Man, cartoonnetwork.com was the first website I ever frequented. When my family first got an internet connection, I didn’t know about search engines, so I would just type things I liked into the url bar, put a “.com” at the end, and hope for the best. Speeds were super slow on our dialup connection, so I’d often have time to make and eat a sandwich while waiting for a flash game to load.

I remember being very confused about Ohio being part of the Midwest when I was learning geography in school. It’s literally one state away from the east coast.

Of course, the concept of “Midwest” as a whole is pretty confusing. I get that it’s meant to be about halfway to the western part of the US, since we started on the east coast, but it’s a bit of an antiquated term at this point.

If anything, we should call it the Middle-North or Midnorth for short, since that’s a more objective description of it’s placement in the country, without the old east-coast-centric viewpoint featured in “Midwest.”

Yeah, exactly. Many republican voters think that everyone should vote for their own goals, and that the biggest group should win, so they’re terrified of not being the biggest group in any given demographic (religion, race, etc.). What they fail to realize is that most people vote for how they’d like the country itself to be run, which includes smaller groups just as much as larger ones, so losing that majority footing wouldn’t impact them very much if at all.

Most republican voters I know, boomer or otherwise, simply view voting differently than most their lefter-leaning constituents. I often hear them say that the point of voting is to simply choose what benefits you the most, and that if everyone simply chooses things that specifically align with their own wants and needs, that the biggest, most important groups will get what is needed. It’s not even that they understand that they’re being selfish by only voting in their own best interests, they just honestly believe that considering the needs of others when voting undermines its effectiveness.

Now, it’s obvious that they’re wrong - smaller groups deserve just as much of a say as their larger counterparts, and the country benefits when they do - but they don’t think about it that way. I believe it’s also why republicans are so concerned about becoming a minority - they honestly believe that voting should specifically only benefit the largest group, and are desperately trying to maintain “their people” as the largest group.

Growing up my family only had one pair of scissors, and they had a big, bulky plastic handle that was curved specifically for right-hand use. It was the most uncomfortable thing to use, and my parents refused to buy a second set of scissors when the one we had was “perfectly usable.” Please, buy your lefty kid some scissors that don’t dig into their skin when they try to force their fingers into the handles backwards.

I imagine most people just don’t really know which style they’d prefer until they’ve already gotten used to the default right-handed method and don’t feel like starting over. Non-standard play also makes it harder to find an instrument, and learn chord finger positions and online tabs, as others have mentioned.

I’m mostly only left handed because I’m missing several fingers on my right hand. As a result, I play right-handed since I can still hold a pick with only 2 fingers. I feel like fingering is better suited to the dominant hand anyway, though I suppose certain styles of play still require a lot of dexterity from the picking hand as well.

The issue with that sentiment is that a significant amount of the population simply can’t afford to be picky. They buy the cheapest available version of whatever they need because that’s what they can afford. All of the power of consumer choice is slowly being stripped away as more and more people are pushed into poverty, and that’s by design.

If it comes down to it, I’ll split the cost with you. If we can’t get socialized medicine the way it’s meant to be, we’ll make it ourselves!

I’m a bit of a noob about privacy, but wouldn’t preventing people from knowing you’re using Tor be pretty important? I know that, among people who know of Tor, but don’t know much about it, the use of Tor alone is generally associated with criminal activity, and often conjures up imagery of worse things than just piracy.

If I were to tell my friends I was thinking of using Tor, and I didn’t immediately have a good explanation of what I’d use it for beyond “privacy,” then they’d think I was into some nasty shit. I’d imagine the ISPs, and anyone else they might give/sell their info to, would be suspicious of anyone logged to be using Tor.

Yeah, but they were making the point that most people use the earphone variety of headphone, so when you countered with the fact that headphones in general are better, it missed the mark. I have nice headphones, and yes, they’re better than desktop speakers, but my wife is still using some cheap raycons she got because they sponsored a youtuber she likes back in 2019, and that’s the much, much larger demographic.

If you ask someone on the street to show you their headphones, the vast majority will pull out a $20 in-ear set, or at best some airpods. People care a lot less about sound quality than you might expect, and prefer the convenience of a small, wireless pod over a nice pair of quality headphones.

Nobody’s ever heard of it; I’ve been singing its praises since 2006, and I’ve never met another person in real life who’s heard of it. It’s an amazing game set in a slightly-steampunk world where cars have only recently been invented, but giant steam-powered mechs were invented around the same time as well. The story’s interesting, but the real fun comes from how much freedom the game gives in how you want to play it:

You can customize your character’s clothes, you can be a good guy, you can be a jerk who charges his friends for every little favor, you can just straight-up be a villain, you can hustle pool, you can play in a band with a bunch of different instruments, each with their own mini game associated with playing them, you can extort or save an orphanage, you can buy and decorate an apartment, then play a dating sim with some of the characters, and that’s all before you factor in the giant mech, which you can customize with a bunch of different pieces and use to fight in a colosseum, explore ruins for treasure, excavate fossils to save a museum, fight giant bosses, transport goods and passengers, and even turn it into an airplane to fly around in.

And that’s all in a PS2 game! Sure, all of the features are limited by both the hardware and the inclusion of so many other features, but they’re all fun, and the graphics look great. I rarely play any game more than once, and I’ve played this game well over a dozen times. It’s helped by the different endings depending on how you play your character, but even the parts that are the same between playthroughs are still fun every time. It’s my favorite game of all time by a huge margin.

Best game of all time. I play it every year.