What doesn’t kill you might succeed on a second attempt.

When you consider that a lot of their customers are pretty entrenched in Amazon’s services, “Boycott Amazon for a week” is more achievable than, “Boycott Amazon forever.”

Now don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see people give up on Amazon forever. But sometimes taking a week off is long enough for people to change their shopping habits.

Although I suppose the insidious thing about Amazon is that they only offer an annual subscription so I doubt people are cancelling their service for a week.

Hmm, I’d probably call it PG13.

The prologue has some fantasy violence / gore, and the main side plot is lesbian romance. Some sexual tension, and I think a fade to black, but I don’t remember anything explicit.

I don’t know if this would bother you, but the language was like fantasy blue-collar. The protaganist is an orc and curses a lot, but I feel they were fantasy swear words and I don’t remember seeing any F-bombs

The book’s main appeal is this wholesome, cozy vibe though. Even if some of the elements are for adults, it’s got good morals and a heartwarming message

This book is like a warm hug on a cold day. I can’t recommend it enough

I can’t find anything concrete online, but my assumption is that it has to do with the adventure / module design.

Consider a scenario where the party is going to go kill a lich, but first must delve into the lich’s lair before they may fight.

“Prophet” being that the party is forearmed with the knowledge of what the final encounter will be - and perhaps some intelligence on the dungeon.

“Squeeze” where the party has encounters that drain their resources. Those grenades / fireballs are going to be handy for fighting the lich, but they’re also useful for dealing with the lich’s zombie army.

“Monster” where the party finally encounters the prophesied monster and fights the lich.

I’ve never heard this trope named this way, but it’s how so many dungeons and adventures are designed. The party knows they have a particular fight coming up, and must carefully manage their resources because they won’t be having that fight at full strength.

When I was a teenager I felt this way. I didn’t ask to be here, and so far life has sucked pretty hard.

My stance has softened as I’ve aged. I still wish I’d never been born, mind you, but I don’t blame my parents for having kids. They just did what came naturally for them.

You can’t consent to being born, and that upset me a lot. But it’s not like they could have asked my permission anyway. Might as well make the most of the situation.

I use a thumbs up reaction as “I acknowledge I’ve read and understood this, but don’t think you require a push notification” so I guess your mileage may vary

Several years ago, HotS went into “Maintenance Mode” which means it isn’t receiving further updates although the servers are still up for now.

Which is such a shame. I’m not big on MOBAs but that was my favorite

I don’t like it very much, but the price is right.

I used to play Overwatch, and abandoned it shortly after the Overwatch 2 debacle. A bunch of my friends kept up with OW2, and when Rivals came out they made the switch so I figured I’d give it a go.

Season 0 was rough. It’s on Season 1 now and things are a bit better.

Hitboxes are bad. Maps seem confusing, although that might be that my game sense hasn’t figured them out yet. Lag is an issue a lot of the time, and the game crashes more than I feel it ought to - but I’m on Linux which I feel isn’t officially supported.

I saw an article the other day criticizing that you can’t type “Free Taiwan” into the chat. I guess I haven’t actually tested it to confirm, but gosh that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I don’t go in for the battlepass, but my friends usually do when they play a game and they say it’s fair. They do have a model that allows you to purchase the battlepass and then continue to fill it out even after it’s no longer the current season. So if it takes you a long time to finish content, you’re not forced into playing more games for fear of missing out.

When it’s fun, it’s a lot of fun. When it’s bad, my goodness, it’s bad. I guess it depends on how willing you are to gamble with your feelings. But hey, I guess you’re coming from League, so you might be ;)

I really hope to, but sadly then I couldn’t afford more sandwiches

I would love to be able to gift my unplayed games to others.

I guess you do get into a problem where a group of people might swap the game back and forth to avoid ever having to pay for the game. But people will abuse any system, so I guess that would just be a cost of it

If a game is still within the refund window, then maybe it should have an option to gift it. The devs / publishers could keep their money and Steam doesn’t have to process a refund. Seems like a win-win

Calling someone an idiot after having your opinion refuted in a thread about people having thin skin is either some high level satire or proof you have thin skin

I suppose it could be some third thing, but I don’t want to make baseless assumptions

In my experience, the fries are great for five whole minutes before they turn into soggy cardboard and broken dreams

It’s a pretty good five minutes though

That’s the plan, yup

Honestly, that’s tough, but fair. No therapeutic tool is going to be a magic bullet solution for everyone.

My wife struggles with something similar. When we try to walk through an exercise together she thinks it’s about saying that her problems are “all in her head.” For my own outlook, I liken it to thinking that although my thoughts might be faulty, my feelings are valid. But hey, I’m not an authority, I’m just another struggling human trying to make sense of it all.

For what it’s worth, one stranger to another, I think that whatever you’re going through you’re totally valid. I hope you find or have found some relief - goodness knows we’re still looking

I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

Example:

Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.

I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

Good luck out there, partner

Say what you will about the woke gaming agenda, I love to see a company brave enough to take this stance. It’s refreshing to see a publisher wear its beliefs on its sleeve because now I know that I don’t have to spend money on their trash games

I’d like minimum wage to be able to support my family, so that a job flipping burgers could actually feed us

Failing that, to live as a bunny in a cottagecore tree stump, spending my days slicing up strawberries like they’re roasts, and baking pies with my neighbours

I hope we won’t have a repeat of yesterday’s outburst of unbridled creativity

Finally, Ernie has everything he needs to blackmail the warden

It’s all coming together