I feel bad for all the opportunities you’re going to miss while you’re more interested in modeling your life based on the behavior and opinions of others than what is good and satisfying for you, independent of others. I hope one day you are able to move past whatever anger is driving you to prioritize rebellion over utility.

This is a petulant way to approach life, and perfectly fits the idiom “throwing the baby out with the bath water”.

It is possible to set boundaries without being deliberately contrarian and resistant to any form of outside pressure.

IMO the best possible solution here is to refuse to speak further about it with their dad, but go on the date and have a great time hanging out with a random stranger for a little bit.

To put it more simply: if you’re hungry and I bring you sandwich and demand that you eat it, telling me “leave the sandwich, I’ll eat it if I want, but I’m not giving you the satisfaction of knowing or seeing me eat it because of how you approached me” is the smart move.

• Wing Commander 4 - At the time, I was very young, and this game changed how I looked at videogames. For my little brain, the FMV cutscenes and genuinely decent acting (ffs, it has Mark Hammil) somehow made it click that games could have compelling narrative
• Kingdom Hearts - this game changed my life in many ways. I can genuinely say I wouldn’t be doing what I do today if it weren’t for this game and my involvement in the fan community around it. This game is very special to me because of its themes and major plot beats, and how those interacted with my life at the time. This game taught me that you could go beyond “compelling narrative” and break my heart with a video game lol
• Natural Selection 2 - I wish this game were more popular in its prime. This is the epitome of what I think good competition looks like, and a great manifestation of what I personally love in esports

Very thoughtful and informed reply. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!

These conservative warnings exist for a reason, though. That being hundreds of lives at stake. What I think would be more interesting is to hear how often these types of events occurred before and after the layoffs at the FAA

Since nobody else will provide the actual clarity

EscobarVape and Elfbar are created by two separate Chinese companies, Shenzhen Innokin Technology Co. Ltd and Shenzhen iMiracle Technology respectively. Mi-Bar is created by an American company but has partnered with Elfbar to distribute Elfbar products in the US

Really wish more people would just provide the facts that speak for themselves, rather than point fingers about who is and isn’t doing their research

I’m 90% sure that it was originally in the form of “to go <there/place> and <verb>” and has just been shortened over time. A refined colloquialism, if you go for that sort of thing

The issue I have with this line of reasoning is that there are equally whimsical, better written series that just didn’t have good fortune to pop off the way HP did.

It’s marketing. And cover art. And simple timing of fads. It sucks. And it funded a horrible person through pure happenstance

In all seriousness, this is what happens when you write novels without doing any world-building and just put down whatever seems “fun”. The are sooooo many things in that series that make no sense once they are superceded by later plot devices. Rowling didn’t think any of it through ahead of time and gave almost no thought to internal consistency with previous content when she wrote new things.

It’s honestly a terrible series in most regards and it’s kind of disappointing how popular it became.

Also she a trans-hating bigot. Fuck J.K. Rowling. Can’t forget that part whenever discussing her or her work.

Yeah, so, Google already has this data about you. What they’re doing here is trying to reduce the specificity of information given to advertisers about your behaviors, and simultaneously give you the ability to never inform specific third parties about your interest in the specific topics you choose

I see this as a good thing. They were literally already getting and using all of this data. In that case I’d much rather have some control over who knows which things about me, rather than leaving it entirely up to Google