Once again posting this chart because when you realize which age group has the most enthusiastic Trump supporters, and you recognize the correlation between their behavior habits and the neuropsychological symptoms of lead poisoning during childhood development, everything starts to make way more sense.

You misunderstood, this wasn’t an analogy. The secret to enrichment is literally putting raw hamburger in a pumpkin and rolling it around your home.

I basically made masking a hyperfixation for a while, until I had a good enough grasp of NT social interaction that I could drop the mask more and more. Then I just came across as cool, confident, and interesting when I was doing my own thing. It’s kind of a “Learn the rules so you can break them” situation. NT conventions aren’t really all that complicated if you devote a bit of time to study. If you can steer your fixations at all, it’s worth the investment so you can get on with your life with fewer interruptions.

The Illuminati rock band?

I generally have more than 16 hours of energy in the day, so I actually did this for a while in college when I worked at a 24 hour job:

Monday: 2am - 10pm - morning shift and midday classes

Tuesday: 6am - 2am - morning shift and afternoon classes

Wednesday: 10am - 6am -midday classes and evening shift

ThursEve: 2pm - 10am - afternoon classes and overnight shift

FriNight: 6pm - 2pm - partying, morning shift, and errands

SaturSun: 10pm - 6pm - partying and miscellaneous

Usually I had to fudge it a little bit to fit my exact class/work schedule, but it was honestly kinda dope. Less time struggling to fall asleep, 8 extra hours in the week, plenty of energy to party all night. If I could finagle my work schedule like that again, I’d probably go back to it.

It’s extremely unlikely, for sure, but not necessarily impossible. You could release a piece of digital content, like a game or an album or program, that becomes wildly popular extremely quickly. Again, not likely, but strictly speaking possible.

I was terrified when I moved out, I thought I would never find a steady job or figure out normal adult stuff, and I’d be homeless in a few months.

You might stop being a minor overnight, but you don’t become an adult overnight. It’s a gradual process and honestly you barely notice.

His son actually further developed the experimental dance therapy into the practice of mental karate.

NOWAI

Even Henry Ford figured it out, a century ago.

I think it’s a complex problem. A lot of these “buzzwords” are actually quite semantically rich, if used correctly. “Synergy” refers to the principle of mutually advantageous reinforcement between factors, like the “three sisters” technique in agriculture. “Paradigm” is a concise word to denote an established, standard framework or perspective.

They are technical jargon, when used correctly. Used responsibly, they can convey a great deal of information with high semantic density. The problem arises when they’re transformed into buzzwords, layered in confusing or abstract ways.

Just because a question was posed rhetorically doesn’t mean the answer is as forgone as the asker assumed.

Ah, yeah if you don’t like info dumps then never mind. It’s basically a novel in game form.

Not what I said. Dropping out of a game because it’s too bleak reinforces the game’s theme of people dropping out of reality because it’s too bleak.

Like I said, it’s not for everyone. But you quit before the threads start to come together. If you don’t care about those threads, that’s your choice. You said you’re interested in exploring the themes the game centers around, and if that’s true you really should give it a real shot and give the game the time to tell its story. But the negativity and pacing are an aspect of that storytelling. People are supposed to be assholes, it’s supposed to feel a bit like a slog, it’s supposed to feel bleak. They aren’t telling the story badly, you’re just not interested in the story.

Sure, but again that’s the point. I can get why someone might not have the patience for it, but you can’t really change the front-loaded negativity or pacing without sacrificing the whole message. It’s a crucial aspect of the storytelling.

Honestly, people who give up on it kinda validate the themes. You and your dozen friends didn’t persevere, like many of the characters. Giving up is one response to bleakness. That’s not a value judgement, like I said it isn’t for everyone, but it is kinda poignant that by checking-out you demonstrate exactly what it’s saying, to some degree.

And if you keep playing you learn the tragic reasons why Cuno is such a little shit and, I won’t post spoilers, but depending on your choices you can help him become way less of a little shit. It’s roughly the same for most of the asshole characters: they’re assholes at first, you find out why they’re assholes and develop a lot of sympathy for them, and sometimes you facilitate their redemption.

The characters are supposed to be flawed, they’re supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.

It’s kind of a necessary aspect. You can’t really effectively explore what persistent failure does to a town without feeling like you’re trudging through a story full of assholes. If the characters weren’t so abrasive and broken, it wouldn’t really be the same kind of thing.

The main theme of the game basically centers around failure. How it manifests, how people react to it, how it affects them in the long run. Bitterness, apathy, delusion. Most of the characters are some kind of fuckup (except Kim, my beloved). Some of them are failures because they’re fucked up, some of them are fucked up because they failed again and again, but either way it’s an exploration of what that does to a person, what that does to a people, what that does to a town.

Some people just disassociate, some people give up and abandon their values to go with the flow, some people fight back impotently against forces they’ll never overcome. Above all, I think it’s basically about perseverance, one way or another, in the face of failure.

It’s very raw, very bleak, very human. It’s easy to feel vindicated when you strive and succeed, when you’re a virtuous hero, but who among us is just a virtuous hero? It’s much more complex and real to fail over and over and still get back on that horse, because what else can you do? The characters are supposed to be flawed, they’re supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.

If you don’t like exploring those ideas, you probably won’t like the game.

The Apollo missions were staged, that’s 100% a fact.

Jokes aside, yeah Soviets are the answer. If there was the slightest inkling that we faked it, they wouldn’t have come out to congratulate us.