I manually type the "!"-prefixed group name each time I post something into it. And that is a reasonable approach in !gs Gnusocial because that way everybody, be he member of that #group or not, can post into this group using the prefix and the group name. Of course, one needs to be a member of the group to get the group notifications lifted into one's Home TL. And the admin of the group (me, in this case) can block accounts from sending posts to that group (as far as I know blocking is only possible with regard to group members not non-group members). Anyway, one could write a script, I suppose, or just have the prefix and group name written down, e.g., in a notepad file from which one easily copy and paste it.
But like 20 years ago with "Half-Life 2", I'm a tourist who loves to wade through absurdly overdone landscapes, with weather effects and atmospheres so ridiculously overblown that you wouldn't even on drugs encounter them in real life. I just love strolling around looking, watching, gazing.. until I get shot by some AI generated villain.
("Half-Life Alyx" is another gorgeous visual experience with so many details and consistent "world building". It's just wonderful wandering around there and studying the debris, the fauna, the extraterrestrial impacts on the Odesa-styled City 17...)
Sadly, today's progress in computing powers (both for the CPU as the graphics cards) invites the industry to either remake old titels (to "freshen" them up visually) or publish new titles primarily with the emphasis on graphics and visual effects. Otherwise these titles have become pretty boring (with regard to story telling, game mechanics, loot system and such).
Not to mention the absurd length of such games. Remember when games like "Half Life, "Half Life 2" and others took about four hours for a decent playthrough? Now you can waste up to 60 hours to get only through tzhe main story line and various side quests. Ridiculous. Who has that kind of free time any more?
Anyway. I'm looking forward to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl". Although to be released today, I'll give it two more months until the main bugs are fixed. And spend my time until then with "Tomb Raider" (the first game of the relaunch trilogy) which is still an amazingly consistent self-contained game; with "Half-Life: Alyx" (the PC mod version); and some others like "Far Cry 5" (very nice landscape), "Callisto Protocol" or "Dead Space", or the original "F.E.A.R." series
As an afterthought: I tried "Black Mesa" and "Black Mesa Blue Shift". Awful games. Look like Playmobil in overdrive. Shiny plastic surfaces, and the XEN world is such a terrible visualisation of somebody's bad mushroom trip... They overblew it on all accounts. Both games show in their "extraterrestrial" environment the deep influence "Dear Esther" seems to have had on game developing. But while the latter Indie game is a gem that too my knowledge first successfully used a "walking simulator" to engange the player in a trance like state (stunning graphics), the kids of the "Black Mesa" Remake teams took the visual ideas of "Dear Esther" and streched them all for the sake of mere bombast. Shock and Awe. (Never thought that Donald Rumsfeld would win even one battle.)
As a second afterthought and thereby returning to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl": There is a whole genre of games built around the concept of a "zone" of some unknown influence through which "stalkers" move carefully in order to garner riches and avoid "anomalies". These idea rest on two templates.
One is the 1971 sci fi novel "Roadside Picnic" by the Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 based his movie "Stalker" losely on that novel). Here the the topoi of the "zone" and the lone scout (called "stalker" after the Tarkovsky movie, I guess) were first introduced.
The other template has been the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 with its subsequent evacuation of the entire population due to radiation, the abandonment of the aerea, and the rewilding henceforth, with radiation givin the the rewilding its specific drift into the unexpected.
Both templates are ruminated again and again. And in their combination, the specifically otherworldly character of "Roadside Picnic", the strangeness of the aliens' visit and what it might mean what they left behind, is substituded with the survivalist theme of the nuclear power plant catastrophe of 1986. I'd love to see games in which the more miraculous aspect of "Roadside Picnic" plays a decisive role. Wonderment and fascination not because of sneaking skills and visual traumatisation of the player but because of the bafflement and wonder created by the story. A shock and awe not of Rumsfeldian liking.
Yes, more of those I subscribe to on Muskodon create a second presence on BS. Which is nice. Doesn't mean that BS gets more "entertaining" that way. To me, the main vibe of BS is that of a sanctimonious Protestantism, this politeness, the civility. Ever saw a rude joke on BS? I never did. But many life-venerating haikus instead. Gosh. Get a life, people.
The nursing home of your mother-in-la is indeed very posh, with all th equipment and accessoires you mention. And I wish your mother-in-law nothing less than such good care. The one I'm working in (my second job aside from the dishwasher job in the restaurant) is not a bad one – people are fed, cleaned, taken care of medically, etc. – but entertainment and leisure activities are the relatives' business. And when I walk the fllor, pushing my trolley carts with dirty laundry and garbage, I meet a lot of old folks. The most pressing problem for most of them: Thre is simply nothing to do, no entertainment, nothing but their own demons. It's more obvious on the demnetia floor. Here you can hear old women (it's pretty much always old women) montonously scream. Feels to me like all the screams that couldn't be mouthed and tears that couldn't be shed when these women were four or five years old children, when everything was forced down their throats to be kept in silence, is now, at old age and no barrier of self-control, breaking out. So what I hear are not necessarily present day screams, hardships of today, what I hear are the screams of 80 years ago, only now coming up for air. Then, on the other floors, old women are tearing up, wailing, nursing staff rushing to get by in oder not to get involved. But even without such hardship, the boredom drives the people mental. And so they sit there, fed and apathetic, not even interested in the TV anymore. So, yes, it''s all nice in the nursing home, it could be far worse, but the people know. They will bore themselves to death. But apart form all these things: There are worse ways to spend one's last years. I'm looking forward to spend my last round in one of the nursing homes. The food isn''t that bad.