If she is 81 in 2025, that means she would have been 21 in 1965. If she’s in the US, that means she would have been in her mid-20’s for the hippie movement.

Hard to say what country she is from or lives in now, but tattoos gained a lot of popularity globally during WW2. If you were to go into a retirement home like 20 years ago, tattoos would probably be considered scandalous scars from a shady past. But today they are pretty common.

I think Hades is the best overall, which has been mentioned here. Everything from Supergiant Games is great. I’ve seen Disco Elysium mentioned too, which is also great.

But I think one game that is underappreciated and not mentioned here is Horizon: Zero Dawn. Ashley Burch won several awards for her performance as Aloy. I think part of the reason it gets forgotten is that the facial animations in cutscenes are bad, at least in the main game, which led to people just not liking the cutscenes very much. The DLC’s animations are pretty good though.

The big noticeable effect lasts probably about an hour. But I’d say there’s probably a 10% residual clarity that sticks around and slowly goes away over a day or two.

I think I agree with your sentiment that sex is overrated. I quite enjoy it, but the way it is portrayed in media is usually more extreme than my own feelings and those of men around me.

I remember when I was around 16-18. I started to diet and exercise, was on the tail end of puberty in my physical prime and drenched in hormones. Went to high school and was surrounded by people my own age experiencing the same. Culture and marketing leads to high school girls constantly fighting with the adults and dress codes to wear skimpier, tighter clothing. I had my first girlfriend and we were both excited to start messing around. And there’s a philosophical component- why do we exist? We are a repeating pattern (DNA) that exists not for a reason, but because it can. Life that does not procreate dies, so in a sense procreation is the most life-y thing you can possibly do.

At the same time, I knew better. I was lucky to have sex education and not be in a very religious household. A couple of friends, and my first girlfriend, were victims of sexual assault. I had seen other men succumb to their desires, ruin their own lives, hurt people around them. Not to mention the very real threats of pregnancy and disease. So even while my physiology craved it and my philosophy guided me towards it, my mind pumped the brakes.

The physiology waned as I got older. Or perhaps just distracted with college and work, maintaining an apartment and then a house. My energy was directed elsewhere. My wife and I quickly settled on having sex roughly once a week.

About a year ago though, we created a polycule with another couple. It was really hard for me to keep up at first. I would have to watch my nutrition- make sure I don’t overwat or ear heavy and greasy foods beforehand. Make sure I was working out and physically active in general, but not a full workout right before or else my muscles would be too tired. Mentally, I would have to start purposefully thinking about sex for several hours beforehand to make sure I was in the right headspace and ready to perform. The past 3 months have been suddenly dry due to just calendar issues and some minor medical procedures in the group, so I’ve found myself in this routine of trying to be horny and keep up but suddenly without the payoff of it. I also have a touch of the 'tism and really like predictable routines and long-term planning while the other 3 people are bi-polar or severe ADHD, and they all seem to have little issue with going from cozy to horny almost instantly.

The actual feeling of horniness I think is similar to most other biological functions. Being hungry or thirsty or sleepy, needing to urinate or defecate. I view it similarly, ideally on a roughly 2-4 day cycle. Ejaculation, which leads to a period of post-nut clarity and calmness that slowly fades over a couple days. I’d find it difficult to get hard for a couple hours after, and difficult to cum again for at least 6, more like 24 hours after. By day 4 I noticed I start to get a little bit more irritable, a little bit more stressed out by little things. Longer than that and sexual thoughts start to interrupt my normal thoughts processes. Blue balls is real too. I know some men exaggerate the affect to manipulate women into sex, and some women have started to think blue balls isn’t real, but the reality is that it’s real minor inconvenience that I try to avoid.

The Wolf of Wall Street scene where they talk about masturbating multiple times a day is hyperbole, but not entirely inaccurate. I think there’s a lot of value to a quick, utilitarian jack off for some cheap stress relief and clarity. Having sex with others is fun, but people obsess over it too much in my opinion.

1. People died. A lot. Ralph Nader, who is today probably better known for being a former presidential candidate for the Green Party in the US, first got famous with his 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed” that brought just how dangerous cars were to the public attention. Which led to a ton of laws that regulated the manufacture and operation of motor vehicles. It was similar to how Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” was with the food industry.

2. Density has increased. It was easier to get away with driving when there were fewer cars on the road, fewer intersections, fewer buildings and other property nearby. Our signs and signals have grown more complicated. I live in a major US city, where there is a main thoroughfare that cuts through the southern suburbs with a 5 lane stroad (2 lanes each way with a central turning lane). There are traffic lights every couple hundred feet to allow interesections with feeder roads. My grandfather still tells the stories about how when he was a teenager, that was a 3-lane DIRT road, where the center was still a turn lane. He could drive for miles before getting to the densest part of the city where there was 1 traffic light.

He also tells the story of how the police radios used to only be one-way, so officers in cars could receive messages from the station but not send anything back. On top of that, their big heavy cruisers were slower and less maneuverable than his motorcycle, so he used to commonly blow by and ignore cops trying to pull him over. It was a completely different world.

They could be in a similar phase of life. I was still 17 when I started college and had a full-time job. A 20 year old could still be in high school if they were held back. This is kind of the range where you can start counting months or talking about how different school systems have different cutoff dates that can mess with things.

I would not recommend 20 year olds and 17 year olds date in general. But it’s very possible for two people of those ages to date without being creepy or having problems.

I see two possible explanations:

1. Class warfare. The same people banning porn are the ones banning abortion, banning homosexuality, banning gender transitions (although they never seem to ban the same therapies for cis people), banning sex education, banning contraception. All of these attacks on individual sexuality are to try to push people into unprotected heterosexual sex. At the same time, these same political groups have been attacking both parental support systems and child labor laws. They want parents too desperate to rebel. They want children working. They want a larger supply of labor: more supply means more competition amongst workers for wages, which means the labor is cheaper.

2. Power. Maybe these payments processors don’t actually care about pornographic games. But attacking pornography in the name of “defending women and children” is easy to sell to the public and sets a precedent for these payment processors violating neutrality. So eventually they will move to banning games that are too violent (well, they’ve already been trying for decades). Then it’ll be games that are too “extreme” or promote “terrorism”. If these payment processors don’t see any consequences soon, I expect in the next 5 years they will try to take down any games that are anti-Zionist. Maybe games that are pro-Ukraine. In 10 years it could be any sort of left-leaning game. Disco Elysium for promoting communism. Horizon for depicting climate change. Stardew Valley for allowing same-sex relationships and being anti-corporate.

Notice that these discussions never seem to apply to copaganda. It’s perfectly fine to be violent and bloody as long as that violence is authorized by the state. The US Military offices have a well-documented relationship with Activision for Call of Duty, so you aren’t going to see any of these groups call for CoD to be banned.

Not just that, but they even get the sexism and racism wrong. It’s suburban, middle-class, straight white women who are supposed to be associated with $9 lattes.

It’s important to remember that this is a model used to analyze relationships. Famously, “all models are wrong, but some models are useful”.

Human relationships can reach incredible levels of complexity. Heck, human sexuality alone is a huge thing to study.

I know a couple where a bi person is married to an ace person in an open marriage. I know a couple that owns their own house and run their own business together but keep separate personal bank accounts. I’ve heard of people who are “just friends” who parent and raise children together. I know people who are married but maintain separate residences. And of course I know people who are married, own and live in one home together, and have parented and raised children together, and have a joint bank account. There are a lot of different ways people can relate to each other.

Twilight Princess is worth mentioning too. It was rated Teen, and had this scene (no gore or sex or anything, just weird surreal horror).

Zelda is such a diverse franchise it really depends on the game. I love Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask, but didn’t like BotW or Windwaker at all. It’s almost like 2 or 3 different franchises crammed into one.

My personal theory is that a lot of the love for The Witcher 3 in particular stems from the fact that very early on it has a sex scene with full nudity, with a female character who is supernaturally hot according to the lore. There’s several women Geralt can seduce, and I suspect a lot of people who mostly play hentai games were in shock to play something with more exciting gameplay than match-3 grids or a jigsaw puzzle.

The Witcher 3 doesn’t seem like a bad game, but I’m similar to you in that I’ve bounced off it a couple times after a few hours. There’s nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing that really grabbed me and made me want to keep playing more either. I still plan on giving it another shot eventually.

I feel similar. After having tons of people tell me for years I need to get into them, I finally played Bloodborne, which multiple people have told me is their favorite.

I pushed through it on my own first. I actually didn’t die quite as much as I expected, though I definitely had to spend time watching YouTube videos and reading 3 different fan-made wiki’s to figure everything out. I managed to finish it, but I didn’t think it was worth it and would not have finished it if not for wanting to be able to talk about it with my friends.

Then I did another playthrough with a friend doing co-op. When it worked (ugh) it was a way better experience. Partly because of my previous experience - I had a better feel for how to build my character, I remembered most of the environments and enemy placement, and still had that muscle memory from my first run. Partly because it’s better as a cooperative experience. Having an ally makes the world feel less desolate. Having another player to take aggro so you can heal is huge- some bosses almost feel like they were designed for multiplayer. And it’s fun just cracking jokes and hanging out, making fun of how ridiculous some of the stuff is.

I still don’t have the love for it that other people do though. I agree 100% on the aesthetic: everything in Bloodborne is just dark and wet and looks the same. FromSoft makes a LOT of game design decisions that are different from most other developers in terms of what they prioritize. Which is fine, but there are aspects of design where they clearly cut corners and the fanbae seems to laud it as a desirable artistic choice. I shouldn’t need to spend hours watching YouTube and researching fan sites to learn how to play the game, and I would argue I shouldn’t have to do that to appreciate the story. They simply do not respect my time.

The multiplayer barely works. It’s restricted to bosses and the areas leading up to them, and costs Insight (a valuable and kind-of finite resource) to use. Simply connecting is a tedious pain. You can only play either completely online or offline, so if you want to play with a friend you have to accept your whole world cluttered with annoying and distracting messages from random players and the specters where other players died. And that also opens you up to having hostile players gank you. Like… Why can’t my friend and I just pair up and play through the whole game together without inviting the rest of the internet too? Why does it cost Insight? Why are the caps for stats never communicated to the player? Why does the Hunter’s Axe do primarily Blunt damage while the KirkHAMMER does almost no Blunt damage, and for that matter why aren’t the damage types explained anywhere? I’m still not sure why some gems increase Attack, others increase Physical Attack, and others increase Blunt or Thrust, plus there are hidden damage types.

The game feels like it was designed to really get good on your second playthrough and beyond. Especially NG+, although even starting a fresh file again is much better than the first playthrough. Kinda reminds me of how some MMO fans like to say “it gets good after the first 100 hours”. For most developers, the player onboarding experience is one of the most important parts to be developed, but FromSoft basically skills over that and outsources it to their community of hardcore fans.

It would be a logical fallacy to jump to such a conclusion without interviewing a randomly sampled and much larger population. It is possible you may be correct or incorrect, but you are jumping to a conclusion about a topic with insufficient data to do so.

Your evidence supports that there are members of the IDF who are enthusiastically engaged with what they’re doing. I am not debating that- i think you’re right.

But it’s important to remember this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because you haven’t seen interviews of IDF members objecting to what they are doing does not mean those members do not exist. I would expect the IDF to have systems in place to minimize the external visibility if any such objections, which makes a generalization like that dangerous.

They aren’t going to let you see the unenthusiastic ones.

I remember back in 2013 I built a PC for my wife, and in 2014 one for myself. At that point, buying something online still felt a bit odd. It was reserved for specialty items, shipping would often take at least 2 weeks, or even 6 weeks depending on where it was coming from. I was no stranger to purchasing online, but brick-and-mortar stores with real stock still existed and could get me what I purchased much more quickly.

I remember being so impressed with Newegg’s website. It made it so easy to build a computer and make sure everything was compatible. It was really easy to compare different options. The filter system was intuitive and comprehensive. I remember thinking “wow this is a perfect shopping experience. The future has arrived”.

I went to build my next PC in 2019, and dear Satan was it so much worse. I had heard about Newegg getting bought out by a larger company in 2016, and it showed. They opened it up to 3rd party sellers. The filters got clogged with garbage and don’t seem to work properly anymore. The sort function became a joke. The UI got rearranged to be less intuitive. I think they purposefylly wanted to make a worse shopping experience to make people frustrated, to get them to give up on looking for deals and pay a bit extra just to be done with it. I ended up having to go to a 3rd party website (PCPartPicker) to figure out what I needed and where to get it. And some of those parts I had to order on eBay (some even from Newegg’s eBay account which is just… Why are we doing this?), some on Amazon or Best Buy. And it’s only gotten worse since.

This same experience has happened everywhere. Just this morning my wife was checking out Culture Hustle to see if they have any interesting new paints and commented on how much worse the website was now than when we last used it a few years ago.

This may make me sound like an old curmudgeon yelling at clouds, but I think the Internet peaked a while ago. There are arguments over exactly when, but sometime between 2008-2016. I remember in 2012 in talking to my fellow students about how Google search results were getting worse.

Toxoplasmosis

The Murdoch empire transcends borders

It’s not in that source, but other sources like this one cite Tsainama Marubo (the main tribal elder who gave all the quotes) as being 73 years old.

Seems to me like the Times found some old guy to complain about the younger generation, which I imagine helps to sell a lot of physical copies of the Times.

Completely unrealistic. No cop in the USA would ever think you need a license to walk, or care about it.

Now if the cop accused OP of the terrible crime of jaywalking then I might believe it.