When you carry a ton of feathers, you also have to carry the weight of what you did to those poor birds…

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.

Completely with you here. “I know Trump would be worse for the issue I purport to be the most important to me, but I can’t bring myself to vote for the better of two realistic options because she’s not perfect, so I’m voting for Jill Stein.” It’s completely nonsensical, and honestly, I have zero respect for anyone who would actually knowingly make that decision.

everything else is small potatoes….

I disagree. It’s all small potatoes compared to climate policy; if we don’t address that, Israel, Palestine, Russia and Ukraine will be fucked, as will all the rest of us. Trump is markedly worse there, so really, it should be no contest.

Look, I get the outcry over this issue, but here’s the thing: Biden isn’t Kamala, and all of this rhetoric is acting like she is. Additionally, Congress passes the budgets that determine where this aid goes, not the president. Furthermore, it’s obviously a hotbutton issue on both sides and chances are she and her team of professionals analyzed the chances of she denounces Israel vs. doing what she’s doing, and determined they’d be better if she took this stance. While I agree that I’d rather see a stronger denouncement of Israel, really, what I actually want is for Trump to lose this election, and any course of action that has the greatest chance of making that happen, I am in favor of.

Let’s talk about Harris’s policy other than Israel. What do you disagree with? It must be a considerable amount if you’re making this comparison, so let’s discuss it.

• Small business economic injection?
• Healthcare cost reductions?
• Tax cuts for the lower/middle class, tax increases for the ultra-rich?
• Social Security / Medicare boosts?
• Decriminalizing marijuana?
• Not implementing disastrous tariffs on foreign trade?
• Rent caps and first-time-homebuyer funds?
• Abortion rights?
• Combating corporate price fixing?
• Student debt relief and school funding?
• Child care assistance?
• Support for Ukraine?
• Tighter gun laws?
• Green energy?

And if Trump has another go at the presidency, then it’s only the Democrats to blame, not the voters who defected.

This is honestly the worst part of this whole thing, because if it happens, they won’t even have a come to Jesus “Wow, maybe I shouldn’t have done that” moment that might influence their actions in the future - instead it will just galvanize them against the party that they are ideologically closest to.

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.

Penalties if found guilty range from a fine to jail time. I wonder which he’d get… 🙄

I really hope they do complain, because that’d be great confirmation for anyone considering adding this shit that it does in fact impact sales.

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.

There really needs to be a global fund that every country pays into, that’s dispersed to countries with significant forestation in proportion to their contribution. If money is the barrier to climate action, we need to make it the best option economically to maintain forests and other similar areas.

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.

Good to know; I only knew that usage from movies and whatnot, had no idea it was still used like that!

86 is a slang term that means to get rid of something. See the Green Day song ‘86’ as an example. The origin is from a really long time ago, when it meant a menu item at restaurants was no longer available.

This statement pretty much summed up my feelings on this issue exactly. This is an excellent, succinct summary of the only sane viewpoint to have.

Maybe for some folks…

Giving the statues “an orange makeover” implies something a lot more permanent or at least harder to remove than high-vis vests. If someone tells you they “got a makeover”, when in reality what they did was change their shirt, would you not think that was a little disingenuous?

I’m not being critical of you, or the protest, to be clear, I just think the title is a poor representation of what happened.

Same reason as why Bethesda slapped Prey on Arcane’s spooky space station imsim

This was the weirdest choice. I actually dismissed the new Prey entirely for a very long time because I didn’t enjoy the old one, when the new one was actually a very different, very good game.