Haven’t played in a while but the better friendly fire mod was essential for me.

Thank you. There is so much shit going on, keeping up to date with everything is literally unhealthy.

No

This is my favourite couple in furry comics.

Calling someone who called out sick a bitch is a little bit insensitive, no?

Even if there was a law being broken, time has shown that Trump is pretty much above the law at this point.

USA does not recognize the ICC which has issued the arrest warrant.

I play on a smaller galaxy size and have a beefy computer.

It’s a mix of strategy and role-playing. Sure if you want to survive on higher difficulties, you probably need a build that is meta. But on medium difficulties or lower you can pretty much roleplay your empire as you like and there’s many mechanics in the game that help with this. Your empire can be a democratic haven for all, a mega corporation, a machine hivemind forcefully assimilating organics into its network…and much more.

There’s also a great exploration aspect of the game. Your exploration vessels regularly find anomalies that tell a neat little story and provide bonuses to your empire (which can range from a small resource bonus to making one of your leaders immortal).

Of course, there’s also the power fantasy. You start with just one planet, but you will quickly expand throughout the galaxy. You can then wage war against other empires, build a federation together with them or convince the galactic community to crown you as Emperor of the entire galaxy. But the game also regularly throws adversaries at you if the AI empires are starting to become no match for you, may it be one of the space fauna suddenly becoming extremely hostile or a Great Khan uniting a marauder horde and demanding everyone to become their vassal.

It is also rare that a bad outcome leads to a straight loss. Losing a war (usually) does not doom your empire but you only lose a bit of territory or get vassalized, both giving you ample opportunities to build up your strength again or make allies to stand together against an enemy.

Stellaris. I’m almost at 1400 hours in the game and while I now play it a lot less often than in the first 1000 hours, I still get the itch to play it again a few times a year.

USA didn’t vote for a female president for the first time but at least you now have a male first lady for the first time.

Signs and stuff I can kind of understand. Our world is chock full of things (ads) that try to get our attention at any point. At some point you develop an internal adblock and since 98% is irrelevant it is a reasonable drawback that the remaining 2% gets filtered out as well.

Barrier of entry is marginally lower. With mastodon you’ll have to make a decision on what instance you’re creating your account. With Bluesky there’s just Bluesky.

Obviously, Musk wants to be the shadow president of the USA but I don’t think it’ll play out as he hopes.

Nah, there’s a pretty huge list of “woke” video games and they include titles that have an optional 1 minute scene of homosexual romance.

Trump and Vance hold no actual power. Musk is now the shadow president of the USA.

There’s a third.

That’s been going on since 10 already at least.

I guess we now know who will really hold power in the oval office. Spoiler: it’s not Trump

I guess there will be many people thinking that, driving up demand->increasing prices before any tariffs even exist.