That’s an interesting take. I found them to be very different people. Two different flavours of cliche’d anime protagonist, sure, but very different people none the less.

My partner and I make a point to occasionally play through a couch co-op game as well. Here are some of the things we enjoyed.

Phogs - Currently playing this. It’s a cute, dog-themed puzzle game thing, where you play as two heads of a single long dog-thing. We’re enjoying it, but we’re not particularly deep in, and I do wonder if it’ll get Ibb and Obb samey, but it’s worth checking out imo.

Cassette Beasts - Couch co-op, Pokemon inspired, adventure RPG with great storytelling, fantastic music and a retro aesthetic. The world is very Zelda-like in exploration and puzzle solving, while combat is Pokemon double battles. Highly recommended, just be aware that one player gets to be the player-made protagonist, while the other is one of an interchangeable series of partner characters.

Sea of Stars - The co-op update did a lot of good for this game. A Chrono Trigger inspired, faux-SNES era, indie RPG. There’s a lot of unvoiced dialogue, which I could see as being a barrier to enjoyment as a multiplayer game, but the game is paced quite well, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem. Also, players do take turns inputting commands, but everyone is responsible for the timed hits/blocks, and you each control a character of equal agency in the overworld, so it avoids the largest co-op turn based RPG folly of having one player and one half-watching “follower.” There are a ton of accessibility options/features (difficulty is VERY malleable), and as an added bonus, there’s a free story DLC coming on the 20th.

Children of Morta - This is perhaps the most “hardcore” of my list, but the girlfriend, despite explicitly not enjoying “hard” games, really really enjoyed this one. An action-RPG with some very light roguelike elements, Children of Morta has you play as a family of hunter-gatherer-warrior types in a fantasy world, working together to stop a malevolent power from corrupting the physical world. Each family member has a different playstyle, their own skill tree, and a lot of personality. The game is very story driven, with a few moments being taken between each run for the fantastic narration to drip feed the narrative, slowly teaching you more about the world, the characters, and their family dynamic.

These are the ones that came to the top of my mind, either because they were particularly good or, in the case of Phogs, is ongoing. If I see anything else worth mentioning when I look at my Steam list next, I’ll add.

I believe we (as in, people) all have a responsibility to hold each other accountable. But we can also only do so much, and inserting yourself into a toxic community founded for the sole goal of normalizing that toxicity in some misguided attempt to reform such people is beyond what any one person can be expected to engage with.

I explicitly stay away from such groups. I call it out in person, and politely check my friends when they say something that they might not realize is harmful, exactly the same way I expect them to check me, but that’s just it. That kind of discourse isn’t welcome in these groups because they were created with one explicit purpose: to justify and normalize the absolute shittiest behavioursof the most sexiest of male culture.

She’s right, it isn’t a small amount of men. But it’s a supermajority in certain circles, and a tiny, neglible minority in others. She, unfortunately, exposed herself to the worst of men enmasse. We should instead go to those latter circles, and avoid/ostracize those former circles, until they realize if their only goal is sex, they’ll have to figure out how to be a decent person first. And men, choose to be better.

Obviously because the child with cancer is just a drain on national resources and he’s doing the country a favour.

/s for me, but I suspect that this is how he rationalizes it. He does love Hitler, after all.

Feel free to degrade me.

Are you okay?

I’m not home right now, but I’ll follow up with more formal testing either tomorrow or the next day. I’m very interested in why such similiar machines get completely different performance.

The machine in question is sporting a Ryzen 3600, for discussion sake.

The vast majority of the Bible was simply guidelines to keep people healthy and happy. All this “the skin of the pig is unclean” stuff? They hadn’t figured out germs yet. No sex until marriage? No contraceptives, so don’t create uncared for children. I won’t waste my time on it but, when examined in context, this is the vast majority, if not the entirety of the bible: lessons on how to be safe and happy relative to the time, made digestable and relevant to the common person.

Sucks they had to get there via fear of imaginary, post-life pain, and it sucks twice as hard that they’ve neglected to rationalize that part as the rest of the belief structure has modernized.

Ah, yes, jokes like “Russia is right” and “Tiananmin square is American propaganda.” Gosh darn my easily offended sensibilities, sparking wars between like-minded leftists, all because I can’t take a joke.

Fuck off.

My partners RX6600 holds 80 FPS on mid settings without framegen. Maybe the gap between med and high is larger than I realize, or there’s an ultra setting I hadn’t noticed, but the author’s experiences still seem out of whack.

I feel like this has been a trend lately. New, high-fidelity game releases, and the wave of “UNOPTIMIZED GARBAGE!” “dev, fix ur game!” starts rolling, only for myself, and the majority of people I speak to personally, to have no real issues. Feels rude to play this card, but I am starting to lean towards most people having no idea how to care for their machine, in a lot of cases, and rarely facing some weirdly specific drive/card compatibility stuff.

Don’t mistake those fascists for socialists. They’re just cheering for the other empire and lying about it. They shit on left-leaning groups because those groups stand between them and the totalitarian regime they desire.

God fucking dammit.

I have a multiple friends who, whenever they find success, almost immediately feel guilty and apologize to anyone else involved. In every case, those friends come from backgrounds where they were surrounded by narcissists. The guilt and apologies are a programmed response because “friends” and family would always frame their success as someone else’s, usually their own, loss. This is now the lens they see every success through.

Win at a game? Apologize to the people you beat. Interview well and be offered a new job? Feel guilty about the other applicants. Hell, go out for a meal with friends and your food comes first? “I’m so sorry, guys.”

Narcissists have programmed these friends to believe that they are undeserving of success, or even good luck, and that they should apologize for existing. I do my best to reassure them when I can, “you earned this,” or “you had nothing to do with this happening,” but ultimately it’s something they have to grapple with until they can figure out for themselves how to grow past that programming.

I have no idea if this applies to your situation, but it is a lens to consider.

Make no mistake, the game the ruling class has always played has been: “how do I abuse these people just enough to keep them desperate, without overstepping and leaving them with no choice but to rebel?” Lately, the children, and grandchildren of the ogliarchs who knew how to play this game have been taking over as their predecessors age out, and, in their hubris, have been over reaching in acts of entitlement. They, like many of us, have failed to recognize the game for what it is and it is already causing the deaths of many people. At this rate, it will spark visible war. Luigi was one man, and there have been many more like him brewing since.

This thread is actually huge, so apologies if this has already been recommended, but take a look at Against the Storm. It’s an indie city-builder with a bit of a rogue-like spin. You can usually get it on fairly deep sales, and the rogue-like elements combined with some meta-progression gives it a real play length, even though a single city-building session is a ~45-60 minute experience.

Holy fuck the throwback meme.

And nearly half are “not concerned” about Trump annexing Canada. What boulder are these people living under?

Of course not. A lot of them are salivating at the thought. Polievere is literally running the Republican playbook right now; the CPC voters are either voting CPC because they just check that box and don’t think about it very much, or they’re actively repugnant people who look at what’s going on in the US and unironically think, “I wish that were me.”

uienia out here doin’ the lord’s work.

/s

Here, you dropped this.

You hear that guys? It’s working; keep it up.