Very disappointing, but expected. Can’t trust liberals not to fuck up.

Not much, honestly. One night this year, my friends and I planned on going to a bar to welcome back a buddy who we hadn’t seen in a long time. Something happened, can’t remember what, and we had to go to someone’s place instead to celebrate.

Later in the evening we saw on the news that the bar had been shot up, and plenty were dead. Bar was shut down soon after. It had a good crowd, wasn’t too noisy, the food wasn’t that bad, and prices were cheaper than other places in the city. My guess is that it was a money laundering scheme and someone would benefit from having it being shut down, because I didn’t hear anything about anyone important being there at the moment as if to imply it was a hit.

Lucky us.

Ig the worldbuilding for my custom 5e setting counts? It’s sort of a continuation of the forgotten realms, with a heavy dose of Warhammer 40K and Doom thrown in. The world of Toril was shattered, and the fragments frozen in place by a divine sacrifice, leaving each landmass cluster within reach of one another (within Voidships).

The government in question was the Dwarf Assembly. It’s a loose confederation of citadels within these clusters. Each one dedicated itself to one trade (for example, mining clusters, smithing clusters, etc.), with each trade being led by the oldest dwarf. Assembly-wide decisions are made with the agreement of all clusters.

Tensions rise within each cluster whenever a problem cannot be solved by tradition, with older dwarves being quite proud and reticent to veer away from it. Tensions rise within the Assembly whenever a younger elder is introduced, being seen as inexperienced.

It’s not meant to be perfect, I wanted it to be a source of dramatic tension whenever the party ever stepped foot on dwarven soil. I also really like the mental image of dwarves with ushankas.

Visiting my grand-aunt’s farm. From my low vantage point, seeing as I was almost a small kid, I was assaulted by a waft of cow dung, and the goddamn mosquitoes were everywhere.

Knew from an early age country living wasn’t for me.

Vibe, and purpose. I have a gym playlist full of metal, 90’s rap, and some bebop. I also have a playlist for rock, another for metal, a classical playlist, a medievalish playlist (think Danheim, Heilung, The HU, etc), and another for just jazz. I also have playlists for the decades spanning from the 50’s to the 90’s. Ended up doing playlists for whenever I’m feeling really good, and for whenever I’m down in the dumps, just in case.

The decades playlists really help with being handed the aux. Most people don’t do well going from Toto or Green Day to Messhuggah and Opeth, so, dividing a genre by decade is good. I know my grandma will not vibe with Polyphia, so I play her some latin music, classical, or jazz, and she’s fine with it.

This leads to many, many playlists, and there’s a lot of overlap, but I don’t really mind as long as I can make sure I have a playlist for any mood I might find myself in.

Don’t know exactly but something similar to a mixture of a brave, true, and cool statement. Think it was first used by right wing chuds but then adopted ironically by terminally online liberals.

You’d say “based” if you agree with the political messaging of something.

(Pls correct me if I’m wrong)

Lady butterfly. Died 47 times against her. I’d always dodged instead of parry in soulslikes, and she kicked my ass over it.

Hm, yeah that might be the case. Last guitar with a FR I bought was well over 10y ago.

Any guitar under $700 with any feature you’d expect to be standard in medium to high end guitars. If a brand new guitar has a floyd rose but is $300, it won’t hold tuning, and the screws will strip easily.

Not saying expensive guitars are good by default, but there’s very little room for innovation in the guitar world, and corner cutting will happen in cheaper guitars.

OP might need a beefier rig depending on the programme they’re in. Not saying they couldn’t go for something cheaper, but there might be a reason for the pricetag.

I’ve used maps.me for years. Works online and offline. Even took it abroad and used it instead of the stuff locals used, with the exception of london and liverpool, since I couldn’t find a way to check train schedules.

Interesting. Malls around me seem to cater mostly to young adults with expendable income. Lots of non-traditional cuisine (commercialised of course, not high-brow places), wine bars, etc. Places where you’d go to on a night out with the gang.

Now that you mention it, they have stopped catering to the youngest demographic. I think the laser tags closed down before the pandemic, and the arcades have been gone for a decade. Unless Chuck E. Cheese has some, I haven’t been. Maybe we’re catching up, then. I still see young teens, around the age I was when I visited those places, walk around. No idea what shops they go into though. Maybe the ice cream places, and the food court.

So I’m not in America and might be able to offer some insight. Others have mentioned big box stores, online shopping, and lack of money as the main culprits. I’m fairly certain big box stores are not it, and the fault may lay almost entirely on amazon.

Where I’m from, malls are still the place to go for new things to buy, including electronics, clothes (of varying degrees of quality and price), drugs (the legal kind), and home decor. Businesses like Walmart (as in, supermarkets that sell things other than groceries) have shops inside those same malls. In the whole city, there is one standalone Walmart, in the emptiest part of town with middle-upper class suburbs around it. The one exception is Costco, which has two franchises in town, not inside a mall, but the demographic that goes there is decidedly middle class families and businesses.

We can order stuff from amazon, but it ends up being about the same in terms of cost, and takes up to a month to arrive. Money is tight for pretty much everyone at the moment, but we all still go to the mall from time to time, for one reason or another.

For example, I’m overdue a visit to get my eyes checked again, my glasses need replacing. And I’ll probably stop by the radioshack (yup, remember that?) and nab some rechargeable AAs.

Hm, Lenovo? Cus you just described my experience with them.

Family problems, health problems, carreer problems, and just GAD piling up on me. Someone took my pulse and it was running a sprint while I was sitting. Hands were absolutely numb and my fingers were twisting by themselves into weird poses, I couldn’t hear a thing and I couldn’t breathe.

That was the worst one I’ve ever had, and thankfully, the last one. Over a year ago. Every now and then I can feel one coming up but I’ve learned how to calm myself down in therapy.

Couple weeks ago. I live in a very “traditional” part of the world and long hair isn’t common on men, especially well taken care of long hair. If I’m not wearing a cap, people often get confused before they see my beard. I don’t mind it, honestly.

Don’t remember the last time I misgendered someone, really.

"> capitalists need their heights shortened

FTFY

Maybe it was the botched launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 was an early access title made by a known developer (at least in crpg spaces) of an existing IP, though BG 1 and 2 are old as hell and I imagine most of the player base didn’t play them, myself included.

I played KSP and was waiting for performance to get better before buying KSP 2. Oh well.

One monitor for moodboard, another for materials, tablet monitor for working.

Oh yeah. Music is one of em. Never learnt how to read sheets or much of anything about music theory. I mean, I only just learnt how time signatures work. I play the guitar sort of okay, and have a decent ear. But everything I’ve learnt has been by feel, and I really want to properly learn theory. I want to know how the circle of fifths works, how polyrythms work, etc. like, I have a feeling of how they work but I couldn’t really talk about it at length and I’d have a hard time figuring out why a section of a song sounded interesting. I dropped that desire some years ago, but with every new artist I discover I’m trying to break down how the music works in my head and often come up short.

Carpentry is another. Ever since I started playing guitar I wanted to build my own guitar from scratch. Then I took some industrial design classes in college and it cemented my interest in it. During lockdown I bought some tools but got distracted with other fleeting interests. Once I have enough space for a workshop, I’ll get on that.

Lastly, storywriting. Whatever I write, it feels like it’d be at home in a technical manual. Regardless of what language I write in, it feels stilted and sterile. I’ve been working on this one lately though. I’m DM’ing a campaign with a ton of homebrew and wrote and designed a 70 pages long handbook for my players. The ones that took the time to read it really liked the flavour and worldbuilding I did, so, progress.

Edit: forgot one, mead, and spirits in general. Made one batch years ago, with apple juice, cinnamon, and cloves. It was good after about 2 years. I still have a 2L bottle in my closet. At this point I think I should just bin it. For a time a friend and I were talking about making large batches of it and selling it on the DL as party drinks. Pineapple mead, mango mead, etc.