I got a used car at the end of 2022. I am just now accepting the fact that it was a stupid decision. I’m already upside down on the loan and now the turbo is having issues that may be costly to repair. I’m wanting to move soon to a place where I won’t need a car anymore, but now I’m realizing selling it isn’t going to be quite as straight forward as I initially thought.

I have a few from playing with friends a few years back. But my favorite is when I accidentally made a dick castle.

Generally my method of building castles is finding a nice big hill or cliff, plopping a few towers along the top, and then connecting them up with a big wall. If it was big enough, it’d be an open court yard in the middle. But in this case, it was just a long hallway connecting 3 towers, with the main tower overlooking a sheer cliff face into the plains below. Majestic, glorious, the perfect spot.

My friend had been heckling me about how the shape was a little phallic, but I scoffed at his observations. After a week of building this thing, and finally getting the roof done over the hallway connecting the towers, my friend made a map. And I could deny it no longer. I spent a week constructing a giant cock n balls, with the head threateningly pointed at the village to the east. The map remained proudly displayed in the entryway to our shared base just south of my castle. To a 15 year old, this was peak comedy.

Later my friend burned it down. I still bring up this betrayal to him sometimes.

Definitely glasses. I tried contacts when I was younger. It took the eye doctor about 15 minutes to put on my trial set of contacts for me and I was very concerned about how the hell we were going to get them back out. I tried to put them in by myself in the mornings before school for about a week and couldn’t get them in once. So I gave up.

Shame, because I feel like I look better without my glasses. But oh well

Much better. I’ve seen maybe 2 bots in the past month or so and they were kicked pretty quickly

My friends and I have been getting back into Team Fortress 2. Still tons of fun after all these years, especially the jump maps

You’re conflating the “amusement” of eating food with the amusement of killing the animals to obtain that food. They are not the same. As stated in my previous post, there is a big disconnect in most people’s minds between the food they eat and the animals they come from.

But more to the point I’m trying to make, animals dying in order to feed people is different from animals being recorded while they are slowly and deliberately tortured to death as a form of entertainment. I don’t know how to explain that one is worse than the other. I’m not disagreeing with you that plant based alternatives are preferable to meat in order to avoid the suffering of animals, but I’m also not understanding why you feel the need to bring that up in the comments of this article. The issue described in the article is fundamentally different from that of the meat industry.

In the meat industry, animal suffering is not the goal. The goal is to deliver as much product (food in this case) to the consumer as cheaply as possible. Animal suffering is a byproduct of this because on a large enough scale, both the consumer and the capitalists running the slaughterhouses are far enough removed from the animals that they don’t have to confront the moral questions of what they’re putting these animals through.

I agree that it’s still a disgusting practice, but it’s not the same thing as deliberately harming animals for your own amusement. In the meat industry, some people can hand-wave those moral concerns away by saying to themselves “at least the animals died for something good: to feed countless families”. Whether you agree with that reasoning or not (which, for the record, I do not), that same person can’t use that excuse in the case of these monkeys. It’s just pointless suffering for the amusement of a handful of psychopaths.

Any MOBA really, particularly League of Legends. A number of my friends played these obsessively, but I could just never get into it. I’ve sat in on quite a few Discord calls with people playing this game and I gotta say, not once did anyone ever sound like they were having fun. I’m not sure what it is, but it just seems like the genre attracts toxicity like no other, especially when playing with strangers. On the occasions I tried them myself, the gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough for me to want to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary to become somewhat decent at the game.

For me it’s Skyrim. Streets of Whiterun, Masser, Jerral Mountains, Under an Ancient Sun, so many tracks that just instantly transport me back to the world I was immersed in throughout most of high school. They bring a sense of peace that comes from exploring in a simpler time.