Forgive each other, be kind to each other. Talk about the fact that everything has been difficult lately and why, affirm that you both want to be here and are sad that it’s been so difficult lately. Try to be blameless. Don’t make that anyone’s fault, I cannot tell you how important this is.

Accept that human communication itself is very badly flawed and you are doing the best you can with tools (including speech itself, literally speech) that are difficult to work with. Being stressed or even just feeling like the relationship has been difficult lately will make the flaws in those tools even worse, and that still isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault.

Figure out what you do together that makes you both better and indulge in it as much as you can - for us that’s road trips together and some specific gaming activities.

This is all shorthand for some very complex ideas and difficult things to do; I can try to unpack some of these if that seems like it’ll help.

Okay, I was around when it was new and I thought it wasn’t great at the time. Incoherent story, game mechanics that often don’t do anything, it’s good at looking cool and not much else. It came out around the same time as Planescape: Torment, and I sure wish that had been the game that had an influence on the next decade of games instead.

That said, my opinion has evolved since then - FF7 is a hugely important game in the history of RPGs because the cinematic style of presentation it offered absolutely did blow everything else out of the water. I get it, it genuinely was important, it just didn’t really cater to the elements I personally care about.

This was so completely deranged, to the point where it was kind of not fun because what even is this nonsense, but I kept going because I wanted to see what nonsense would happen next. I’m not sure I’d go with “masterpiece of jank” because I think it pretty successfully realized its vision; this is a surrealist and bizarre work, not an incomplete one. …please don’t ask me to explain what that vision is, though.

You’ve also got their coverage of the 2016 election, where it’s a matter of settled fact that they slept on an FBI investigation of Trump for things we now know actually happened while putting Clinton’s emails on the front page at every opportunity.

You’ve also got them giving a platform to dreck like this - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/immigration-stephen-miller.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur - which includes lovely bits like “The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is near a record high, and increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics.”

I’m not one of those people who has accumulated an entire drawer full of examples and is able to provide you with 400 bullet points of what’s wrong with the NYT, but maybe two more will help push you to investigate a bit more? The NYT may publish left-leaning content sometimes, but they are not an actual ally of the Democrats, let alone the progressive or far left. They routinely publish Republican lies uncritically, and their perception as left-leaning is one of their best weapons.

I saw this thread and thought as I clicked, “I wonder if anyone’s posted… oh, good.”

You’ve got some moderately highbrow and transhumanist stuff in there; have you tried Greg Egan? The two starting places I like to recommend are the Clockwork Rocket books (natives of a universe with alternate physics explore it and figure out what’s going on, kind of Flatland turned up to 11… and then up to 121…), and Permutation City which I think will meet your “some very interesting ideas” and then keep accelerating.

I think demand for legendary armor is high and sustainable enough that the situation may continue pretty much indefinitely. The grind required is huge, and a lot of people are undertaking it with great enthusiasm, and looking at the examples provided by other legendary equipment supports the claim that interest will hang on more or less indefinitely. I’m still constantly running into people who want to do raids to work on that armor or Coalescence, fractals for Ad Infinitum, etc, and those projects have been available for years.

Note that I’m using the word ‘may’ here because all this is wild speculation about what players will do en masse; it’s not a hill I’m going to die on.

Your analysis stops before you consider how one might actually make money from rifts, specifically by using the essence you loot to make motivations and selling said motivations on the market. Just poking at it casually yielded ~160 gold from motivation sales for me recently, some of which was of course eaten by the other materials needed for motivations. It’s worth noting that besides activities mandated by the story, I used zero motivations myself - there are plenty of people tagged up and doing them, and you want t1 and t2 rifts for this purpose more than t3 anyway. I wasn’t very seriously trying to make gold with this, just running around with friends who wanted to do rifts for their own reasons or collecting xp to fill in mastery tracks.

Deciding whether this is a good way to make gold relative to other options would require significant work, but that’s where you want to go if you want an answer.

Does the cult have a good plan for healthcare? If so, please send me your newsletter, manifesto, religious tract, pentabarf, whatever.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is pretty astounding, offering an incredible level of detail and degree of freedom, plus just lots of zombies to fight.

Hey again, you’ll probably need a minute to remember making this post, but I saw Intergalactic Fishing was on sale in the Steam Summer Sale, so I went ahead and bought a copy. This lives up to everything you’ve said - I very much enjoy the gameplay of messing with the lure puzzle minigame and collecting information on all the fish in any given lake, and I’m absolutely wanting to catch Just One More Fish.

…I guess I’m hooked.

Thanks again!

I use my Deck in desktop mode a lot of the time, but let’s go with games I just play with it in handheld mode, since my list seems to be different.

• Siralim Ultimate
• Chronicon
• Demon’s Tilt
• Satryn Deluxe
• Stellaris
• Vampire Survivors
• Time Break Chronicles

I finished Overload this weekend, so I’m wandering through my backlog looking for a next thing that sticks with me for more than five minutes. Oxygen Not Included doesn’t seem to be cutting it, so… we’ll see. I’ve got Cataclysm: DDA around as a light diversion until I get pulled into something, and there’s always Guild Wars 2 and Deep Rock Galactic.

I love the last additional arrow at the bottom on the excessively-signed post.

What else is good in this area?

At least bookmarked; I just have to give this a try!

Man, as someone who just does day hikes, that reads like a really rough trip. The things you take for granted are a bit mind-blowing. Thanks for the info, I’ll have to look into the stuff around Lusk Creek!

Oh hey it’s you again! (from the ‘what have you done outdoors this weekend’ thread) I actually wandered around Garden of the Gods and some of the River to River trail last year, and I’ve sometimes wondered about going back to the area. I found some pretty cool views on the section I did hike, and obviously Garden of the Gods is freaking amazing. Is there a lot more to see on the River to River trail? Your photos seem to say yes.

People other than ffmike are absolutely welcome to answer as well of course, I just think it’s neat to recognize someone.

Symphony of the Night has an entire pile of bangers and is my clear winner in this category.

I came here to make sure Chronicon was represented, I just spent some of my weekend tinkering my way up to Mythic 9 and beyond. This is an amazing list, I should go check off the rest of it.

Wow. 19.5 miles in a single day? That’s huge. Cool random picture, too.