It's not a virtue if it's just normal. Trying to repress normal things and pretend they don't exist, and then getting mad anytime you still manage to see them is just a way of life that is going to lead to constantly being angry.

When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don't generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn't really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in "heaven"(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it's a really nice thought that I don't want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.

The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don't want to take that aspect away from anyone.

So, just. "What if memes was a videogame?"

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/biden-promise-tracker/ Honestly, for a politician, that's a pretty high follow-through rate. If his term ends and all the stalled and in-progress convert to compromise or failed, hes still gonna stack up pretty good.

28% may look low without context, but compare it to previous single term presidents... and if he gets a second term, he's on track to do very well.

Yeah, on most models made in the last 5 years or so. Specifically for people with vision or partial hearing loss. But of course the ones that make fake engine sounds are also largely for the specific drivers those EVs are targetted at. They also tend to play them inside the cabin too. The fake engine sounds are pretty terrible though, like videogames from 20+ years ago.

The percentage they get has come down as house prices went up relatively. And they for sure still have to do a good job for you. Ideally they should save you as much as they make in the end. If your agent didn't meet those expectations, they should be out of business soon.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but most do. If you didn't like yours, pick a different one next time, they didn't deserve your business.

I wouldn't be surprised if the reason they are waiting forever for their tax return is because they didn't successfully exploit a loophole and got put into the pile for closer inspection. It's not like you just randomly have to wait longer than everyone else. Something happened.

A gimmick that is already in up to 10% of households, with a further 10% of those households using it more than 4 hours a day. Sure, it sounds like a small amount when put that way. But that's already getting to be a pretty targettable market, and if you look at the growth chart, it's not slowing down.

You may individually not have liked it, but it is indeed here to stay. I don't think an apple headset will be worth it for a bit, but apple sold alot of Quest 3's at the very least. So they sold people on the idea of VR, and then once they were in the door, they bought a reasonable headset. In that way, apple has helped alot. They helped to establish it as something that is "ready" for apple to take it seriously. That conveys alot of legitimacy to "normal" people.

I personally am, of course, in the minority of people that use VR for 8+ hours a day. It has replaced TV, Consoles, and gaming monitors for me. Plus I do my exercise in VR. I made a virtual 4k 120hz screen for my PC, that I use from the comfort of my recliner. It's like if you had a steamdeck to stream your desktop to, except you don't have to hold the weight of the deck, the screen is not near your hands, and also its 10 feet wide and at a comfortable viewing distance of 20 feet away, and is 4k 120hz. And you can use whichever controller you like holding. Also it's cheaper. The downside is that if you want someone else to be able to see your game, you have to stream a video of it to their device, or a nearby TV. And speaking of a nearby TV, while playing on my Virtual screen, I can also just see my real TV too. On Quest 3, the passthrough video is clear enough to see about a 720p equivalent resolution at a comfortable viewing distance(40 degrees of your field of view). 720p may sound low, but it wasn't that long ago that we were happy to see 540p (DvD quality) as a huge upgrade to what movies used to look like before. And Quest 4 will improve upon that too.

VR has only just crossed the first threshold into main stream adoption. The Quest 3 was the first headset that is worth it to non early adopters. They will only get better from here on. Not to mention they are also coming the other way, with AR stuff starting as light weight and unintrusive as possible and slowly building on what is possible to pack in without getting in the way at all. Step 2 of the AR sunglasses is coming soon.

While VR is the "console" of the future, AR is the "mobile phone" of the future. And eventually they will meet and blur the lines, kind of like how we use phones now. Modern smartphones are both what cellphones used to be, as well as surprisingly capable portable console gaming now.

It's also available in VR for anyone that wants to play it that way. But heads up, it's not the version that is currently heavily discounted. It's pretty good in VR though.

If you want a VR lego full on sandbox style game though, there aren't any with the official lego brand, but there are plenty of "plastic building brick simulator" type games. Basically just like playing with real legos, except no one else can see them. But you can also have whatever bricks you want and your wife won't stop you. Hehe.

Most EVs actually play sounds already. Just older ones wouldn't now. My brother set his to a spaceship sound. But you can pick normal sounds too, like various style ICE engine sounds.

If you are comfortable with games that are not technically classified as freeware yet, but functionally, they probably should be... then emulation of older consoles is a great way to go too. While they are certainly not "legal", I don't think anyone playing them has ever gotten in trouble. Only the people that try to make money off of it find that the console companies are motivated enough to shut them down. Otherwise, it doesn't feel super risky to just play stuff. Just stick with games that are impossible to pay for if you want to be completely safe. There was a ton of good games on 16 and 32 bit consoles that you literally couldn't pay for now if you tried. And even as new as gamecube is getting pretty hard to possibly pay money for.

Newer stuff, I only feel ok emulating what I actually own. But as time goes on, newer and newer stuff becomes the new old stuff. A pretty wide variety of console emulators for android are in a good place now.

I do recommend a controller though if you go this route. Ideally one of the ones that also holds your phone for you. Either by making it into a switch/steamdeck kind of shape, or the ones that hold the phone above an xbox style controller. Both are good.

Terarria can be played as casual or low stress. You choose when to advance the difficulty, and how elaborately you contruct your preparations for the next step. But for a largely stress-free casual playstyle, focus on being a summoner. Also, there isn't much penalty for dying. So if you can wrap your mind around not being bothered by dying, then any playstyle can feel casual really. It's certainly a tough mindset to achieve for some of us though, lol.

Magic DosBox, not a game. But in combination with https://www.old-games.com/ , it's a pretty good selection of all the old games made for Dos back in the wild west of indie games back before they were even called that. There are, of course, also old commercial games that have transitioned to freeware now too. Should be able to find lots of awesome games there. Moraff adventure games are particularly interesting. Bit of a steep learning curve, but great to come back to now and then. The site has reviews of every game and sorts them into categories. It can be a little overwhelming just due to the sheer number of available games, but take it slow, and work your way through. It's worth the time investment to find gems.

Sparklite, I don't know what it looks like purchases-wise, it was free with gamepass and had no in-app purchases when acquired that way. It's probably one of the newest games I'll post about. New enough that it was possible to get it with gamepass, lol. The game sort of has a modern retro zelda feel. I don't think it's a particularly long game, but it's certainly enjoyable and pretty casual. I think if it has transactions, reading other reviews it might be like a "purchase the rest of the game" style thing. So basically a free demo that you can then choose if you like the game enough to pay.

Hmm, I was gonna say moonshades, last time I played it there wasn't much for things you could buy. But when I look now, there is. So I can't say for sure how unnecessary any of it would feel now, but it wasn't necessary back when I played last. It's kind of like the old early 3D party dungeon/maze crawlers where you use the arrow keys to walk one "block" at a time. There is only 2 party members in this. So you still sort of get the group synergy stuff, but each character is a bigger share of the team power. You could do a tank/healer thing or magic damage/melee damage, or not have either one focus on anything in particular.

I hope it's still not necessary to buy anything, it was a good game. But the store is pretty comprehensive now, so that has me worried.

Cardinal Quest 2, it is possible to spend money, but honestly spending money would be worse than earning the stuff yourself. I still probably gave them some money, since I think the game was free. You don't have to have played Cardinal Quest 1, it's pretty story light. Kind of like playing Diablo 2 if you never played Diablo 1. Kinda the same game as the first with much better execution after learning some lessons. The game itself is pretty easy, but there are optional challenges you can take on that can be as their name implies. Lots of replayability as there are many character classes and 4 different stories. Over time you'll likely want to beat each story with each class. Mostly cuz it keeps track, lol.

Galaxy Genome, it's a space exploration game. Sort of a project to make a comprehensive 2D version of Elite: Dangerous. Or at least it started as that, I don't know if it has achieved and surpassed that by now. It was pretty far along last I played. And that was a while ago now. I kind of play games on and off for years, so that is mostly gonna be a running theme of all the games I post here. Games that you find yourself wanting to pick back up again, over and over.

Grim Quest and Grim Tides. Two games by the same person. I haven't played Grim tides yet, but it's also free. Grim Quest is not a particularly large game, but I've still managed to play it over many years. I did a full run of each difficulty one by one. There is a bit to learn before it feels easy and casual, but it does get there. To be fair, I try to play it without dying. If I let myself die, it would be alot more casual even from the start. Dying is not heavily penalized on default settings, but you can alternately choose to play hardcore. Otherwise dying usually just means you gained less money for that run, and didn't make the game any harder. The game only gets harder when you successfully clear a dungeon. You can also just exit the unfinished dungeon without dying and keep most of what you have acquired so far on that run, minus a small fee for quitting the dungeon.

There are preset difficulty options, but you can also craft your own custom difficulty. There are things you could spend money on, I think it may have started out with ads. But I consider games with ads that you can pay to get rid of as basically a free demo, and getting rid of ads is the purchase price if you like the game. So they don't deter me if they don't basically break the game to add ads to it, or affect the flow of the game whether the ads are there or not.

Exiled Kingdoms, its an older isometric 2D adventure RPG. Kinda feels like it would have been made 30 years ago for pc, but it was made relatively recently for phones. I don't think there was any micro transactions. It may have had an initial purchase price, not sure. That's usually what I look for in a phone game. The traditional model of buying a game and then just playing a game. No gross mobile game stuff.