Depends how everything else is going. Probably at the point we have a draft to go to Iran, we’ll already be an authoritarian state and your options are to go to to war or to ICE camp. You think Russians are volunteering to die in Ukraine?

But I’d be curious if that would have worked in Vietnam. I’m guessing they would just put a note in your file to subject you to as much abuse as possible or just kill you the way they did Pat TIllman. Conscientious Objector status is a really a sop to religion, otherwise I think a lot of people could qualify for it.

Edit: Get out of the US if you at all can.

I thought Bethesda was sure to come up! I did play heavily modded Skyrim back in the day, when things were run through a Nexus of some sort; I don´t know if it became enshittified, but it seems like they had the mod thing pretty well handled. I also played a lot of Fallout 3, and was so happy when I could get rid of the green glow, which is not only ugly, but unrealistic. Chernobyl is a beautiful wild paradise now.

I’ve played Zomboid and I think it’s a pretty small town, and survival is really always the top priority. Never consider it an exploration game.

Yes, it does seem that what you like is PROXIMAL to a few other much more profitable genres; thank the gods for mods.

I’ll look into the Undead Legacy mod thanks.

What are some of your game recommendations for exploration+?

I remember playing Elite back in ray-tracing days and getting really excited when I found some missions that tied together in a thoughtful way, though I think the rest of the universe was basically procedural.

Draftees make horrible soldiers, especially in unpopular wars which, lets be honest, have been all of the US’ military engagements since 1945. I think the military would rather do without them and the grenades that tend be dropped into the tents of sleeping COs.

Your problem is with yourself, I’m afraid.

You can play Minecraft however you want. I once just travelled in a straight a line as possible for as far as possible, sometimes building mine cart tracks, sometime glass tunnels underwater, lighting beacons along way. I´d stop every once in a while to farm wheat, chicken, and eggs, and then I’d keep moving. The real dopamine hits came in discovering caverns, so many beautiful caverns.

(If anyone’s interest in similar voxel-based games for free, Luanti is an excellent and moddable open source project.)

I had a problem with Dwarf Fortress because I´d played it long enough with the goal of surviving, so I´d build a fort and seal all the possible entrances so no fun could get in. What I couldn’t design out (vampires), I modded out. It is quite accomplishment to keep a fort up and running and attracting goblins every season, and you find projects to keep you busy and happy, but it does get boring after a bit. Ultimately I couldn’t emotionally handle losing all my effort because I´d consciously fail to foreclose a risk, so I haven´t gone back to it.

Consider looking at these games not as games, but as windows into your soul.

Edit: Damn replied to the wrong comment again. @BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.net

True, my comment was more an also and an as well than a correction.

I’m getting into Jung a bit right now, and his thinking that the “collective unconscious” is some real extra-dimensional Encyclopedia Brittanica is annoying, though I think that trait is more pronounced among his fans.

Yes, often culture plays a huge role, but some psychedelic experiences are universal and likely reflect the way our brains construct reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stIUrIgODFs

I don´t think that’s correct. I’ve replied to comments after they’ve been shown as deleted.

I kind of like it better than reddit’s “don’t spend too much time writing a reply to a comment because it might have been deleted by the time you hit send and then you have nowhere to post it”

deleted by creator

Badda bing badda boom

I can block you if it will help you feel more accomplished?

Your picture is a few centuries after the Trojan War and from a different culture.

I think the lesson is that cultures always adapt modern and local standards to cast into their historical tales. Beauty especially can change with time and place. You know all those round-faced women from the days of early film? It’s not that women got hotter over the century–those women were hot. Guys from the 1920 would probably think our hot women to be poorly-fed vagrant farm workers.

Another data point: Mar-Al-Lago face. Hideous to us, but extremely attractive to the guillotine class.

That said, the blonde, blue-eyed nordic beauty standard is perhaps the most durable beauty standard we have in the West; it absolutely dominated at least between 1950-2000, so it makes cultural sense to make Helen look like that.

Edit: Another data point this Jewish guy from 30 CE Palestine:

The article says it got the last four of credit card, which is something, I guess, but superfluous to anyone in a situation to get the rest of it.

In animals such as on the feathers of birds and the scales of butterflies, interference is created by a range of photonic mechanisms, including diffraction gratings, selective mirrors, photonic crystals, crystal fibres, matrices of nanochannels and proteins that can vary their configuration. Some cuts of meat also show structural coloration due to the exposure of the periodic arrangement of the muscular fibres. Many of these photonic mechanisms correspond to elaborate structures visible by electron microscopy. In the few plants that exploit structural coloration, brilliant colours are produced by structures within cells. The most brilliant blue coloration known in any living tissue is found in the marble berries of Pollia condensata, where a spiral structure of cellulose fibrils produces Bragg’s law scattering of light. The bright gloss of buttercups is produced by thin-film reflection by the epidermis supplemented by yellow pigmentation, and strong diffuse scattering by a layer of starch cells immediately beneath.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_coloration

Straight-up blue pigment is rare, but it does exist. Here’s a list of those critters [cancer warning]: https://www.colorwithleo.com/what-animal-has-a-true-blue-pigment/

In Nigeria, a tooth gap is considered attractive. Maybe that explains their flag as well.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teeth-gap-beauty-standards-african-diaspora_n_6617fca0e4b00830e916aaa9

Example:

It’s just overused and poorly handled.

It’s structural. Who is at the top of media organizations? Historically, it’s been men, men who work a lot and probably have nannies. They’re not interested in story lines that criticize absent fathers without absolution.

My understanding is that the hardware market is currently not a free and open market of well informed buyers and sellers. LLM companies are literally buying hardware that hasn’t been made yet for uses which will never exist.

Honestly, Iran could go a lot further in inspiring the left. I love that one of the main Iranian spokespersons is constantly talking about the “Epstein Class” and soft-framing the war as a class struggle.

I mean, I fucking hate Fidel Castro, but the guy wrote good propaganda.

Is there a direct financial incentive to do this? You can’t sell someone’s complementary chicken sandwich for bitcoin.

To be fair, if I was going to reuse a password, it would be for a Chick-fil-A loyalty account.