Best advice I can think of is to hit up your local hobby shop, or a Renaissance fair, if you have one nearby. Those places are chock full of ttrpg nerds.

If you wore a sign or badge that says something like, “looking for D&D group,” I bet you’d get asked by at least a few folks. Especially if you’re already being nice and friendly and joining in the other activities there!

That said, playing online is not as bad as you’d think. I’ve played with a group fully online for over a decade now (shout-out to Foundry VTT).

I wish you luck in your ventures!

If I’m not mistaken (and I might be) the immutability can actually be toggled off for power users.

Socialism has several different lineages. All of which used different strategies for accomplishing socialism (workers own the means of production) and maybe eventually communism (stateless, moneyless, classless society). (I often use “socialism” interchangeably as both the movement for and the desired end state, which I think Marx used to do, too, iirc).

The Marxist-Leninist/Maoist version is what most folks are familiar with - create a “vanguard party”, leverage that political power to take over the government in a workers’ revolution, and then use the power of the state to accomplish socialism and eventually transition to communism. That strategy was how we got the USSR and Communist China, loosely speaking. How much that strategy actually fulfilled the promises of socialism/communism is up for debate.

But there were other socialist movements in other areas of the world. The European version tends to be either democratic socialism (use standard political power to ease a transition to socialism, sans revolution) or social democracy (use government to implement the desired economic egalitarianism without the precise goal of the workers owning the means of production). (I hope I got those right, I often get them mixed up.)

I would agree with you that no European state has reached the end state of socialism or communism, as they’re still pretty dang capitalist, but a good number of EU states are a lot closer to the promises of socialism than the rest of the world, as far as I understand things.

Probably?

An important thing to note is that “Breadtube” is an exonym. That is, no supposed “member” of Breadtube joined or formed a group with that label - it’s just a label that some leftists put on a few video essayists who are/were either socialists or were perceived to be close enough.

Contrapoints, Lindsay Ellis, and HBomberguy were some bigger examples of this “group”. All of them can be critiqued for different reasons, but I will usually give them a watch when they put out something. I usually learn something of value, IMHO.

#notallburgers?

Why burgers?

That is nice. Even a small support system is something to cherish. I wish you the best of everything!

Yeah. That’s scary. I hope your wife is supportive, at least?

I’ve been using a black and white toner Brother printer I got in 2013 and it’s still chugging along. My 3rd party toner cartridges also work well. Sucks your color ones aren’t though.

Yes. Study.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1586566/full

This is splitting hairs a bit, but Ground News is more of an aggregator with useful framing than a source in and of itself.

To be fair, CNN “leans left” in the same way US Democrat liberals “lean left”. Which is to say, socially progressive (usually) and economically capitalist.

Assuming I’m using those terms right, which I think I am, at least in the context of the US.

This isn’t a particularly well thought out stance, but I do wonder if books are kind of self-selecting for appropriate audiences? As in, just being able to read and understand something in a book might be enough to warrant your permission to read it.

Movies and shows can be consumed more passively, with almost no maturity required to experience the media, so I can see why providing that guidance would be warranted.

But I don’t know, that stance might crumble under scrutiny.

It ain’t perfect (cost of living has always been relatively high, even for states with comparable cities), but it’s far and away better than any red state to my knowledge.

I have a long running DnD 5e game tonight, and on Fridays I’m running DC20 (which is similar heroic fantasy, currently in beta but still lots of fun)

I don’t think the NYT is untrustworthy wholesale. They still break some stories early, have insider sources for political stories, etc

But they’re also very much an outlet committed to making money over most else, have no sympathy for explicit anti-capitalism, and will run just the worst op-eds from the worst people.

It was lined with plastic.

Ah. Gotcha. For some reason I was stuck on what I presume is the other lawyer giving a “sit” command. An unintentional red herring, perhaps.

Maybe it’s obvious, but I genuinely don’t get this one.

That’s exactly it, yep. I’m well over apologizing at this point.

And yeah, I also moved back home for a while after college, and it was a bad time. Plenty of good, but plenty I’m glad to leave behind. Let us all strive to be better people than our parents were, I say.

I’m glad you’re out, and I hope you’re doing well. Stay safe out there!