They shared the chat using Google’s built in sharing feature, so it seems legit.

Many ancient practitioners of stoicism were wealthy statesmen, including emperors. And, the literate elite were certainly enamored with it. I’m not a historian, but stoicism was shaped by wealthy and powerful people, as was every popular philosophy.

I’m not opposed to it. I like aspects of Stoicism. But, When it comes to wealth, it always rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed so often to me that wealthy stoics make a virtue out of possessing, but not coveting wealth, and in doing so make a vice of dissatisfaction with one’s wealth. For a rich man, this is reasonable. However, a poor man is correct to be dissatisfied. Poor men need to be angry, and to rise up and demand wealth (in my opinion), their pain and anguish is meant to be felt and to stoke action.

Stoicism is not often presented as compatible with this mindset of mine. I’m sure there are types of stoicism which address this, but most influencers seem to present Stoicism though a relatively uncritical lense.

My caveat to this is that many of the foundational individuals to stoicism, as well as present influencers, are members of the upper class, and while there are a lot of great ideas in there, stoicism can often be distilled into a philosophy of rugged individualism which is more easily achieved with wealth, power, and privilege.

I am of the opinion that stoicism is good, but a disproportional number of those who practice it are often out of touch.

Congratulations! … [Cries in Florida man tears]

Tons of people already are. The following site is useful for searching papers using ai https://consensus.app/

Unfortunately, I do not know. If you find anything out, I’d like to hear about it.

Not good news. So I’m coming from a Florida perspective. The general wisdom here in the past has been native milkweed in the garden is important for the monarch.

After working at native plant nurseries, and now for the local government doing environmental work, I’ve seen the narrative shifting to no milkweed.

Basically, disease has become a big issue in our South Eastern monarch populations, and it turns out that gardens have become hotspots for it. Here is an article on the subject.

https://www.wuwf.org/2024-09-03/half-the-butterflies-in-northwest-florida-are-dying-from-a-parasite-on-milkweed-plants

I personally stopped recommending Milkweed of any kind to people years ago after seeing the effect of disease in the nursery I worked it.

Aphids love milkweed. If you want a butterfly host plant for the southeast, I recommend getting a passion vine native to your area. Monarchs don’t be really need more milkweed, and you can host more species! It is cool to feed the lady bugs, though!

I have to say after watching the videos, boo to the corpo for the weird exploitative lies, but kudos to the two women for staying in character! They legit put effort into moving like the real robots around them, and all while in what were probably uncomfortable costumes. I hope they get positive social media attention!

If you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you like this other girl? Was she mean to you?

I’ll be honest, this is confusing as hell, so I might be misunderstanding.

I think it’s a little hypocritical that you want it to be a chill, no drama space with the bros, but you also want to exclude a girl because you see her as competition for the guy you like who is in this group.

I understand you had a bad experience with her, but you said that the guys don’t know that. From their perspective, you’re just excluding other girls for no other reasons than seemingly to be the only girl in the group and perhaps to have exclusive access to your crush.

“Warning: you will get texted so use your disposal number.”

Umm… What?

I’m so happy that new pipe is working again.

I use virtual credit cards from privacy.com. for trials I set a $1 limit and forget about it. It’s pretty useful for legitimate subscriptions too, since I can pause or end them just by pausing the card.

I didn’t realize that it sold so well! That’s good to hear it is successful. I’m not over the moon with the game, but I did get 30 hours or so out of it, and don’t think it’s bad at all. My biggest annoyance was that it felt too similar to AOE 2, which I saw as the superior game at launch. Still, that’s a bit of bias from an old gamer, lol. I think it’s fun!

Definitely! Just to clarify, I think that good RTS games make good esports, but fundamentally on the basis is being carefully made, captivating, and nuanced. I think an overt focus on developing an RTS as a esport tends to lead to low risk, streamlined designs which while fun, lack some of the staying power that older, more established titles have. Perhaps, I’m disillusioned about the genre in general, and that’s not the case!

Also, yeah 3d can be good, but I do think that Sprite based graphics are easy to parse and very pleasing to look at. I wish we had a healthy balance of the 2. 2d also tends to look more, evergreen, with 3d RTS looking dated on release due to the quantity of animated units. Though, strong art design would help offset this.

I disagree with this premise. I think games like age of empires and StarCraft had mass appeal and success. They brought in audiences who don’t normally like games, and broadly were well received by young, old, and different genders. Especially age of empires 2.

Modern RTS games are just (mostly) sloppy, unfinished, cashgrabs with no vision. They suffer the most from the transition to 3d as well. If a major studio actually put work and time into a polished, 2d, isometric, RTS that wasn’t solely focused on being an esport, I think there is a major vacuum for them to fill.

Man, if I was personally responsible for laying off 1500 people, I’d flush myself down a toilet. People like this guy are just shit.

Probably if there is some sort of universal intelligence evaluating our actions and decisions, it would turn anyone entertaining this idea into an worm in their next life. The premise that the good fortuned should be passive to suffering, and enable it, out of some misguided moral calculus is absurd. You can’t game the system.

Mario vs Rabbits is a surprisingly fun turn based tactics game. It’s something different gameplay wise from much of the switch library.

I saw someone mention Mario Odyssey. I hadn’t owned a Mario game since Mario 64, but I thought it was incredible! It’s just fun as all heck, and the surreal tone of the game kept me entertained. It has a bizarre mashup of “realistic” styles with the Mario universe. There isn’t co-op exactly, but one person can play as the hat, helping out. Just, don’t count it out because you aren’t hyped about Mario. It’s a quality game, and stands on its own merits.