First time playing BG3, but I’ve played a good bit of 5e and a little 3.5e. I’m trying a monk for the first time. Way of the Open Hand. I named him Rick O’Shea. He goes up front and bounces between enemies, fucking 'em up. I can’t remember every choice I made, but I know for sure he took the Athlete feat, but that makes less sense outside of BG3. I can’t remember his level, but I’ll probably pick Mobile for another feat.

My favorite 5e character I ever played was a high wisdom, low intelligence human cleric. He would occasionally do a stupid thing that came back to bite him, but he would learn from that mistake and not do it again. He would also relay metaphorical farm wisdom to the party, always formatted as “Pappy always said…”
E.g. “Pappy always said never milk a cow if you ain’t brought your bucket.” Meaning don’t start shit before you’ve figured out subsequent steps. Don’t try to pick a tough fight and then realize you’re out of spell slots lol.
He was a cleric of Helm but somewhere along the way he was convinced to serve another god instead who had pretty much identical goals in mind (idr the details) and I think his name was Pyxis or Pryxis or something. Idk, the cleric could never get it right so he would call him Pixar and he was like sure, fine, close enough. Anyway, so for flavor, Spirit Guardians was always Toy Story characters flying around.

I’m so glad that after months of rampant cheating ruining the game and content creators calling them out for doing nothing about it, they’re finally planning to do something about it at some point vaguely soonish. The only thing they’ve actually done is hide cheaters on the leaderboards, which is pretty damn pointless since they’re still free to terrorize matches.

A lot of people think that this only affects top ranks, but it causes top ranked people to make smurf accounts to enjoy the game at a lower rank without cheaters. This effect cascades down until there are champs in plat and diamond lobbies. At that rank, they don’t care enough to make a smurf account and just stop playing entirely.

They’re somehow simultaneously celebrating a 10th anniversary of the game and ignoring it circling the drain.

Not to be overly morbid, but what’s the point in saving up for retirement if the job is killing you? Financial security is important, but so is your mental health. And based on your general field, I don’t think I need to explain that stress has real, quantifiable consequences. I wouldn’t be surprised if reducing your stress level actually raises your ability to do some stuff for yourself that you’re currently finding pretty impossible. Less stress at work might give you more energy to exercise, cook healthy meals, better maintain your home, etc.

You might need to adjust some of your “extra” spending to make it work, but if that’s the only real sacrifice in the switch, I’d say make the switch. You’re obviously unhappy with what you’ve got or you wouldn’t be looking at other options and asking the internet.

FWIW, I’m in my mid 30s and changed careers ten years ago. I was a chef and loved what I did, but I had a boss that completely killed my passion to grow or even sustain. I literally got a raise when I quit for a job scrubbing toilets. I found my footing in power plants and now I’m an operator in-house. It’s never too late to make a change. You’re never in too deep. And in many cases, it’s gonna take a step down before you have a chance to rise up higher. Never stop learning and growing. Cheers and good luck :)

ALL AROUND THE WORLD, STATUES CRUMBLE FOR ME

I know you phrased it as “losing” here, but it still made me think of that moment in Firefly when somebody refers to Mal having fought on the wrong side in a battle, and he says “May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one.”

When a person has convictions and is put at a certain sort of fork in the road, they would rather do anything else before ever seeing themselves transform into the sort of person who would take one of those paths. Some would sell their souls to survive, and some know that their cause is worth several times more than their souls are worth, and the bill comes due at some point.

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

That’s your choice, but you don’t get to then complain about the prices set by the people who read the manual for you so that you could enjoy your life instead. You either pay them or pay yourself.

It’s not perfect, but some more news and their podcast “even more news” are good and they tend to wait to report on breaking stories until more facts come out, or at least state upfront that there is still a lot that they don’t know yet.

Lately, it’s kind of impossible to report on some of this shit without getting a little emotional. But they’re closer to tears than frothing angrily.

Well yeah. Duh. The far right fiercely demonizes the concept of empathy, therefore exhibiting and teaching empathy must be far left.

Their whole platform is to move money from the poor to the wealthy. They trick some of the poor into supporting this by being vehemently opposed to whatever the adults in the room want to do. Psychologically and mentally speaking, conservative voters are edgy, rebellious teenagers fighting against the tyranny of their dad without understanding that dad set the rules because they’re incapable of succeeding without rules being set for them, so they vote for their older brother to punch dad in the mouth and remove all the rules, and then the older brother just says fuck you, cook your own dinner, and btw that xbox belongs to me now since I’m the man of the house. But at least there’s no bedtime now, so that’s cool I guess? And their little sister now just goes to school, does chores, and isn’t allowed to go out anymore, but that’s fine because that’s her place, and if she wanted a better deal, she’d work hard to earn it, so she must just be lazier than them.

The three-named dork missed and just clipped his ear, and now I don’t think there will be other opportunities again.

They’re making their site inconvenient so you’ll download their app. Every fucking website and product has an app now.

Yep. At least have the balls to kill somebody in your false flag. Ideally somebody more notable than fucking Big Balls lmao. And make the supposed perpetrators somebody more official and organized than a bunch of 15 year old carjackers or whatever. Fucking lazy cowards.

Yep, that’s more or less why I said I don’t put him on a pedestal. But as DOT secretary, he recognized the need for collecting tax dollars and using them effectively, plus things like the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment resulted in him directly, loudly, publicly raising awareness to the need to regulate these essential industries and sectors more stringently to prevent future disasters.

I think he’s learned a lot in the past 5 years. I’m open to people having the ability to learn and grow if they’re showing actual evidence of it, and he is imo. I can’t hold his McKinsey roots against him forever. I worked at Walmart for a few months nearly 20 years ago, and that has very little to do with who I am now.

My bad, I didn’t know anything had changed recently with the DNC. Idk anything about the new people, but I imagine it must be a good start if you’re so excited about it and since the changes all happened pretty much immediately after losing 2024.

Alright, my hope tank just got up to like halfway lol.

Yep, it certainly was.

Who are you hoping will be the progressive Democrat that runs in 28 that proves that neoliberal policies are just a thing of the past?

It just seemed like overconfidence to proclaim any sense of achievement in that arena without yet achieving anything or even naming names. I want you to be right, but fascism is very much on the rise and the opposition party isn’t doing much to signal any real opposition aside from leaving Texas to withhold quorum for the absurd redistricting vote and I guess not blocking Mamdani from winning the NY mayoral primary.

Just feels a little like Bush’s premature Mission Accomplished banner 20 years before giving up and pulling out of the conflict.

Meanwhile the DNC finally bucked neoliberism…

In 2028 we can have a progressive with no neoliberal baggage

I’ll believe it when I see it. I fully expect the superdelegates to crown another milquetoast neolib as nominee. Newsom or Harris probably. There will almost certainly be some silliness in 26 and 27 to get some lesser-known names propped up some so that they can have a chance, but we’ll have a stage with 15 people on it and only about 3 will be taken seriously. Idk who specifically to even hope for right now. There are some good younger Dems, but they need more time in the oven before even attempting a presidential run. Fox News has done a good job demonizing certain names such that even people who aren’t plugged into it have heard and believe the attacks.

For example, I don’t think AOC could get elected for anything other than her current district or maybe Senate. She might even hurt a ticket as a VP pick. She might be good on a cabinet, but that’s not elected, and that’s probably the end of her political career.

Buttigieg has been doing the work of getting on right wing media to surgically dismantle attacks and explain how his policy positions benefit everyday Americans, and I think he usually comes off as intelligent and compassionate, not condescending. As with all politicians, I don’t put him on any sort of pedestal, but he’s putting in the work and proving he has effective communication, and that’s an incredibly important skill for a president to have.

Idk. There’s still a little hope in the tank here, and I’ll vote in my primary to try to get somebody who isn’t ass garbage, but I expect something like Newsom v Youngkin/Vance if trump isn’t still alive and cancelling elections to cling onto power.

Yeah and Tesla has been selling “full self driving” for years. Stop letting Elon sell shit he doesn’t have yet. He’s pumping his stock prices and then leveraging them for other ventures. It’s like gambling double or nothing with a credit card. Eventually it’s all gonna come due, his companies will collapse, and the entire market will crash from it.

The question you’re asking is actually very complicated. Pretty much every for-profit media company will have a bias to the right since their goal is to profit today and survive to profit tomorrow. Lowering the taxes for the company and for the wealthy who own large portions of the company are obviously something that the company and the people running the company want, and the platform of the right is consistently to lower taxes on businesses and the wealthy.

The wild thing is the way that the right has shifted in the past 30 years or so. Politicians would stir bigoted voters up with dogwhistle rhetoric while maintaining some level of deniability so that non-bigots would also still feel okay voting for them. This all changed with trump. Suddenly, it was possible to say the quiet part out loud and still get elected. Rather than using mild bigotry as a tool to get into office and then make bank off of bribes and carving out loopholes and conduct insider trading, now moron bigots themselves are running and winning, and they don’t actually know what to do or how to do it, so they mostly just shitpost and grandstand because they don’t actually know shit about governing.

We’re now coming to a point where these companies are hopefully starting to realize that the right is so bad at governing and so damaging with their shitposting that they’re actually hurting these companies’ bottom line. I wouldn’t dare call Democrats “the left” because they’re factually a center-right party; the Democrats were posturing to be a sane, safe, profitable alternative. Like it or not, Biden steered our economy back in the right direction, and Harris would’ve continued on that track while also letting these companies continue to amass wealth. Media companies who saw the forecast and reported with some bias towards Democrats are absolutely not left-leaning. A real left-leaning media company would not be structured like a corporation or traded on the stock market. A real left-leaning media company would be advocating to eradicate the systems as they are and remake them with equity in the foundations. We live in a very right-wing America, and any positive reporting of capitalist America, or gentle criticism of small details of the colonial capitalism of America needs to be understood as right bias. Every time somebody puts the stock market or companies or government contracts or “the economy” over feeding the hungry and housing the unhoused and treating the sick, that is right bias. RATM hit on this perfectly in Bulls On Parade:

Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes
Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library
Line up to the mind cemetery now
What we don’t know keeps the contracts alive and movin’
They don’t gotta burn the books they just remove 'em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells
Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells

TL;DR: the litmus of whether your news is biased to the left cannot be determined by whether they nudge for the center-right or the far-right candidate.

Yes, but also these are pretrial detainees, as in not yet convicted of any crime. Article 1 of the 13th amendment says “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (emphasis my own)

Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

“I’m putting together a team. The best team. The best people–look, there’s a lot of, shall we say, bad folks. Can I say bad folks? The woke don’t like that too much, you can’t say anything nowadays, but if they had it their way, I’d just say that I disagree, but I don’t just disagree, they’re bad folks with bad ideas and they’re very low IQ. The sleepy Joe Biden people were just so incompetent and they left me with nothing and it’s horrible, and they should be arrested for what they’ve done, and I’m gonna look into it. But with these South Park, have you seen this? It’s unbelievable, but the left got to them and now they don’t do Obama anymore, and they make things up about me, and it’s actually not small, not even, like, it’s really quite large, but you won’t hear that because I’m very humble, but I have to tell you that I’ve heard many girls say that it’s not small, and more than they want, and not just from the very young and small girls either, but I shouldn’t talk about that. My lawyers say ‘Sir! Sir! Don’t talk about the young girls!’ but I have a very popular, they can’t keep their hands off me, and what am I supposed to say? ‘No’? ‘Wait until you’re 16, 17, 18’? There’s no, and it’s very unfair how they’re treating me, and it never would’ve happened to any other president. The Clintons were very bad people, both of them, and they don’t even hide it, but it’s always me that gets attacked by the fake news media, and I’ll never get any credit for the deals…
But which one are you? Kanye or R Kelly? Because I want you both, you could really help me out with the blacks, and I could really help you with the pardon. And perhaps there could be a little get together at the southern white house, and we could talk about things and meet some young girls together, and it’s not gay so long as the balls don’t touch, they say. Many people say that.”