The only downside is that the participants need to be familiar enough with their chosen game to do a randomizer which means roping in casual players is difficult.

Casual players can be fine with some games. Some actually become easier with Archipelago (e.g. Noita, Risk of Rain 2) since you’re getting meta-progression between runs that normally wouldn’t be there. Others though are especially punishing for new players (Doom comes to mind - you have to be pretty intimately familiar with the levels. There’s keys hidden in secret areas sometimes, for example, and ammo can be very scarce.)

Every time I see this, I can’t help but feel like it works better without the third panel. Showing it happening dulls the comedic impact of the final panel. Anyone who doesn’t know what Kirby is about isn’t going to understand the comic anyway, and anyone who does doesn’t need the third panel to understand what happened.

It’s assumed that you already have a pear tree; the partridges are just being installed into your pre-existing tree. Don’t be greedy. Mature fruit trees are expensive.

One brother is on an Xbox One is on a PC One is on a steam deck with WiFi hotspot.

That’s going to be the limiting factor.

Are you specifically looking for something to play against each other? There’s some pretty good options for co-op games with crossplay, and that might make for a more friendly experience, but if you’re in the mood for something competitive, options are a little more limited.

Some potential options:

• Destiny 2
• Monster Hunter Rise
• The Ascent
• Borderlands 3
• Warframe
• Remnant 2

If you all had a PC, you’d have a lot more options. Maybe two of you should consider going in on a Steam Deck for Brother #3 for Christmas!

replacing First-past-the-post voting in your state

Yeah, well, incidentally, ranked choice voting was on the ballot in 2020. We had a sign out encouraging people to vote for it, and I talked it up to whomever it would listen when political discourse came up, but it didn’t pass, so here we still are.

Voting should be an absolutely minor thing in the totality of your political actions. Join, start, or support a union. Find what mutual aids groups are nearby, and participate. Join protests. Pressure your local politicians. Support your comrades in their direct action campaigns. Build political power that is under your control, not the control of a system invented in the 1700s by a bunch of wealthy white slaveowners.

Totally with you!

Voted PSL, and yah, I am terrified.

Ah, you lost me. You see a problem, but you seem to be unwilling to accept that there are incremental steps to solving that problem, and the first step is to make sure Trump loses this election. If you aren’t doing everything you can to effect that result, you are, to put it simply, fucking up.

To support the Democratic party is to actively decide to place less value on the lives of non-Americans

Netanyahu wants Trump to win, and with good reason. Harris might not have good policy with regards to Israel / Palestine, but Trump’s is indisputably worse, if you aren’t staunchly pro-Israel. Furthermore, Harris is better in pretty much every measurable metric including climate change, where Trump’s “Burn it all down” policy would doom us all.

To be clear, if I was going to be a single issue voter, climate change would be that issue, not foreign policy, because if we fuck that one up, everyone loses.

It’s cool, though - I’m sure the people dying in Gaza if Trump wins will understand that you couldn’t vote for “better” because it wasn’t “perfect”. Your 12-16 year plan for change will surely make them feel better about their situation, when Trump is encouraging Israel to do whatever they need to to end the conflict quickly.

That’s some master-class mental gymnastics. Go vote. Jesus fucking Christ.

I wonder if those folks who cast a protest vote for Jill Stein will be sleeping soundly tonight… I sure hope not. I hope they’re fucking terrified.

Not only WoW, but most old MMOs were built around being social experiences. The really old ones (Everquest, most notably) were basically chat rooms with games attached. The gameplay was very slow, and you relied heavily on other players to progress, so you spent a lot of time just chatting with people, either in zone chat or in groups or in guilds. Over time, you started to recognize the same names showing up in the same places, or as you progressed, the same players would be progressing at the same pace so you’d keep seeing them as you moved from zone to zone.

It was also a lot easier to build friendships for otherwise socially awkward people. You had an immediate common interest and common goal (advancing in the game), so you had common ground to talk about, and a common activity to enjoy together, but during the downtime, conversation would often shift to other things - where you lived, how old you were, what your hobbies were… so you’d get to know people ‘outside the game’, too.

Nowadays, WoW and other MMOs are much more fast-paced, and much more solo play oriented. There’s still group-required content, but it’s very action-heavy; you don’t have a lot of time that you’re just sitting around chatting, and groups are much more short-term things. 15 or 20 minutes, whereas once upon a time, it was 3+ hours as standard.

I met my oldest friend in an MMO about 24 or 25 years ago… we accompanied each other to a few different games over the years, and now we aren’t playing anything together, but we still talk. I flew across the country to attend his wedding a couple years ago. Similarly, I met my wife in WoW. Our first “date” was killing bugs in Silithus together. We’ve been together for about 18 years.

Old (as in, early-late 2000s) MMOs generated a lot of friendships; this isn’t at all an uncommon story to hear from people who played them at that time.

Correct, there’s currently no way to migrate post / comment history to another instance.

Surely we’ve all seen it before at this point, but it’s never too late to be reminded of The Enigma of Amigara Fault.

That would make Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa the only places in the universe an American can’t vote for President

An American who is registered to vote in a state can vote from Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands or American Samoa just like an American who is registered to vote in a state can do so from another country, or from space. An American who is not registered to vote in a state cannot vote from anywhere, regardless of where that is.

There’s no real difference between $213 billion and $270 billion when it comes to buying power. Both are effectively unlimited. Both could buy small countries if they wanted to. But there sure is a difference when it comes to ego, because when we talk about it, we’re always treating it like a great thing to be the richest person in the world, instead of sociopathy.

As long as we keep treating wealth like a scoreboard, this will continue. If we collectively demonized people with unreasonable wealth, ostracized them from society, and stopped glorifying it and treating them like celebrities because of it, we might be in a better spot.

Incidentally it’s a lot easier to take legal action against a business that violates the ADA than to take action against a government that insists on defunding programs like that.

Every time you look at the app, they share the time you’re seeing with every other user, it’s a privacy nightmare!

You’re the hero the internet needs.

Vampire Survivors’ genre has been coined ‘Bullet Heaven’, literally the opposite of bullet hell. The fact that it has the tag on Steam is kind of meaningless. Monster Hunter: Wilds’ Steam Page has the Dating Sim tag, but I’m willing to bet I won’t get to romance a Rathalos.

if you have a more effective metric in mind, I’d love to hear it instead of just pointing out flaws

I mean, isn’t the whole point of this comment section to discuss the merits and flaws of the proposal you’ve made? If we’re not discussing the downsides, too, what’s even the point?

That said, an ideal system would be a measure of the quality of content, not the quantity of content so, as another user has suggested, some measure involving net upvotes might be more effective. Yes, obviously a user can create multiple accounts to upvote everything and fuck with that metric, but I kind of doubt many folks would go to the trouble.

Maybe some combination of PCM and the average number of votes divided by the number of active users could generate some sort of quality metric. At the very least it might be a measure of engagement.

Spam Resistance: Creating multiple accounts to inflate MAU is easy. Generating meaningful posts and comments is harder.

Isn’t this actually just spam encouragement? A community with a bot that posts 50 low-value posts every day will have a much higher PCM as a result, and that behavior is more obnoxious to users and moderators who have to see it and deal with it, vs. someone creating a bunch of accounts, which is largely invisible to everyone else.