At least it’s not Windows?

Who ever listed them as being anarchists? The Hobbits are among the last parts of the Kingdom of Arnor, and there are comments that they have taxes, but when nobody bothered picking them up, the elected mayor of the Shire and the leaders of the four farthings reinvested those taxes into whatever projects they saw most fit. Plus, there’s a whole aristocracy. There’s the related familes like Bagginses, Sackvilles, Proudfeet, Boffins, Brandybucks, Tooks; and there’s some others who they’re not related to as well.

The hobbits are literally the final remnant culture of a kingdom. And when you consider what happened to them with Saruman and Wormtongue in the Scourging, they’d much rather be under the King and have the military support of Gondor and its allies.

Now, if you want an anarchist place with hobbits, we could talk about Bree. But Bree is much smaller.

Heresy indeed. The Codex does not support this shell.

Crafters are definitely up there, overall - but I think wargamers might beat them. Hundreds to thousands of models, paints, brushes, terrain, carrying cases, books - it adds up to a hoard of epic proportions. That’s just personal experience though. Lego fans can also get to be out there, and TCG players.

Yep. Definitely suits his role as a sun god. And the whole “dark sky/bright sun” thing was a detail I absolutely used to describe his descent on Angel Grove.

And I swear, that’s a codpiece under his tights. Because I sure didn’t prompt it with anything that wasn’t strictly PG.

Nope, just to generate the images for the named villains that aren’t canon Ranger characters. I have a tabletop game (mostly virtual, but nominally hybrid) that I run weekly using the Essence20 system. I use these as visual aids during the fights and encounters.

I have to admit, as much as this looks extremely cool, I didn’t plan for the Egyptian deity Ra to be an Evil Tommy, but the helmet has led me in that direction.

Deus Ex and both System Shocks should be on everyone’s lists. I don’t really “like” any first-person games (going back to Akalabeth), and I enjoyed both of those games. If you like that style of game, you might also want to try out Thief: The Dark Project.

But I think what comes after HL, given everything, is just Portal. You said “replay” about them, so I guess you already have. So maybe, Narbacular Drop would be the next best thing - it’s the game that the Portal devs made before it was Portal. Maybe you’d want to look at The Stanley Parable, too.

There’s also Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior that’s more FPS-y. I don’t think you must know anything about 40K to play it, but I couldn’t tell you, because I already was into it when I played. Also, the two Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force games, built on expanded versions of the Quake 3 engine.

I’ve missed Sodaplay and Sodaconstructor!

OpenTTD still is holding most of my attention this week. I might play some Blood Bowl this weekend though.

I would say that I have used an LLM for productive tasks unrelated to work. I run a superhero RPG weekly, and have been using Egyptian & north African myths as the origin for my monsters of the week. The LLM has taken my research and the monster-creating phase of my prep from being multiple hours to sometimes under one hour - I do confirm everything the LLM tells me with either Wikipedia or a museum. I can also use an LLM to generate exemplary images of the various monsters for my players, as a visual aid.

That means I have more time to focus on the “game” elements - like specific combats, available maps, and the like. I appreciate the acceleration it provides by being a combined natural-language search engine and summary tool. Frankly, if Ask Jeeves (aka ask(dot)com) was still good at parsing questions and providing clear results, I would be just as happy using it.

There’s also a PS2 SAC game that came about a month before the PSP.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex for PSP. It’s not favorite genre, being an FPS, but as far as I’ve gotten, I can rely on my heavily-gunned Tachikoma to handle the problem when I struggle with the controls.

I prefer lighter roasts for flavor too, brewed and held around 200F so it maintains the floral notes. As far as ‘forcing extraction’, I mean in something like an aeropress or a french press, rather than percolation.

Instead of putting it in the trash, why don’t you figure out what you can put in the box to reuse or recycle it?

So, from my limited understanding here, it’s still best to stick to lighter roasts unless you’re very careful about forcing extraction?

Start with video games. But try to make it a game that has couch co-op so your family can come together.

All that says is that we need to increase import costs 80-85% and instate a labor tariff so that the company has to pay taxes equal to a US citizen for every offshore employee.

I’m just waiting on incoming news about Hochul cheating on her husband.

Yes, anyone reasonable knew that this would lead to higher costs. Americans are expensive to employ. The point of the tariff package is to bring back manufacturing and production to the USA. Stop importing so much crap from China and other places, and things will balance out. That increase in costs should be compensated for by jobs for American citizens across all sectors if people respect the purpose of the tariffs - to disincentivize imports whenever and however possible.