I don’t like most of the responses here so I’m offer my own. Love is not found it is built.

My wife and I got married young. I’m 34 and I’ll be celebrating my 9th anniversary in under a week.

Love is where all those things come together. We have the deepest friendship. We’re weird in the same ways and we’ve basically developed our own brand of humor. I can make my wife laugh literally with a look.

Love is also a commitment to never, ever bail. It’s unlike anything else. With friends, you still try to be good company or you wouldn’t tell them the deep thoughts. But my wife and I can share anything. We’re so intertwined that there’s more understanding than judgment. We can say things we don’t like about people, about the world, about ourselves. We can be truly vulnerable.

We didn’t find love, we built it. From 25 to 34 I’m a phenomenally different person, but we’re like two planets oscillating around each other. Our orbit influences the other, and vice versa. We never would have been these people if we weren’t together. With most friends I feel like they may have some influence… But in marriage it’s just undeniable.

It’s a truly unique thing. But I will say I couldn’t understand it until I had it. And I still don’t. Dating for 4 years wasn’t the same as marriage after 1 which wasn’t the same as marriage after 5 and that’s not the same as it is now after almost 9 years. It’s always growing, always deepening, and it’s just insanely personal at a very deep level.

Kinda sounds like you have your own definition of what constitutes an “April Fools joke” and your are assigning negative connotations to it. I don’t think that’s an objective fact.

“April Fools is not [fun for everyone]” is an opinion more than a fact. I don’t think anyone disagrees with your underlying premise that mean spirited “jokes” don’t belong in the workplace, but rather your assertion that it’s a prerequisite for April Fools jokes to be mean spirited.

Also, if we are going to bring the level of scrutiny to all jokes that you are bringing… I don’t think it is even possible to design a “joke” that would pass your test.

I would hope so. I think it would be the right thing to do. But I don’t think Democrats would see all the “instant landslide wins” that are talked about. I don’t think they can accurately predict how that will go. I just don’t buy that the average non-voter is definitely voting Democrat.

But again - we should push for it because I think it’s the right thing to do, not because I think it’s good strategy.

I don’t think this is clear cut anymore. Low information voters broke very hard for Trump. Democrats have work to do to win back the average voter, but the adage of “we win when people turn out” broke in this last election.

Democrats need to get off their ass and offer something better. The fact that Trump won so handily should be a damn wake up call that they are out of touch. Republicans message sucks ass, but it still beat the hell out of Democrats. The party leadership needs an overhaul because they are floundering and trotting out these old adages excuses how piss poor they’ve done leading the party.

No.

And by no I mean we’re not just now asking that. A lot of us already knew we were the baddies. We have been.

He’s been working on that for 4.5 years. 10s of thousands of attempts.

The grind is so real

I asked it who will win the super bowl later today and it said it didn’t know.

That’s the same thing as what you were asking, from a timeline perspective.

I’ll start with a caveat that I’m a huge FF7 fan.

Remake was cool, but plagued with pacing problems. The biggest issue was they had to make everything sort of from scratch, and so a ton of development time was put into the “fixed costs” of things. The result was a cool, but extremely padded game. It really is maybe 15% of the content of the original, but stretched out.

Rebirth covers SO much more. Like holy shit it is maybe 10x the game that Remake is, and there’s good quality content. There’s the usual side quests, but they are, in fact, side quests. If you don’t want to do the fetch quest things they talk about, you can skip over the vast majority. I didn’t like that critique… If a game has optional content you find boring, it’s hard to knock the game for it.

But the visuals in this game are dazzling. I thought the map was huge and vast, and had so many different environments… And then realized there were 5 or 6 completely unique areas like that. It’s a real marvel to go through the different landscapes.

Story wise, I think they did an excellent job, provided you did play the original. It’s hard to get around that part, but it’s sort of a price of admission for a sequel game. But they cleaned up SOOOO many issues with the original game. Things are explained so much more clearly, that I think people forget how incoherent the original story was. There was a lot of hand waving and completely unexplained sides. This game really brings them all into focus. They added a pretty hefty amount of story as well, and I thought it was for the better.

There are some knocks I agree with… The Cait Sith sections are a bit brutal, but luckily they’re infrequent. The combat is super fun - again I think I disagree with the author on this… There’s so many shortcuts you can set to not have to go through menus. I rarely found myself in the situations they talked about, but to each their own.

The game is not perfect, and not for everyone. But I thought the voice acting and story elements were great. They found a reasonable way to be really goofy and funny at times, while also maintaining a more serious tone when needed.

I massively enjoyed it, and thought it was a great 2nd addition. Like all middle parts of a trilogy, I could completely sour on a lot of them if they don’t bring it home. Part 2 sets up a lot, pays off a small amount, but they’re really setting up for a massive ending. If they execute, both games will be seen as massive achievements, in my eyes. Though I think most of the criticisms of Remake are well warranted.

It’s 2 of 3

I’m pretty shocked that you’re getting downvoted for saying that a murder might not be the way to invoke change.

That’s pretty nuts to me. Everyone seems like they are trying to justify this… Why are we justifying murder? People can be pretty devoid of empathy. I understand that people want change, and that we need it. I worked in health insurance and know how wasteful it is and how much pain it causes.

Pseudo-celebrating a murder and trying to back-justify it is about the same as actively hoping/campaigning that it happens. It honestly seems like some people are on here with the mentality that any CEO should be moderately expecting to be murdered, and that it is acceptable to live in a world that operates that way.

I mean the polls for Biden were bad and getting worse. Harris was only down a couple points… Biden was down double digits. I hate to say it, but with the 2 point polling error, Biden had 0 path to make it. I don’t know a single state that he would have taken off of Trump.

Ah yes. Great. We’re the election conspiracy theorists now. It’s apparently democrats turn to make completely baseless accusations.

This stuff is exhausting. We want to look for every reason except for the one that matters: Democrats lost America. We need to break the party apart and start over.

Every other excuse just delays and distracts. Democrats fucked it. We can be all high and righteous as we want, but we lost 2 of 3 to Donald Trump.

Face the reality. Democrats need to reinvent themselves or they will lose to shit candidates like Trump.

… So living further away from the equator is detrimental to your health? I haven’t heard of this phenomenon.

Iowa itself is a lost cause. It’s 75% Republican here. We’re gerrymandered to high hell, so even if Baccam squeaks through, Iowa state legislature won’t look very blue. If it’s 60/40 Republican I’d be absolutely shocked.

But contributing one Senator nationally would be pretty neat.

If Harris gets Iowa the race is over. These races are not truly independent - they are correlated. If Harris picks up Iowa, there’s a very good chance that means she’s swept every swing state.

Right - I just mean literally any attempt to try and cater to a specific group is gonna be like this.

Both campaigns go after different groups. I just think literally anything that is contained in these are going to sound racist.

In a less charged example, both candidates try and appeal to women. Those could be viewed as sexist.

To be fair… When the article’s opening line is “In outreach to Black Men”, it doesn’t really matter what you put after. It’s going to sound bad.

It can be both things.

There are no definitive data points that should lead anyone to believe that either candidate has a significant advantage.

I’m not sure anyone who is well versed in election projections or polling would say anything other than it’s a toss up. As a heavy consumer of said data and reporting, I haven’t seen anything to the contrary.

You’re not wrong about media incentives, but they’re also not wrong that this is a very close race.

Technically… But there’s also a lot of waste from the 500 pack that people throw out half of. It likely evens out.

… What?

Is this some weird “victim mentality” thing?

People love to use it because it got popular and grew to mean more than the original definition to the point where it just got generic to encompass a wide range of things. It’s the same as cringe.