Oh, you mean the pizza. You hated the pizza. You liked bread.

Ex X executive is fun to say out loud.

It’s gotta be temporary. It’s intel.

Oh no I don’t play games with money I don’t have. I’m ok losing what I already have though. Beats a lottery ticket.

I do not. I could probably qualify though.

When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose bud. That’s where I’m at in this moment. If I lose every penny I have I’m still poor. If I don’t, maybe I can get a start on a damn house or something.

Rambo is just dood in ban danna shooting musheen gun and holding big nife.

I’m just being a dick. I haven’t seen it since I was around 7 so that’s all it was for me haha.

Been saying 5ever since I was about 5. That was 5ever ago and I thought I was a clever boy.

Me too. I personally think it was brilliant.

I don’t know how you missed it. After the debate I was eager to see him. “Please don’t be senile. Please don’t be senile!”

I mean, you do you. I personally love video games and I’ve loved them all of my life. It’s something I can do with my kids that allows us to connect. I didn’t grow up in a world with access to anything else. There’s no beach trip in a world where your shoes have holes in them and you’re living on brown beans. My mom always found a way to scrounge up an old video game console for us and we’d borrow games from friends who had it better or had stopped playing their older games. Hell, when we stayed in a women’s shelter once for weeks, all the kids who were stuck there got by on the Sega Genesis and the Super Nintendo in the tv room. We were able to bond and make friends in that horrible place with that shared horrible experience because of video games.

I had adventures that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. I had fun that wouldn’t have been available to me without video games. It’s hard for me to understand why you feel the way you do, but I guess we’ve had very different experiences and you feel the same way on the opposite side of it.

My grandmother just passed away, and when I stood there at her casket I remembered very fondly sitting in the floor with her and beating all of the Donkey Kong Country games. She wasn’t physically able to do much and video games brought us together and made us connect and enjoy life together. I remember the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1998 when my mother and I would sneak and open the only present I had under the tree (Zelda, Ocarina of Time) when my dad would go to sleep.

I’m happy that what you do with your kid makes you happy. I don’t understand why you’ve had such an extreme reaction to what we do though when it really doesn’t matter. People like what they like.

Part of me agrees and part of me doesn’t.

I don’t know a kid who doesn’t have at least a Quest 2. I have four brother in laws aged 11-16 and every time I go over there at least two of them are in the basement rocking the headset. My neighbor is on his every day. My daughter has the Quest 2, full body trackers, and a beefy gaming PC almost exclusively dedicated to VR. The kids are all in, seriously.

I’m 38. I have a Quest 2 but I also have two toddlers and an infant (in a couple weeks anyway). I haven’t turned my Quest on in about a year. I got pretty heavy into Pavlov for a while, but here’s where the failure comes in for VR being mainstream and widely adopted. I can’t play and watch my children. I have to ask my wife to take on all of the responsibility just so I can play, and I don’t feel good about that so I just don’t play.

It isn’t the same as something like a Steam Deck. I can put it down and get back into it easily while also keeping an eye on the world around me. I can put my kids on my lap and they can watch me play if they want to. You just can’t do that in VR. It completely disengages you from your surroundings. It isn’t easy to jump in and out of it because you have to be trapped to a dedicated space with your eyes turned off to the world.

I love VR, but not enough to pull myself entirely out of my life to play. I think most people face that issue.

It’s a nonissue when you’re a teenager on summer break with no responsibilities. There’s just no room in a busy life for VR.

I’d like to see it succeed. I’d like to see it come to a point where you can somehow keep your real space visible, if only on a monitor in the corner of a high res display. I love it, I just can’t use it.

Yes, yes. Of course! Of course!

Or not to be, that is the question.

You’ve tied my head up in knots with this one. Haha

As to the argument above yours, fostering a space for Nazis to grow their movement is scary. I get that some segments of society think that posting gay porn is scary too, but gay porn never led to death camps for anybody.

I think all ideas are worth discussing, because if they’re hiding in quiet corners there are no voices of reason to refute them. It’s hard to take that stance nowadays with the internet working the way it does. Algorithms feeding information to people just because that information gets engagement is frightening.

I had a conversation with my neighbor yesterday about how he got interested in the whole furry thing. He said that initially, he read the critical comments online, took them seriously, thought it was funny, so he engaged in harassment of furries. His engagement led him to more furry videos. He began to like some of the people he was engaging with. Fast forward to now and he’s got fursuits hanging in his closet and everyone he hangs with is also a furry.

It got me thinking about how a lot of kids end up going down these rabbit holes online. Not that I consider being a furry a bad thing. My daughter is into that stuff and I support her being herself. His example just made me think of how other people fall into extremism online.

I fucking loved this video as a kid.

Wooooooooooo

My cousin (actually double first cousin, so almost a brother biologically. His mom is my mom’s sister and his dad is my dad’s brother) had a fuuuucked up childhood.

His father was a severe alcoholic and abandoned him. I wasn’t allowed around his dad as a kid. I have two memories of him from when I was a kid. One time he bounced the muscles in his arms and legs and told my brother and I he had live frogs under his skin. In the other memory, he chased my father with a chainsaw and jumped through a window in an attempt to kill him. My father doesn’t associate with most of his family. My father abandoned me too, but I had a mom and a step dad who did their best.

His mother had him until he started school. She dropped him and is 1 year old sister off with my grandparents and disappeared. She popped back in when he was a teenager. I mean, she was around before that, but she tried to be a mom when he was around 15.

He thought his father didn’t even think about him. When I was in the 7th grade and he was in 5th grade, we snuck into the attic of my grandparents’ house to sneak a cigarette. We were snooping and found a box full of unopened letters from his father. Neither of us were even allowed to have pictures of our dads.

His dad had written him a letter at least once a month all of his life despite never getting a reply. That broke something in him. He went from thinking that he had a father who didn’t care at all to the harsh realization that our grandparents hid letters from him. The only people who loved him, in his world, had betrayed him in the worst way.

We sat there bawling our eyes out reading those letters. He found out he had two half siblings, Michael and Rebecca. His father had sent him pictures of every stage of their lives. Turns out that despite his problems, the woman he had his next two kids with had it worse and abandoned him to raise them as a single father.

I’m crying typing this. Lord.

Next day at school, he had a binder with their pictures glued on the front. He wrote underneath the photos. “Michael and Becca, I love them both.” He had never met them, but had read about their first words, their first steps, favorite foods, the ways in which they reminded their father of him. Goddamn.

I didn’t know anyone from my father’s family but him, and we were close all of our lives. We learned to play music together, wrote songs together, we did everything together.

I didn’t understand his interest in the whole juggalo thing when that came up and I thought it was cringe as fuck. I don’t feel that way now. As bad as I had it, he had it worse. When I was a kid I could only focus on my problems. My grandparents had it together. They had a nice house, money, and nice lives. I was dirt poor. I had nothing. I thought he got lucky and I envied him for having a real home to grow up in.

Only as an adult did I see that he had it worse than me. My mom had problems, but she was there. No one lied to me about my father. My father legit didn’t care, and even though he was doing better than my uncle, he didn’t write me any letters. Shit, I contact him today and he might reply three months from now. My cousin was lied to. He was told that his father a worthless drunk who didn’t care and didn’t even try. I’d rather learn that was true than learn they’d hid my father’s love from me.

My grandma died two days ago. I should message my cousin. Goddamn I’m mad at myself that I haven’t yet. Didn’t even cross my mind. Fuck.

But yeah, I can’t relate to the juggalos, but I get it. I get where they’re coming from.

My cousin is a full fledged juggalo. I don’t personally get it. I’m antisocial anyway, but the lifestyle is just bizarre to me. It isn’t for me I guess, but I’m for people being happy and doing what they love no matter what it. I don’t need to get it.

He loves the lifestyle. That man has travelled all across the country couch surfing with complete strangers. It seems to me that almost any juggalo will invite another juggalo into his home like they are a huge extended family.

He’s had some wild life experiences that I could only dream of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNRRQI6NtoQ

It’s called the Mandeller effect. You’re trying to stir shit up, aren’t you?