First and foremost: at this juncture, I would implore everyone to keep OPSEC firmly in mind, and to take preemptive precautions.

Use a phone with Graphene OS, and use encrypted communication (preferably XMPP, but Signal at the very least. No technology is best)

with that said,

Mutual aid will be more important than ever, join and build up your local groups if you’re able, it will pay off in dividends in the coming years.

• Search your local area + ‘mutual aid’.
• Help your local food not bombs.
• Create a worker owned cooperative with your friends if possible, or join an existing one.
• Help spread the meshtastic network to build up communication resilience in your community.
• Plant trees in your community to help reduce the heat island effect for the coming heatwaves.
• Create or join a community garden near you to bolster food availability and foster connections with those around you.
• engage in guerrilla urbanism, make your community safer to walk or bike
• encourage your coworkers to unionize under the IWW, contact them for help on how to unionize your workplace.
• vote in your local elections to try and have a state or city government that is less hostile to the above actions, but continue to build decentralized power independently of them regardless. Do not make the mistake of handing off the responsibility to make things better to them, it’s up to YOU, and your community, and hopefully other nearby communities doing the same, but that is all.
• consider having the means to defend yourself and the skills needed to do so effectively. But do not neglect medical equipment or its use either.

We have tremendous collective power if we just use it, and hopefully this outcome will result in us coming together and building that world in the shell of the old. Collective solidarity is our only solution left.

Alan Carr’s stop smoking book is highly regarded, and encourages you to smoke as you read along, until by the end you won’t want to.

Combine that with a NAC supplement (which doesn’t do anything for withdrawals, but studies show it makes trying smoking again far more unpleasant for your brain which helps you stay off them.

When I was a kid, I played a lot of Runescape. I loved that the quests were all unique and had their own, sometimes genuinely well written and engaging stories, with point’n’click style puzzles, reminiscent of Sierra games. It was the most fun I’ve ever had in an mmo.

But my god is there a lot of repetitive grinding. I tried to get back into it a few years ago, but my patience for killing the same mob for 3 hours straight, or cutting and burning trees like a giant line of cocaine, simply isn’t there anymore.

I wish I could play a version of it without the grind, and just the quests.

I believe to ping someone, you need to put an @ symbol before their name instead of /u/. Depending on how you’re interacting with Lemmy (web or app) it should provide some means of auto completing the ping.

I’m glad to see this has been as positive a place for you as I have found it to be myself. Your thoughts are well formed and pleasant to read, and I’m thankful that you choose to share them here with us. :)

Welcome! :)

I figure it’s not too different from a regular text post here, so if there’s a community that seems relevant to the post somehow, that’d prolly be best.

As to how to find them, I’d recommend the communities tab of lemmyverse explorer, and searching a word or category that seems close to what you’re posting to see if there’s a community that already exists for it.

When I remember to, I try to add a message in the post body recommending Freetube combined with Libredirect, since that still works.

Sorry to hear things are rough for you. I hope whatever is causing it improves!

Mine is an odd choice, or maybe not, but its the first thing that came to mind: Night in The Woods

It’s about a girl that comes home from college to her old dying town. I know that doesn’t sound terribly uplifting, and there’s some downer stories mixed in there, but overall I found it a very heartfelt and uplifting game, because the main character’s friends are the most wonderful bunch of people, and you hang out with them and go on little adventures throughout. It’s got a cool creepy mystery story going on, but the game is mostly about deep friendship, family, and overcoming struggles with their help, and I found that very uplifting and worthwhile.

How do you define the destinction? I assume you’re only counting ‘in’ as officially recognized by the republican party, the political entity?

While I agree civil war is unlikely, there are paramilitary groups in the republican party, which Frontline investigated.

I could see a more minor version of The Troubles taking place.

If you’re advocating for the ability of individuals (or if you can get them to agree, an entire town) to opt-in to donating extra money to the state-wide school fund, I say more power to you! Totally agree that should be an option. :D

Before I edited the comment, it said vegan meat alternatives, without stipulating impossible beef, so I thought maybe the vegan part triggered people? Though I still got downvotes even after. Ah well 🤷‍♂️

That might’ve happened in the sequel? I don’t think you ever see the main character’s parents in the first game, but I do recall visiting them when you come back from WWII in the second game.

I wasn’t a big fan of the sequel, since I found the main characters to be unsympathetic assholes.

I think Mafia received that criticism because of its surface level similarity to GTA, which is known for packing a ton of random side content in its open world.

In Mafia there is genuinely nothing to do out in the world when driving around outside of the main story missions, except for occasionally a mechanic at a garage will offer you some small mission to steal a newer and faster car. Because of that, people complained that the open-world part was pointless and a waste.

In the case of rdr2, it has a linear story, but a plethora of side content the player can engage with outside of the main missions. In Mafia, there was a single person that would sometimes offer you little missions to steal faster and better cars, but otherwise had no side activities whatsoever in between driving to and from the story missions. The lack of side content was the main complaint.

The Original Mafia game is generally criticized for being a linear game in an open-world, but I think its linear nature is one of its strengths, because it gives the narrative a tight, driving focus that open world games tend to lack.

meat alternatives, like impossible beef and chicken patties.

If you and your neighbors have the means, then you could opt for private tutoring if you feel your public school is not adequate.

Ooh, that’s nice. I could see that effectively replacing disqus comments below articles. Cool beans!

In Vermont, they passed legislation that distributed school funding equally across the entire state, so that impoverished areas would have just as good of an education as the wealthy ones. People bitched about their taxes going up, but otherwise have been no downsides.