I imagine he spent the entirety of the ban raging like Dennis Reynolds and counting down the days. “IDIIIOOOTS! IDDDIIIIOOOOTSS!!!”

STALKER, Stardew Valley, No Man’s Sky, Skyrim, Morrowind, WoW Classic/Vanilla, Mass Effect, Fallout 3/New Vegas.

I love that cats universally smell and rub their cheeks on groceries.

When I worked at Kmart years ago I was just a layaway employee. Since I was kind of fat and and of average height, the security guy asked me to stand-in while he dealt with this huge dude, maybe 6’3", as some kind of intimidation tactic while he asked him questions. My job was apparently to block the security office door to prevent the guy from leaving. Security guy starts asking about warrants and the guy is like “Fuck this” and rapidly approaches me at the door. Towering over me. This job paid minimum wage and I had zero training to deal with Brute Squads. I just let him go past me while the security guy desperately chased after him, asking him to stop repeatedly.

Security guy talked a lot of shit about me after that. Couldn’t give less of a fuck. Not my job to get knocked out by giant dudes who got caught trying to steal a pair of Basic Edition sweat pants.

Obviously this has nothing to do your situation or how you handled it, but it definitely speaks volumes about what the point of Security even is if the train security officers can’t even do anything.

EDIT: Looking back, that job was pretty fucked. It was on the bad side of town and Sears Holdings wound up getting rid of security entirely. Word got out extemely fast and it became a free-for-all for shoplifters. Groups of middle-aged women would come in with huge purses, fill them to the brim and casually walk out, laughing and saying “Nothin’ for us today, thank you!”. Got to the point where friendly deterrent didn’t even help. We just stopped giving a shit. I had been threatened with violence over refunding a TV that had been forced into a back seat so hard that the box still had red paint on it, had a gun flashed at me over making eye contact with a dude I recognized, and used to have to chase a kid around who would ride the bikes, steal candy and kick fragile shit off of shelves. That job is why I will never work at a department store again. Picked up some great customer service skills, though.

Something about this sentence really makes me want to be a pirate. Like a lot.

Sorry. That was a stupid word choice on my end.

You’re right. It’s not something I generally use in conversation (not since the early 2010s anyway) and I’m not sure why I thought it was cool to say it on here. Just a shitty reactionary thing that I blurted out.

What an immensely gay fucking thing to plaster on your window.

Bassin’s Black Bass with Hank Parker for the SNES. The best fishing game ever made.

I have a few relatives who seem incapable of understanding that miraculously high-definition photos from the 1800s containing never-before-seen imagery of lumberjacks posing with 12ft. tall sasquatches could possibly be inauthentic. .

I’m on the opposite end of this. Seems every time I reach out about an item I’m either ghosted, or the person sold it ten weeks ago and couldn’t be fucked to take it down. I think people are just inept in general, as several years in Customer Service revealed to me long ago. I watch people whip left turns onto busy streets without so much as looking nearly every single day. The general populace is pretty low-functioning, and they’re out there raising kids and making important decisions.

I was Lawful Neutral, but gave my monitors to my wife in exchange for a better single monitor. Nothing special, just a 27" Samsung w/ a high refresh rate and richer blacks that I found difficult to achieve with my old monitors. I found that I rarely (if ever) used both of them. Only while looking up information in MMOs like Classic WoW, but I play those so seldom these days that I’m getting a lot out of a single.

Yeah, both Messenger Lite and Facebook Lite are fucked. Post a photo or video on Facebook Lite and it’s guaranteed to be blurry piece of shit. If it’s shot horizontal, it’s going to be low-res vertical with letterboxing on the top and bottom. I have to hop on the main app just to post a discernable video for my family.

If I didn’t live on the other side of the continent and Facebook were my only real lifeline to my friends and family, I wouldn’t use it at all anymore. But now there’s this sunken-cost fallacy shit on top of it all, and how I get daily memories from the deceased like my father and grandmother. “Hope you’re having fun in Canada, love you, Gram”. Some of these messages are still applicable today, and I don’t know how to separate from that.

Honestly, there are two mobile games I’ve really been blown away by: Night of the Full Moon, and Dungeon Boss Respawned. They’re very polished, very feature-complete games that are on the small and neatly contained side. For PC, Bastion is pretty damn good. Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2 as well, but it’s difficult to get those running anymore. Raft, Ori and the Blind Forest and Stardew Valley are also phenomenal.

I’m sure there are other small games worthy of mention, but I’m struggling to remember them. I usually play large open world games. On that subject, absolutely try Valheim if you haven’t.

I’ll be happy to summarize each of these games if you’d like me to.

I really enjoyed what I played of Primal, and I hope they do more historic ones like it. One set during the Dark Ages would be sweet.

I was thinking of Arx Fatalis. I could have just looked that up in the first place, but for a moment I forgot about search engines.

Is that the one where you draw signs in the air with your mouse in order to cast them?

I don’t know if Gothic 1 and 2 qualify as true cult classics or not, but clunky controls and interface aside, these are two of the best games I have played in my life. Gothic 2 especially. The games offer an atmosphere like nothing I’ve ever played. The soundtrack, themes, and overall color pallete provide this rich and stirring ambience that always manages to make me feel as though I’m exploring an ancient pine forest on a dark, rainy day. See for yourself.

https://youtu.be/HZ1tyNFODM4

You can feel the spirit of the entire franchise contained within the first two minutes of that audio track, perfectly encapsulated. It was an entire world apart and years ahead of its time. If it resonates with you, then these games are absolutely worth the initial difficulty of figuring out those ridiculous keyboard controls. But if you’re really struggling with them, just read up on the Gothic 1 storyline and then skip straight to Gothic 2. It picks up right where the first leaves off. You won’t miss a tremendous amount, and the controls and gameplay are infinitely improved. However, sticking G1 out long enough to figure out what you’re doing will make G2 far more rewarding when you reunite with various characters and revisit previously explored areas.

A studio is remaking Gothic 1, but everything I’ve seen of it so far is about as faithful to Gothic 1 as The Dark Tower movie was to the books. They’ve massacred it. So stick with the originals.

I’m with you on that too. I was thinking more “click on the map and appear there” kind of fast travel, but stationary transit between hubs is fine by me. Awesome you mentioned Morrowind anyway since I just started modding it again this week for a new playthrough.

I never fast travel in games that allow me the option not to. I find them infinitely more engaging that way. Skyrim got it just right with their well-balanced mounts.