Clearly gotta start listening to truecrime podcasts and let some young kids muck up your YouTube algorithm and they won’t know anymore what your gender is

I started playing that one a couple of years ago but found myself horribly lost on one of the introductory quests (I think the first lockpicking was what did me on?) and kinda lost interest from there. I can see the appeal though and at some point I’ll certainly circle back to it

My wife and go on kicks of playing a bunch of Minecraft together which is amazing

As others have said loss of interest can happen and the interest can of course come back with a vengeance. I’d recommend picking up another hobby until gaming suddenly grasps your interest again.

Two types of hobbies that have lasting positive impacts on people are creative hobbies and physical hobbies. Your brain is wired to invent and create and your body is wired to move, so being able to do each for fun is brilliant for your mental and physical health. Hop on a bicycle, go for a walk and enjoy the crisp fall air, stop off at that gym you forgot to cancel your membership for, and start doing it regularly.

For creative hobbies you can get a pack of printer paper for a couple of bucks and a pack of Crayola crayons or colored pencils and just start doodling. If you suck at drawing make wierd geometric shapes to rebuild the fine motor skills that computers have killed. Or if you want something more in-depth model making is always great because it has elements of fantasy while having entry points at any skill level. Personally I’ve been getting back into model railroading which if that seems boring to watch a train go around in circles, consider it has its own table top roleplay scene in the form of operations

My 4 year old when we tell her something she doesn’t want to hear will do the same, except it always starts with “WELL,”

It was also a nightmare of paperwork to change it (both to get married and divorced), and I don’t want to do that yet again.

My wife and I have been married for a few years now and the pharmacy still has her name hyphenated as maidenname-legalname because that was the only way to get the prescriptions consistently processed by insurance

At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass

Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure

Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.

Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.

The upscaling technologies they’ve been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn’t necessarily needed. There’s an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn’t run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I’m sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!

If he’s anything like American conservatives he probably appreciates the comparison more than anything

Manufacturing jobs actually pay pretty well. Like I said, it’s hard to beat the pay and benefits of working in manufacturing if you don’t have a degree.

The reason they struggle to fill these roles is because most people don’t want to work in industrial facilities working physically taxing jobs, often at odd hours filling second or third shifts and risking that the facility doesn’t sufficiently value safety leading to a serious injury or death

A large percentage of US manufacturing is food processing. Manufacturing has been struggling to fill open roles for years,¹ and as a low-skilled job with tons of openings lots of migrants, both citizens and not work in manufacturing since the pay & benefits are hard to beat for not requiring any degrees. Its a similar situation with farm work. If the Trump administration actually performs significant deportations and cancellations of visas like he promised, food availability will be affected as farms and food producers struggle to keep up with demand

¹ Here’s the JOLTS data showing as much as 200k unfilled manufacturing jobs. I can’t easily directly link my query, but here’s a screenshot of the data with enough info to replicate my query

This is particularly American sensibility about not drinking alcohol casually around children

Shockingly this will vary by family. Some families take their kids bar hopping while they drink to excess, some drink casually and not in excess, and some are sober around their kids, and some remain sober all the time. My wife grew up hanging out in bars with her parents biker friends and their kids. She learned to watch some of them and save the good homemade wine when someone was about to topple. I grew up with parents who would have a single drink with dinner one to two times a week and would avoid getting drunk (at least that I know of).

Personally, as a parent and living in an area with a strong alcohol culture and with alcoholic family members, I drink very rarely (the alcoholic family members really kill my desire to drink), and when I do I make sure we have more than enough adults available to parent and drive if needed. I also am very much a lightweight so there is no drinking without getting noticeably giggly and sloppy. My wife feels and acts similarly but is not a lightweight and can realistically drink one drink and be visibly unaffected.

I honestly think the OP is less about the presence of alcohol around children but more just calling out a wine mom as such

My wife’s family will 100% get drunk around their kids, and drunk drive with the kids in the car. Seeing that first hand makes us really reluctant to drink at all.

I’ve only seen the ocean when visiting family in LA, so I do genuinely wonder if the waves are especially loud and violent there compared to, say the Gulf of Mexico or the US East Coast. But importantly, that is the exact same conditions Hollywood people would be used to too, so they should be very aware of how loud the ocean is (I’d say its comparable to cruising altitude in a standard commercial passenger aircraft)

Don’t forget the universally established upward direction so all ships are magically oriented exactly the same when they meet

At beaches too. Hollywood is based so close to the beach they should know how hard it is to hold a conversation at a normal tone of voice near the ocean

I read an interesting article about historical armor fights. Basically some researchers got special forces members to wear replica historical armor and simulate battle as described in various surviving epics and identified the armor to be surprisingly effective

Duels did happen from time to time in the 19th century. For example, California Senator David Broderick in 1859 became the only US Senator to die in a duel, and there’s a difficult to validate tale of two French men in 1808 holding a gun duel in hot air balloons!

Actually I have a history book about the history of ballooning called Aeronauts that I found at a thrift store. If I remember I’ll see what that has to say about this tale because it does call out other largely fabricated tales as such

But like most fictions, the fiction of Wild West duels contains some kernels of truth and certainly makes for great drama

Honestly the original effects also had me going:

So I suppose it’s not that much worse with the ring

Edit: meant to reply one comment up. Too late now