Why on earth would we want to see this?!

Even if there weren’t a million examples of prior art, the fact that patents on game mechanics are even allowed is just awful for the industry as a whole, and we as players should absolutely rail against this. Every game borrows from other games’ ideas and mechanics - I’d bet money that there hasn’t been a single fully “original” game in 20+ years. If companies are allowed to patent every little mechanic (even ones they didn’t come up with), the industry as a whole will just become impossible to operate in.

Essentially nobody is complaining about the quality of care available here. The problem is that only the rich can really afford it. Most people will avoid going to the doctor if at all possible, just because they can’t absorb the cost even if they’re just told to take an Aspirin and sleep it off. Long-term care for anything serious is just impossible to recover from financially for most people - it literally bankrupts entire families. With how hard it is to move up a prosperity bracket, that’s a devastating blow that is often felt for generations.

I think your view might be slightly skewed because you have free care available, and can go to the US or Mexico for better options if you can afford it. Here, if we can’t afford it, we have nothing, or we assume tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

Many, if not most, of us are jealous of other countries, though. Really, this is only a hard truth for the MAGA crowd, and even that is (I think) largely the fault of the nationalist propaganda that’s been shoveled at us since we were kids.

As an American, I agree with you, though - the US is in no way a ‘strong democracy’, or much of a democracy at all. It may once have been, but it certainly hasn’t been the case for a long time.

This would also spawn a Captcha% speedrun category, where the goal is to beat Doom before the Captcha considers itself solved.

“Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, B, then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”

Halo Infinite: Post-season 5, battle passes are now free during their introductory season, but cost $5 to unlock afterward

Marvel Rivals: Battle passes will not expire if you bought the $10 Luxury pass during the season

These are not FOMO-less. Marvel Rivals sounds like the worst of the three in that regard. The ‘old’ method incentivized you to skip buying a battle pass if you weren’t going to finish it (because you’d lose rewards); MR’s system gives you a FOMO CTA to make that purchase to stop you from losing rewards.

Compare this to, say, Dead By Daylight, where there’s “seasons” with unlockable rewards, you can get them for free, and you can keep unlocking them after the season ends.

My wife and I actually did this, sort of. Not a completely new name, but we took her grandmother’s name, rather than either of ours. Or, her great grandfather’s name, I suppose.

You’re thinking of the Winter Solstice, which was on Dec. 21!

Thanks for the explanation. Sounds reminiscent of terfs and feminism, where the movement itself is good, but the extremists co-opting it are the problem? I’d only heard about it in passing, and it seemed quite reasonable to me; I wasn’t aware of that side of it, though.

Yikes. Sounds like TERFs.

I’m not thrilled about the 4B movement as it’s transphobic

Can you explain why this is? I’m only familiar with the basic premise, what’s transphobic about it?

Sure, and I mean, I’m not suggesting you just roll up at random with a trunk full of board games and set up shop. You talk to the library staff, arrange a time when they’re okay with you using the space and being a little louder, and advertise that time. It feels like you’re being argumentative just for the sake of being argumentative; in towns and cities with actual, functional communities, this is a normal thing. Heck, I grew up in a town with 1700 people in it; we had scheduled special events in the library and it was never a problem, so this isn’t just exclusive to big cities.

We’d need something like a communal boardgame hall, supported by donations that anyone can come to without needing to pay anything.

All I’m getting at is, you have this - it’s the library. If you have the population to support a boardgame hall, you have the population to support a gathering at the library. Even if this doesn’t apply to you, it surely applies to other people who might not have considered the possibility.

Do you mean that you have no library, or the library doesn’t have a game night? If the latter, you could try to start it; it’d just be a matter of getting their permission to use the space, setting a schedule, and putting up a sign. It might not take off immediately; it’d probably help if you brought a friend or two the first few times, but if there’s interest in your community, I bet folks would start coming once it became clear something was happening.

Where I live, the library serves this purpose. They even have advertised game nights for various age groups on weekly to monthly basis. Maybe reach out to your public library and see if they would host.

Every time I hear conspiracy theories about reptilians secretly pulling the strings, I wish so fucking bad that it was true. I’d take that in a heartbeat.

There’s also a wide range of player skill levels to consider. If you aim to make a game not be frustrating for most players, it’s going to be boring for a large percentage of the best players. If you aim to make a game challenging for the best players, it’s going to be unapproachable for most. Different difficulty tiers of the same fight helps to address that but still alienates players if they find even the lower difficulties too challenging. It’s a delicate dance.

The other half of it is, the older generations tend heavily towards being Republicans. So even if they aren’t rich, they’re still voting for this.

Even with insurance, medical payments were hundreds of thousands of dollars each month.

Jesus. My father died of lymphoma after fighting it for 8 years or so, and he was miserable for a lot of that time. Luckily (if you can call it that), he was a military veteran and the VA took care of the treatment, but even with the treatment, his quality of life wasn’t good. If I get cancer, I’d rather just kill myself before it reaches that point than bankrupt my family. It’s pretty fucked that that’s something we have to think about.