Time spent with friends and partners.

Wrapped under a blanket with someone I was really into, playing a game together, watching a show, or just talking, was really nice.

I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

Some exceptions:

I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.

I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.

Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.

Fine. Sometimes sad. I dated someone with a kid for a while and the good parts were good. But now I’m old so it’s kind of moot.

Right, and you shouldn’t ask a married monogamous person out on a date, either. Never came up for me but is worth keeping in mind! A lot of guys seem to struggle with “she likes me bro she smiled at me” -> “my guy she’s the cashier at work she has to smile at customers.”

You can just ask people out. You can just ask to kiss someone. I was in my mid 20s when someone told me the first one, and late 20s when someone told me the second one. Dating got a lot easier after each revelation.

Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like “the best metal from Colorado” or “a deep dive into acid jazz”. They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.

Also seeing who’s playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I’ll check out band B. I saw “Year of the Cobra” play with “The Well” and it was a good show, and I bought their album.

I think you have to also account for the kids’ ages. An infant is different than a toddler, teen, or adult child.

Lots of people never reach more advanced stages of moral reasoning. They don’t do bad things to avoid being punished, or maybe because they have a simple understanding of “it’s against the rules”

The current justice and prison system is abhorrent, but something needs to happen if someone tries to murder someone else. Most people are alright but there are a lot of anti social people out there, too. And a lot of people who would be alright if they were in more stable circumstances

Yes. What’s blocking you? What circumstances are you in where you want to talk and aren’t?

Depends a lot on the details and execution.

Some friends can tell a good story about having a beer anywhere. Other folks would make meeting (some well liked celebrity) tedious.

I’m a little too deep into the “I had an onion on my belt” side of things, so I try to be patient with other people’s meanderings.

I live in a walkable city so I have a lot of options by just going outside on foot.

The park. Sometimes for a walk, sometimes for a bike ride.

Grocery store or something nearby. Get a snack or something for dinner.

Thrift store, though that’s a bike ride or train ride.

Library. Just browse the stacks.

Bookstore, less often, but sometimes it’s fun to see what they have.

Record shop, rarely, because I don’t have a record player but a few friends do, and I might see something they’d like.

Sometimes I just walk around without a goal. See what there is to see around here.

I’m outside so I’m not sure how to evaluate “the room”. My phone is the most immediate at hand (pun intended) useful thing right now though.

There are other RPGs that may scratch slightly different itches, if the fantasy + combat + resource management parts of DND don’t really appeal.

I really like Fate. it’s a lot more focused on story and is overall a lighter system. it does ask more from the players though.

I think of my cat as a lovable, kind of stupid, little brother. He usually wants to be involved in whatever I’m doing , follows me around the apartment, and so on. But also sometimes he just decides to do something ridiculous like climb into the dresser and get stuck.

I’m not sure how he thinks of me exactly. Seems affectionate!

A stupid argument I was having about how DND isn’t the best tool for many stories that aren’t about combat + resource management. I know people can have fun with anything but it bugs me when people are like “I do a political intrigue game about secret modern vampires in DND 5e” the same way it might bother some of you if someone was like “I put in my screws with a hammer” or “I add up the numbers in my spreadsheet by hand and type them into the totals row one at a time” or “I don’t use copy-paste I just retype everything”

Like, it doesn’t matter but it bugs me a little.

But I was getting down voted into oblivion so I gave up after someone begrudgingly admitted that yes different games have different focuses.

Frog core anyone? https://froglord.bandcamp.com/album/save-the-frogs

Don’t forget about the halo effect. Someone on stage doing a killer set is going to seem hotter. When someone is good at one thing, we start to think they’re good at everything (where being hot is a thing).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

HR is not likely to side with the worker over the company.

There’s also a certain kind of “hr energy” that makes my skin crawl. Like if you worked at a company called AB Tech they’d be up front in the meeting going “I SAY A, YOU SAY B! A!” and I’m just like no, please stop, I’m not that excited to make charts for assholes.

The hr person where I work now seems nice, at least. My old job the main hr person gave me the creeps.

No, it’s not awful all the time. Cruising down a highway or familiar streets can be kind of zen. I say this as someone who despises car-culture and believes most transit should be mass, public, transit options like buses and trains. But I have fond memories of cruising down the highway at night by myself singing along with my favorite music.

I live somewhere that’s walkable and has a subway system now, and it’s much better. Don’t have to worry about parking, insurance, fuel, drinking too much. So if you really hate driving, you could look into living somewhere that doesn’t require it.

ll take a very extreme example. Our culture’s racism would be inherently better with better transit. There’s reasons why more urbanized cores are more open to other people and cultu

I’ve also thought about this. Being on the subway with other people humanizes them in a way being stuck in traffic doesn’t. When you have the shared experience of everyone groaning over the “being held in the station by the dispatcher”, that makes a difference. It’s a lot easier to hate people you never see.