As I said at the root of this thread, my ire is mostly reserved for rich people who refuse to tip. If you’re struggling, you have to make your own decisions and compromises to get by. But the guy who makes more money from interest than the bartender makes all night, when they don’t tip they’re an asshole.

The problem you’re describing, that people aren’t paid enough and CEOs are too rich, is a very real problem.

No one should rely on tips, but they do. Refusing to tip now just hurts people , real people, immediately. You have to live in the world as it is while trying to improve it.

The bartender can’t eat your idealism nor find shelter from the elements in it.

Your experiences are different. My friends who work for tips tell me they rely on that money. Losing those tips would have an immediate and real adverse impact on their health and safety.

Have you ever worked for tips or been a close friend of someone who did?

People who make more in daily interest than the worker does from the shift , I don’t think have the moral high ground on tipping.

Guy taking home $250k salary with health care griping about $10 extra. Really.

Sure, income and the economy should be different. The worker can’t pay for housing with idealism.

I accidentally made a rom-com subplot in one of my games… Twice… And the players loved it both times.

The first time there was a divorced smith lady who sort of had a death wish, and the timid tavern owner who had a massive crush on her. Of course the players wanted to set them up.

The second time, the players had to infiltrate a masquerade ball. Sadly I’m starting to forget the details. I think there was tension around meeting them while masked and, like a rom com, trying to figure out what they thought about the PC. And then they tried to get the NPC involved in their heist, because they just happened to have a skill they needed. And of course it wasn’t a clean heist, and the NPC had some trauma.

Mergers and acquisitions should be a lot harder than they are. Maybe even prohibited in nearly all cases.

Those people aren’t a good match for you (or maybe anyone).

Meanwhile Canada is removing bike lanes for more car support, and the US elected a deeply anti-environment party.

My work uses python and it hasn’t been bad for new code that has tests and types. Old code we inherited from contractors and “yolo startup” types is less good, but we’ve generally be improving that as we touch it.

Video Games are a broad medium, akin to reading. Asking “should I get into books?” would be similarly difficult to answer.

Also, be mindful of sturgeon’s law. 90% of everything is crap. For every “Taylor Swift” that was widely popular and successful, there’s 9 meh bands no one remembers.

All of that said, it’s a wide and deep medium with a lot of experiences.

If you like card games, there’re related genres. Deck builders are popular. Slay the Spire is popular. Cobalt Core is fun and not as hard. Monster Train is pretty good.

Those are all also “rogue lites”, so you could make the leap from there to something like FTL.

Lots of options.

Probably don’t spend a lot of money up front. Stuff goes on sale on Steam pretty often.

Probably avoid “gacha” games that are free to play or have “loot box” stuff. Those tend to be exploitive and bad.

I get the impression that some people have such decision fatigue, asking them to do something seemingly trivial is akin to asking someone without limbs to pick up a spoon.

People’s brains don’t work good.

Most people don’t know much, and don’t care that they don’t know much. Half of US adults can’t read at a 6th grade level. They don’t care about and probably do not understand complex topics.

That’s it. They just want cat gifs, and that’s the end of the thought.

I knew someone who was smart and successful and politically aware. She didn’t care about any of this. She was tired from work and just wanted the familiar ease or twitter. Trying to figure out which server to sign up for and finding content was too much work.

A lot of people have executive dysfunction. Making a choice is hard.

“would you rather have nothing to eat, or poison?”

If you eat nothing, maybe you can figure out a better solution with your remaining time. If you eat poison, you’re probably going to be too sick (or dead) to improve things.

Trump is poison.

Also Biden did improve some things, so it’s less “nothing” and more “some crackers”. Sure, a full meal would be better.

t’s not stupidity, it was a clear option between something the American people know does not work, and something that might work.

There is no reasonable expectation that Trump would “work” for anyone outside of some very wealthy and grifters. So, yes, voting for Trump is stupid.

Accelerationists can fuck off.

Satire is dead. Unfortunately, this guy somehow survives despite his best efforts to get sick.

I knew a journalist who said she used it for work. Apparently that’s just where a critical mass of people refuse to leave.

But also she’d send me stupid memes from Twitter.

Never used Facebook much. Nor Myspace before it. Seemed like it had some obvious pitfalls that everyone else was ignoring.

Used Twitter for a little while, but it was just making me mad. Then horrible guy bought it, so I deleted the already abandoned account.

Instagram also seemed like a source of feeling bad, so I never used it much.

I left reddit recently. It had some good content but the ownership sucks. With general Internet search getting bad, losing reddit sucks. Like, I searched yesterday for how to disable a setting in some app, and landed on some AI slop website that told me to write a letter to my local news station.

So this is all that’s left for me. It’s frustrating that most people don’t give a shit and will just move on to the next private platform. I had a friend who was generally smart and successful, but she just didn’t give a shit about this kind of thing. She wanted her easy entertainment, so she was on all the major platforms. Mastodon “didn’t have good content” so she didn’t use it.

I switched to mint because ms won’t even let me upgrade to 11 if I wanted to. Other than some initial hurdles installing it, and losing some hd space because I kept windows on the other partition, it’s been fine. Proton and Wine are pretty low maintenance

I believed it was because right wing groups are more authoritarian, and thus more likely to simply fall in behind the leader. Like all the Republicans that said bad things about trump, but when it came to votes they went along with him. Personal beliefs are less important than group cohesion.

I believed left wing people are more likely to value things like truth, accuracy, fairness, over group cohesion. Thus when there’s a disagreement or problematic leader, the group fractures instead of the majority going along with whoever’s perceived to be the leader. Personal values are primary.

Also I guess the surface area for problems in left wing spaces is bigger. If a right wing guy makes a racist joke, the right wing probably won’t care. Nor if they do something sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or whatever. They just have to swim with the current of all that bad stuff conservatives believe/accept. But a left wing person, who is just as steeped in the shitty dominant culture, will be held to a standard if they fuck up. They have to go against the current of the dominant culture. And if they fuck up and some internalized racism bubbles up, that’s a whole problem in a way right wing folks don’t have. They don’t have internalized communism or feminism to grapple with.

I don’t know if this is actually true, though.

Sorry for the kind of stream of consciousness post, heh. Think I’m mostly following what you’re saying