Same. I gravitate towards female avatars for the most part, usually because I just like looking at them more.

Sometimes it’s more game specific. Mass Effect, for example, the stock fem Shep is just the canonical version of the character in my head. Had a cooler and more relatable face design. And perhaps most importantly, default masc Shep just really looks like every dudebro I’ve ever disliked in person.

Yeah, everyone’s got their preferences, fo sho.

This was the first time I ever felt empathy for JD Vance, just as a dad. Also probably the last time.

Jesus, technical people are some of the worst communicators I’ve ever worked with.

It’s not necessarily their fault though. Y’know who goes into technical jobs? People who often prefer to work with machines, physical stuff, laws of nature, that’s who. And often because it’s MUCH easier than working with people, at least for them.

On top of that, soft skills are HARD. Communication is HARD. It comes easier for some, but it’s a skill like any other. It’s the technical socialites, the diplomatic devs who become the best managers and leaders, due to the rarity of their hybrid skillsets.

I’m in the middle. Just technical enough to mostly understand the devs and understand the implications of plans, and just enough soft skills to turn that into decent documentation, emails, and working with clients.

SUCKS that I’ve gotten a taste of project management and hated the absolute fuck out of it. I probably would’ve been decent at it otherwise.

It does make a little sense, when you consider that one of the goals is to demotivate fascists from voting at all.

Straight facts don’t dissuade fascists. They have every argument and deflection in their back pocket ready to go. Trump is a rapist/racist/traitor? Fake news, fake news, fake news.

But… Trump is weird? That hits them right in the ego. They’re not a principled policy-based voting base, it’s a cult of personality. Even if they want to say he’s NOT weird, it’s not a fact, it’s an opinion. So all it takes is showing a bunch of really strange gaffes, irrelevant rants, and incoherent ramblings, and you just might get would-be Trump voters to feel too embarrassed to vote for him.

It’s a long shot, but based on what I’ve been seeing, it appears to be effective so far. We’ll have to wait and see.

Maybe I’m just bad then. Wouldn’t surprise me 😬

Oof, I’m mostly the opposite these days. Multiplayer games either have too much toxicity from randos, or they’re stuffed with progression systems that actively make me hate the game even if the gameplay itself is good.

Still like coop games like Darktide every once in a while.

Or if you develop wrist pain… most FPSs just go right out the window. Or you play on controller and get whomped by the mouse and keyboard players.

I played Red/Blue as a kid. Enjoyed the crap out of them. And then never played any of the later games ever. I think if I tried now I’d feel the same as you.

As someone whose friends got me into destiny 2 on launch… even if you played through the story it was meh at best.

I played through the base game and the first major expansion, but the whole gameplay loop just got so boring so fast.

That’s… an interesting one. Uniquely frustrating from what sort of perspective? Like, do other fighting games work for you but platform fighters don’t? Or are fighting games in general just not your thing?

That’s true, it could be racism, it could be both.

God, if Taylor Swift runs for president I’d be stunned. I mean, given the circumstances I’d vote for her, but geez Louise.

The only outcome that might suck even more is if Biden did step down, Kamala steps up, and she still loses. Cuz then it’s like… oh so we’re just gonna be misogynistic as a voter base now, great, thanks fellow Americans. Like, we were ready to vote for a shambling shell of an old man but not a lady with Hillary Clinton energy, okay. 🤦

Well, in the current economy, the statistical indicators that economists rely on are booming. GDP, etc. What folks on the left like us are saying is that those indicators are easily measurable but do not paint an accurate picture of what most Americans are experiencing. It doesn’t feel like a boom out here because, well, it ain’t.

It’s not like we’re sipping champagne, kicking it at the beach, and complaining that the guy next door has a nicer beach. We work just as hard as other generations and get a lot less to show for it.

Acknowledging that is important, but corporate politicians in either party seem like they just don’t want to anything about it.

Still voting for Biden, but yeah, not enthusiastically.

Yeah it’s not great, but like… coming across as coherent is important no matter the position. Biden kinda failed that basic competency test, probably just due to his age and not like, stupidity or a personal failing of any kind. I’m still voting for Biden, but yeah it’s not exactly an enthusiastic vote.

So, speaking from a purely pragmatic perspective, voting for Biden is better than other US electoral choices for the purpose of trying to help Palestinians.

I understand your reticence and moral indignation, I largely feel the same.

But the biggest reason Trump won in 2016 is because voters were not particularly enthused with their choices, and a great many decided not voting at all (or voting for Trump as a protest against the establishment) was preferable to voting for HRC.

I have to imagine that we both believe that Trump is worse than Biden when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Given that we’re already in election year, it’s down to Biden and Trump. One of them is going to be president come January next year.

Taking all that together, if we want things to get better for Palestine, we should vote for Biden because the alternatives are much worse.

Granted there is a lot you can do outside of elections to help, and I wouldn’t recommend ignoring those. But given that voting for the US president takes a few hours out of one day every four years, it’s not a good idea to ignore that either.

I hope this helps you understand those of us who don’t really like Biden but will vote for him regardless.

At this point I’m not sure what’s newest, since my kid just watches everything streaming.

I do have to say the newer 2D animated shorts, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, are a fantastic return to form.

Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.

So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he’s still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he’s in.

Which to your average adult viewer means… he’s a bland and uninteresting character.

That said, he’s still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.

The framing of the article’s headline is bad, but the problem is that because people in starter homes can’t trade up, first time buyers can’t buy starter homes. Ultimately, the problem is that MORE people are stuck renting.

And that’s purely descriptive. The people in the starter homes are not to blame, in any moral sense. But people read blame into it because emotionally resonant headlines get more clicks, so they frame it that way.

people are lazy have busy lives and want to put their time and energy into things that aren’t learning a whole new technology skill.

FTFY.

Once Firefox on mobile got extension support, I switched over immediately to use a decent adblocker. Made sure every app that opens a browser opens in Firefox. Has made my mobile browsing experience so much better, of my goodness.