I really did think that a Chinese social media company would never stand a chance here. I run into 80 year old farmers who ask me, “Did you see ‘at feller on TikTok who does ‘at thang with the tractor?”

That same person will go on and on about China. People are neat.

Yes! This is how it felt to me. I would have been almost as happy just to see it as an animated movie. It was amazing and took games as a whole forward, and you knew it within the first few minutes of playing it. Like, I legit felt like that was the moment that games truly crossed over into art. That is kind of an exaggeration, but not by a lot. Damn I want to buy it and play it on my Steam deck haha. I still have my ps3 copy but no ps3.

Oh my god you’re missing it. It isn’t a survival game. It is a masterpiece of story telling.

I haven’t played it since the month it was released, but thinking about it still makes the hairs on my arms stand up. Within 5 minutes of playing the game I was on an emotional rollercoaster. It might be the only game I ever played that hit me that hard, with Red Dead 2 trailing it by a mile despite being the best game I’ve played in years.

You are cheating yourself if you never play it. I do not like survival games either, at all. Not even a little bit. The Last of Us might be the greatest game ever made.

I always assumed he rubbed them on his pits. Now that you ask, maybe he carried them around or something.

Haha, god I loved doing this on Counter-Strike. “Did you guys hear about the hidden tit pics in counter strike? No shit, hold alt and press f4 and it shows the best tits I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how game developers get away with this stuff.”

Half the lobby is gone, the other half is laughing.

I forced myself. My first car was a 1992 Pontiac with a manual transmission. I didn’t even know how to drive it off the lot haha. I just wanted the damn thing.

Oh yeah, you had that pic just hanging around on your phone. I’m guessing 20s.

Dude, I know you’ve heard it a thousand times, but I was 22 yesterday, no shit.

Man I miss being young. Even with the horrible taste of expired fire extinguisher I’d bet this is a favorite memory. :)

I don’t know why, but this reminded me of one of the absolute worst moments of my life.

I was bullied as a kid, and when middle school hit I wasn’t keen on dressing out for gym in front of those bullies. My gym teacher was probably the biggest dick on planet earth and every three days he’d suspend me for three days for not dressing out. I was suspended for most of 6th grade.

My mom had had enough and threatened me, “I swear to you, if you get suspended one more time over a zero in gym class I will throw your Nintendo 64 in the creek. I mean it!”

Guess what my dumb ass did? I left my gym clothes at home. I was fucking desperate and I went around begging everyone I knew, “can I please borrow your gym clothes?” I finally managed to trade a copy of Donkey Kong Country and 10 dollars for a copy of Extreme G and as a bonus I could borrow dude’s gym clothes.

He handed them to me in a plastic grocery bag and I raced off to gym class. That big, tall, bald bastard of a gym teacher said, “I guess it’s time for your suspension, eh Grassman?” “No sir, I’m dressing out!”(He called me Grassman because I forgot my flag football things and used big giant blades of grass).

I ran back to the boys locker room and slid those clothes from the bag. Oh. My. God!

The smell of axe body spray, ass, and armpits hit me like a ton of bricks. I powered through it, put on the nasty ass shirt, and vomited in my mouth. I just couldn’t bring myself to put the shorts on. I was nearly in tears because I knew I was doomed. I put my clothes back on and I could still smell it on me. I walked out and tried to explain it to the asshole. Nope. Suspended.

I really did think my mom was going to throw my N64 in the creek. She didn’t, thank goodness. Instead she got really pissed and called the school. When I got back I was called to the office and the principal asked me to explain why I had been suspended so many times. He then called Mr. Bald asshole into the office and let him have it for suspending me so many times over not dressing out. “You are denying this young man an education entirely because of gym?” I’d love to have been a fly on the wall after he sent me to class.

I happily took my zeros after that and slept on the bleachers. 1st period was my nap period.

I will never forget that smell though. I can still smell it, seriously. It hit me so hard that 28 years later, I can still smell it. Gah.

I worked with a dude who used crystals instead of deodorant. He was a very talented musician so he was still always hanging with a beautiful woman. I loved his music but I couldn’t stand to be around him.

He had the personality of a dude who uses crystals for deo too.

You know what bums me out? The solutions in place currently make the problem better for one group and worse for another.

My uncle is a landlord. He recently realized that he could increase the rent by 40% because that’s what HUD will pay.

So if you have HUD, you don’t notice the increase. If you don’t, enjoy the 40% increase.

I’m just an idiot who is angry for some people I don’t know. Fuck this world. Fuck profit chasing. Fuck landlords.

For someone with extremely high anxiety, yes it does. She’s like a chihuahua.

My car has a clutch. My wife can’t drive it. It’s exhausting when something goes wrong with her car.

The whole “small town on the edge of dying” bit. Holy shit have I experienced that firsthand.

See, what happened with a lot of these towns is that their industry became a part of their pride and culture. Where I’m from it’s coal. Trucks everywhere have a decal of a coal miner with one of two phrases. “Coal keeps the lights on.” and “6 inches from hell.”

My grandfather was a coal miner, so was his father, and his father, on both sides of my family. My father realized that the industry was dying so he left (and left us here haha). My brother did it for awhile but left it behind because of the drug problems in the mines. There was a whole underground urine market that kept things moving.

Even the poor fools who never worked in the mines go on and on about coal like it’s some kind of idol.

I would imagine the same thing happens in other places. The people fear big changes until their fear backs them into irrelevance. I’m getting older, so I can relate to that, only I vote for my kids, not to make me feel less afraid. Whatever world they grow up in won’t be one that I’d be perfectly comfortable in. It has always been that way as far back as we have been recording history. No sense in fighting where the world is going just because I don’t understand it or relate to it.

Moscows are fat. Trump is fat. Coincidence? Probably not.

Don’t count on people who never breathe through their nose to look deeper than what some personality on YouTube said. They don’t care about definitions, they just hear words and repeat them without looking any further. Like happy little dumb parrots. Some jackass said, “we ain’t no democracy, wurr a cawn-stuh-toosh-uhnool republic!” and they said, “huht huht! That’s right!” without bothering to learn what a constitutional republic is.

But nuthin hayuh-pinned! It wuz aint teefuh! Reeuhnt freeee…

I was so proud of myself for your comment that I was about to make. :p

It is a good one.

At my store (which I worked at for 23 years and miss dearly), I would always let my regulars come in after closing if I could still serve them. If they had cash, I’d ring it up the next day.

That was one of 7 stores I worked in over the years (same company).

The other 6, hell no. Once they realized that I’d open the door after closing those bastards were coming up to an hour after I locked the doors. Same jerks every time yelling and cussing at me, “Well yer still here yuh faygit I don’t see why you won’t let me git a beer!”. Sometimes I’d stay late and hide in the office to watch a little tv before going home. It was always the same jackasses beating on the door at 1 AM putting their hands and faces up to the glass with stupid looks on their faces. I stopped letting them in after it became a problem for me and no matter how many times I said no, they’d walk their drunk asses to that store to try me.

It is amazing how much culture can change over 40 miles of road. I mean it, it’s crazy. Even the meth heads were polite and reasonable when they were in the middle of a 3 week, no sleep, hallucination fueled nightmare. “Ah, man. I’m so sorry that I bothered you. There’s people following me across the road so I’m just gonna borrow a little of your light here until someone I know comes to get me. I hope you have a good night.”

In that one store every local was always polite. I had two memorable assholes there over 23 years. At the others I had so many I couldn’t tell you.

Ur mom is a locust. Huht huht huht.