So so so many people keep pointing at Trump and saying “But he’s the worst/we’re all doomed/holy shit you need to vote blue no matter who” and comments about “perfect being the enemy of the good” so we should hold our nose and support Democrats.

I feel like I’m the only person who remembers how hyperbolic we all were about Mitt Romney or John McCain being existential threats to democracy. South Park literally made fun of everybody at the time pointing at how running such a divisive campaign let them distract the public from their real goal of stealing the Hope Diamond (obviously). How many of us would BEG for Romney at the top of the Republican ticket at this point?

So sure, Trump is the threat now. When are we supposed to stop rewarding mediocre neoliberalism then? If it wasn’t 2016 or 2020 or 2024 then when? Trump will eventually die and some new Republican will take his place as the leader of the party. EVERY Republican will be the next existential threat and we’ll be scolded and told to hold our nose yet again and vote for the Democrat. If someone can tell me the “end date” where I don’t have to choose between the lesser of two evils, I’d love to know when that is.

I don’t blame other citizens for voting how they do. Everyone has to decide for themselves their red lines for support and in the privacy of the voting booth who they want to support. I do blame Democratic leadership for not learning a single lesson from 2016 about hand picking candidates and browbeating everyone into thinking that’s OK.

It’s a periodic thing here in Illinois where loud conservative voices want to secede because Chicago is a hell pit, a drain on resources, and they can’t stand how much the Democrats control in the state. This is all basically bluster though because Chicago and the surrounding areas tend to basically fund any and everything downstate (the metric escapes me but it’s something like the “blue” areas lose a dollar for every dollar spent but the “red” areas basically gain a dollar for every one spent). So if Chicago was suddenly its own state, they’d all be left with basically nothing.

As with so many right wing things, it’s a grift/manufactured outrage to distract from the fact that those leaders don’t know what the heck they’re doing or are actively making it worse and scapegoating the liberals.

I think it’s fair to say that I would remember SOME things that took a lot longer to figure out the first time, but the specifics are gone that I still could not finish the game outright if I reinstalled it right now.

Also I’ve had two kids since it first came out and my memory is shot so that helps too!

Agreed. I’ve played the game twice, once when it came out and the second when the DLC came out. Fortunately enough time passes, you can easily forget the puzzle solutions and just lose yourself in the world again.

Hmm…440 hours on Steam…probably another 125 on the Switch…

I love this game. It’s so cozy and comfortable. I found SDV after my divorce just when it had originally released and I was drawn into the cute world and how much character oozes from every corner. Every person you meet has something going on or you can just be a weird hermit building out your farm in peace. There’s enough of a story to propel you forward but never overbearing and it gets out of the way when it’s “done”.

As time has gone on from my first playthrough, I’ll typically dive back in when the itch strikes or a new content update comes along. The last few playthroughs I’ve done a lot to mod the game and introduce new things into the world to discover, some of which just feels indistinguishable from the official content and others that just help reduce barriers that I want to skip over (like fishing).

Stardew Valley is a game I will likely always go back to. I’m sure it will eventually eclipse my current most played game (Team Fortress 2 @ ~800 hours). I’ve tried other games like it and while they’re fun, none seem to have the staying power that Stardew has over me. While I will absolutely check out his next game, I’m hoping Stardew Valley never really stops being updated over the years.

I think original Sims made the biggest impact on me since I probably played that one the most. Our PC couldn’t handle The Sims 2 when it came out, and I only tangentially tried 3 and 4. Mostly enough to build a cool house and spend a few days with the Sims I created. Sims 1 I probably poured a ton of hours into it.

One thing I did discover and never fully completed in the later games was trying to do some sort of haunted house family. As in, have someone move in and intentionally die in a way that created a new color of ghost. Get all of the different ghost colors in one house/lot then move a normal family in. I don’t think it really mattered in any way, I just loved the idea of a regular family cohabitating with a rainbow of ghosts.

There’s something both so unique and also so simple to the Sims that I’m surprised it’s taken this long for folks to try and “go for it” the way Cities:Skylines went for Sim City. Like, you have to craft interesting stories within the game but you don’t need to wholecloth invent a galactic empire/fantasy world/etc…you can broadly look at our world and copy/paste for inspiration. With Paralives and Life By You “coming soon” in some fashion, there’s going to be some interesting competition here.

I mean, words could be said about Kyrsten Sinema but I think this is far more appropriate of a summary of her time as a politician…

Link because the embed didn’t work

Seconding the Secretlab chair. For someone who works from home and would play PC games at the exact same desk when work ended, it made sense to invest in a chair beyond my $30 IKEA one and has held up pretty well over the last several years.

The best part of it too was for Wi-Fi calling, if it was off, couldn’t be turned on since it relied on AT&T’s website/capabilities to approve and authenticate. That was at least my experience as well as my family’s.

So if you hadn’t already enabled it before the outage, you literally couldn’t turn it on.

I thought this article from Vox did a good job laying out how it could fall in Trump’s favor.

Taking Trump out of the equation for a moment, I do find resonance with the argument that a state shouldn’t be able to disqualify someone from a national election and that a decision like that should sit at the federal level. I’ll also echo circularfish in that I don’t trust Republican states to fairly apply this standard. It seems like something Democrat-controlled states might do because they believe in rules/institutions so they’ll only do it when pressured, if even then. Republican-controlled states will do to score points on Fox/OAN against anyone from Joe Manchin and leftwards on the political spectrum.

Enjoying it a lot, maybe ~12h in or so?

I put about 30h into Valheim and this feels like it will play out a similar way. I’ll have a blast for a concentrated time, maybe play with a friend or two, then find something else. I thought the mishmash of realistic world and cute cartoony monsters would clash but it’s working for me. Just starting to see the loop of automation and what to look for in a second base. It has a charming amount of jank attached to it.

I spent most of my time yesterday rebuilding my base after one of those grass elephants attacked us for no obvious reason, then a bunch of WAY higher level Relaxasaurus raided alongside the elephant and burned my base down.

It’s also not necessarily easier, but more understandable, for roles such as HR, marketing, etc…yes, it’s still someone’s job but one company probably doesn’t need two HR teams worth of people and cuts accordingly.

Message being that everyone should have their head on a swivel during a merger and that goes double for those jobs that provide day-to-day business support to keep things running.

I don’t think I played any truly bad games, but I do have a list of games that I bounced off of for one reason or another. Maybe I ran out of steam to play them, maybe life got in the way and I couldn’t come back to it, or I just didn’t want to “git gud” with the limited time I have. I basically deemed them not worth my time when I did manage to sink a ton of hours into Spider-Man, Cyberpunk, and Talos Principle.

So that abandoned graveyard consists of…

• Tunic - I hit a wall at one of the bosses and just couldn’t progress. Ran out of juice unfortunately.
• Mr. Sun’s Hatbox - Such a weird quirky game. Didn’t get close to beating it but I got enough out of it and called it quits.
• Hunt: Showdown - This one was a bummer. It’s been on my “need to try” list. I tried it, solo, and died right away. I could tell it was one of those games that needed a time investment to make it work and I just don’t have it in me.
• Cult of the Lamb - Something about the roguelike aspect of it didn’t mesh with me, which is weird because I feel like that’s really become a genre I like.
• Overwatch 2 - I played poorly as Lifeweaver, was griefed in chat, and quit :)