Or is salad an undercooked and dry soup?

In one of my settings, this is taken into account, sort of. The world spans ages. In the first age, magic is so plentiful that entire species, at various levels of sapience/sentience, were created by random accidental acts of magical creation. By the third age, most have disappeared, leaving areas dominated by single species. By the fifth, only non-magical life remains, just humans, and there is no sixth.

Start with the token effort of not engaging in negative self-talk. Calling yourself scum is a self-fulfilling prophecy, a lie to let you feel self-righteous when you have been trained not to feel self-esteem. You must learn to spot that thought as you are having it and cut it off. It’s the only way out of the spiral. In case that’s too vague, whenever you are even thinking you are inferior, focus on literally anything else, as long as it occupies you enough to cut off the train of thought. Do math in your head. Focus on a 4 seconds in 6 seconds out breathing cycle. Balance a pen on your finger. Whatever. Just don’t follow the train into darkness.

If you want to produce the sensation of being trapped you have to use the feeling of power and loss. It stems from the sense of ‘If I could just…’ If I could just get out there, I could defeat that henchman for him. If I could just get out there, I could solve that riddle for him. If I could just escape this box, all would be fixed.

Now, the trick is, because this is a video game, players have a reduced sense of agency. The player’s sense of capacity is ‘what happens when you hit the button.’ Mario, before more modern adaptations, had a capacity to move left and right, jump, run, and ‘use ability.’ The player never had the ability to do anything else, so it never feels like a limitation. No one ever said, ‘playing Mario makes me feel trapped because I could beat Bowser if I could just access the cannon that’s right over there.’

So, to produce the feeling of confinement, one must create the sense of power, and then take it away. Give the player enough power that they could even defeat the dragon, but then take it from them so they feel limited. If you can find a way to make it feel like it’s not even forced, as in they feel like they could have won the game in Act 1, Scene 1, but their lack of skills as a player were what made them lose, all the better.

If that’s the style of game you are looking for, I could see a structure of 'do code golf puzzles to:

• program robots to help the knight directly’
• ‘trick’ henchmen or magical castle elements (abstracted coding) into doing things that help the Knight’
• write the guard’s ‘daily action plan’ so they patrol in a way that doesn’t get the knight caught’
• complete abstract ‘magical haxors’ that open the dragon’s firewalls’
• social engineer the dragon between runs to let you have more supplies’
• give simple instructions to collections of small woodland creatures to do simple things that add up to a real goal (in the vein of Opus Magnum)’

I played one a few months back that might fit the bill. ‘Garden Life: a Cozy Simulator’ It’s a game where you grow/decorate a garden of flowers and sell/give them to people. Very pleasant.

That’s kind of subjective.

There are two broad views on whether something ‘was a good plan.’ Generally, everyone agrees that accomplishing the intended goal is the first requirement, but people tend to divide then on whether there is a secondary requirement. Many hold that the second necessary requirement is that the action doesn’t violate prior tenants.

e.g. if the goal is to get children out of a burning building, actually getting them out is generally a minimum requirement for ‘a good plan’, however, if the plan is to get them out by punting them out the window, it would be argued by many that the plan was bad because it violates a prior tenant to not hurt the children.

For the tariffs, it is almost a given that it will create a better business environment for companies that want to compete in sectors where tariffs act as a protectionist measure. However, it is also generally a given that the tariffs will cause financial pain for the average American, whose standard of living depends on cheap foreign labor. For many people, the damage done to the American public is like the punting. It violates established values, and thus becomes a bad idea.

This also all assumes the stated goal is the real goal. The claim is the tariffs are intended to help American businesses, but the general interpretation is that’s a lie. Many people believe the tariffs are simply a threat to get obedience from other governments. From this view, the tariffs are a failure, because essentially no power has been gained over the rest of the world, and many places that were cooperating freely before now have antipathy toward the US.

I cannot confirm this.

Seems like it creates bills, but also has enough hype behind it to generate investment/donation interest.

For as long as I’ve known it I’ve preferred the version of Ghost’s Cerice done by Saint Raven, a much less known band out of Utah.

Starts out pretty good but goes quickly downhill.

That Gnome TV makes gno sense at all.

That orc TV has too many thoughts, not enough shouting and explosives. Orcs would watch wrestling, Michael Bay movies, and Russian candid camera shows where they surprise people with boobs.

Halflings are absolutely not known for their passion. Simplicity with a spark of mischief is their bag. They’d go for gardening shows, cooking shows, home improvement shows, and true crime to remind them about how great life is at home compared to those crime ridden tall folk cities.

The Fae don’t have TVs. You and your loved ones are their TV. Dance, puppet, dance. …unless you’d like your daughter to dance for us?

Rice cakes. The contrast between the dry, crispy, puffed rice and the smooth, unctuous nutella provides an accent to the sweetness that I quite like.

Why is it so hard for employers and employees to understand the most basic principle of professionalism? The employee works and is paid for it. If the employer wants them to work longer, they have to pay for that time. If the employer does not want to pay, they cannot obligate the employee to do that work. If the employee wants to be paid, they have to show up and do the work. It’s not rocket surgery.

I have yet to see any place with a good hiring procedure, this nonsense included. People saying they work in HR should generally be looked at as if they just admitted to being in a cult, which is terrifying because it means cultists will be deciding whether you get to do the thing you do to keep from starving in the street.

You kidding?

(Looks at them)

That empty spot is where those two would be, if they didn’t have to do 55 hours/wk at work and care for their families the rest of the time.

He got depressed and vanished a year ago. No one knows where he went. He didn’t leave any contact info.

He’s literally too stupid to breathe. We keep him around for the laughs but no one is going to tell him anything.

And he’s literally dead.

Did you read those papers you signed when you started your job? You probably agreed to this there as well.

Wait til you find out about the pilonidal cysts!

On a certain level, privacy always was a luxury. Through most of human history, you lived bumcheek to jowl with othet people. The trick is, now it’s a different beast. Corporations have the ability to be much more powerful in their invasions. As for your specific situation, there are some VPNs that try to hide that you are using a VPN. I think proton has something like that. I forget what it’s called. And you could technically go VPN on VPS and get a much easier time but you’d have to switch it out all the time if you wanted anonymous-at-server browsing, and you’d have to pay for the privilege which comes back to privacy as luxury.

VS is great. It’s what Terrafirmacraft would have been as a game instead of a mod, and it has a fairly vibrant modding community of its own. I’d still like to see some more development on it but it’s great so far.

Chonky and fat are the same thing. Did they mean floofy?