Some of my favourite games were JRPGs growing up. I always had the impression that while CRPGs gave the player a lot more freedom, I found JRPGs were more about telling one really good curated story.

Games like the early Final Fantasies, Chrono Trigger, and basically anything Squaresoft put out “back in the day” were among my favourite gaming experience.

These days, whether due to my tastes changing, more limited time, or just the genre shifting in a way that doesn’t appeal to me, I play very very few JRPGs. A lot have gone the route of the heavily anime-inspired fanservice vehicles that just aren’t really what I ever liked about the genre.

I still will play the heck out of a Persona game though.

My favourite pasttime is just looking at the other bylines these authors have to see if they are just as shitty as I think they are. (Spoiler: Yes, they always are).

This man brought us such bangers as:

“How Minimum Wage and Rent Control Laws Fail the ‘Bronowski Test’”

“The Biggest Thing That Separates Authoritarians From Supporters of Freedom”

“35 of Ayn Rand’s Most Insightful Quotes on Rights, Individualism, and Government”

“The Myth That the Rich Don’t Pay Their “Fair Share” of Taxes”

Sounds like a real winner.

I regularly see people try to defend Finland using it because it predates nazism, but so what. Acknowledging it is forever tainted by association and that maybe they should distance themselves from it isn’t admitting some type of defeat.

People probably rocked Hitler moustaches before him too, but you don’t see people running around with them anymore (except one comedian in my country that I absolutely despise).

Don’t give them ideas.

I feel like it’s that last one. If they don’t make an anti-China gesture, people might think they are evil authoritarian supporter.

Remember, diplomacy is now only talking to people who agree with you 100% on everything. Otherwise you are expected to walk out of any meetings they have been invited to. My nephew would be a better diplomat than most of these assholes.

Good. I enjoy food/cooking/eating content, I love to cook and I am totally down for someone to cook/eat a reasonable meal and provide feedback on it on a stream.

I do not want to see people eating 600 chicken wings in ten minutes or something though. It’s not nutritious, you can’t even possibly enjoy the taste at that point anymore and it just encourages really unhealthy habits.

Definitely not; we don’t eat it that often even in Japan. While yes we have fast food variants of sushi that are readily available; it’s overall more of a special dinner/occasion type food. I probably eat sushi once every couple months.

The only thing I could see being included in a lunch is something like inari-zushi, my office serves that as a side dish lunch a lot (which would get around the food safety concerns). We have chiraishi zushi at the office specifically on Girl’s Day, because it is a holiday thing.

An elementary school might have something similar on holidays, but generally the school menus are planned by a nutritionist on staff that does a pretty good job. It gets tricky for kids with special diets, which are often not well accomodated, and there is a weird obsession with milk despite the prevalance of lactose intoelrance.

EDIT: We have a massive food waste problem too, so we are no better in that regard, but at least our school lunches are pretty good.

There a couple very specific eras of JRPGs that hold a very special place in my memory.

The Super Famicom era around games like Chrono Trigger is the peak for me though. I remember I got it as a gift totally by mistake, my parents had meant to buy another game but got possibly my favourite game of all time instead. I can still go back and play that game and it holds up just fine.

PS1 era Squaresoft was also pretty much a golden era for me, Xenogears was a pretty massive influence on some of my younger intellectual development.

Spec Ops: The Line is probably the first example that comes to mind.

They get a bad rap because of the sometimes fascist leaning fanbase, but paradox grand strategy games do let you play whatever side you want. Everytime I tried Hearts of Iron (admittedly my least favourite paradox game), I played as the USSR.

Some of the Metal Gear games, though that’s still “the good americans vs the corrupt government” which isn’t really ideal either.
Yakuza 3 features CIA as one of the villain factions.

I am generally in this camp as well; my attitude in my online life pretty closely mirrors that in my real life. People who know me in person know I am an active communist, that even includes some of my bosses, nobody really cares.

I am not going to give out my specific address more than is available in my profile, but I just make it a point to not post anything online that I wouldn’t tell a stranger in person. If I post it online and somebody traces it back to me…I don’t particularly care. Doesn’t mean I want to start getting NAFO death threats, but they also have the attention span of a termite.

If there is something I really cared about keeping private, I just don’t mention it to anybody anywhere.

There’s no good here, it’s a non-applicable use of that saying.

He could have, at the bare minimum, used the leverage he had coming out of the primaries to try to affect the democrats platform to some degree. It would have been a drop in the bucket honestly, but the bucket is bone dry. Instead he just spat on everyone who supported him and threw everything in behind Biden of all people.

His message may have been one part of my early radicalization process, and I am thankful for that, but he’s never truly cared about anything except funneling stray liberals who have been just a bit too left for the party’s liking.

I suppose the fact he is running as a Green rather than a Dem makes that a little less likely. I could easily be wrong, but I don’t think a Green (at least in recent memory) has turned into a Democrat cheerleader. Whereas Sanders was running as a dem and just served to try to funnel a few more left-leaning votes back into the far-right.

What about the freedom to choose smog?!

“But at what cost!?”. You see, this is actually a bad thing because it means there is more pressure on the younger generation to support the aging population. People dying younger is actually healthy for the economy! Until China can get their elderly under control, they should take a note from the West and raise the retirement age to at least 70.

Honestly I wouldn’t even be surprised to see a take like that on a lemmy world news community.

I assume every single one of his tweets is accompanied by a litany of flags and/or maps? That seems to be his one shtick.

Stay as safe as you can, is there any possibility you could get out? For the obviously material safety reasons, but also some of the stories about how the post-war economy is likely to go is extremely concerning.

I realise not everybody can just drop what they are doing and gtfo, so I hope you stay as safe as possible regardless.

Dude’s biggest claim to fame is a diatribe on the horrors of an ice cream cone.

It scares me that these people are teachers though.

We have had our arguments over territory, but by and large the average person here have never had a very anti-Russian point of view to begin with. It was a pretty popular language to study for business reasons, because we do so much trade with them. We also don’t have much of a connection to Ukraine.

I think a lot of the Japanese opposition was more a “war is bad” point of view, as opposed to “russia is evil”. Which results in people just wanting a resolution as soon as possible. On the other hand there’s not a good understanding of the circumstances that caused the war, and the news doesn’t really report on it. So there are still plenty of people who think Putin woke up one one day and decided to invade for no real reason. They just would still prefer the killing stops now.

For imports, metals, coal, oil, gas. Which makes it pretty readily apparent why our energy costs have skyrocketed. We actually get a lot of seafood from Russia as well, which may surprise people who assume we just get our own fish. Salmon and roe primarily, I believe.

Exports were largely cars or car parts.