Go Go Town on steam came out recently, co-op available local or online, controller compatible, up to 4 players (aside: you didn’t tell us how many players needed, but stardew is 4 so I’m going to assume a 4 max isn’t a problem). Not sure on system requirements, might be a little heavier than stardew but it’s not all that graphically intense. Had a blast playing it local co-op with the kids.

Gameplay loop is familiar: extract resources to grow your town, unlock higher tiered buildings, eventually automating most of the logistics such that it runs itself like a little town simulator. The game is very casual friendly and forgiving, for example, you can freely just pick up and move a building, no reconstruction or lost costs, you can’t really “die”, and if you need to step away, shops might run out of inventory and stop producing but they won’t death spiral or anything.

Counter point - the internet is full of people who will hit you with an opinion or criticism qualified by zero effort, evidence, or critical thinking, to the point you aren’t even sure if they’re a person or just a bot that throws out dumb “psychic reading” quality nonsense.

I think an appropriate response to this is to demonstrate that you’re allowing AI to answer their question, rather than involve your own cognitive time. It’s basically the same thing as letting your phone answer a suspicious call with a generic “please state your name and why you’re calling”. It doesn’t just save you time, it very deliberately declares a boundary that says “you can waste your time on this bot, but you’re not getting my time”.

Like I don’t know if you’re old enough to remember “let me google that for you”, but it’s basically that.

It’s worse than that. Much like the corporate, “middle class” white collar structure depends on keeping people too indebted to ever really have power or freedom to negotiate for fairness, the military also depends on underpaying and overworking its people. They have to provide that same level of inadequacy, and then, make not getting it even more unbearable.

When you start to look at the math, a lot of the previously incomprehensible decisions of the government start to make sense. Why is abortion illegal? Because given free choice, poor people stop reproducing at levels needed to maintain the slave wage labor when they can’t afford the basic necessities to raise a family. Or more specifically, women do… you can find a willing sperm donor, but the mom gets told by society don’t have a baby you can’t afford, and does exactly that. And then they trot out a whole “God doesn’t like this” moral argument, all while happily looking the other way when it’s clear a bunch of their leaders party fucked kids on an offshore island.

To be clear, autism doesn’t make someone an asshole, but autism makes it a lot more apparent when someone is an asshole. Which in the current climate,

I’m just glad they got a power hungry, austistic lunatic in charge now, so everyone can see this is absolutely the end game, before this becomes normalized and people like me get called removeded for not wanting a car that can be remote deactivated.

Honestly, AI creating absolute dogpiles of low-effort resumes, making shit up all while being the trendy thing so HR recruiters not only can’t ban it but have to embrace it, is the best damn thing to happen since the pandemic briefly taught us most of us could do our jobs remotely. I’ve already observed several new hires come in, make a complete mess and sail off for their next opportunity … it’s definitely gumming up the corporate gears. It’s automating all the circle jerk bullshit, and I’m here for it.

Everyone wants to run a subscription service, until they have everyone on a subscription. Then instead of celebrating that they won capitalism, they go and start with the exclusive extra addons and upgrades. Because unfortunately no company in the history of companies has ever said that’s it, we’re making enough money, let’s relax.

To be fair, showing no historical correlation and just assuming the problem or separation started this year because it’s specifically indexed to the start of the year, is garbage math. Like, you got the correct answer, but you did the problem completely wrong.

See the problem with this though, is that if everything’s just pretend and made up, then I can’t get mad about Elon Musk’s “Nazi Salute”. And yet, there are abundant red flags showing a rise in fascism, that if ignored, may very well permanently alter the world order and our standard of living. In the past 48 hours there was a significant chance the supply of coffee that drives most of my economic output could be disrupted or tariffed.

And, that’s because a lot of this comes back to the connotation of the word, “pretend”. Replace it with the word, “Idea”, and you get sort of the same concept, but suddenly the non-existent thing sounds much more powerful.

(side note, I might have fudged the data a little and just made up that I checked with anyone else)

It’s ok, I checked myself by asking the person in my life most likely to agree with me. We’ve agreed the association with red vs blue politics in the US is your responsibility for making an analogy that could be easily construed that way, not ours for fitting what you said into the context of current cultural norms. Therefore in conclusion: everyone thinks you messed up with that analogy.