I only played Stellaris off and on, but I went years without buying an expansion and always thought the new systems were complete and better than what they replaced when I returned. Breaking current saves is frustrating, so I guess you would need to delay an update if you had one you planned on returning to.

If you didn’t know, you can roll back to older versions of steam games with some work. A few games have a built-in system, but most of the tile you have to manually replace files after redownloading the old versions.

This is a great response that captured my feelings well. I’m not sure why the replier assumed the ex was initially angry, to me it just sounds like they were telling a story about something that happened to them that day. If I was describing this to a partner and they assumed it was traumatic for me, I would be perhaps a bit flattered by the concern, but mostly just confused. Because that is a significant overreaction to a common experience.

A professional mechanic is going to know much more about taking care of cars than us, that’s what we pay them for. And it’s normal (and thoughtful) for them to give people advice that we may need to look into more later on. And if the partner kept thinking I would internalize feelings of inadequacy from these mundane experiences even after I corrected them, it would be both annoying and insulting. If anything, that would be patronizing.

Also, if I told a story where I described not knowing something that would be useful in the future, and my partner did know about it, I would want them to offer to teach me about it. Accusing your partner of being manipulative just because they try to help you with a problem is both cynical and immature. I pity people who are so jaded as to see genuine offers of help as instead malicious, but I would encourage them to at least try to assume others are engaging in good faith until being given a reason to suspect otherwise.

I feel like I’m losing my mind sometimes how people assume the most absurd troll comments are sincere and real. They’ve kept up the bit in replies too.

They agreed with the statement, then added an example of being a bystander to something clearly wrong where they chose not to interfere. As a result, the bad thing continued, and the commentor did not care so long as it stopped affecting them. It is really not hard to see the thinly-veiled analogy. And yet people point out the problematic nature of the story, likely after supporting the idea it is parodying.

I took it to be a coyote. They go after sheep sometimes. Also, they are associated with being trickster figures in mythology.

If you mean they are donating from their own profits, yes they can write that off. But these customer donations are not income for them and cannot be written off by the company.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-000329849244

But people should research charities before giving, some are many times more effective than others.

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/en/best-charities-to-donate-to-2024

They do not. It is not income, so they can’t claim it as a deduction. The customer could claim it as a deduction if they wanted, but these donations are small enough I’m sure they really aren’t worth tracking for an individual.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-000329849244

This is a good example showing OP was being too broad. I like the sentiment but think they should limit it to topics for which there is a sizable amount of genuine dissent (meaning we don’t have to invent an argument for an hypothetical unreasonable contrarian) and that aren’t easily demonstrably falsifiable (meaning we are covering opinions and theories, not matters of objective fact).

OP likely was meaning to apply this to controversial social policies or philosophical questions exploring what values people prioritize. Too often loud voices demonize “the other side” and dismiss them out of hand with strawmen.

This is a TF2 reference.

https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/ÜberCharge

But an upvote doesn’t mean “I like this”. It means you judge the post/comment to be high quality. There’s a correlation for sure, but quality is a holistic judgement based on context. It measured by the same spectrums as downvoting: to what extent is the post/comment relevant, original, funny, entertaining, informative, rule-abiding, respectful, etc. We don’t need separate buttons for all of these, the voting buttons just wear many hats. You’re generally going to think more highly of stuff you agree with or that makes you happy, but accurate bad news and unpopular opinions can still succeed score-wise despite these disadvantages.

Here’s the thing…if you get upset that a random woman that you don’t know would take the hyperbolic position that they would rather be in the same room as a bear than with you, you’re likely the exact type of man that these memes are talking about.

What the heck? Expressing resentment at the implication that you are more threatening than a bear based solely on gender is evidence that you are, in fact, more threatening than a bear? How does that follow? You don’t need to have a fragile ego to recognize the unfairness of it.

They know how dangerous a bear is.

If they would rather be alone with a bear than a random stranger of any gender I’m going to say they don’t.

The original post was a bad-faith engagement farm that became much more popular than it ever should have been. It ended up bringing up a bit of good discussion and a lot of insane takes.

I was using it almost daily from the start and felt worse for it, so I started dreading taking it and quickly preferred no medication. I eventually finished it off and instead of getting a refill, I switched to something that worked great from the start and was cheaper.

I’m not saying it’s not a good medication, I even recommend it, but if it requires a strict schedule and that much of a miserable buildup just to still be worse than an alternative it’s simply not the right one for me.

I still can’t find anything about him being a pedophile. If you have something you can link about it I would genuinely like to know.

He was never given a reason for his permanent ban, but it is thought to be for for his view on trans athletes. He was temporarily banned earlier for saying “the rioting needs to fucking stop, and if that means like white redneck fucking militia dudes out there mowing down dipshit protesters that think that they can torch buildings at ten p.m., then at this point they have my fucking blessing…” in regards to a BLM protest, which was considered inciting violence. Not saying that’s a great statement but it’s pretty clear he’s talking about rioters specifically.

But neither of these thing make him a nazi. That label shouldn’t just be thrown around casually.

It’s interesting that he seems to get a lot of accusations of being far-right by the far-left and far-left by the far-right. I don’t know if there was some controversy I missed that inspired the pedophile comment, but calling him a borderline nazi is frankly ridiculous.

Here’s the introduction to his wikipedia page for anyone curious:

Steven Kenneth Bonnell II (born December 12, 1988), known online as Destiny, is an American live-streamer and political commentator. He was among the first people to stream video games online full-time and received attention as a pioneer of the industry.[4] Since 2016, he has garnered further attention for streaming political debates with other online personalities, in which he advocates for progressivism and liberal politics.[5][6] The New York Times has described Bonnell as a liberal,[2] while Bonnell has described himself as “a very big social democrat”.[6]

I went through a month’s supply of strattera before switching to adderall. I also only took it on “need to be productive” days, which may have been the wrong approach. I was reluctant to take it otherwise because of the side effects. I felt like it did help me focus on tasks, but the benefit was essentially offset by the drowsiness it caused making it something of a wash for my productivity. I work at home so I would end up needing to take a nap most days I took it. Sleeping became very refreshing though, which was a silver lining.

Other symptoms were a pounding head, a decrease in appetite, and an increase in anxious thoughts. None of the symptoms were intense except drowsiness, and all of them mellowed out after a few weeks.

Adderall works a lot better for me now and has fewer side effects. But I’ve seen others in the community really appreciate what straterra has done for them, so it seems to vary a lot from person to person. Despite my disappointment with it, it may be worth trying if stimulants aren’t working well for you. My doctor recommended it initially because it was working well for some of her other patients.

I think you’ll be hard pressed to find someone progressive enough for lemmy to like that will also be interesting to a Joe Rogan fan. I would recommend Destiny though. I wouldn’t say he’s like Joe Rogan, but he frequently does debates with commentators of all politcal positions including those with similar beliefs to Joe. He has an aggressive, confrontational style that would be your best bet at trying to demonstrate the weaknesses of the views Joe would advocate for.

If you’re not familiar with his views, Destiny could probably be described as a left-leaning liberal institutionalist moderate. His community can attract a variety of viewpoints and is relatively accepting of criticism for Destiny so your brother would have an easier time interacting with them than someone like Hasan.

It’s nice you are trying to look out for your brother like this. Good luck!

When games go too far with this, it can encourage exploit or cheese strategies, or at least strict adherence to a meta build. This can actually mean resorting to a solution with less skill needed, since the game has already been effectively solved. A still-challenging situation that doesn’t demand perfection can be reasonably done with unoptimized preparation and adaptation.

It wasn’t my decision, but getting fired from an exhausting job was amazing for me. I wasn’t going to pull the trigger myself, but walking out of my boss’s office I couldn’t keep a huge grin off my face. I was in no rush to find a new job so the months of uneployment that followed were some of the happiest of my life. And I have a better job now that pays less but is so much less stressful.

That’s not really how these stories went, at least for the ones involving mortals. The gods used favored mortals or demigod children as proxies instead. So maybe you could interpret Athena turning one of Poseidon’s lovers into a hideous creature as her way of punishing him.

Depending on the telling, Poseidon/Neptune had sex with her in a temple dedicated to Athena/Minerva, and the latter transformed her as punishment. Then she may have just been chilling until Perseus came along to behead her for an unrelated situation.

Socializing well is one of the hardest struggles of being a human, and even people that are naturally social still may not get along well with others. I like to recommend the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Think of it like a “For Dummies” book on socializing. It has a lot of real-life anecdotes for difficult social situations people overcome and how. I should mention I just pirated the audiobook for it though.

Also, like others have said, I like listening to Healthy Gamer on youtube/twitch. He’s a real, active therapist with a lot of experience helping people with these kinds of things, particularly for gamers. You can also just play it in the background while doing other things.