A girl in college once told me I have “beautiful, horse-like legs”. I did martial arts at the time and my calves and thighs were very well toned, but I was actually a little self-conscious about them, and I had never considered horses to be particularly beautiful so I kind of took it as an insult after walking away from the conversation. It wasn’t until I relayed the story to a colleague a few months later that they told me it was probably a genuine compliment.

Breaking News: Biden takes big sip of water from “World’s Greatest Dad” mug.

MBFC: “This source is left-leaning.”

I’m inherently distrustful of anything that tries to tell me if a source is biased or not. Who verifies that the bot isn’t also programmed to have an agenda?

I think I’ll just stick to plain old critical thinking skills and evaluate things for myself.

Whenever I think of the answer to this question, I always lament at how many film trilogies or games could have been absolutely immaculate duologies but were, for various reasons, sort of forced into a third installment through fan expectations, studio pressure, or just plain Hollywood/corporate greed.

It usually begins with a film or a video game that is an unexpected success, something that was written off by the execs that turned out to be not just a work of art, but a pop culture sensation. Star Wars, The Matrix, The Terminator, Assassin’s Creed, Mass Effect, etc were probably never intended to have a sequel. Their original plotlines all tied up the loose ends nicely and made for a perfectly adequate self-contained story. Then the second film/game in the series comes out and it’s another well received installment. Maybe it’s because the second rides a bit on the coattails of the first, or maybe because the first walked so the second could run, it’s hard to say, but in every case the second always sets the bar too high. The third installment is typically the one that sours the soup, so to speak. I’d wager that even a really well written story can’t really live up to the expectations that fans have for the third installment of a well-beloved series. Having the perfect three-peat is a feat rarely seen accomplished, but nobody ever seems satisfied with just two good pieces of media with no plans for a third.

Bro, it’s a GoPro. You’ll get 20 minutes of 1080p footage and then the battery will die.

Future time travellers going back in time to the moment the first time machine was invented to figure out how that one worked because in the future theirs suck and are locked down to prevent abuse.

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There is a procedure for this. To simplify the answer, Kamala Harris will become President on inauguration day in any of your listed scenarios, since she’s the current VP/VP-elect.

It’s theoretically possible that if Biden drops dead today, that the DNC could manage to pivot to a new contender, but there are two significant problems with that:

1. It’s suuuper late in the process. They already called the primaries for Biden, so he has the delegates. If he dies, they go to his VP, so it would be up to Harris to give them to someone else at that point if anybody else were to be selected (essentially dropping out of the race herself). This is a bad move because giving delegates to someone who didn’t even primary will seem undemocratic, coronating somebody that the people did not even endorse for the ticket.

2. Replacing Biden with someone else doesn’t give them much time to campaign. A big part of the election cycle is traveling to swing states to convince those people to vote for you. It’s not that those people are suddenly going to go vote for the other guy (Trump, in this case), but they’re far more likely to stay home because they won’t be energized for this newcomer who didn’t have enough time to court their votes, or to convince them to turn out for their policies/platform rather than be apathetic about the outcome of the election.

I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.

Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.

For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.

I mean, if you want an answer to that you could just stop using your smartphone for a few weeks and see what your brain comes up with. Here’s a short list of some examples that were popular when I was a kid and smartphones did not exist yet:

Magazines, the daily newspaper, books, going out and exploring, shopping at malls, doing a hobby or craft, personal projects, television, chit-chatting with friends or even strangers, video games, puzzles, play with your pets, exercise, play sports, sitting quietly and being alone with your thoughts.

I’m bisexual man, but I lean mostly towards women as my preference. Occasionally, I feel the pull to fool around with some guys, but nothing ever too serious.

I had just gotten out of a 5+ year relationship with a girl that I really liked, but the relationship was extremely unfulfilling sexually. She was a dead fish in bed and I had become bored with run-of-the-mill sex and I wanted to experiment a bit while I was single. I downloaded Tinder, set my preferences to any, and started swiping.

I was honestly just really horny and looking for anybody, male or female, who wanted a quick one night stand and I happened to swipe on a dude’s profile who had such a sexy butt pic as their profile picture that I was convinced it was a girl and didn’t bother to check. We talked a bit and he clarified that he was actually a guy, but that didn’t deter me. I agreed to meet him at a motel he was staying at for work and we could fool around a bit.

To keep a really long story short, I met the guy and he did not look as advertised in the photos. He was much uglier, and did not have a cute ladyboy body. Looked like a stereotypical redneck, complete with mullet and trucker cap. I was disappointed, but I didn’t want to be rude so I stayed. He offered me a drink, which I declined, and then he asked me to take off my clothes so we could start (he was already pantless when I walked in the motel room).

I then had the roughest, most uncomfortable blowjob in my entire life. He was really into giving head and deepthroating. I have climaxed once before during a blowjob so I know what a good one feels like and this guy was not very good at giving them. There was a lot of slobber and gagging involved which kind of took me out of the experience. Had to ask him to be more gentle and use less teeth a few times during the act. Eventually, mercifully, I came in his mouth and I went into the bathroom to wash up and I swear I could not get all the slobber and goop off of my junk. I went home after declining more sex with him, took a 45 minute shower, and tried to scrub my cock clean again. Took like a whole day for it to feel less gross.

He texted me the next day asking if I could “feed him another load” and I blocked him. Absolutely the worst sexual experience of my entire life that I didn’t want to repeat. Really put into perspective all the dead fish sex I had been having with my ex girlfriend and I realized that it wasn’t so bad after all.

You have a curious definition of “strong argument”.

Conquer half the world for spices.

Use absolutely none of them in authentic British cuisine.

Just the way His Majesty intended.

Holy shit… Are you telling me it’s not “gotta love those Starbucks lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane?”

I have a serious problem with understanding lyrics in songs. I look them up when I don’t quite understand what is being said and I realize I didn’t even fully comprehend half of the verses to begin with. It’s like musical dyslexia or something.

It doesn’t matter to anybody who has already made up their mind to vote/not vote for him.

It matters that justice is done and that the system holds him accountable.

Behold, the moderate Republican.

Well, we survived him once, we can do it again.

I’d still prefer to not get set back another decade by having him in office, and the danger of him never leaving office by way of dismantling all of the safeguards that prevented his coup in 2021 can’t be ignored.

If there are ways I can resist, I will. If there are people I can help just by reaching out, I will extend my hand to them. I won’t let Trump’s hateful rhetoric poison my humanity or turn me against my fellow man.

If things get bad enough, my girlfriend and I have a “bug-out” plan that we discussed and agreed upon that basically amounts to - withdraw everything from our financial accounts, sell everything that isn’t nailed down if we can or abandon everything in place, round up the family and buy plane/boat tickets to head somewhere that has low requirements for citizenship or will accept American petitions for political asylum if things get desperate enough. This is in the worst-case scenario where the U.S. descends into a full fascist/totalitarian state and there is a clear and present danger of us getting killed just for being political dissidents.

Ideally, we’d like to stay here and hope that things get better, but every year things seem to get worse and worse. The American Dream is dead and rotting, and we can just barely see a pinhole of light at the end of the tunnel for us to be able to achieve a life, but we’re both left wondering if we’re even going to be able to hold on to that if we do manage to seize it given how much the economy is backsliding each year.

tl;dr: the plan is to keep our heads down, but our spirits as high as possible, and always know where the closest exit is in case of an emergency.

We already have the Cube Rule of Food Identification Unifying Theory. Tacos are Tacos. Burritos are Wraps. These guys need to get with the program. We base our food taxonomy on the specific arrangement of carbohydrates like civilized people.

There’s definitely some variance out there. Some managers care about their employees and have a conscience, which would make them more likely to sympathize with a hungry dude who can’t pay. Others are the typical Scrooge McDuck caricature and go out of their way to be cruel to others.

I think generally in my experience chain restaurant managers tend to get promoted from within the company and start at the lowest position, so they have more perspective on what it’s like to be at the bottom rung of society and have a bit more empathy for those who have unfortunately sunk even lower than that. Private business managers on the other hand, it depends. Some are guided by their own morality, while others have a chip on their shoulder about how they made it without help and so can everyone else (which is total nonsense, in order for there to be winners in capitalism, there must also necessarily be losers, so not everybody is going to make a success of themselves in that way no matter how much effort they expend).

As much as people hate to hear the “it’s complicated” answer in regards to anything regarding Israeli affairs, well, it’s pretty complicated… But to name a few reasons:

Religious fundamentalism/Zionism in the United States has been forcing politicians to take sides or else alienate their constituents - Christian fundamentalism is bizarrely in favor of a Jewish state because it fulfills their own doomsday prophecy, not for any logical reasons or out of a genuine desire to help the Jewish people.

Weapons manufacturers and arms dealers are lobbying to keep Israel as a partner considering they are almost always mired in some kind of conflict. It’s a multi billion dollar industry and the people who make guns, bombs, artillery shells and ammunition are not keen of giving up their cash cow.

Consider of course the historical ties and diplomatic agreements, which if flippantly broken send a message of unreliability to other allied nations (I’m not sure I totally agree with this one, as the USA is basically a schizo nation flipping back and forth once every 4-8 years between isolationism and globalism depending on which party holds office).

Lastly, since the Cold War, the USA has kept Israel close to project their own influence in the middle east. Countries like Egypt or Saudi Arabia would have to think twice about provoking the United States considering who their neighbor is. Great strategic location bordering the Mediterranean Sea that makes it easy for USA to get soldiers on the continent if it ever comes to that.