Yeah, but every game has an expiration date if you have to rely on a server still being live to download the full game, which is kinda my point.

If the disk cannot install and play the full game, then it holds little value as physical media for preservation. At that point the only value it has is for collectors.

You love to see it. These fucks are so used being world bully that they never bothered to consider that Iran would be able to meaningfully resist. I’m assuming that they started believing their own propaganda about the Middle East being “backwards” and other racist, orientalist drivel.

You’re not as strange as you think, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you’re still quite young (20s?). Your 20s are largely about trying to fit in and following social conventions - you do all the things you think you’re “supposed to”. As you hit your 30s, you stop caring so much about what other people think and what other people have told you that you’re supposed to do and start figuring out what you want to do. A big part of growing up is learning that there are no “rules”; you can eat candy for breakfast if you want, sing in the shower, be an absolute cringe goblin - sky’s the limit so long as you’re not hurting anyone.

Finding a partner to avoid being alone is a terrible, terrible idea for all involved. Learn to enjoy your own company first and figure out what you actually want your life to look like, then you’ll be much more likely to find someone going the same direction. Figure out who you want to be and take the steps to becoming that person. Be unapologetically yourself, and you’ll find people who like you for you, which is absolutely preferable to trying to fit yourself into a tiny box of what you think you’re supposed to be and earning the admiration of people you despise.

As some other commenters have mentioned, investigate whether you may be neurodivergent, because you’ll be much more able to make sense of yourself and the world around you with that knowledge if you are.

I haven’t shopped at Amazon for a year or two now. It is not as cheap as people believe and anything worth buying can be found elsewhere, usually for the same price (sometimes less). Most places even have similarly fast shipping and some use Amazon as a shipping service, which I wish they would disclose up-front so I could choose to shop elsewhere.

Seconding Ace. They also tend not to have surveillance in their parking lots unlike Lowe’s and Home Depot, which are known to employ Flock cameras.

Good.

I’m not a fan of electoralism, but it’s worth pointing out that ICE does not have the manpower to patrol every polling place. I don’t think they could even cover every polling place in a large metropolitan area, let alone an entire state. They’ve only got like 10,000 guys. That’s not that many in a country with over 300 million people.

It’s definitely all three, but I just want to point out that Cuba I believe has more doctors per capita than any other country and sends medical aid all over the world. They developed their own Covid vaccine because they had no access to the others thanks to the blockade. It’s not like they have nothing to offer.

I hope so. If they’d been able to keep the missiles the Soviets had stationed there, they wouldn’t be in this mess.

It’s probably going to come down to the lease terms. There’s likely a mechanism to file some kind of complaint about this that would make the 3-days stop ticking, but I’m not a lawyer. If you can find a legal aid clinic, that’s probably your best bet. Power-tripping landlords are the worst and I’m really sorry you’re dealing with this.

Stems from medical misogyny dating back to the Victorian era. Birthing on one’s back is easier for a doctor to observe, and obstetrics centers the doctor over the person actually giving birth. Everything to stick it to the midwives, who actually knew what they were doing.

Unless they’ve changed dramatically, they’re not new, just back in fashion. I remember those being around 20 years ago. Of course, they all had cables back then.

Last time I had the pads on mine disintegrate, I found some replacements that were made of real leather. I haven’t had to replace them since. Some brands also make fabric pads; I’m sure they probably last longer than polyurethane, but I would expect them to wear out eventually.

The most obnoxious Democrat supporters have their whole ego caught up in being a “good person” by having the correct ideological positions. Admitting that their “team” is full of war criminals would directly challenge their egos and is thus summarily dismissed. They are idealists, and thus disconnected from material reality. They tend to be quite caught up in the notion of “electability” - the idea that they shouldn’t back candidates or platforms they actually want, but those calculated to appeal to the largest number, which is always smack dab in the center of the Overton window, in their estimation. (Of course, ironically, a true socialist platform would have the greatest appeal were not USians so propagandized against it.) I have literally had liberals tell me that though they are not themselves racist, they need a candidate that would be accepted by racists. I think more often than not, they cry “electability” so they have an excuse for supporting a conservative candidate while simultaneously calling themselves “progressive”.

This is to say nothing of the fact that liberalism is a conservative ideology, and that it is more than happy to back imperialism if it means the spoils can subsidize their lifestyle. Or in other words, Democrats will cheer for any war if it keeps their Starbucks cheap and their gas tank filled. They are not anti-war at all. They oppose the appearance of warmongering, but not the actions themselves; they want plausible deniability so they can go back to brunch.

Tl;dr - Democrats are bad people who pretend to be good people and back war criminals because they like imperialism, no matter what excuses they make for it.

I was never banned; I deleted my account as I was frustrated with the increasing surveillance. Someone had mentioned Lemmy in one of the degoogling or privacy subs and I decided to check it out. It reminded me a lot of how the internet used to be before it was filled with bots, so I stuck around.

A lot of people spend a lot of time on an extrinsic search for intrinsic meaning. There isn’t one. The value and meaning of your life can only be self-determined. That feels impossibly heavy at first, but as you come to embrace it, there is an incredible freedom in it. If there is any determinant of adulthood, that’s it - to be self-defined. To that end, there are no “rules” about what your life must look like - marriage, kids, home ownership, whatever else are all options, but not compulsory. It’s up to you to determine what it is that you actually want.

The other marker of adulthood, I think, is to have come to terms with your childhood. It sounds like you think your father was given advantages that he hasn’t seen fit to pass on to you, and you understandably have some feelings about it. Family of origin issues can really cloud your mind until you sort through and come to terms with them. Talking to a therapist about it (or bar that, reading some books on the subject) could be of some value. A lot of people go through their lives reenacting patterns they observed in their parents or projecting their unmet needs from childhood onto others, to their own detriment. This is work that you have to do yourself; no one can “fix” you.

Comparison will not get you anywhere. Consider who you want to be, and then start taking steps in that direction. Once you have set out on that journey, you may encounter others on their own journeys or you may not, but you won’t have your self-worth riding on the outcome.

The US has no maximum working hours, not even in the so-called “progressive” states. There may be limits in the public sector or in very specific industries (airlines), but this represents a very small percentage of the US labor force.

I’m not trying to be US-centric here, and I know other places have better laws, but the average USian is extremely ignorant of their own labor laws and the US deliberately misrepresents its actual conditions to those abroad via propaganda. (That system is being allowed to break down for the moment but it is not gone.) This is what capitalism brings, and anyone who thinks they are insulated from it or that their country is ‘too civilized’ to go down this path is being wilfully ignorant. The vassal states will not be unaffected as the imperial core turns to open fascism.

Averages are not very useful for making sweeping generalizations. An average of hours worked is going to include people working 80 hours per week to make ends meet as well as people working under 40 who are unable to get healthcare benefits. In the US, the number going down would reflect increasing underemployment, not prosperity, as we have no safety nets and virtually no one is working sub-40 hours and getting full-time pay.

As for time spent watching television, it’s a passive form of escapism that it more accessible to people under stress. The worst times in my life have been when I would do nothing but watch television to distract myself after work - because I had no social connections and no money to spend on hobbies or going out.

Those here not currently feeling financial pressure are not paying attention to the rise of fascism if they’re reporting being completely unstressed. I am lucky enough to be well-situated financially, but I can feel the walls closing in and I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do to prepare for what’s coming. (It’s easy to say “organize,” but I am not as able-bodied as I used to be and I don’t have the time or energy to commit to an org.) I try to agitate with the people around me, but it more often than not feels like I’m tilting at windmills.

Tl;dr - yeah, I’m pretty stressed.

I swear someone wrote the plans for the operation 20 years ago and they just never bothered to update them.