I blame the people who voted for trump, personally. I’d be happy to watch the leopards eat their faces, but unfortunately we’re all stuck with them.

Surely there’s a couple people still working there.

Yes. And no one’s going to do anything about it.

Most people are too lazy and thoughtless to stop using it .

The engineers that work there certainly aren’t going to stage a coup.

And no one’s going to just do violence to Musk.

Guild wars 2 is the only MMO that didn’t bore or annoy me.

• feels like a real video game. You can jump and dodge and stuff
• much quality of life stuff is free and baked in. Deposit most stuff to the bank from anywhere, craft from the bank, etc
• minimal gear grind. The tier you can buy for cheap is good enough. The next tier is a small improvement.
• generally helpful folks
• lots of different stuff to do.

I switched to linux because windows 10 is going end-of-life, and I can’t upgrade to windows 11 even if I wanted to.

It’s been fine, other than some trouble getting mint to dual boot the first time.

Time spent with friends and partners.

Wrapped under a blanket with someone I was really into, playing a game together, watching a show, or just talking, was really nice.

I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

Some exceptions:

I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.

I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.

Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.

My understanding is XFCE is lighter weight and simpler. Little to no animations, for example.

https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-cinnamon-mate-xfce/

I am extremely basic and I’m using the XFCE that came with Linux mint. I don’t need anything fancy.

Fine. Sometimes sad. I dated someone with a kid for a while and the good parts were good. But now I’m old so it’s kind of moot.

Right, and you shouldn’t ask a married monogamous person out on a date, either. Never came up for me but is worth keeping in mind! A lot of guys seem to struggle with “she likes me bro she smiled at me” -> “my guy she’s the cashier at work she has to smile at customers.”

You can just ask people out. You can just ask to kiss someone. I was in my mid 20s when someone told me the first one, and late 20s when someone told me the second one. Dating got a lot easier after each revelation.

I really don’t think Baldur’s gate 3 and whatever the fuck Monopoly go is are the same kind of thing.

Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like “the best metal from Colorado” or “a deep dive into acid jazz”. They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.

Also seeing who’s playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I’ll check out band B. I saw “Year of the Cobra” play with “The Well” and it was a good show, and I bought their album.

At least you can improve inventory in-game (eg: do normal gameplay quest and crafting stuff to get bigger bags). Some monetization is cash or nothing.

Still bad when they make something annoying and then charge to fix it.

Guild wars 2 specifically has a surprising amount of quality of life stuff for free, but you can see places where “we can make money here” won out occasionally.

Baldur’s gate 3 characters aren’t even that complicated. You pick stats at the start from a limited range of options, and then make very few choices when you level up. Some levels you don’t pick anything at all. This ain’t path of exile.

I got a mod for bg3 that gives you a feat every level and holy shit did that make it more interesting.

To WotC’s credit, making character choice really shallow is probably why the game succeeded so well. A lot of people don’t really want a lot of choices, especially when some are traps.

The larian games have some interesting interactions beyond just oil. You can make people slip on ice.

The old Magicka game also had some fun interactions that more games could learn from.

For a generous definition of “these days”, check out the pillars of eternity games. They’re very good and clearly a love letter to Baldur’s gate. Unfortunately the team is now making a Skyrim-like for some reason, but I hope they come back and finish the main game story sometime.

There’s also that solasta game that’s DND 5e but on a smaller budget from a few years ago.

“constantly be jumping while conjuring a skeleton” is pretty stupid and counter intuitive for an optimum thing to do, but it that’s what you should do if you want to level those skills up.

Morrowind also had some bizarre optimum behavior if you wanted to get the +5s on stats when you leveled.

There’s a lot of like management being like “we gotta hit this deadline (that we made up)” combined with “if I hit all my targets and put in some overtime, the boss can buy another sports car this year”

I don’t want to work extra to make someone else richer. Maybe if I had a shit load of shares. Maybe. But I don’t. So I do my job with professional standards, but I’m not doing 12 hour days