International politics are pretty complicated.

I have finally rediscovered my love for cooking. Here’s what I do:

1. Don’t follow the recipe. The chef can’t write and the writer can’t cook. A lot of it is nonsense. If you think you know better, you do.

2. Do whatever you want. Don’t oversalt it or burn it and everything else can be fixed with more cookery.

3. Don’t cook for 2 hours unless you are having fun goofing around in the kitchen for 2 hours or are making a holiday dish everyone’s been wanting all year.

4. Learn all the shortcuts and try your own.

5. Eat while you’re cooking to see if it’s the way you want it and use all those spices and sauces to see what they do.

6. Easy mode: To make anything delicious, add salt, oil/fat, and acid. That will make everything but burned or oversalted stuff into edible. Also, pepper is somehow underrated despite being everywhere and in everything.

7. Don’t eat it in 10 minutes. You won’t digest it properly and it will add to your stress rather than relieving it. Take your time eating; the people making you rush are the problem not the food.

Agreed. It evokes a whole story. Either the Paladin is so overcommitted to their work to such a degree that they are willing to go on dangerous adventures or the society is so legalistic it’s the Paladin’s duty to accompany their cases wherever they go without exceptions. Alternatively, maybe the Paladin wanted to be an adventurer anyway to escape their boring life as a parole officer and found just such a situation that they can fufill their desires and duties at the same time.

Too often this option is presented by people who are deliberately manipulating you and causing you to think that you only have the two choices which each benefit them and neither you. Always consider who is offering this choice and why. The true lesser evil here is whatever you have to do to get out of the situation where this choice is being presented to you.

The actual bubble that needs to be popped is financialization. The US economy is now completely detached from productivity and is now running on speculation only through financial valuation. At the same time, people are starving, infrastructure is falling apart, the birth rate is plummeting, and suicide is on the rise. It’s time to stop taking “job creators” seriously and use all this fallow professional experience and skill to restart the material economy and forget this pretend crap that keeps plutocrats busy doing nothing of any value to anyone.

Nah, I can think of a worse feeling. To me it feels worse that people without executive dysfunction have never had to deal with this even one time and many of these individuals have no patience for people who do. At the same time they are fully capable of not procrastinating and do it anyway for fun and can at any time come back around to whatever it is they intended to do effortlessly. Because this is their experience and they constantly benefit by going along with societal prejudices without having to think about them because their default is non-thought at all times, there are no consequences for them to believe the brain is magic and brain disabilities can’t exist.

I think that’s the right approach. Once it starts getting old it won’t get better. That being said, the writing of the DLCs does not have the problem of the main story and are often pretty good. If getting access to all your character’s abilities wasn’t attached to playing the main story I would advise skipping the main game and only playing the DLCs.

I, like you, heard the story was bad but figured I could just focus on the gameplay and ignore the writing. Unfortunately, the reason the bad writing is so notorious is that the game is setup to jam it in your face consantly. It’s unrelenting.

Imagine playing a pretty decent game while a dead-eyed 50 year old comedian is making the worst jokes you’ve ever heard in your life while doing a very poor impression of gen-z internet slang they barely understand. The comedian thinks you the player are actually stupid so the jokes are as condescending as they are awful. Now imagine they won’t shut up. Every time you do anything in the game, you get a few minutes of these whacky jokes. Accepting a mission, every bullet of the mission, skits that you have to watch before progressing, etc. You have no choice but to engage with the lazy, insulting, horrendous writing that wears thin after minutes and goes on for the entire hours-long game.

There are mods that disable the endless chatter which I can’t recommend more highly. I made the misake of playing the game raw. The game is actually pretty fun, but the aggressive garbage of the writing is not something easily ignored.

This is really interesting. Faking an endorsement by someone who is accused of preventing thousands of needless deaths to sell shirts is on one level nefarious but on another level incorporating Luigi into mainstream pop culture. The plutocracy wants people to think this kid is the worst monster who ever lived, but the average American is so pleased with what he is accused of doing his likeness can be used to sell clothing. I am not totally opposed to the mainstreaming of this kind of folk hero. Optimally he should at least get some royalties to pay for his legal fees, though.

It’s an inhuman facsimile of the expression of humanity.

China has for decades deliberately designed their economy to provide affordable and quality labor to the capitalist world, and in all of the English speaking world capitalists are free to invest their money however they please wherever they please. Since it is cheaper to produce and import particular similar quality products from China than produce them domestically, that is what the right business move would be to minimize costs to maximize profit.

Definitely. They could do something about this but they would make less profit.

This is, very unfortunately, what happens in every internet space which is targeted towards children and allows communication among users. It is by far the easiest way for anonymous predatory adults to make contact with typically unattended children. I would like at some point to see a child-oriented space on the internet have the highest priority of children’s safety at some point, but there hasn’t been one yet.

Lived communally for years. It really depends on who else is living with you in the community because you must cooperate with them. The system works really well and I recommend anyone try out living in one for a while, but it’s very different than living individualistically. That being said it can also work too well and you may find yourself not leaving or interacting outside the commune for weeks or months at a time and falling out of contact with the outside world.

This is not a universal phenomenon. This is the result of stress affecting sleep by causing sleep latency problems or the quality of the sleep itself leaving the individual non-refreshed upon waking and needing a refractory period to recover from sleeping before getting out of bed. The reason it’s coming up a lot more often is that greater numbers of people are experiencing the health consequences of chronic stress.

Anti-social socialists are an absolutely fascinating internet phenomenon. I have met a handful in real life, but they’re more tolerated for their merits than any kind of influential when it comes to face to face dialogue and praxis.

This appears to be stupid, and it is, but it’s mostly evil. Teaching children to accept absurdities and distrust evidence to make them easier to control.

If it brings me pleasure it is something I need, as I need to enjoy my life. On something like this I would just think about whether the cost justifies the amount of pleasure it would bring me. If I know I would get tired of it after a few weeks, I’m not going to blow thousands on it. If it’s a major enhancement of a hobby I’ve had for a long time which deepens my ability to enjoy it and I’m not risking anything else by spending the money, then it’s a decent investment in my happiness.

Smarter and faster, but the same fuel tank and no brakes.

And the Nintendo of my childhood was responsible for pretty much every anti-consumer practice and cultural trend concerning videogames during my childhood:

Inventing the idea that videogames are toys only for little boys only for marketing purposes. Betraying and exploiting established relationships with developers. Screwing over partners on disc technology and reversing course to limit technology to be under their control. Supporting Jack Thompson throughout his campaign to ban all videogames with any adult content at all. Lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit to hold the entire industry back. The list goes on.