tutorial bollocks and cutscenes before it even lets you do anything interesting, and yeah being real that might as well be 20!
or
B) Where the game lets you make decisions as to what to do, and you can easily end up "choosing" (ahem) to play easily 20 hours of bad (I'm looking at you DA:I, I hear the same issue happens with the recent Crimson Desert too) before you run out of bad and have to get to good!
With TV shows often a watch guide can save you by just saying "Skip all these episodes, you can come back and watch them later if you really love the show later on", which I honestly feel like is the only safe way to introduce people to TNG for example.
Bleach, the anime, has entire 20+ episode seasons you should probably skip, but because all the ones you skip weren't originally part of the story continuity (they were added by the anime-makers), it doesn't even feel like you missed anything. Also being real it goes pretty hard from the start - the skips are later on, so isn't quite what you're discussing.
