My understanding is XFCE is lighter weight and simpler. Little to no animations, for example.

https://itsfoss.com/linux-mint-cinnamon-mate-xfce/

I am extremely basic and I’m using the XFCE that came with Linux mint. I don’t need anything fancy.

Fine. Sometimes sad. I dated someone with a kid for a while and the good parts were good. But now I’m old so it’s kind of moot.

Right, and you shouldn’t ask a married monogamous person out on a date, either. Never came up for me but is worth keeping in mind! A lot of guys seem to struggle with “she likes me bro she smiled at me” -> “my guy she’s the cashier at work she has to smile at customers.”

You can just ask people out. You can just ask to kiss someone. I was in my mid 20s when someone told me the first one, and late 20s when someone told me the second one. Dating got a lot easier after each revelation.

I really don’t think Baldur’s gate 3 and whatever the fuck Monopoly go is are the same kind of thing.

Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like “the best metal from Colorado” or “a deep dive into acid jazz”. They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.

Also seeing who’s playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I’ll check out band B. I saw “Year of the Cobra” play with “The Well” and it was a good show, and I bought their album.

At least you can improve inventory in-game (eg: do normal gameplay quest and crafting stuff to get bigger bags). Some monetization is cash or nothing.

Still bad when they make something annoying and then charge to fix it.

Guild wars 2 specifically has a surprising amount of quality of life stuff for free, but you can see places where “we can make money here” won out occasionally.

Baldur’s gate 3 characters aren’t even that complicated. You pick stats at the start from a limited range of options, and then make very few choices when you level up. Some levels you don’t pick anything at all. This ain’t path of exile.

I got a mod for bg3 that gives you a feat every level and holy shit did that make it more interesting.

To WotC’s credit, making character choice really shallow is probably why the game succeeded so well. A lot of people don’t really want a lot of choices, especially when some are traps.

The larian games have some interesting interactions beyond just oil. You can make people slip on ice.

The old Magicka game also had some fun interactions that more games could learn from.

For a generous definition of “these days”, check out the pillars of eternity games. They’re very good and clearly a love letter to Baldur’s gate. Unfortunately the team is now making a Skyrim-like for some reason, but I hope they come back and finish the main game story sometime.

There’s also that solasta game that’s DND 5e but on a smaller budget from a few years ago.

“constantly be jumping while conjuring a skeleton” is pretty stupid and counter intuitive for an optimum thing to do, but it that’s what you should do if you want to level those skills up.

Morrowind also had some bizarre optimum behavior if you wanted to get the +5s on stats when you leveled.

They’ll probably start eviction proceedings if you stop paying rent. They may also do other unpleasant things to make the apartment unlivable.

In the US the law is generally not cheap and not on the side of the poor.

If there are alternate options for renting a place, then I’m open to hear it.

Public housing. Well funded, well run, public housing. Rip out the profit motive.

You probably have to remove all the conservatives from power first because they ideologically do not want a government that does good things.

Also probably repeal faircloth, which arbitrarily limits how much public housing there can be.

Owning a house involves paying out of pocket for maintenance whereas when renting, you can have the landlord take care of that for you, and it doesn’t involve paying whoever comes to fix your stuff.

Those costs are almost certainly built into your rent. It’s not free. You also risk the landlord just not fixing things.

There’s a lot of like management being like “we gotta hit this deadline (that we made up)” combined with “if I hit all my targets and put in some overtime, the boss can buy another sports car this year”

I don’t want to work extra to make someone else richer. Maybe if I had a shit load of shares. Maybe. But I don’t. So I do my job with professional standards, but I’m not doing 12 hour days

Funny but snopes says merely a legend https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/field-of-seeds/

My hypothesis is that a lot of people are emotionally invested in DND, and if you say bad things about it then it feels like you’re saying bad things about them. Saying it didn’t happen or it was the players fault let’s them still feel good about DND.

We’re all susceptible to this.

For some reason DND fans seem less likely to just go “yeah it’s kind of garbage but I like it”

Ah, yeah. During combat there’s the related “if you can’t decide what you’re doing in a minute, you dodge and we go to the next person” rule you can bring out.

There’s a wide range between tpk and something interesting happening.

Like, the players are dicking around and can’t decide how to ask the bartender if they can have access to the secret occult library in the basement. Just really spinning their wheels and being total PCs. Fine. Timer runs out. Their rival shows up, doesn’t acknowledge them, says something quietly to the bartender and is being lead to the basement.