I understand why the fascist aging Boomers don’t care about impending climatepocalypse but I don’t understand what their younger toadies think they stand to gain by going along with climate science denial

As long as they keep allowing snake oil advertising, AI-generated content is not my biggest problem with Youtube.

Culture wars to keep proles distracted from class wars you say?

I do like pineapple in Asian chicken/rice dishes, but I was raised on beef burgers topped with pickle, ketchup, cheese, lettuce, tomato and bacon and that’s my burger comfort zone.

It’s not always easy or free to access published material - a lot but not all Adventurers League stuff is on Scribd, and there’s a lot of third-party content on DMsGuild that’s just a little too obscure for liberators to bother de-fingerprinting. If you can’t find a free copy of a title within the first couple pages of web search results then at least you’ve set the bar for spoilers at having to pay for them.

As someone who has played through adventures after having read or even DM’ed them… It’s not hard to take a back seat to other players who don’t know the surprises and twists of an adventure. Encourage your players to make a choice, if they must read ahead then at least don’t trivialize the adventure for the players who don’t.

The snake-oil part is solved by prohibiting scientifically unproven claims. Laudanum was sold as a cure-all; obviously as a society we don’t want to allow opiates to be marketed for everything from allopecia to zika.

Mexico’s pharma industry works like this to some extent. You can walk into a .mx pharmacy and get yourself antibiotics, boner pills, a CPAP machine, hormonal birth control, and much much more without a doctor’s note. Purity doesn’t seem to be a big problem; you generally don’t have to worry that it might be 10% opium or whatever. International travelers can bring up to 3 months’ personal supply back to the U.S., which would be tricky if border officials’ drug-sniffing dogs routinely flagged contaminant drugs of concern in medication inspections.

Healthy people have a resilient emotional support network and that can mean different numbers for different people - but 15 channels of commercial messaging bots is not that

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Since the odds are so slim of tariffs at this scale further boosting an economy that was already pretty vigorous - I think the more important question is, who are you going to scapegoat when tariffs don’t work as advertised? Immigration? George Soros? Biden? Deep State? Panama and Greenland? Her emails? Will you swallow the doublethink when Murdoch and Bezos’s fake news tell you a recession is really sort of a boom, and vodka rations are up 8%?

He should sort this out with a therapist. It sounds like they need relationship counseling together but, call it a hunch, I doubt she will join him in that right away.

Very eye-opening! this info and its implications make me feel even better about removing myself from Reddit.

The fediverse needs someone with Maxwell’ energy to promote and seed.

We knew that was coming when we saw Sundar Pichai in Oligarch Row at the inauguration

I was already iffy about Reddit since the r/place #fuckspez whitewashing. I was never suspended - but when I learned Luigi was suddenly an “unperson” topic there, I realized that commercialized social media is inherently compromised.

I’m not swearing off FB/Insta entirely just yet, but every time I visit them I’m more and more vividly aware how tedious Meta channels are.

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Lots and lots of people, actually. Many identify with the tough-talkin’ images being projected, believing it’s just what the world needs and that the magic sorting hat will assign them to the privileged class when the dust settles.

You dodged a bullet. Ghosting demonstrates emotional irresponsibility.

This is your opportunity to decide for yourself, just how often is a reasonable frequency of check-ins? Maybe he’s intentionally playing hard-to-get, maybe he’s underconfident and fearful of initiating, mistaking passivity for being “chill” / approachable.

Initiating check-ins should feel somewhat evenly shared. If there are also other red flags this early in the getting-to-know-you stage, then yes just honor your intuition and leave the ball in his court. When I was dating, I checked in the day after a date, and then every 2-3 days thereafter. If you both have full schedules then maybe a week? You’re not a bad person if a week between check-ins is too little connection for you.

In my defense, my family of origin revolved around a cookie cutter Atlas Shrugged minor villain dad - gaslighter, business cheat and mooch, compulsive womanizer - so Atlas Shrugged’s heroes were the fantasy I needed when I read it. I knew I wasn’t a “John Galt” so I tinkered with a dutiful Eddie Willers identity for a bit. Some good still came out of it - I got interested in philosophy as a respectable formal academic topic, and outgrew the fantasy.

If you’ve experienced abuse in one relationship, you’re more likely to find yourself in subsequent abusive relationships. You 100% don’t deserve abuse, but there are emotional habits that people learn in childhood that set us up to be especial targets for predatory partners.

I grew up witnessing my narcissist father cyclically abusing and neglecting my mother. With that baggage, in my late teens I was groomed into a manipulative relationship with a slightly older partner. I broke free after a few years, but this was all pre-Internet, so it was only much later that I learned the vocabulary to name narcissistic abuse flags and connected the dots. It was cyclical, and would almost certainly have turned physically abusive.

I think it’s an oversimplification to say we tend to gravitate and feel special chemistry with people who recreate familiar (abusive) relationship patterns. There’s a lot more complexity to romantic attraction and sexual attraction than just comfort/familiarity. I think there’s usually more subtle, coded things going on that predators use to probe and groom targets - how we respond to a bigoted “joke”, or two-faced cattyness, glorifying drugs and alcohol, etc.