abraxas
Running against Biden meant throwing out the biggest indicator for success against a “worst case scenario” opposition candidate. Incumbency is worth all the young guns waiting 4 years for their shot. Despite what you may have heard, nobody in DNC is more likely to win 2024 than Biden despite all the baggage and Republican hate.
I think it gets pretty hypocritical, singling out religion like that. In the workplace, I can have memorabilia of my favorite sports team even though someone else hates it (unless perhaps it’s a Catholic School team that has a cross in its logo?). I can have the flag of a hostile foreign country because I’m proud of my heritige. I can have a picture of me kissing my wife even though it would normally be just outside the common no-tolerance Harassment policy. Unless it was taken at the wedding, or in/near a religious monument. I can wear gauge earrings, or just a little star… as long as it’s not a Star of David. Ditto with pendants, even new-agey wooowooo pendants, as long as it’s not a pentagram. There’s no path there that isn’t hypocritical.
Freedom of religion and freedom from religion go hand-in-hand, and it’s not always an easy relationship to figure out. Forced private secularism is its own anti-freedom problem, even when discussing the employee at a government workplace. It’s not really secular if I’m forbidden from wearing something for solely religious reasons. Even if the religious reason is that the thing I want to wear is religious.
I think girls who get long eyelashes do it because they like how they look.
And thank god if they do because I would hate a woman who only cares about what other people think of her looks.
As one of my favorite baduk streamers puts it, “the mistake was earlier”.
Using dozens of DLCs to get B2B-grade revenue out of a game sounds like a great business strategy, but as Paradox is EOLing all those games that people have spent hundreds on, I think there is this reaction of “why should I prepare to spend hundreds again?”
I genuinely believe this is a “short term revenue” thing, and will ultimately cost them against a subscription-from-day-1 model. I mean, I doubt I’m the only person who can’t bring themselves to even LOOK at Crusader Kings 3. I never touched Sims 4 until it was free. And if EU5 comes out? I’ll act the same. Paradox already has more of my money than Blizzard, so more power to them, but how many people like me aren’t going to consider buying sequels? It’s not about the money, it’s about the investment of money. If I were in $500 from subscription fees, I’d feel less harmed than $300 in DLCs for a now-out-of-print game. We humans are a complicated psychology
For me, I’ll try em when they’re free or when they go full patient-gamer. Which is a shame because Paradox makes excellent games. They just keep making people like me want to wait to pull the trigger.
Those 90% “vegetarian versions” are insulting to vegans because they are not balanced meals. Ya’ll still need protein. A plain salad with no high-protein veg is not a meal. The same salad with croutons made with butter is just insulting ignorance.
I recognize your name and we haven’t seen eye-to-eye in the past, but I’m gonna side with the vegans on this one here. Restaurants need to get their heads out of their asses about what a vegan meal is.
Flip-side. If you have a high-protein vegan meal and you just plop a steak on top of it, that’s also not a well-balanced meal. The term often used is “heavy” (if not just “unbalanced”).
I’m sure most of them have never been to China.
I spent two weeks there and that was enough; I would never choose to live there. It’s a fairly safe place as a tourist or on a business trip, but there were dozens of red flags in that time as well.
Ironically, though, none of the red flags there had to do with Communism. More about censorship and unnecessary overt shows of military force around every corner. I saw more large arms there than driving through rural America, that’s for sure.