I hope everything goes well during the visit! If she’s supportive, that’s already a great sign. Constantly explaining things can get exhausting after a while, but it’s definitely easier to handle when those questions are asked in good faith.

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but as someone who is really considering moving to Portland from the deep south, how is it? It seems like a really fun city, but it’s hard to sift through the propaganda with it being such a target for conservative media.

It’s gotten a lot better. I’ve been getting back in to the game with some friends of mine lately. We do encounter bots every now and then, but one of two things happen. Either it’s a single bot that’s kicked pretty quickly, or a few bots join at once and we just queue up for another server. Either way, it doesn’t happen that often and we can still have a good time playing in pubs. If you play community servers, bots are basically non-existent. Definitely worth giving it another shot if you’re at all interested in playing again, the new summer update just dropped a few days ago!

These sorts of proposals always seem biased toward white collar work. If you can accomplish all of your work for the day in 4 hours and spend the rest of the day “sitting in cafes arguing about politics” then that’s great for you, but wouldn’t someone need to work in that cafe to bring you the coffee? And if more people are going to be going to cafes, wouldn’t those workers need to work even harder? And wouldn’t the people who harvest the coffee beans and the people who ship those beans halfway across the world and the people who inventory these shipments and divide them up across multiple retail spaces based on demand all still need to work the exact same amount, if not more? To me, it seems like blue collar or retail workers will get the short end of the stick while the people with bullshit jobs that contribute nothing to society get rewarded with even more free time. But of course that’s nothing new. People with essential jobs have always been the first ones to get shafted.

This guy: "Oh gee golly, all of this pretending to work all day sure is hard. I wish I had more free time :( " The girl bringing him coffee who makes minimum wage and just learned she’ll need to work a double shift today and will now need to make arrangements to have her kid picked up from day care: “Wow that must be super hard, I literally cannot imagine having to deal with that”

I don’t know man, I’m not going to pretend I have any better ideas but we need to start framing these things better. Obviously I would love for all workers to have as much free time as possible, but when people keep talking about work in terms of “going to pointless meetings all day” or “typing stuff into spreadsheets” then it’s hard to take their ideas seriously.

Much better. I’ve seen maybe 2 bots in the past month or so and they were kicked pretty quickly

Pretty great actually! I just signed the offer letter for a new job and will turn in my notice at my current job later today. I’ve also been reconnecting with some old friends and was able connect some of them back with each other too. I stayed up a little late playing some games with them last night. It was great hearing everyone goofing around together again, it almost felt llike no time had passed at all

It depends. During the work week, I’m awake before I’ve developed an appetite and settle for a banana and a coffee. Specifically cold brew espresso with a splash of whole milk and a scoop of chocolate flavored whey protein powder.

On the weekends though, I wait until 10 or 11 before I eat so I can savor a bigger meal. Typically bacon, eggs, and some diced red potatoes all cooked in the same cast iron pan. If I’m feeling frisky, I might whip up some French toast or pancakes as a side.

My friends and I have been getting back into Team Fortress 2. Still tons of fun after all these years, especially the jump maps

Congrats! That’s a huge step.

Alcoholism kind of runs in my family. Frankly, alcohol caused enough problems in my life long before I ever had a single sip of it myself which turned me off from drinking for a very long time. I’ve occasionally drank as an adult, but recently a close family member went through some serious health problems because of alcohol and it was just the final straw for me. I don’t know exactly how long it’s been since I’ve had a drink, but it’s been a few months and I just don’t have any desire to change that right now.

I never had problems controlling my own drinking, but I don’t want to risk going down a bad path by turning it into a habit. Seeing the people I love get affected by this poison just makes me question why it’s such an acceptable substance to abuse in our society.

You’re conflating the “amusement” of eating food with the amusement of killing the animals to obtain that food. They are not the same. As stated in my previous post, there is a big disconnect in most people’s minds between the food they eat and the animals they come from.

But more to the point I’m trying to make, animals dying in order to feed people is different from animals being recorded while they are slowly and deliberately tortured to death as a form of entertainment. I don’t know how to explain that one is worse than the other. I’m not disagreeing with you that plant based alternatives are preferable to meat in order to avoid the suffering of animals, but I’m also not understanding why you feel the need to bring that up in the comments of this article. The issue described in the article is fundamentally different from that of the meat industry.

In the meat industry, animal suffering is not the goal. The goal is to deliver as much product (food in this case) to the consumer as cheaply as possible. Animal suffering is a byproduct of this because on a large enough scale, both the consumer and the capitalists running the slaughterhouses are far enough removed from the animals that they don’t have to confront the moral questions of what they’re putting these animals through.

I agree that it’s still a disgusting practice, but it’s not the same thing as deliberately harming animals for your own amusement. In the meat industry, some people can hand-wave those moral concerns away by saying to themselves “at least the animals died for something good: to feed countless families”. Whether you agree with that reasoning or not (which, for the record, I do not), that same person can’t use that excuse in the case of these monkeys. It’s just pointless suffering for the amusement of a handful of psychopaths.

Tacos for sure. Throw your choice of meat (I prefer chicken), chopped cilantro, and some diced onion in a corn tortilla, then squeeze a slice of lime on top. It’s very possible you’ll need two tortillas per taco for some extra structural integrity depending on how much meat you put in there, but either way you’d definitely want to lightly toast those tortillas on a pan for a minute or so on each side before assembling the tacos to kick it up a notch.

As a bonus, chips with guacamole is a great side for this that’s similarly easy to throw together. An avocado or two, lime juice, and some salt and pepper is all you need, plus your tortilla chips of choice.

Reading through Attached by Amir Levine, recommended to me by my therapist. It talks about different types of people’s ability to form attachments and relationships with others. I’ve definitely learned a lot about myself so far and I’m only halfway through.

Any MOBA really, particularly League of Legends. A number of my friends played these obsessively, but I could just never get into it. I’ve sat in on quite a few Discord calls with people playing this game and I gotta say, not once did anyone ever sound like they were having fun. I’m not sure what it is, but it just seems like the genre attracts toxicity like no other, especially when playing with strangers. On the occasions I tried them myself, the gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough for me to want to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary to become somewhat decent at the game.

For me it’s Skyrim. Streets of Whiterun, Masser, Jerral Mountains, Under an Ancient Sun, so many tracks that just instantly transport me back to the world I was immersed in throughout most of high school. They bring a sense of peace that comes from exploring in a simpler time.