I served in the US Air Force for 20 years. Ever since I was 18, AF was always the abbreviation for Air Force.

So when “AF” suddenly entered the common lingo as “as fuck,” it really threw me and my coworkers for a loop. Suddenly, everyone seemed to be talking about the Air Force, but the context didn’t make any sense at all! It took a while before we learned that it meant something totally different.

… And then we felt old and out of touch.

hunter2

Reverse this for me. I shower first thing in the morning every day and my bath towels are just drying clean skin. They only touch me for maybe a minute or two before being hung to dry.

However, I go to sleep at night, after a full day of developing natural body oils on my skin. And I lie in bed for 8+ hours at a time.

My bed sheets are far more gross after a week of use than my towel will get in a month, more or less a couple weeks.

You say you don’t care for Porsche IRL. If you have any interest in driving performance vehicles and have an opportunity to drive one, try to not pass it up.

I used to be pretty big into cars in my youth. I actually took part in some drift racing in northern Japan when I lived there for a few years, and those guys are all big math/physics/car nerds (not the Yakuza gangster wannabes like you saw in Tokyo Drift; that movie was fantasy American street racing with a Japanese skin over it), so I really got into that stuff for a while. But high-end sports cars were out of our league, so I haven’t ever tried a Porsche. I guess that needs to go on my bucket list.

I suppose have finally accepted there’s never going to be another “campaign” style title. I guess that’s really the gaming industry as a whole with all the battle Royales and similar arcade-style games.

I really hate that there’s so much push to get us to play online multiplayer games now. I mean, I get it from a financial standpoint - it keeps players engaged with a game long after they’ve finished the campaign and if they can squeeze micro-transactions/seasons/DLC into it, it’s a source of added income for years afterward. But from a gaming standpoint, I just see it as repetitive gameplay that doesn’t lead anywhere, with rewards that are never worth the effort.

I’m also not a fan of playing online with strangers because the environment can be very toxic. I barely tolerate playing co-op with my friends some days. 😆

Even then, expansion packs were far and few between, and they expanded the story! They didn’t just add a custom skin of horse armor to your game. You got actual real content to enjoy with your money.

Incidentally, I just jumped back on the horse this morning by adding the latest World of Warcraft expansion to my account. I was almost done with Activision Blizzard and their awful content updates, but I decided to give it one more shot. So I might have some WoW screenshots incoming in the near future.

I had been an active player since 2005 and have bought every collector’s edition since The Burning Crusade. Only because Blizzard used to be an amazing company. But they’ve been garbage since they sold to Activision, and I’ve been spending more and more time away from it in the past decade. My wife actually gave up on it when Mists of Pandaria came out.

I barely played the last expansion; it just wasn’t fun trying to level up a dragon so I could glide just a little bit further across the map, when I have dozens of actual flying mounts in my inventory. Too much work for something that should’ve been given to us after meeting quest and/or level requirements. As far as I understand, their latest expansion is supposed to be the first in a massive 3-part story to reinvigorate the franchise, so I’m hoping they actually hired someone who knows what they’re doing this time.

I have a Mazda like this. I absolutely hate it.

I have a small built-in touchscreen on the top of the dashboard which is visible in my peripheral vision while driving. But it turns off touch controls while the car is moving. And the physical controls are in the center console behind my manual stick, on the passenger’s side. So I have to blindly feel around for my knobs and buttons while driving, or take my eyes completely off the road to look down at my center console.

It would be safer if I could just tap the screen quick while keeping my eyes facing the road, versus trying to search for knobs down next to my passenger’s thigh.

I also hate that this newer model removed the mute button from my steering wheel. I used to be able to immediately mute my radio by pressing that button on my 2010 Mazda. But in my new 2017 Mazda, I need to find the tiny volume knob by my passenger’s thigh and slap that knob. I still have volume buttons on my steering wheel, but I can’t immediately mute by holding the down volume button. So I need to go searching for that knob, which is more time I’m not looking at the road.

The Internet was the Wild West back in the '90s. Anyone could do pretty much anything and there was very little regulation. In the past 3 decades, standards have been popping up to help us build a solid structure for how the Internet works, but a lack of regulation in the beginning led people to believe the Internet was a truly free bastion of information. A place we could share data without going through an institution or government or organization that put their own spin on it first. Which has prevented certain areas of regulation from being enacted, like limiting who can use what root domain names.

Of course, that mindset has backfired since people realized how easy it is to just post false information, and we now find ourselves in an age of misinformation, unable to verify data we find online without a solid reputable organization behind it.

4chan is a perfect example of this. It was originally created under the concept that anyone could post anything and not be censored or banned for it. Their idealism led to many people pushing boundaries with how hateful or violent they could be. Which started as jokes, but then new members came who misunderstood the satire and sarcasm (it’s very hard to identify through text only) and took the diatribe as a welcome place to be their truly awful selves. And before we knew it, 4chan became a cesspool of the worst people, who push misleading information to corrupt the minds of their followers and harm large groups of people.

We’re in an awkward place where a lot of people want the freedom to continue posting whatever they want without censorship or regulation, while others want data to be regulated and controlled to ensure validity and hold people accountable for their online content. It may be many more decades before we find a solution, but for now, the best thing to do is teach our young students critical thinking skills and how to identify potentially misleading data they find online.

I inherited my childhood home and I’m still over 1,600 miles away from my mother. But she preferred her own childhood home on the other side of the country and moved there as soon as she divorced my dad. I’m still very close with my mother. Just not… physically.

Those symbols on those shirts are an equivalent to a swastika

That’s… the point. This particular branch of the game led to everyone (except you) becoming a Nazi. All because you tolerated racist diatribe from your supposed “best friend.” It’s a tongue-in-cheek look at what could happen if you tolerate racists in your life. And it doesn’t end well for the racists.

Perhaps you should play the game before you jump to conclusions on its content. Yes, it’s a dark game, but it definitely doesn’t show any love for Nazis.

True, but I didn’t want to thank you and NOT the person I was directly responding to. And I thought it was kind of weird only tagging one name and not the other.

Maybe I’ve just been socializing on Discord too much. I’ve gotten used to tagging everyone I’m talking to directly.

I have not played this game before. I might have to check it out. Thanks @[email protected] and @[email protected]!

EDIT: Not used to tagging users on Lemmy yet. Sorry for the edits. Hope I got it right this time.

I can get behind that. My wife and I share a bed, but she’s talked about having her own separate bed. She’s an extremely light sleeper and even shifting a little bit in bed wakes her up. Suffice to say, she almost never gets good sleep and ends up napping half of the day after I’ve gotten up. She still prefers to fall asleep cuddled up to me, though, which is why we haven’t gotten her a separate bed yet.

We also have plenty of separate hobbies that the other doesn’t care for. I collect comic books that my wife isn’t interested in, and she loves true crime shows, which get very boring and repetitive for me. But we each indulge in our separate hobbies in nearby rooms, so we can excitedly share details with the other.

She loves telling me all about the horrifying ways someone was murdered on one of her shows, and whereas I don’t care for the show myself, I enjoy how excited she is about sharing all the gory details. I love her passion for her interests. 🥰

Considering how old this picture is, I totally believe that this was a decades-long search. I first saw this pic as a young man, and I’m middle-aged now.

This is exactly the relationship my wife and I share. We’re each other’s best friends, so it’s easy to hang out every day. Which is important because we’re both not working, so we’re around each other 24/7.

So many couples struggled throughout the pandemic because they were actually forced to spend a lot of time together and realized they just didn’t care for each others’ company as much as they thought. But it had no effect on my relationship with my wife because we already spent almost every moment of our free time together.

And it’s not like we do absolutely everything together. There are plenty of days when we’re indulging in our own separate hobbies or interests. But we’re always close by, so we can chat or share our geeky hobbies with one another.

If you marry someone for looks, status, money, etc., you may find yourself in more of a business relationship than a romantic one, which will struggle as you get older. But finding someone who completely gets you is refreshing. You don’t need to put on a mask around them; you can be yourself and be confident that they love you for YOU. And if you truly respect them, you’ll also love and appreciate them for being themselves too.

Yeah, I always wait for Steam sales before I buy games. No way I’m paying $50+ for a game I don’t even know if I’ll enjoy. Fortunately, the Tom Clancy franchise goes on sale pretty regularly.

Both recent Ghost Recon games are about toppling dictators in foreign countries.

Wildlands takes place in a South American-esque nation where the local drug cartel has taken over the government. You’re sent to sneak in and take out the regional leaders one by one, freeing the oppressed people from their control, until you gather enough intel to find the dictator himself and stop him. It’s very much like a Tom Clancy spin on the Just Cause game franchise.

Breakpoint goes a little more sci-fi in its story. It takes place on a technologically advanced island nation that’s overthrown by a militia (run by a former Ghost buddy of yours) who wants to use their AI drone swarm technology to “end all wars” (read: conquer other nations via fear, intimidation, and billions of deadly drones).

You’re sent to investigate what happened to a ship that got too close to the island and got attacked, and find yourself also attacked and marooned on the island, with no way to escape or call for backup. So you’re now a one-man army, figuring out what happened on the island and slowly overthrowing the coup and rescuing civilians caught in the middle.

Both recent Ghost Recon games are about toppling dictators in foreign countries.

Wildlands takes place in a South American-esque nation where the local drug cartel has taken over the government. You’re sent to sneak in and take out the regional leaders one by one, freeing the oppressed people from their control, until you gather enough intel to find the dictator himself and stop him. It’s very much like a Tom Clancy spin on the Just Cause game franchise.

Breakpoint goes a little more sci-fi in its story. It takes place on a technologically advanced island nation that’s overthrown by a militia (run by a former Ghost buddy of yours) who wants to use their AI drone swarm technology to “end all wars” (read: conquer other nations via fear, intimidation, and billions of deadly drones).

You’re sent to investigate what happened to a ship that got too close to the island and got attacked, and find yourself also attacked and marooned on the island, with no way to escape or call for backup. So you’re now a one-man army, figuring out what happened on the island and slowly overthrowing the coup and rescuing civilians caught in the middle.

Splinter Cell was amazing back in the day! But trying to replay it nowadays, the controls are so wonky. I barely got through the tutorial before I got tired of it. I’m so used to modern controls now; Splinter Cell came out in an era where part of the gaming challenge was the controller itself.

When you’re playing co-op, the whole map is available. You don’t have to stick together, you can go do anything you want while playing with friends.

One of my friends is a wildcard and likes to go start shit every time we play, so he just runs off and terrorizes enemy compounds on his own. While my other buddy and I actually stick to the mission and take out our targets.

We tried to play along with our other friend, but he has no sense of subtlety and always makes a mess, so we just let him rampage somewhere else on the map while we’re accomplishing the actual stealth mission.

He loves to shoot everything he can with a helicopter, then crash it into the enemy base and jump out guns blazing. He’s the absolute opposite of a Ghost operative. 😅