I've got a question for all of you: What's the best way to run a leftist reading group? And where to start? For context, this is going to be a small number of young people who do not habitually read, so my academic instincts are useless here. Someone suggested reading during the meeting, which is maybe more approachable but I don't see how would this work logistically (do we read out loud? Do we wait for the slowest reader to finish and then talk?). And I need to suggest a text. Presumably, people would get intimated by Capital, so something introductory with short chapters might be better. Any ideas?

My favorite memory of the two Pathfinder games, and I mean this unironically, is doing that infamous quest in Kingmaker right near the start where you have to fight swarms. Level 1 combat against enemies immune to weapon damage – you have to actually consider your options and possibly accept turning down the difficulty. That interplay of character options and enemy immunities is, in my opinion, the core gameplay of CRPGs.

What a cute little rat! They're really the sweetest-looking pets.

North Dakota: Annual income needed to live comfortably: $52,807

That's way lower than every other state. What's up with that?

Not trying to sound conspiratorial, but I feel like summer and winter have been getting longer the last decades. Surely it didn't always take heavy coats to go outside in March?

On a related note, have Israelis reached level of Apartheid delusion where they larp as the people they despise and constantly demand to be called Palestinian/Mena?

It's sometimes done in relation to the whole claim about being "indigenous" to the Middle East. Read this article for some particularly embarassing examples, featuring the appropriation of Native American headdresses for a double slam of racism.

The post seems oddly trusting towards the game developers and hostile towards the people playing it. I don't really care whether some auteur followed his vision of making a game with lots of "friction"; I want to know whether that results in an interesting experience that tells us something about the medium. Maybe it does, but the argument that some hypothetical gamer (who's also excessively anti-microtransactions in a bad way?) wouldn't like this game isn't cutting it for me. Especially when the positive comparisons in this post are to Dark Souls (as usual) – isn't that universally beloved by critics and gamers alike? That's not a strong argument for explaining why DD2 may be unpopular, if it even is, for which I have seen no evidence.

I ended up instance blocking Lemmygrad because the juvenile and sometimes reactionary views they hold on there were really annoying me. Frankly, we wouldn't lose anything if we defederated.

Incidentally, this also describes the basic plot of Goethe's Faust, a classic of Western literature which also features a man getting sidetracked from his intellectual pursuits by chasing underage women.

Flanagan's two previous haunted house series really pissed me off in the end. Hill House started off strong, but by the end you know exactly how the haunting works and it's basically just one ghostly "insane" woman who's the cause of everything despite having no relation with anyone. That's not how character-based horror is supposed to work. Bly Manor was even worse and I turned it off after some interminable monologue by a ghost misogynist about his ghost powers. In both cases, I think the source material played with the idea that you cannot be certain there's anything supernatural going on, so to instead have a clear list of rules about how ghosts work, like we're in some bad anime, really seems like a wrong decision.

It's a role-playing game, why would you try to find the most effective class? Pillars of Eternity had a system where every class and every stat was supposed to be equally viable and as a result, none of them are memorable or really stick out. Besides, mages can only do what they've prepared each day; the power creep is another issue that magic points on their own don't fix (see all the arguments about D&D psionics).

I don't think you'd gain much enjoyment of 3 by replaying the originals. The characters that come back are basically just for fanservice and the story kind of acknowledges the premise of the originals but conflicts heavily with Throne of Bhaal. Other than that, there's just a few written jokes referencing various old characters. So if you want to play 3, just go for it.