I hear that. I work from home and I’ve yet to make friends in a new country. It would be downright monastic if not for my family, instead it’s more of an insane asylum vibe.

I’m not even convinced happiness and fulfillment are the right thing to be actively seeking in life. If you have purpose, these things will come in time. If you chase them as your purpose, you will never truly have either.

On the contrary, I think the games industry is struggling with it. Larger developers keep increasing their budgets, and the need for return on investment is making them too risk averse to create anything worth much of a damn. Meanwhile low or no-budget (kick-started) indie titles are making several times their investment while doing really commendable creative work. The profit incentive is self-destructive in art.

That’s… Better than what you said before, but it pains me that people think that’s the full depth of artistic endeavor, to have given people fodder for small talk.

Art is a kind of conversation, but it’s not small talk. If you’ve been following that conversation and you bring a new perspective to it that changes how everyone thinks and shapes the conversation from that point onwards, that is what you might call “artistic success”.

On the other hand if all you’re doing is trying to make money…

Nobody knows. People have been making art for several thousands of years and nobody has ever known whether it was any good unless it made a lot of money! Thank goodness we’ve cleared that up, now I’m going to go try and will myself to have an aneurysm

You mean commercially, or artistically?

That’s how you talk to someone with depression? Validate their hopelessness? Fuck off.

OP, voting is the bare minimum. You’re going to feel much more empowered joining your local climate protest group.

I sympathize. I go for inscrutable energy and get similar results, too often. They seem well meaning enough, even though the joke is landing by a toehold

An A4 sized e-ink tablet with colour and an open source OS would be my dream gadget.

Maybe it never began

Old StumbleUpon was everything to me

If you knew what came next in the ST timeline, you would not wish for it

All corporate social media has my permission to die

I may have lost hope, but I will keep doing what I can to help. I still love what America should have been.

It’s been somewhat traumatic. I had to take things back to where they began two generations ago, return to the roots that once were, though they’re new to me. I’m grateful that you and I could commiserate, at least. It’s validating to speak to others who felt the same.

I left three years ago. I saw all this coming, though I still do the voting bit. Sorry it’s come to this.

I have. Are you going to leave if you can or revolt en masse?

You mistake me: I think it’s so bad people should leave if they can, or revolt en masse. I just also like talking about history.

If we’re talking about American politics in our lifetime, yeah this is tops. But it’s not history’s craziest politics by a long shot

I’ve been quite coffee dependent ever since about age 16. Sometimes I like to take a week off, facilitated by a massive two litre teapot. In summer, iced tea is my crutch of choice.