Yep! Got it 👍

I wrote a little rhyming riddle a long time ago, it’s not really funny but might as well share it

Air without and air within
Rainbows play upon my skin
What am I?

I won’t go hungry without creative works, I always have a choice whether to engage with them. I consume them in order to feel an emotion. Those emotions can change and become tainted by controversies or the actions of the people involved, but not always. Because my relationship to the art is and always was about how I feel, if I don’t like the feelings it gives me I get rid of it.

My favorite game to play when I am sick is Banished, a medieval city building game that was the labor of love of a solo dev. It starts off quite brutally difficult until you learn the best ways to handle the first winters and then it becomes a cozy opportunity for optimization, and a challenge to balance expanding the city as much as you can while supporting the population with agricultural and forestry goods. It’s inspired some other games to follow in its footsteps, and it has a modding community still making content for it.

Me: uh oh, they are being mysterious about the food source

Also me: ok they are definitely cannibalizing the dead poor people

Movie: reveals they’re actually eating bugs

Me: oh… uh… ok? That seems like a practical protein source… Guess they’re entomophobic

I’ve tried it, but personally I wasn’t able to handle it, the cat, and holding the cat’s mouth when trying to use the plunger. It was just way easier for me to hold the pill in the same hand holding their head and just drop em in.

Pilling a cat is a skill but one worth learning. I had two elderly cats who each needed pills and both hated it in their foods. I hold the kitty in my lap, pull back their head and poke a finger between their front teeth and release the pill down their throat. Then stroke the throat gently and release, and give them a high value treat right away. First time is rough but it gets better and becomes routine for everybody. If the cost ends up being a big difference it’s something to consider

His name is Guillermo. Guillermo the Guillotine.

Thank you for writing the comment for me so I didn’t have to. Every history nerd I know in my life is a woman except one. The women know all sorts of interesting contextual things ,the origins of traditions, crafts, foods, the local area, and social development. The guy I know knows all about wars and battles amongst other classic History things. Both are valid and count!

Here’s a fun one from a story told at a panel from a con:

Siddig (Dr Bashir) was asked when he believed his character was replaced by the changelings, and did he make any acting choices related to that. His response was utter confusion and surprise, because he never knew that Dr Bashir had ever been replaced in the storyline. During the time of filming, he hadn’t been reading the full scripts, only memorizing his lines, because he was playing too much Ultima Online.

This was exactly my play too, mind locusts were crazy OP, especially with movement bonuses over Xenofungus. I usually played Zahkarov over Deirdre but the result was always the same, lol. A planet covered in Xenofungus and a massive mind worm/locust army. That game is so good, I was immensely disappointed in Beyond Earth. It couldn’t live up to the original unfortunately

Try Debian based Linux Mint with the KDE plasma desktop environment. Linux has its issues but they’re honest issues. Linux has hiccups because a bunch of volunteers are trying to build an airplane while flying it, while Windows has a bunch of C suite goons purposely creating a hostile user environment to monetize you for every red cent.

I think when people talk about “falling behind” they’re actually talking about missing out on the initial gold rush of novel uses, quick cash grabs, and straight up scams that a lot of people are making short term money on.

Same, when I read through the Bobiverse series it was quite evident the author believes in biological determinism, great man theory, is at least somewhat sexist and feels squeamish around queer people. He doesn’t outright say those things but it comes out in which characters are focused on, their actions, and the consequences of them. It’s an entertaining series but for me it was hard to ignore the red flags.

If Narnia is real, the most important thing for all people is owning a wardrobe and keeping the hinges on it.

We live pretty frugally in comparison to our peers. Less than $30 a month in subscriptions, our utility bills are low, we eat out maybe once a month and every other meal is made at home. We thrift and get just about everything we can second hand from yard sales or friends. It used to be that we were putting aside money, now there’s less extra. We’re getting ready for worse, and planting fruit trees, learning gardening and canning, and reaching out to our neighbors.

Baguette from the grocery store, brie cheese and some berries. Sounds fancy but it’s easy, and aside from buying the things requires no effort. Tear off chunks of bread with your hands, slap a slice of room temp brie on it, eat. Then eat berries. Cherry tomatoes work too, just eat them whole. Great with a glass of wine if you’re having a Day, but cold water is nice too.

Been daydreaming about a city builder sim that realistically characterizes cars. No “magic parking”, no perfect drivers, with pollution mapping, traffic deaths, an average commute time per citizen as a statistic, that kind of thing.

I imagine it starting out exactly like Cities: Skylines, where you start building out your town with commercial and industrial and residential zones. As you lay out roads and utilities, the citizens keep demanding more parking and bigger roads. If you build them, your town becomes mostly parking lots and huge, dangerous roads. People complain about living near pollution, loud car noises, traffic deaths and commute times. Your town would have negative income from all of the building and maintenance costs and constantly be needing to be bailed out due to how expensive it all is.

The trick, then, would be not to listen to the complaints from car drivers. The only way to build your town where the budget is balanced properly is to increase density, utilize mixed use areas, and to build as few large roads and utility corridors as possible. The game wouldn’t tell you this outright, it would simply give you realistic price tags and maintenance costs compared to people moved and let the player problem solve and optimize.

There would be a robust palette of micromobility options, public transit, greenways and parks and pedestrian areas. Car access would be optional for building placement and based more on emergency vehicles or services. You could design your own streets with your desired configuration of bike paths, street cars, pedestrian walkways and green spaces and save templates to use elsewhere.

There would be lots of beautiful middle density building models, parks, and plazas, and a mode where you could rehabilitate an already developed car centric city.

If someone made this game I would be so happy and play it all the time, making a perfect transit utopia

My point is that if you want to win in a first-past-the-post voting system, if you can’t get everyone to vote for your candidate the next best thing is to stop your opposition from showing up. Common tactics are limiting who has access to polling places, purging people from voting rolls, adding barriers to registration, and sabotaging mail-in ballots, but you can also encourage apathy, purity testing or erode faith in the electoral system, all of which work to allow a party with a minority of supporters to win an election.