Yeah, I keep in touch. I experienced some deprivation as a kid, so as an adult, I pursue interests with glee. Maybe even to my detriment, but overall I think it’s a positive thing to rush toward interesting things.

The flip side is, really draining sometimes, and I push it away in favour of gratification. Could also be a sign of an imbalance in life, if recovering from work-based responsibility doesn’t happen well enough, and it intereferes with personal life responsibilites.

I have two Hori sticks, the RAP4 (modded) and fighting edge unmodded.

Both work great on pc and playstation. Hori at least had a switch stick, but not sure if any more. It was based on the RAP, which is a fine stick, even out of the box.

If you don’t have budget constraints, ordering a custom could work too, since you could get it to work on the switch and ps. I don’t think many sticks support both out of the box.

If you can leave the switch out, Qanba is real nice. Razer sticks are pretty cool too, very heavy and boxy, but I like that. And Hori is a bit more budget friendly.

The Nacon stick with Sanwa parts seems like a good deal too.

There a youtube channel and a steam curator called Mortismal Gaming who loves CRPGs. Their shtick is also completing games at 100% before popping a review, and they are churning out new material at an amazing pace. Check it out for some decent coverage on the genre.

As for a maybe hidden gem, Age of Decadence looks pretty good. I have not played it yet, but the genre seems to match, and the premise is solid.

Expedition Rome is well appreciated too, even if it leans more toward tactical battles.

Yeah, Addict is great for what it is especially for thr price. Paying that much for basically a nothingburger seems weird?

Just bought a wollen cape for those crispy autumn mornings. It’s nice to lounge around in, but maybe I’ll summon the courage to take it out too.

Kinda feels like a trenchcoat in function, but lighter and with a hood to boot.

If you care about fashion, everything will go out of style every now and then. If you like cargo shorts, wear them. There’s no reason to cater to someone elses gatekeeping. If you think that they don’t fit your look, then that’s a completely different issue.

They are very handy too in all the right ways.

Driving people out because of their past isn’t fruitful. Someone used to have bigoted views but something made them change their mind, and they pushed hard enough to reform their life? Sounds like they wanted it, and are probably a changed person.

I know a few people like this. They help others leave similar situations. Great people doing important work.

I guess when I ran into Aesop Rock, and got absolutely infatuated? I don’t do a lot of rap, so his stuff hitting so damn hard was a surprise.

I remember a few of the other times. Mostly it has taken the right moment, the right mindset and the right artist. A dark autumn evening and a walk in a park for Dark Sanctuary, falling asleep to SunnO))) and waking up to it was a mindblowing experience.

Carpenter Bruts album Trilogy opened up electronic music for me, and Crypt of the Necrodancers soundtrack cemented it.

Oh wow, it’s still going? I really thought the game got shut down! It’s a cool shooter, definitely fun to mess around in.

As it stands, vocational education is faltering but high school is still ptetty strong - and they are mandatory untill you are 18. Not all vocational school/trade schools suck, but I’ve talked with a good deal of young students (hundreds) to get s feel that there are staggering differences in how much the teachers care, or are able to motivte the kids into caring about learning.

If you take vocational education/trade school, there’s a good chance you have a single course or two of publics, history or similar subjects and that’s that.

It’s also turning into a bit of a gender issue, since our high schools are skewing heavily toward female students, with boys opting more and more to do trade school, partially due to lack of grades, partially because they feel like the school system isn’t for them and studying theory is unpleasant or downright hard. So they get demotivated and go where it’s considered “easier”, and scrape by.

After you graduate secondary education, a lot if guys don’t pursue further studies, so their access to education and discourse stalls. Young women do pursue higher education though, but it is not an idel situation at all.

This seems to be the case yeah. The rhetoric of the left is preaching acceptance and solidarity, but in an uncertain world “feelgood rhetoric” isn’t strong enough. The right are preaching what appear to be solutions (close borders, nationalism, tax cuts to income and gas, segregation and defunding social programs to adress debt) so people buy into it.

What they don’t realise is that the tax cuts hurt the debt cutting messures and eroiding social security hurts nations and paves way for more insecurity, hate and fear (which fuels the right wing machine).

There’s precious little education on politics and choices for 20-somethings, and people are left to try and understand what the media pushes out. Finland benefits from a trusted national news media, though they have been criticized by the right of being politically biased and not worth their budget. So people slanting toward the right tend to be sceptical of it, and are pushed away, toward other news sources.

Heyy, very cool! Thanks for the recommendation! I gotta keep this one in mind, after I get through Fear&Hunger. It’s pretty brutal, but god I love the pixel art.

Penny Racers was the jam, way back in the day. It was our family game, but unfortunately I played too much, and no-one could keep up.

Circuit Breakers is a really good Micro Machines clone. I still take it with me when the old ps-systems get carried around.

Biofreaks and WU-TANG:enter the pain are so much fun. Stupid gory party fighters with more jank than a dump site, but I don’t care.

I have so many fond memories of the game, but I keep forgetting the name. Thank you for the reminder, maybe this time I’ll remember to try and emulate it.

Social work and sex ed with a smidgen of research.

Tinder is very superficial and a hard platform to find people on. The gender ratio is very skewed and it turns against itself, since the competition for attention is so hard. This benefits the app though, since it makes peopel waste money on superlikes and whatnot - so they won’t ever try to fix it.

You definitely aren’t too old to date around and have fun meeting people. Mingling around in real life might be easier, since you don’t have to rely on a single picture and a few lines of text to impress someone.

An aboslutelty wonderful timewaster has been Brotato. Someone described my relationship to it quite well: it’s like solitaire. Whip it out every now and then for a quick timewaster, win or loose, it’s fun.

Boltgun was great too! So much Warhammer-infused fun.

“Dude just talking to people, everyone can do that”.

An absolute wannabe authoritarian brute. The institution pushing back against outrage could (and probably already has) lead to a massive Streisand effect.

Happened when I was kid, mid teens. I was playing Diablo at night, and remember being kinda on edge, since I wasn’t supposed to - so I was keeping an eye and an ear on the house.

So, I’m slaying it in Baal Runs, and see something move across the doorway of the study, and just feel caught. It must have been mom, and I’m caught - since it was this average-height white figure, wearing a night gown. And no-one else is at home.

I leave the room and look left to moms bedroom and hear her snoring. There’s no-one up inside the house, and no-one has crossed the doorway back into my mums bedroom.

This wasn’t the only weird, spooky thing to have happened in that house, but it is the only one where I was strictly awake.