Took me a while to realize that for most people, it’s less about religion and more about maintaining rituals and, more importantly, belonging to a community. To my knowledge, atheists don’t have the latter outside the internet.

That a dictatorship led by a “good, strong leader” would be enough to fix any country. Held that belief from ages 16-22. With time, I understood that it would devolve into a bad strong leader anyway, especially because any one single person cannot realistically do everything at such a large scale, nor can they ensure that everyone down the chain of command is “good”. Paranoia would seep in, more and more resources would be spent hunting “the bad ones”, innocents would be wrongfully accused either by honest mistake or by malicious enemies.

Nowadays, I really enjoy the idea of “Do not take for yourself any power that you would loathe your worst enemy to have” and I wish it could be applied to all levels of politics.

Emacs is a table saw, vim is a chainsaw, nano is a scissor. Every problem those 3 solve is a differently sized single sheet of paper.

I’m amazed that Brazil, known for its endless violence (>40k dead in 2022 and a homicide rate of > 20) sees slightly more good in their fellow countrymen than USA.

I played it out of morbid curiosity after everyone started talking how bad it was. I went in like “It can’t be THAT bad, can it?” - and indeed, it can. I’m still amazed that menus are fucking .swf files (Adobe Flash for those too young to recognize it)

It’s one of the least credible scifi settings I’ve ever seen. Also, despite the whole “multiverse” the main story tries to paint, it’s much closer to a time loop, given how nothing changes and effectively none of your actions are acknowledged by anyone. City NPCs won’t even react to your dragon shouts Force use totally unique space magic, unless it hits them, then it’s just like being shot. Even Oblivion guards would tell you to holster your weapons, Starfield guards won’t even grunt if you shoot around like a maniac (but hit nobody)

I played DNF shortly after release 🏴‍☠️ , but I was already an adult by then and was aware of the development hell that the game went thru. Started playing not expecting much and I was still disappointed.

“Power armor is for pussies!” - says the guy whose game is almost literally a shitty Halo: only 2 weapons, limited ammo, regenerating shield ego.

Curious. What puts you off in Ivalice Chronicles?

I am sad because these squares look very out of place, unlike hexagons which are beautiful and perfect and never cause problems whatsoever, ever ever!

So, all those cartoons depicting cavemen dragging a woman by her hair were on to something. Time to write some caveman on modern woman smut!

Exactly, the trailer does a hell of a job of selling the game. It completely hides how you’re supposed to avoid destruction. How the hell the devs didn’t think of adding a free “fucking around” mode, or villain mode (which is the top mod for the game) is truly baffling

I couldn’t afford subscriptions either, which is why 99% of my WoW playtime is in private servers, most of which are now long dead. I think my account in Firestorm might still exist, I first played there when it had Warlords of Draenor, then gave it another go during BfA. I should check it again someday.

Pretty sure you can go 3rd person as soon as your hands are untied, when you enter the first building after either the Imperial or Stormcloak soldier

My personal experience with the Mega Drive Sonic games was always “fun first 2 stages, not so fun afterwards”

Megaton Rainfall. The game billed itself as having you fly around like a demigod stopping an alien invasion. I bought it like 2 years after release, hyped as all hell. The unskippable intro is boooooooooooring and takes way too long. Time to blast some aliens! Only they end up as some sort of fucking puzzle, where each one has to be beaten the correct way. To make matters worse, you have to avoid destruction at all costs, if too much civilian infrastructure gets blown up, you fail the mission. Of all the (limited) powers you unlock, exactly one can protect civilians, and it fucking sucks.

“Finding the correct amount of crackers to make a boiling tube crack, by Liane Cartman et. al.”

Looks like a typical aristocratic family tree, like the Hapsburgs or the Ptolemaic Egyptian dynasty

Ugh, I felt the years weighing down on me, 1999 Sonic

I still refuse to use it for anything other than minor curiosity. I often read AI summaries on coding questions I throw at DDG or google, but I’ll usually open the Stack Overflow link or Reddit to read the actual post just to be sure.

I’m still waiting for the right sale price to buy Cyberpunk 2077

Palworld might fit your group, though my recommendation is to play via direct connection to one of you that isn’t the mr grind - any local save can enable multiplayer and people just need the invitation code to join in. The save remains local on the host’s machine.

An old game that might be fun for you is either Jedi Outcast or Jedi Academy, the best Star Wars games with lightsaber dueling and force using, also guns (they use the Quake 3 engine but aren’t as fast paced) - the former has 3 saber dueling styles, the latter adds dual saber wielding and the 2-bladed saber (the one Darth Maul uses)

A NeoGeo emulator + Neo Bomberman could be fun, too. Or the classic SNES bomberman games, too.