Oof, I’m mostly the opposite these days. Multiplayer games either have too much toxicity from randos, or they’re stuffed with progression systems that actively make me hate the game even if the gameplay itself is good.

Still like coop games like Darktide every once in a while.

Or if you develop wrist pain… most FPSs just go right out the window. Or you play on controller and get whomped by the mouse and keyboard players.

I played Red/Blue as a kid. Enjoyed the crap out of them. And then never played any of the later games ever. I think if I tried now I’d feel the same as you.

As someone whose friends got me into destiny 2 on launch… even if you played through the story it was meh at best.

I played through the base game and the first major expansion, but the whole gameplay loop just got so boring so fast.

That’s… an interesting one. Uniquely frustrating from what sort of perspective? Like, do other fighting games work for you but platform fighters don’t? Or are fighting games in general just not your thing?

Interesting observation.

Aaahhh. Yeah that’d probably do it.

Jesus why was the text so goddamn big

#metoo was a needed movement, but in certain cases it definitely went too far. I think the “believe women” rhetoric makes sense in the contact of “sexual assault happens more than you think, we should stop completely ignoring or actively disbelieving women on impulse when they share their stories”. But some people just took it as “why would any woman ever lie about this, they must be telling the complete and full truth in all circumstances” which is unfortunately how the Al Franken allegations went.

Well I suppose not always. We did have a revolutionary war and a civil war.

But anybody alive today? Less bite than a newborn.

Same.

I wouldn’t equate voting for the lesser of two evils with “blind allegiance”.

For all of Biden’s faults (of which there are many) he’s still the better candidate on offer.

All the issues you bring up are valid, of course, but unfortunately there’s a lot at risk should Trump win. And voting for a senile old man is still preferable to voting for a fascist who is primarily running as a way to stay out of prison.

I’m not sure how we can hijack the DNC primaries to get a real quality candidate, but as far as improving our elections overall, that’s where I’d like to see some progress.

It’s entirely possible I’m only familiar with the far right, and not so much the average mainstream conservative. Which is a wild thing to think about my life, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

You have not been listening to conservatives, then. I grew up on a steady diet of Rush Limbaugh and later Fox News. “Activist liberal judges” has been a decades-long refrain on the right.

He was kind of a wet paper sack sitting the primaries, if he’d come in with this energy he might’ve gotten somewhere.

At this point I’m not sure what’s newest, since my kid just watches everything streaming.

I do have to say the newer 2D animated shorts, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, are a fantastic return to form.

Like most really early animated characters, Mickey Mouse was a lot of things over a long period of time. And as far as American animation goes, Mickey Mouse has been a staple for the childhood of literally every generation. Younger millennials and zoomers grew up on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. Children in decades prior watched Mickey be a musketeer in one short and starving due to poverty in the next.

So while the rough edges of the character have been sanded down over time, he’s still very much a plucky, brave, kind, and helpful protagonist in most of the media he’s in.

Which to your average adult viewer means… he’s a bland and uninteresting character.

That said, he’s still an icon of animation as a whole, and most things with Mickey in them are doing some new and novel something (design, production pipeline, whatever) that pushes the whole industry forward in some way.

I believe they are referring to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ character on Seinfeld, Elaine, who was the most overtly progressive of the main cast.

Perhaps my point didn’t come across. I’m not trying to explain why a swing voter would stay in one party. I was trying to understand what might cause someone in the US in today’s world to be the kind of person who could feasibly vote for either party when they are wildly different on the major topics in the zeitgeist.

That’s something a swing voter might be likely to do, but it’s not a cause of being a swing voter.