Xortl

They are not the same thing, and it's hard to imagine you actually don't know that.

I would love to read an update about your experience with antidepressants, as it's a path I'm thinking about more and more with the (losing) battle I've been fighting against my own long term depression.

I really resonated with your eventual realization that while others have their own battles, they are very rarely similar to this. I guess I knew it was unusual, but I took way too long to realize just how weird it was to feel soul-crushingly miserable for no identifiable reason, even when things are going well, even when I'm around friends I like and they're having fun.

Wishing you the best OP.

I'm happy to read evidence I'm wrong (I want to be wrong - it would make me much more optimistic about a fix), but my own life and everything I've read suggests the opposite - once someone develops a serious drug or alcohol addiction it leads to them destroying everything good in their lives and inevitably they either sober up or end up homeless. Nearly all of the people who stay homeless in the long term have some severe mental illness (including addiction). Short of an involuntary commitment which is its own kind of hell, helping these people is incredibly difficult.

I have multiple family members who fit this pattern and it's absolutely godawful. The addiction literally rules them. They will perpetually ask for money for "needs" then spend it on drugs. If another family member houses them, they will sneakily maintain their addiction and steal from family to support it when necessary. If you offer them housing on condition of getting sober, they will choose addiction and homelessness. If you offer them housing without condition, they will use it to stay an addict in perpetuity, who everyone else is paying for. I don't think this last is a remotely viable solution with the number of addicts out there, which is only growing.

I'm not saying this to condemn addicts/mentally ill people. I just want to give an idea of just how hard this problem is to fix.

My personal favorites are those games with simple rules and deep strategic depth and I play them regularly online or with other people who love those games in particular. I am also in two general boardgame groups and they both much prefer the complex rule games, I'll give my best guesses as to why.

1) They like the worlds of the complex games, building societies or facing some major broad challenge. 2) Elaborate games are so open-ended and hard to analyze forward strategically that they are much more balanced across people of different skill levels. People who would have no hope of a competitive, fun game of chess will have a more interesting game of Brass: Birmingham or Eclipse. 3) The games can be played with a lot of players and involve a lot more human-human negotiation and discussion, rather than pure strategy.

I love the simple but incredibly complex games myself, but I understand why they're not everyone's cup of tea.

...missing? They're waiting for their votes to be tallied.

70% of Republicans think Trump was the fair winner of the 2020 election. They are just collectively massively misinformed.

I say this as a straight non-religious white man who is disgusted by Trump and the fact that people support him.

Making the main character and his brother hispanic is not "the same" as the game, especially when the remaining straight white non-hispanic men in the show are absolutely awful.

Or take the US version of The Office, where the one Christian character is a running joke, an awful person with terrible takes not meant to be taken at all seriously. Can you imagine how it would've gone over if the one black or hispanic character on the show was just a running joke?

70% of Republicans think Trump was the real winner of the 2020 election and that's hardly the only misinformation they have. It's hard to imagine that that wasn't a huge factor in the election.

There's a similar "actual test" scene in By The Great Horn Spoon!, a fun kid's book about the California Gold Rush we read in elementary school.

If someone puts great effort and cost into producing media, why would others be entitled to get the fruits of that labor for free? Game of Thrones is a luxury, not a necessity; people aren't entitled to it just because they want it and refuse to pay for it.

As a huge fan and patron of 3blue1brown's videos, does anyone have recommendations for similar high-quality channels covering other topics? Personally I'm interested in at least:

* History/biographies

* Sciences (physics, chem, astronomy)

* In-depth nonpartisan analysis of political situations, especially current ones. The breaking news cycle does a poor job parsing out useless or incorrect information.

* How we've managed to create the insanely complex technology we have today, starting at the basics