Centrists putting fascists in power and then selling out the left to (temporarily) save their own asses is a tradition as old as fascism.

The perfect plan. The only thing that could screw it up is if the climate somehow changed.

I would take a class if I were you. Not necessarily at a college but an art, cooking, or dancing class. Whatever you’re into. You mentioned running so maybe try to train for a marathon (or whatever your distance is).

The only other way I know of time traveling is brown liquor and you definitely don’t want to go that route if you’re depressed and lonely. A class will help you meet new people too.

I ran some trail and road marathons when I was younger and trail runners are always super interesting and a bit nuts in a good way. It’s a solo hobby at times but there is a community. Trail running isn’t about your time since every trail is different. No one really compares anything except distance and even then, finding a cool trail is more important. So, it tends to be about the process rather than the outcome.

Definitely not 9-5, M-F. Most billionaires inherited substantial wealth to begin with. But executives, in general, don’t have “hours” in the same way as rank and file workers. It’s more about knowledge and meetings — well, hopefully knowledge — so you might have an 11am meeting, a 2pm call, and then a 7pm dinner with a potential investor or whatever. You don’t really “work” in between those obligations unless it’s a small company (where you probably aren’t a billionaire anyway). At most, you need to make a board report or PowerPoint for a presentation or something like that.

Billionaires who just own things and aren’t in the C-suite don’t work much at all. Even if you’re on some boards, it’s not much in terms of actual obligations. There’s definitely tasks to do but it’s also definitely not a job. So, a bit like being a landlord.

Meh. I’m an American and I don’t hate it here. But I’m from (and moved back to) a culturally distinct place (New Orleans) so I don’t really identify with the dominant culture. I loathe the politics/corruption and how our government is structured. (The amendments are the best part of our constitution and maybe we should think about that for a bit.) I’m deeply ashamed that we’re the world’s biggest arms dealer and oil/gas producer.

That being said, we have beautiful landscapes and individual American people are usually kind, decent people, at least on an interpersonal level. The corruption of companies and elected officials doesn’t usually extend to the middle class. (Like, you don’t have to bribe someone to get a driver’s license or permits or whatever.) There’s obviously loads of advantages to being an American citizen, just as there are to being an EU citizen. I love our national parks. Just the western half of the United States contains enough varied forms of amazing landscapes to keep a person occupied for a lifetime.

So, I wouldn’t say I like America as a political entity. It’s definitely in my top 30 or so countries to live. I wouldn’t give up my citizenship for a random place but, having travelled extensively, there’s a lot of countries that have a better form of government and a healthier balance between oligarchs and labor.

I grew up poor and I think a good measure of whether someone is poor or lower middle class is “Did your parents help you financially or did you help them?”

Maybe the Technology Connections guy is an heir to the General Electric fortune. He certainly has a lot of access to old toasters. 🤔🧐

/s

Incandescent light bulbs burned out at the speed they did because of an agreement between light bulb manufacturers to not make them better. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

When I was a kid in the 80’s and 90’s, you only owned a few games if you had an NES or SNES (or Sega equivalent) even if you rented/played a lot of them. So, I got insanely good at the few games I owned. After I beat Street Fighter II with every character on the highest difficulty, I decided to beat the game using only one button (plus the D pad, obviously). Finally did it with Chun Li and X button.

With Super Mario World, the hardest personal challenge I did was beating every level except the switch blocks. There’s a bunch of secret exits where switch blocks are supposed to be the way. It took a lot of cape+blue Yoshi shenanigans to get that one done.

Now that I’m old (or least older) and games are way longer, my biggest accomplishment is actually finding time to play a game all the way through, much less do side quests. I made time for BoTW, Horizon Zero Dawn, Nier: Automata, and Hades. But if I stop playing a game for awhile, I forget all the controls and that’s the end of that game.

NFTs are digital POGs with no slammer to gamble them with. That’s way, way more stupid.

Because the library won’t stop e-mailing my wife.

For a technological civilization like ours, I think it’s just that Earth/humans are weird and we’re past the main ones (like going from single-cell to multi-cellular organisms).

Having to overcome the physical obstacles on other planets rules out the type of spacefaring technological civilizations like ours. No matter how intelligent a civilization on a water world is, it’s not starting fires, much less building rockets. Just getting out of the water would be their space program. Even a totally Earth-like planet that’s a bit bigger and has an intelligent species wouldn’t be able to get to space with chemical rockets.

And also, humans are weird. It could be as basic as “we have hands for building complex tools.” We have a seemingly insatiable need to compete and explore, even beyond all logic—maybe no other intelligent species wants to strap someone to a rocket and send them to space because it sucks up there. We’re violent: without WWII and the Cold War, do we even have a space program?

So many things had to come together to create an intelligent, tool-building species with hands that lives on a planet with the right balance of land and water. As far as we know, it never even happened on Earth before and even then, we had thousands of years of civilizations before anyone was dumb enough to strap themselves to a rocket just to see what would happen.

You can go back as far as you want but I think the current situation is because they got routed in the 2008 election and decided that openly courting the worst people in society was their only option. There’s always been racists and conspiracy theorists in America — see The John Birch Society, for one of many examples — but parties didn’t openly court them, at least without plausible deniability. Maybe a wink and a nod but not open courtship.

So, after 2008, Republicans started saying the quiet parts out loud because they were desperate. They — especially Mitch McConnell, in my opinion — thought they could control the beast they unleashed but, it turns out, that isn’t how unleashing beasts works. It started with the Tea Party and pretty quickly escalated into a situation where “moderate Republican” became an oxymoron. And then Trump came along yelling the formerly quiet parts and that was that.

This is set to change in the next iOS version. (In developer beta now; to be released in early September, typically, when the next iPhones drop). So, if you’re otherwise happy with the keyboard, I’d say just use Text Replacement rules (Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement) for a few months.

One piece of advice I can offer (as someone with a similar wide range of interests) is that you should sometimes treat life like a field trip. If you meet an expert in something, ask questions and show enthusiasm. Experts (usually) love talking about their favorite topic. I know a gearhead who restores old cars who doesn’t talk much. But if I ask about any car, he will put his beer down and talk about different cars until the sun comes up. Chefs love talking about food. Most people like telling people about their life’s work (as long as you aren’t the type of asshole who tries to tell a Ph D they’re wrong because someone on the internet said something else).

Also, people say life is short. It’s actually simultaneously too short and too long. You won’t have time to be a Ph D level expert in all your interests but you’ll (hopefully) have decades to learn about whatever floats your boat. Life can get in the way but if you find hobbies you like, it’s restorative. Work and family responsibilities exist, to be sure, and lots of people feel too drained for hobbies but doing something fun isn’t draining.

Nah, Zelda games don’t typically save once you beat them. You get a little star on your save file, I think, but otherwise, it drops you back to the save right before you fought Ganon so you can do all the side quests if you want. (If you’re a completionist, good luck finding all 1000 Korok seeds.)

I found the first half of master mode to be really fun too. Eventually, you level up enough that it’s not that much harder but at first, you have to basically play in stealth mode and avoid fights or use trickery. (Eventually, you level up enough that it’s almost easier because the monsters are all stronger and it’s easier to get good weapons/shields.)

Honestly, the point of BoTW isn’t the ending. It’s much more about the adventure and exploration. I turned off all the HUD stuff and just enjoyed exploring the world. By the time I fought Gannon, it was trivial because of how powerful Link had become.

But it was worth beating it because

And party on dudes!

My favorites are cocktail sauce and creole mustard. Cocktail sauce has ketchup in it and creole mustard is a type of mustard but it’s pretty different from typical yellow mustard.

Both also have horseradish and I also love “horseradish sauce” (sometimes aka “prime rib sauce”) which is basically mayo, sour cream, and horseradish. So, I might just really like horseradish.

I enjoyed the Link’s Awakening remake and Link Between Worlds on 3DS. It looks like it’s got a similar style as those games even if the gameplay might be different.

It might also be setting up a full-blown BoTW-style game for Switch 2 as well. I could totally see this as a “Let’s work out how Zelda’s combat works because Switch 2 is going to have you play as both Link and Zelda.” Kind of like how GTA games have multiple protagonists now.