West coast small towns are like something out of Central Casting.

Even the homeless groups and young hoodlums are completely diverse and look like they were hired by Netflix for portraying fair representation. It’s hilarious to see after living in places where racial and gender lines were set in some kind of ancient stone and people haaaated each other’s groups or identities.

It actually makes me feel really hopeful for the future going into a walmart out west and seeing every other couple is interracial or there are gay or lesbian couples openly holding hands in public. The attitudes and cartoonish hatred you see on Trump-fixated media seems like fiction from another world. (At least until the ICE gas grenades start landing in the home depot parking lot.)

I grew up in an entire family who had fallen down this slippery pipeline of magical thinking. For some of them, it cost them everything.

It’s almost entirely bullshit designed to prey on people who are desperate for something better in their lives, desperate to feel less alone, desperate to feel hope that the universe is bigger than it seems and that they won’t die or have to say goodbye to everyone someday.

That’s where it does the most harm, along with religious beliefs like the rapture or Armageddon fantasies, it’s just magical thinking that makes you feel like nothing on Earth here and now matters. No need to worry about the climate, Jesus/Aliens are coming. No need to get educated and invest in your future, Jesus/Aliens are coming. No need to value your every moment like it may be your last, because Jesus/Aliens are coming, you have all the time in the world to ignore the people and precious memories around you.

The most fucked-up part of it all is I think there may be something weird going on, but it’s not aliens or jesus, it’s not an escape, it may not even be an “objective” thing, but maybe some natural phenomenon that our brains are recontextualizing. But this kind of “maybe there’s something real” event seems to be exceedingly rare and without a way to study or replicate it, without valid, unambiguous evidence, it’s like any of our own subjective experiences, it takes place inside you and can’t impact the world around you. If you think it will, you will end up alone and disappointed.

I hate this manufactured holiday bullshit so much. The fact that everyone has to do it at the same time, all over the goddamn western world, it just throws a massive wrench into work, plans and issues like medical appointments, work projects, and of course financial planning.

I think it would be a lot easier if buying food for a dozen people didn’t cost half a grand right now.

I have high hopes that Light No Fire will learn the lessons from NMS and make a world that is both dynamic and interesting, but grounded enough in a single planet that it’s not such a slog to explore and it’s not just “Oh, neat, a green planet with blue worm aliens and purple trees, this is a color/creature combo I haven’t seen in hours.”

Also, imagine how nice it would be if they just drop it as a huge MMO and you just drop in somewhere and people start randomly finding each other and building communities. That would go so hard, and yet the studios capable of making that kind of experience are soooo scared of the 2% of players who will play that and whinge all over the forums that they’re “bored, lost and can’t find anyone.”

I am using a 7-year-old video card on a 5-year-old machine and have been notified my health care premiums are going up 1000%.

I’ve been playing small, cheap, low-res social games with friends and family like Misery or RV There Yet and those are nice. But I feel like gaming broadly is starting to recede in my rear-view mirror. Too many real-world problems and stresses and not enough pay.

I am not sure what all these huge companies are going to do when nobody can afford anything anymore.

That may be it, I am expecting something more grand or epic or complicated to start uncovering, not really realizing that what I’m already doing is “it” and the rest is just exploring for the sake of exploring.

I really really really want to like this game

Same, when it comes to games with vast scope and scale of a universe, it’s either this, Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen.

Elite Dangerous feels very “cockpitty” even with recent updates, it’s just not very pretty or engaging and I’ve tried several times to launch myself into it. VR was amazing for a little while, but still felt very “yellow cockpit” after a bit and a dark field of stars everywhere you look.

Star Citizen was very engaging for a bit, the open-world PVP, realistic scale, social, busy world and hyper-realism and absolutely beautiful environment have sooooo much potential, I log in annually and stand in a viewing area on a space station and just look out at the universe… but that’s it, I don’t like the janky, unpolished controls, the broken missions and lack of personalization/incentive to survive. I would even take very basic survival mechanics like base making, farming, upgrading skills and devices and places to loot and gather furnishings like No Man’s Sky. There should be a reason you want to get a crew together and hang out in a personalized ship.

No Man’s Sky feels a lot like “less intuitive minecraft” and I think I rather just play minecraft if I want to dig and build in a colorful, cartoonish world. The whole "harvest oxygen and swamp gas and process it with tungsten dust and then turn that dust into widgets which you refine into super widgets… it gets grindy and off-putting because it’s not comfortably accessible, it’s not intuitive, and that’s where my biggest beef with NMS is, the lack of an intuitive direction or goal and the feeling that there’s just too many lonely planets and not enough rewarding experience in spending so much time landing on each. Even if it was an actual MMO it would be more engaging.

I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game

Are you me?

I have it installed right now, I logged in to play all this new, raved-over content and found myself on some planet with too much air-traffic making noise overhead, needing to collect minerals to power my ship, and a base with some minecraft-like chests of loot.

I know the game is vast and deep and full of surprises and such, but I have the hardest time connecting with it enough to feel like I want to explore several hundred hyper-colorful planets.

So she pissed off a bunch of reddit incels?

I am not sifting through one of the worst subreddits in existence for hours reading people arguing. I asked what she did that made her a “shit person” and all her comments from what I saw on brief scan seem based or at least mid/average for reddit drama and I still am left feeling like she just makes sexually insecure young men angry with utterly average comics, which is fine, ya’ll fuckers need to feel more human emotions.

At least you had bots, I had an actual mod of a huge sub report me to admins because I asked why I was banned for quoting someone’s comment and then reporting them for hate, 12 years of good standing and a stint as a mod also just flushed because the site is managed by unpaid child labor.

My question was “what did she do that makes her a bad person” and you replied to my question with some vibe stuff, which I summarized, and now you’re butthurt? It’s okay to not like her comics, and that’s all I’ve read that she’s done bad.

I don’t get the big deal, I am not hiding that. Does that make my question in bad faith? Or does that make the way I summarized it hurt your feelings? I do not care, I just get really weirded out seeing internet hate campaigns against people who are fine and haven’t hurt anyone.

Ah, reddit mods. Truly the most underprotected class who don’t deserve such foul hassles due to their unimpeachable history and consistent, upstanding behavior.

So she didn’t actually do anything bad, you just don’t like her style. I’m not sure exactly how being a successful but mid cartoonist makes you a “shit person” but I guess that’s where we are in society.

I have seen this sentiment before and nobody’s been able to say exactly why she’s a “shit person.” What did she do?

This is why corporate America wants our population uneducated and tuned out and hooked on AI slop and distractions.

Regular walks are the absolute best thing you can do for your dog and yourself.

Across suburban humanity, there are countless millions of dogs who get to stare at the same walls every day, all day, and they are creatures designed for roaming and running down prey. For that matter, so are you.

Dogs get depressed and anxious, people get depressed and anxious. Walking helps with that.

The beach is a nesting ground of vast biomes of creatures, singled-celled, through to vast arrays of worms, some parasitic, all the way up to burrowing arthropods like sand fleas and their many, many cousins. We don’t usually have problems with any of this stuff when we swim or hang out on the sand because… and I cannot stress this enough, we do not eat raw produce we find in the sand.

Please do not eat raw produce you find in the sand.

Laughs softly in spreading American corporate virus

I wish everyone who reads it would have as positive of an interpretation/association.

Like, imagine if we decided that books older than five or ten years were suddenly not worth reading

I can’t even get anyone I know to try reading Hail Mary before watching the inevitably less satisfying movie, and these are educated people who like science fiction, and the book was written exactly for today’s readers with shorter chapters.

Rates are falling, the book may go the way of the radio. Not gone, just not shaping society like it used to.

https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump

Welcome to getting old in the new millenium, where the things you loved are still kept fresh and can be still seen all over the internet, yet they are still… inextricably, old. I do not know what the next generation’s idea will be of intellectual development, but if it follows the patterns of history, likely we will hate it. With a deep, burning fire in our aching bones.