I can relate. I spent a good deal of my childhood growing up in a toxic environment and ended up struggling with social anxiety and self esteem issues into my mid 20s. As a grown adult I would require 30 minutes of existential crisis to work up the courage to text my dentist for an appointment. Progress is slow and it can be really hard at times, but it’s absolutely worth it and you have more than enough of your life ahead of you to recover, grow and feel fulfilled. I still have my bad days, but I’ve also experienced social moments that felt genuinely life affirming.

And remember you are absolutely not silly for worrying about and struggling with this. Your problems are 100% valid and important and you should not feel ashamed and kick yourself down. You are not alone and we can all make it.

This is a talking point I’ve heard almost word for word, multiple times, from all sorts of reactionaries - young men are struggling because they grow up in single mother households without a strong role model. They really like telling you that your problems can be fixed if we just returned to tradition, but the fact is that having two parents around isn’t a magical trick that generates healthy childhoods, and I know way too many people who grew up in abusive and dysfunctional nuclear families.

Also, why do you think the caretaker must be something separate from the role model? What is the logic for splitting them up? Can’t one parent, or both, or multiple people in a communal parenting scenario be both caretakers and role models at the same time?

I’ve been working professionally for several years now and this is also my workflow. I sit down and think of what the requirements are, which tools I need to use, and sketch out a basic structure of what components I need and how they work together. Then I make a prototype where I just focus on building something that works and fulfills the requirements. Once I have a functional product, I take notes of what can be improved/optimized and start iterating. It does imply spending some time going over, rewriting and refactoring code, but I find that with each design iteration I gain a much deeper understanding of the problems the code needs to solve by actively working on it, putting it together and seeing it run than I could achieve by trying to think of everything in a void before I even start working.

I fucking hate this trend of westoids painting maps with their hot opinions as if the rest of the world only existed to be a fashion accessory for them.

With how hard media has been pushing atrocity propaganda, I guess the only way to eat it up uncritically is to just assume that Russian units have warcrime quotas they need to meet, which are also the driving force behind their military strategy.

Since you already got answers, I’ll just elaborate on the virtual machine part. There are tools such as VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation Player that allow you to essentially set aside part of your system’s resources to simulate another machine that you can install and run an OS on as if it were an actual, physical computer. This way you can try out Linux inside Windows and see if it’s fit for your needs without having to replace your already existing OS and if you don’t like it you can just delete the VM and move on.

This is a video showing how it works, it was released two months ago so there probably weren’t any UI changes to the tools in the meantime that could throw you off, and you can just follow it if you feel like giving it a try: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7XO1RXiOLs Also this if you prefer a written format, but it’s two years old and might be outdated: https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-mint-in-virtualbox/

GAMMA is a big modpack for Stalker Anomaly that mostly revolves around overhauling progression and actually making you interact with all the various gameplay systems like crafting and repairing gear. It also comes with an installer for maximum convenience, and you can check more info out here https://github.com/Grokitach/Stalker_GAMMA

I can definitely recommend it, but as noted before it does make the game significantly harder.

I struggle with keeping focus at times, but I try my best to sit down and read some sort of theory at least once a week, preferably more often if I manage to get my brain to cooperate. I’ve read various bits of Marx, Engels and Lenin (currently going through Imperialism) and a small bit of Mao. Apart from that I also try to educate myself on history, particularly the 20th century and the post Cold War era.

Still playing Anomaly + GAMMA on and off, recently managed to lose an ironman savefile to a bunch of mercs because I thought I was hot shit after having good results ironmanning vanilla Anomaly. Definite increase in overall difficulty right there.

I haven’t really followed any of the recent events. I kinda lost any hope or interest in most AAA gaming. From Microsoft’s lineup, I used to be quite fond of Obsidian but their recent stuff disappointed me.

It’s really not, there are explicitly beginner-friendly distros that you can either use as a learning experience before jumping to something else, or just stick with them forever if they are fit for your use case. I started with Manjaro back when I really had no idea what I was doing and it was very usable out of the box, though being Arch-based it does have a rolling release update cycle so there’s a chance of something breaking on an update. Then there’s always Ubuntu which is beginner-friendly by design, more stable, and widely used so that even if you run into issues you should be able to easily find support online, or Linux Mint, which I haven’t used personally but it was made with providing a smooth transition to Windows users in mind.

I’d recommend giving either of those a try in a virtual machine and just using them for your day to day stuff for a bit to see how it feels.

checks notes The Soviets used human wave tactics with 10 soldiers from mongolia sharing a single rifle until the Germans literally ran out of bullets to shoot the zombie horde and got overrun and also they cheated by receiving lend-lease, and btw the Germans had better K/D ratio which means they actually won the war because wars work like team deathmatch in video games.

Really, westoids wouldn’t be nearly as exhausting if all of them were this honest.

EU citizens need to learn how and when to shut the fuck up.

I’m not Russian and could very well be misinformed on this, but to my knowledge, Putin had been fairly friendly towards NATO and actually tried to cooperate and coexist up until the late 00s. In addition to that, NATO’s eastwards expansion after the Cold War is something that NATO’s own analysts warned against on the grounds that it would constitute a real security threat towards Russia.

I don’t think anyone here actually wished for war, but the reality is that NATO, a deFeNsiVe orGanIzaTIon with a proven track record of attacking countries on flimsy or just flat-out made-up accusations, actively chose to continue expanding towards Russia’s borders, all the while knowing it would constitute a real threat. I know mainstream media likes to paint Putin as a lunatic who woke up one morning and randomly decided to invade his neighbor because cancer or legacy or something, but keeping in mind NATO’s post Cold War track record, what exactly would you consider to have been a better option? Just let Russia get surrounded and hope that the explicitly anti-Russia alliance will be a merciful master?

Not trying to defend Putin or anything, he’s obviously not a socialist or any sort of anti-imperialist ally, but on the matter of this war, I can’t really blame him for doing a rational geopolitk moment. He is bad, but NATO is worse, not on moral grounds but on material, actual capacity to oppose global socialism and keep the world firmly under imperialist oppression grounds. Even if NATO magically disappeared tomorrow, Putin’s Russia would not be able to magically pull the result of decades of consolidated hegemonic power out of its ass. There are no good sides to the conflict for us to give our support to, but, once again, I honestly think that a Ukraine/NATO victory would be a worse outcome materially.

From my personal experience of my cringe liberal phase, I think it’s a combination of being completely uneducated about, well, everything and being in a comfortable social position, where you are safely insulated from struggle and the effects of US imperialism.

These people live in a fucking fanfic.

I’m obviously not an authority on the matter, but from what I’ve read regarding simulations of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, even with only a tiny fraction of the world’s nuclear arsenal involved and the direct conflict limited to those two countries, the effects would be felt worldwide, with global agricultural production being disrupted and hundreds of millions potentially suffering from starvation as a result. While it is true that climate crisis is pretty much unavoidable and therefore more pressing than a hypothetical nuclear conflict, we must keep in mind that the effects of a nuclear exchange aren’t limited to just the initial destruction.

I came to some very similar conclusions, and I started from the position that while NATO is definitely guilty of escalating and Ukraine did have a nazi problem, invasion was unjustified and Russia should be condemned. However, after several months of witnessing the west completely tear off the mask of liberal civility to the point where people are openly pushing racist rhetoric and calling for the mass suffering and death of Russians and the balkanization of their country, I just want to see them humbled.

I was even willing to write off the more disgusting SLS material as just terminally online edgelords, but the moment it really hit me was back in March or so iirc when an Ukrainian cultural org of sorts posted on social media a whole bunch of hogwash about how Ukrainians are civilized european farmers while Russians are asiatic mongoloid savages. That was when I really processed what Ukraine stands for and what the west is cheering on, and I truly think there is no way the world will be in a better state if Ukraine wins this conflict. The rotten mass that is the west needs to crumble for humanity to progress and, even with all their very real flaws, Russia is doing their part in giving them a bloody nose.

I’ve played it for a few hours at launch and encountered multiple bugs, from minor things like characters playing wrong VOs to them just straight up disappearing from existence and decided to wait for patches. I read up on its patch notes and discussions every now and then and have still been seeing mentions of unfinished content and gamebreaking bugs.

How far into it are you? I’ve been itching to play it for a while but with how long Kingmaker was, I don’t want to sink several dozen hours into it just to hit a progression blocker at some point.

I agree, maybe even in the form of a more elaborate post on the basics of internet privacy, annonymity and protecting data. Anticommunists have already attacked this community with DDoS and spam accounts, it is reasonable to assume that they’ll also take any chance to dox members. We need to keep informed and practice good data hygiene.