What an insane take. If both sides are equal on one completely undefendable thing, then you vote based on other issues. One of the two parties are going to be in power at the end of this election cycle, regardless. Both are permitting genocide, and it’s a fucking problem, meanwhile only one of those parties are actively working to strip the people’s right to do something about that.

All this “both sides” bullshit feels disingenuous. If you were really concerned, you’d be focused on paths to solutions, rather than focusing strictly on trying to devalue Democratic votes. I certainly don’t see any path to stopping this genocide that starts with permitting a Trump presidency.

My life is almost a total failure. I am in my 20s

Your life has barely started. It can’t be a failure when it’s barely begun. You spend 18 years with no real control over yourself or your trajectory, then you finally begin to make a few relevant decisions for yourself. Even if you’re 29, you really only start your life when you’re 19-20. That’s 10 years out of 50+, assuming you live to be at least 70. You have only lived a small fraction of your life.

I won’t pretend to know the unique challenges you’re facing, the difficulities of finding work in your region/with your degree, or the social/economic struggles you’re facing because I am so far divorced from your life that any direct discussion is so meaningless. I would never have the relevant information and context, so I can’t suggest what you should do in a tangible way. What I can say, is this: find what you want to measure your life in, and work towards that. If you value your life through work and wealth, I can understand why you’d feel the way you do, but there far more ways to be prosperous, and things you can focus on.

A healthy dose of positive nihilism would do you wonders: each and every one of us is so tiny, so insignificant, that the difference between a “successful” and “unsuccessful” life in the terms you’ve defined literally do not matter. You and Elon Musk will both die and decompose, and regardless of either of your impact on the world, this rock we’re riding around the sun will continue to support life for a time, and one day everything humanity has ever conceived will be dust, and our sun will explode, and the universe won’t care if you lived with your parents or owned a mansion. The only things that matter are the things we, individually, give meaning to. If you choose to find meaning and value in creating art then your work has meaning and value. If you choose to find meaning and value in helping others find joy and happiness, then dedicate yourself to your friends, your family and your community, because that has meaning and value. If you want to experience the world through literature and media, then engaging with that material has meaning and value. No one else can define what matters to you in this world, because they’re not you.

I’m sorry that what you’ve spent time and energy on isn’t panning out for you. I really, truly am. But step back, and think about if those things matter to you because they matter to you, or because everyone else has told you it’s what a successful, prosperous life looks like. Then consider what your version of a good and meaningful is, and chase that. Many people waste 10, 15, 20+ years on things that they ultimately realize don’t bring them joy. In a way, you’re lucky to have found out sometime in your 20s that what you’ve been working on isn’t leading you where you want to be. It took me until 33.

Dammit, and I JUST bought some of his chocolate as a gag/to say I tried it earlier today!

My friend, I hate to tell you, but that’s just not true. We are incredibly at the whims of everyone else to even get too and from work or school each day. We only have running water, electricity, food in the fridge, etc., because we all depend on each other.

Don’t mistake being independant with being self-sufficent. Don’t mistake requiring the support of others for requiring the support of any one, specific person. Every single one of us is dependant on many of us, but none of us should plan on being dependant on any one specific person for our entire life. And that’s okay. This is how society functions, and life is a lot better for it.

Though I am sorry for whatever happened today to leave you feeling that jaded. Some individuals really just aren’t worth it. It sucks when we think they are, and find out the hard way.

I’ve just haven’t had universally good, or even clear majority good, experiences with cats. I don’t “dislike” them, but I don’t choose to like a given cat by default, because I never know what I am getting into. The cuddliest cat can and has suddenly decided it is clawing the shit out of me without warning, and without fail the owner acts like that’s just their cats personality, or just a “cat” thing.

I’ve never had a dog react in such a way unprovoked. Sure, I’ve met asshole dogs, and they warn me not to go near them immediately. But I’ve never had a dog wander up to me, insist on pets, and then all of a sudden bite me.

I like animals that try to tell me how they’re feeling, rather than flip with no warning, and I feel the same way about people.

I can see the logic behind the mistaken correlation between narcissts and cat haters. Cats are known to be independant animals, unlike many other pets that praise you unconditionally just because you provide the food. They don’t feed a stereotypical narcissists desire. But it’s a gross oversimplification of both human-animal relationships and diagnosible narcissism to suggest that there’s any real correlation between the two based on that.

“I’m a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I’m talking about”

Should we call it a fallacious call to authority, meme on it for being a “how do you do, fellow gamers” moment, or simply mock the guy for whoring himself out in favor of daddy corporate? I could write an essay on the ways this is an absurd statement.

Gamers hate Denuvo because it doesn’t “simply work”. It limits paying customers from accessing their content, bogs down mid-range machines that are already overtaxxed by poor optimization and, in admittedly uncommon cases, full on breaks some games until patches and fixes roll out. Stop pretending that “gamers” are out here rioting because they’re too cheap and immoral to pay for content. Quit your fuckin’ lying.

Well, if the goal is to be something terrifying, you’ve got the spirit for sure.

Do yourself a favor and stop putting off Cassette Beasts. Every time I play it, I am gobstruck that an indie team made this and sells it for a fraction of the price of whatever mediocrity Pokemon is pumping out.

I could sing it’s praises all day, but I’d rather just politely nudge you to push it up the list.

Let’s be 100% clear here, the order of operations were:

No, racism is not a problem in our state.

I’m so tired of you Democrats and your woke ideology about racism!

You should go back to where you came from!!!

Specifically speaking to a NATIVE woman.

It’s often said that if you don’t think racism is a problem, it’s because you’ve spent your life on the benefiting end of that equation. I’ll never begrudge someone for being lucky enough to not have to suffer from racism. That’s a problem to be solved with education. But the difference between being an ignorant, lucky beneficiary, and an active oppressor fighting to maintain this terrible status quo is stark.

I immediately opt out of any platform that aggressively tries to decide what content I consume.

A little surprised to hear Zero Time Dilemma is seen as the weakest game of the trilogy. I played them all in a vacuum, never really engaging with the communities around the franchise, and I would never have said that myself.

If I had to pick, I’d argue that Virtue’s Last Reward was the “worst” one, but I am not happy about writing that. It was a great game that I enjoyed start to end, but ending on a “this will only make sense when the 3rd game releases in X years!” note leaves a really sour taste in my mouth. The other two games are complete experiences, and when I am playing a visual novel, the last thing I want is a cliffhanger “join us next time to find out!”

That said I think I enjoyed puzzles and philosophical musings of it the most out of the three? So my opinion is more about what was bad than what was good and should probably be discarded anyway.

I’ve gotta put this one out there because it will largely get overlooked every time the topic of “Visual Novel” gets brought up, but Digimon: Survive.

As a tactics RPG, it’s pretty mid. Character growth and customization exists, but isn’t quite as expansive as I’d like for that kind of game. It’s no Final Fantasy Tactics, for example, but comparing it to other tactics games doesn’t do it justice, because it’s one of the better-to-best written visual novels I have ever played.

Each of the endings explores the way small changes in circumstance can heavily impact people’s decisions, each of the characters and their partner monsters are oozing with personality, and some of the potential outcomes for each character represents some of the most wild, fucked up, and human emotional responses possible. Your decisions as the main character have minor impacts in the lines of which characters reach their end of their growth arcs, and which evolutions are available to your partner and some of your companions partners, and the collective value system limits which of the main branches you’re permitted to explore for your ending. Which it doesn’t boast the wide assortment of branching narrative paths that some visual novels take, it does still succeed in making your decisions feel like they matter.

And this is completely aside from the fact that it’s a Digimon game. A franchise widely viewed as “for children”, yet it engages with heavy existential themes and doesn’t shy from letting horrible things happen to good, and bad, people. People die, on screen, in ways I would not want small children to see. In a lot of ways, the game is a functional “reboot” of the franchise, sharing a lot of commonalities with Digimon Adventure, but using older characters, more serious mature themes, and never referencing the monsters as “digimon”. In fact, the term is only used once, during the epilogue of one of the endings, otherwise they’re referred to as Kemonogami, and treated like Yokai. They’re engrained in the history and legendsof the world, and it’s an amazing take on the franchise.

I’m gushing at this point, but what really matters is it’s an extremely well-written visual novel with competent enough Tactical RPG gameplay, and also currently on a rather deep Steam Sale. Cannot recommend it enough.

Well then, I guess I’m here to do crime.

Why the hate?

Gosh people… Shutdown your brain

You can’t seriously be shocked that people are downvoting you when your only defense is “stop using that silly little brain to think”.

Human life expectancy has doubled in those couple hundred years. Believing that something is good just because it is old is absurd.

Alright, I’ll bite: what exactly is a “stonefruit” in this context? Google just says “fruits with large seeds that are basically rocks in the middle”, which I suspect is not the pseudo-intellectual flex your boss is going for?

It might be boring and obvious, but the speeds.

I used to have to plan ahead, set overnight downloads, very consciously and actively manage data rates and in general never plan around getting something. Today, I can get basically ANYTHING in less than an hour on FiOp. Most things, 5-10 minutes. Transfer rate has outscaled data size, and it’s fantastic.

Fantastic article.

I’ve got nothing against cosplay, but these right-wing nut jobs pretending to be Roman conqueror’s just take it too far.

Fucking real, though. The cultural group responsible for checks notes “shaming people who have the wrong bubble color in texts”?, suddenly think they’re the one’s being unjustly preached to? The joke in this image is not the one OP thought they were making.

If you’re looking for “maybe slightly higher specs than the Steam Deck”, a good APU solution will get you there on the cheap. In particular, the 5000 series APUs are pushing 50% off in most places, because they’re the last entry in a socket type which has already been replaced.

The challenge will be finding a pre-built that takes advantage of these facts, so you may do best either using a website that lets you define the parts you want and then builds the PC for you, or walking into a local PC shop and asking them the same question followed with “I’ve heard that Ryzen APUs are surprisingly good for gaming and affordable right now”.

Using AI to automate collusion while holding not personal accountability.

“But what if the invisible hand was an AI algorithm?”