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Gaming (Mass Effect, Witcher, and too much Satisfactory)

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I live for 90s TV sitcoms

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • Paywall

    Nov. 11, 2024

    Lydia Birk, 56, has held on to her favorite copy of “The Velveteen Rabbit” since her three children — now in their 20s and 30s — were young.

    She loved being a stay-at-home mother, and filled her family’s home with books. (All of her children could read before they started school, Ms. Birk recalled with pride.) She hoped one day to be a “cool” grandma who would share her favorite stories with a new generation.

    But none of her children want to have kids. And though that decision is “right for them,” Ms. Birk said, it still breaks her heart. “I don’t have young children anymore, and now I’m not going to have grandchildren,” she said. “So that part of my life is just over.”

    Like Ms. Birk, a growing number of Gen Xers and baby boomers are facing the sometimes painful fact that they are never going to become grandparents. A little more than half of adults 50 and older had at least one grandchild in 2021, down from nearly 60 percent in 2014. Amid falling birthrates, more U.S. adults say they’re unlikely to ever have children for a variety of reasons, chief among them: They just don’t want to.

    “That is a best and worst thing about having kids,” said Ms. Birk’s husband, John Birk Jr., 55. “You watch them make their own decisions, different from your own.”

    Still, would-be grandparents like the Birks may experience a deep sense of longing and loss when their children opt out of parenthood, even if they understand at an intellectual level that their children do not “owe” them a family legacy, said Claire Bidwell Smith, a therapist based in Los Angeles and the author of “Conscious Grieving.” It doesn’t help that our society tends to paint grandchildren as a reward for aging.

    Curious to see if they voted Blue or Red. Any Red wanna-be grandparents should be eating their own words right now.






  • Hey I used to live in Des Moines! I agree with you. Iowans treat Des Moines like a city. “I have to go into the city today”. No you don’t. You have to go into town. Des Moines is a big town, it’s not a city.

    They refuse to believe they’re a city, any time they’re faced with acknowledging they might be becoming a city they do something regressive to it to try to prevent it. Built out not up. Kill all mass transit ideas. Anything diverse happening? Let’s keep that in check. They are a city of 300k that want to run it like a small town. Then the politics, just yuck the people who run it.

    There were some fun places, the east side had some good bars, the keg stand in WDM was my stomping ground for a while, but so many people are just happy to have their strip malls and chain restaurants. Oh my god we got a Texas Roadhouse, I remember it made the news when Des Moines got one. God forbid anyone try an actual good local place.

    Depending what you want to dive into I can definitely tell you more good and bad




  • I can always tell with food. In the Midwest you don’t dare use any spice except salt and maybe some rosemary on Christmas. Anything else is too fancy. The West Coast has their own style, northeast has chowder and seafood, except salmon which is the PNW. Interesting how they all separate.

    I remember driving through the Midwest and I just wanted a sparkling water. Anything bubbly. They had coolers and coolers of soda and added sugar drinks, two small things of actual water, and one thing of liquid death, with added sugar. Wild place



  • Okay so I read the comment, (is that witch hunting), and I agree with them. You’ve gone around being very negative about gaming, and are upset that someone called you out for being negative? Do you see the irony there? You’re allowed to have negative opinions of course, but if all gaming makes you annoyed then maybe it’s time to just disengage from the gaming communities. Not everyone has to like everything, but purposefully being in a community just to shit on everything doesn’t make you the hero.

    I have no idea why you brought up AI at all, unless you’re admitting you’re using AI to write your comments which other people seem to assume you are. Which… k, weird, just write your comments, don’t know why we need anything extra.

    In short, you can’t be mad when you’re being negative everywhere and then people call you out for being negative. If you want a more positive experience then… just be more positive.








  • So hiding it and not telling kids about it is a solution, which makes them curious, and then go eat overboard. Which is what I did.

    What is much better is what Europeans do, where they have a much healthier view of alcohol, grow up around it, know what it is and does, and don’t have nearly the unhealthy binging Americans do. On top of that they also aren’t having an opioid crisis.