It’s not just more people choosing not to have children at all. People who want to have children are having a lot fewer. In my grandparents’ time families would have 10+ and sometimes 20+ children. Now even having 4 kids is considered a lot!

Genetics may be expensive but rooting hormone powder is cheap! Also don’t buy fancy grow lights. Shop lights are way cheaper and work just fine!

Here’s the key thing to realize with deck builders: every card you take reduces the number of times you’ll see every other card in your deck by a small amount. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “this looks useful, I’ll take it” over and over again.

The best decks in Slay the Spire have 5 or fewer cards and they go infinite in on turn 1. Of course in most runs you don’t have the opportunity to create a deck like that. Instead, you want to think about what the core of your deck is right now. Think “if I could remove as many cards as I want right now, what sort of broken thing could I do with the rest?” If your deck can’t do anything broken even after all those removals, then see if adding a card would change that.

If your deck can do something broken after removing all those other cards, and none of the reward cards on offer would change that, why take them?

There are many opportunities to remove cards throughout a run. Take them as much as you can. Try to get rid of as many filler cards as possible. Strikes and defends, for example, have no business being in your deck at the end of the game.

Ironclad, being the first character you can play in StS, is meant to teach you this concept (he also teaches you other concepts, such as health being a resource). He has a number of cards that exhaust other cards and he can frequently build into a deck that’s capable of exhausting down to a winning core. Try playing an exhaust based ironclad and see what you can do with an eye towards creating a broken core.

I played some of Human Revolution but I didn’t like the grind-factor (nor did I like the weird forced boss fights).

The original Deus Ex was so beautiful for the way you gained exploration and progress experience for finding secrets and accomplishing goals. Replacing that with a more “RPG-like” system that rewards hacking every single computer and doing non-lethal takedowns on every single enemy totally ruined it for me.

Oh you don’t need quick reactions for Deus Ex. It can be played in a very slow and methodical way. It’s just that you need precision to get the most out of the sniper scopes (which can be used on multiple weapons).

The original game has plenty of characters who are true believers in the government lie: the UNATCO soldiers, the mech agents, and even multiple civilians who either work for or support the government.

The main resistance force, the NSF (Northwest Sessionist Forces), is pretty controversial among the public. People seem to be split between viewing them as terrorists or heroes. Not unlike the way people view antifa in real life!

The original Deus Ex is perfectly playable today as long as you follow a guide to get it patched up and configured for a modern system. Plus it runs at a rock steady frame rate on any PC today, whereas it didn’t at the time of release (it was very laggy, buggy, and crashed a lot).

The game is definitely meant for mouse and keyboard though. You need some very high precision aiming and a steady hand to cope with the scope wobble (unless you train to master level).

I’m honestly quite tired of remasters. Why can’t we see some new original games?

The original Deus Ex is this bizarre mixture of jank, camp, and sheer brilliance. So much of what made the game amazing was unintentional and contingent with the era. A remaster is never going to be able to recapture that lightning in a bottle. It’s always going to be soulless.

Git is not very efficient for handling a lot of binary files. Your best bet would be for hosting fanfic and erotic lit.

Or just ZZ for me since I’m rarely in insert mode (I just press esc quickly after making an edit out of habit).

Buried in your argument is the assumption that people accused of virtue signalling are actually being virtuous. In many cases they’re actually just doing harm in order to appeal to their own tribe. This is virtue signalling and there’s nothing virtuous about it.

People who walk around calling everything woke are virtue-signalling to their right wing tribe, for example. It’s classic social bullying.

That’s fair! I’ve often levelled this same argument against my friend when it comes to mastery and video games.

I mainly play video games during my lunch break at work. It would not really make sense to practice a musical instrument in the office.

Wow thank you for the very detailed reply! I’m saving this!

Yes I’m serious. I think my issue is that I use hot water to brew the tea and then ice to cool it down which makes it too watery!

But that’s the case even for home made bacon (or any home made smoked / cured food for that matter).

Every time I’ve brewed iced tea it always tastes super weak sauce. Canned/packaged iced teas taste wayyyyyy too sweet to me. I just want ice cold flavourful tea with a tiny bit of sweetness. How do you do that?

I’m sure Lipton iced tea is full of artificial colours and emulsifiers and possibly even fats for some reason, in addition to excessive amounts of sugar. I’m not going to defend that crap. No one should drink that stuff.

They’re not. I was just trying to give an example of something you could swap out the Lays for that would not be “ultra processed food” but still be just as unhealthy.

So instead of Lays they’ll start serving the kids fresh cut fries, double fried and generously salted.

The problem with those is all the additives, such as nitrates. You can also get nitrates from eating bacon which is not nearly as processed.

Of course. But that’s often a sign of bad game design. Difficulty should follow a smooth curve. Enormous difficulty spikes are what you expect from old games in the 80s.

But there’s also an element to mastery that gamers seem to completely neglect: downtime. I finished my math degree a couple of years ago and throughout that entire process I got stuck on math assignments thousands of times. Bashing my head against a wall trying to solve the problem right now rarely worked. I had much better success putting the pencil down and coming back to the problem later, after a period of downtime.

Since graduating I’ve been revisiting a lot of old NES games that I never finished growing up because they were too difficult. Since I’m busy with work I don’t have a ton of time to play every day. This forced downtime actually has the benefit of getting me to think and reflect on my approach, just as I would expect it to!