IIRC New Zealand returned to actual normal, as in COVID was a relative non-issue, faster than many other countries. Their restrictions were more severe and weren’t lifted very quickly, but when they were lifted things were actually fine.

Places like the US and much of Canada dropped restrictions while things were still pretty bad in terms of infection rates and strain on health care systems, and really they hardly enforced them to begin with. You could see this as a return to normalcy since restrictions were gone, but in Alberta they lifted restrictions when we were still dealing with plenty of deaths, severely impacted health care, and on top of that we were still figuring out the implications of the whole long COVID thing. That’s not a return to normal, I don’t think, it’s pretending things are normal when they’re not.

I find pan frying them works best if they’re leftovers, the dough fries up better after it’s boiled and then dried out a little. It’s a very good option for sure.

Potato and cheese is classic, and honestly it hits the spot better than you might expect. Toss with butter after boiling. Keeps them from sticking and tastes great.

Commonly topped with sour cream, green onions, other onions, and/or bacon depending on what you have handy. A nice fatty sour cream with grilled yellow onions is my favourite, especially served with a nice hunk of garlic sausage.

On our trip a few years back we got some simple pastries, sandwich supplies, and snacks from Bonus to save money and I never felt like we were missing out on good food. Even as a discount grocer everything we got from there was super good.

I have read some bad fucking Star Wars books in my youth. Still love them. Even Darksaber, where a random hutt builds a death star because it’s actually even easier to build planet-destroying weapons than Disney made it seem.

I agree with all of this. Except I would probably buy all the stupid shit I want because I have no concept of how all the stupid shit I want could amount to more than a rounding error.

Unironically my two favorite sauces for fries. I attribute a not insignificant portion of my weight gain pre-COVID on slathering cafeteria fries with too much mayo.

It is genuinely ridiculous how much content there is in this game for the price. Like, a lot of it looks like an excuse to play the same levels a dozen times with minor variations, but then there are tons of levels, lots of events, ongoing updates with new content of all types, so many different towers and upgrades to play with, community maps to add even more variety… It looks like I’ve played over 200 games and I have so much of the game that I haven’t even touched yet.

Just to throw a few other options on the pile:

• Valheim is more combat oriented, but is probably my favourite survival crafting game after Subnautica. You’re playing vikings trying to earn their way into Valhalla. I die a lot. Very fun.
• Planet Crafter is more chill, more jank, and more linear, but it’s a survival crafting game that is clearly heavily inspired by Subnautica. You are sent to a mars-like planet to terraform it as part of your prison sentence. It’s a great podcast game, just build and explore and watch numbers go up.
• Less on the survival crafting side of things, the environmental storytelling is also really good in Outer Wilds and Return of the Obra Dinn. Very different games, but they were actually what I went to after Subnautica to scratch that itch and it worked weirdly well.

I wouldn’t call it a bug, just that a naive ranked ballot naturally favours the centrist voices. I don’t even mean this in an extreme way: in Canada we basically have three centrist, neoliberal parties running parliament, and this would mean that the Liberals just win a majority almost every time. NDP voters generally won’t vote Conservative, Conservative voters won’t vote NDP.

This can turn into a bug because it ends up pushing other voices out: if the popular vote suggests equal support between left, right, and center candidates, you would typically hope the make-up of the government reflects that, but more likely it would look like a center majority. There are ways to mitigate this (large number of parties, electing multiple candidates on a ballot, proportional components of the vote, etc) but ranked choice on its own tends to be a centralizing force, not a way to get a more representative democracy.

Again, not a bug, and I definitely wouldn’t call it worse than FPTP, just making it clear that it has its own biases that are worth taking into account.

Ranked choice is one of the simplest ways to get a more representative, but to the question in the title it does tend to favour centrist parties. Progressives will vote for a centrist over a conservative, and a conservative will vote for a centrist over a progressive, so the centrist party will win almost every time.

It’s still an improvement over the disaster of FPTP because it will at least elect parties that the majority can tolerate, but there is still a bias present.

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that’s not right.

Things could work out but I’m sure not feeling optimistic.

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I’ve dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

This is basically it, yes, but sometimes I’m drunk-ordering 40 nuggets and a milkshake and adding the mint myself is enough effort to make me reconsider my reckless disregard for my wellbeing.

Nord Light was also pretty good when I tried it. I waffle back and forth between light and dark themes now and then and there’s always a few good options that brighten the space without flashbanging you.

I only played a few hours of Dome Keeper but it was quite a bit of fun. There’s already a fair amount of variety possible in the runs but not so much that this isn’t appreciated.

Considering there seems to be minimal changes to the game and the graphics honestly didn’t need any updates beyond what the GameCube could put out, I am still unreasonably excited for this game. I played the everliving fuck out of TTYD through my teens. Tempted to mess around with a danger Mario build for the first time in more than a decade.

As a wee lad I rented it a few times. I never actually figured out how to play it, I just ran around and died but I liked the vibe of it.

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“Most planned core features of the game have been implemented. Single-player and multiplayer modes are fully functional and we have a separate dedicated server tool if you want a server running 24/7. There are currently six fully developed biomes out of a planned total of eight (plus the Ocean). There are hundreds of different items (weapons, materials, armor etc) in the game, to be found or crafted by the player. We have over 200 building pieces, and about 50 different types of creatures including monsters, animals and bosses.”

It sounds like the game’s getting Ashlands plus one more biome, but not much for new features. So depending on your definition of feature complete it’s at least pretty close anyways. From this point on it’s theoretically more of the same.

I’m pretty much on the same page as you, although I started playing a couple months ago with a couple friends. The game is obviously not abandoned, and it’s a pretty full game even with more to come. We finally built a hot tub on the weekend and I don’t know how I’m supposed to expect more from this game than chilling in a tub with your naked viking bros.