Clearly gotta start listening to truecrime podcasts and let some young kids muck up your YouTube algorithm and they won’t know anymore what your gender is

My wife and go on kicks of playing a bunch of Minecraft together which is amazing

As others have said loss of interest can happen and the interest can of course come back with a vengeance. I’d recommend picking up another hobby until gaming suddenly grasps your interest again.

Two types of hobbies that have lasting positive impacts on people are creative hobbies and physical hobbies. Your brain is wired to invent and create and your body is wired to move, so being able to do each for fun is brilliant for your mental and physical health. Hop on a bicycle, go for a walk and enjoy the crisp fall air, stop off at that gym you forgot to cancel your membership for, and start doing it regularly.

For creative hobbies you can get a pack of printer paper for a couple of bucks and a pack of Crayola crayons or colored pencils and just start doodling. If you suck at drawing make wierd geometric shapes to rebuild the fine motor skills that computers have killed. Or if you want something more in-depth model making is always great because it has elements of fantasy while having entry points at any skill level. Personally I’ve been getting back into model railroading which if that seems boring to watch a train go around in circles, consider it has its own table top roleplay scene in the form of operations

At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass

Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure

Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.

Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.

The upscaling technologies they’ve been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn’t necessarily needed. There’s an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn’t run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I’m sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!

If he’s anything like American conservatives he probably appreciates the comparison more than anything

This is particularly American sensibility about not drinking alcohol casually around children

Shockingly this will vary by family. Some families take their kids bar hopping while they drink to excess, some drink casually and not in excess, and some are sober around their kids, and some remain sober all the time. My wife grew up hanging out in bars with her parents biker friends and their kids. She learned to watch some of them and save the good homemade wine when someone was about to topple. I grew up with parents who would have a single drink with dinner one to two times a week and would avoid getting drunk (at least that I know of).

Personally, as a parent and living in an area with a strong alcohol culture and with alcoholic family members, I drink very rarely (the alcoholic family members really kill my desire to drink), and when I do I make sure we have more than enough adults available to parent and drive if needed. I also am very much a lightweight so there is no drinking without getting noticeably giggly and sloppy. My wife feels and acts similarly but is not a lightweight and can realistically drink one drink and be visibly unaffected.

I honestly think the OP is less about the presence of alcohol around children but more just calling out a wine mom as such

My wife’s family will 100% get drunk around their kids, and drunk drive with the kids in the car. Seeing that first hand makes us really reluctant to drink at all.

Everyone is expecting his government to still follow the established rules

Realistically, the government will be forced to continue to follow the established precedent and constitution until the moment its not. When it will go off the rails and what to expect are entirely unknowable, but ultimately every institution relies upon and expects the United States federal government continuing to function and enforce the rule of law.

Most likely, if Trump is successful at becoming a dictator, it won’t be by breaking the rules but simply changing them. Lukashenko of Belarus was elected to their position, then changed the rules to hold onto power. Putin of Russia continues to be elected to his position and changes the rules to hold onto power. Erdoğan of Turkey continues to be elected to his position, and changes the rules to hold onto power. By following the laws and engaging in (heavily manipulated) democratic elections it provides an illusion of legitimacy and stability that doesn’t immediately scare away all business investment and industry, two things that the United States relies heavily upon as a service-based economy. A violent revolution would immediately collapse the economy, eliminating most support for Trump’s cause and radicalizing many against him. A policy-based revolution can occur before most people can even identify that its happening, and by the time its clear what’s happened it will be too late to do anything to stop it.

But a policy-based revolution actually requires the policies to be passed, and in the United States, policies don’t pass without financial support from wealthy businesses and their executives. The Republican party is made up of members who are all varying degrees of unhinged. Many seem to only follow trump because that’s the politically “safe” thing for them to do and will break the moment it appears “safe” to break from him (we saw the first Republicans try to do this in early 2021 following the insurrection on Jan 6th, but Trump was still too powerful so they were primaried and now presumably took jobs with large donors in the private sector). Mike Pence certified the election (a largely symbolic gesture that while legally required to conclude presidential election, there is no precedent nor written law dictating what happens if an election is not certified) against trump’s orders because actually toppling democracy was simply too far for him. Other republican politicians will find their own breaking points where their personal values and morals outweigh their careers and take an action against Trump’s wishes. And the entire opposition now knows without a shadow of a doubt that Trump and his cronies will attempt to keep him in power, so the opposition will do everything it can to stop it. The cards are still in Democracy’s favor, and they’re very much stacked against Trump and likely the Democrats as well (Once Trump passes there’s a good chance the Republican party will collapse and either a new party will grow out of its remains or the Democrats will swing right again collecting the Republican politicians still wishing to continue their careers and a new party will emerge from the Left. Historically, no political party has survived past its dictatorial strongman)

So, in short, yes Trump’s scary, but clearly I have more faith in our political institutions and politicians to shake off this obvious grasp for dictatorial power than you do.

Good news is the Republicans are varying levels of unhinged, so since Trump doesn’t actually care about policy they could become deadlocked again as they infight over how badly to screw up the country, probably with trying to muck up Medicare or the ACA again

I’ve only seen the ocean when visiting family in LA, so I do genuinely wonder if the waves are especially loud and violent there compared to, say the Gulf of Mexico or the US East Coast. But importantly, that is the exact same conditions Hollywood people would be used to too, so they should be very aware of how loud the ocean is (I’d say its comparable to cruising altitude in a standard commercial passenger aircraft)

Don’t forget the universally established upward direction so all ships are magically oriented exactly the same when they meet

At beaches too. Hollywood is based so close to the beach they should know how hard it is to hold a conversation at a normal tone of voice near the ocean

I read an interesting article about historical armor fights. Basically some researchers got special forces members to wear replica historical armor and simulate battle as described in various surviving epics and identified the armor to be surprisingly effective

Duels did happen from time to time in the 19th century. For example, California Senator David Broderick in 1859 became the only US Senator to die in a duel, and there’s a difficult to validate tale of two French men in 1808 holding a gun duel in hot air balloons!

Actually I have a history book about the history of ballooning called Aeronauts that I found at a thrift store. If I remember I’ll see what that has to say about this tale because it does call out other largely fabricated tales as such

But like most fictions, the fiction of Wild West duels contains some kernels of truth and certainly makes for great drama

Honestly the original effects also had me going:

So I suppose it’s not that much worse with the ring

Edit: meant to reply one comment up. Too late now

There’s a Christmas movie called Holiday in Handcuffs where a woman abducts a dude to play her boyfriend so her family gets off of her back, and naturally they actually fall in love by the end but also HOLY SHIT HOW IS THAT A THING

I just accepted a job with a small MSP starting early next year. I kept a close ear out during the interview for signs of the classic MSP hell stuff that would chew through techs but it does look like I got a good one (small 8 or so man shop) but check in in about 3 months and we’ll see how I’m feeling haha

My longer term plan is to use this as a stepping stone to then move onto being in-house then figuring out my exit strategy before burnout takes me, which I’m thinking I’ll either be aiming to move into IT management or possibly moving into a business analytics or cloud administration type role. Technical sales probably wouldn’t be too bad either.

As a wisconsinite I can tell you climate change is destabilizing the polar vortex so now there’s about a week every year where it’s -40 so climate change isn’t just about warming but the general change and destabilization of the climate