When I visited China, sadly all I could find was this non carbonated version of Red Bull that came in like a 10 ounce can. Really roughed it.

My pop psychology take on it is that his fanbase does not want to see aspirational media. They don’t want to see anything from Drive to Dragon Ball Z and say “that, I want to be like that.”

They’re all largely blackpilled. Rejected by society and they reject society back. And want to see themselves on the stream. Someone just as given up on life, bitter and resentful and yet even with all that, somehow still living the “dream” of streaming for a living. They take comfort that he grosses out normies and is inexplicable to people outside his fanbase; the negative polarization problem at its peak. He makes the people they hate uncomfortable and confused, so he must be doing something right.

If you’re not familiar with it, Eternal September is a concept that directly relates to this.

Man, how did I miss that happening? I thought I was fairly (too much) plugged into 2020, but I never saw that until now. Very cool.

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Might need to update my pronouns on here.

Certainly Eric Adams is going to perp walk all the decision makers at this guy’s insurance company as they go to the murder trial, right?

Had a similar first time thing taking my child on his first backpacking trip out into actual primitive camping. We had to filter our water and put our food in lockers so no bears or coyotes would come for it, etc. On the hike on in he was pretty insufferable, even though it was only a mile. But even by evening he was already getting very into it, gathering kindling for the fire, seeing his first millipede, stuff like that. We did a lot of hiking around the second day, seeing some ruins, climbing some foothills. He really liked that.

I grew up on a farm, so for me this stuff is already pretty natural. But he’s born and raised in a major metropolitan city, so I am trying to make sure he actually knows how to touch grass. We’ve done car camping before, but it is pretty incredible how much more rustic just a simple mile hike between you and where cars are allowed can be.

Citizen Sleeper is next on my list. Got it for Christmas, but there’s been a bottleneck on the Switch since my child started really getting into Minecraft.

I personally think it rules, but I am aware that the hyper anime aesthetic complete with occasional fan service (though to a much lesser degree than other Kodaka games) is not for everyone. So, I don’t blanket recommend it to anyone, but if you enjoy or at least tolerate that part of it, the rest of the game is tight.

One thing to know going through it is that the very first play through there are no meaningful choices (aside from a joke bad end choice). You don’t get to the branching narrative until you experience the 100 days once through. But even that has an in game lore, characterization reasoning behind it, which I thought was pretty clever.

I’m a sicko, so I’m neck deep in Last Defense Academy. The choices actually do matter is super refreshing. The included story flowchart branching at your choices reminds me of Radiant Historia in terms of bouncing around trying things out. Thankfully Kodaka is not too precious about anything and so the melodrama works. I doubt I get all 100 endings, but I’m going to get way more than I thought I would when I first heard about the concept.

The tactical RPG gameplay itself is fairly straightforward, but as someone that plays every Fire Emblem game at launch, I enjoy it. I should maybe be playing on a higher difficulty than normal, I’ve gotten an S rating for every battle I’ve done outside of two of them, but honestly being able to just shred through it has it’s own fun to it.

The visual novel type gameplay between battles is good enough. I wish it had just a little more depth, maybe some extra power-ups unlocked for getting friendship points ala Persona would be nice. But it doesn’t punish you too much for not min-maxing, which I’m sure most people will appreciate.

I do appreciate just how many gameplay systems have in game lore and plotting attached to them. It doesn’t feel like gameplay is divorced from story at all. The way your character navigates the flowchart to the way character death is handled during the tactics RPG sections all tie back into the main story, which makes it feel less discrete than some games that just sort of have story and have gameplay and never the two shall meet kind of stuff.

Domino is one of my favorite films. Maybe I give it extra love because it is so underrated, but what a fun film with a very stylized look.

Our first hot couch guy senator. Another glass ceiling shattered.

Oh, no! Not his Morbestie!

So many liberals act like you’ve grown a second head when you bring this up. It’s amazing how much they memory holed this.

There was a certain type of Ben Shapiro republican that was all in on him. Tried to make him happen so hard.

Like FlakesBongler, I would say a lot of what made me more comfortable expressing myself was the gym. Not quite for the same reasons though.

Working out pushes you toward discomfort, because that’s where real change in the body happens. When you are regularly testing and pushing yourself past your physical boundaries, the mental benefits are really under-reported. You know yourself very well after regularly working out.

Plus, the discomfort of hundreds of pounds on your shoulders as you do squats is much greater than the discomfort of someone knowing you’re a communist most of the time.

Relatedly, once you’ve ground yourself to dust by doing 200 kettlebell snatches in 10 minutes, you may find that whether or not someone knows you’re a communist isn’t the release valve you thought it was. It doesn’t matter as much. Your anxiety takes on a different role in your mind.

When I was younger and not working out, I often fell into that whole “there’s someone wrong on the internet” mentality. Part of me no longer being like that is maturing, I’m sure, but that maturity has to come from somewhere and I think doing as many pull-ups as possible with a 40-lbs weight vest on is honestly part of that.

Surviving all that builds confidence too. You know what it’s like, as Vince Lombardi is often credited with saying, to reach “any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.”

You can probably get this type of feeling, experience and growth from other activities. Like gardening or painting. There’s a lot of ways you can channel this sort of primal part of the brain. But for me as a traditional masculine guy, lifting was it.

This one declaring the heat death of the universe to end the game is very amusing.