Typing into the void, yay!

If the story here is told in earnest, I can think of two possible solutions.

First, perhaps the “being a jerk” thing might be conflated with some other change, such as simply being more assertive or socially confident in general. See if you can be confident and assertive without the “jerk”. Think aggressively supportive or unflinchingly complimentary (“Hey, you’re looking really nice, and I hope you have a nice day!” Or “I noticed you’ve been working on X really hard, and the progress is showing!”).

Second, use your newfound social connections to your advantage! Talk with the girls about how you’ve been feeling, and then ask them if they would be able to introduce you to one of their friends that might enjoy the version of you that feels like you.

Both of these paths will take courage! It’s tough to be vulnerable when you’re already accustomed to social disappointment. But if you can get this far, go a little further and you just might find some real and profound happiness for yourself.

“naturalism”?

It’s in quotes, so it’s probably not referring to scientific methodological naturalism, or philosophical naturalism. Anybody have a guess what they are referring to in terms of a relationship to fascism?

If a book or game seems too big and daunting (cuz yeah of course those are huge commitments!), you could always shoot for something smaller in scale. Like short poetry or short stories for writing, or maybe a small Minecraft mod to get your feet wet with the development side of things (or whatever moddable game you currently enjoy).

I’m not good at either, so I can’t help much further than that. But hopefully starting small seems more doable?

I dunno. I watched the Witcher season one adaptation and thought it was pretty good. I don’t remember any “education” or overt political messaging.

Seems like bog standard conservative chud hot take to me. But I could be wrong.

I was gonna say! They’re replacing conferencing software with… diagramming software?

But hey Msft tried to steal “office” and “windows”, so fuck em.

We should be wary of any corpo media, esp when owned by billionaires.

That said, a lot of the value of a news medium is simple consensus. Basic observations carry more weight as having actually happened when more news orgs independently verify one another. And most of that work is being done by genuine, professional journalists.

Be discerning with your media consumption, but I would recommend against writing off entire institutions unless the reporting is so consistently awful that it’s not worth the energy to sift wheat from chaff - e.g., Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, etc etc. I don’t think the WaPo has reached that level of shitty (yet).

And a bag of cocaine! Or maybe that’s the gloves, lol.

Alright, Ehud.

Live up to your namesake and kill a national leader through strategic left handedness.

The superscripts are almost certainly references to translators’ footnotes.

The random italicization I’m less sure about, but it seems to primarily be on words that may not have a direct Hebrew counterpart?

“that is the question we need to answer”

provides no answer to the question.

Honest question. What alternative perspective do you think they could bring that would heighten discourse?

I personally don’t think there is such a thing. Not with modern online conservatives.

I have a million other avenues for listening to conservatives if I want to. I don’t need them here.

Hell yeah! Message away!

I highly commend the idea! As someone who has taught English in Japan (kinda sorta, DM me if you want the whole story), TA’d Japanese in the US, and has tried to tie video games with teaching foreign language, I’d like to offer a few bits of advice.

Netcode is Important

Smash is great but the netcode is AWFUL. Instead of more advanced algorithms, it just slows or outright freezes the game if anything is out of sync even a little. I could barely tolerate it playing with folks outside of my general region in the US (and often even within it). I can only imagine it to be unplayable between Japan and anywhere else.

If you wanna stick to platform fighters, I would highly recommend Rivals of Aether 2 (PC). It plays a LOT like Smash but uses rollback netcode, which makes for a MUCH better online experience.

I don’t think I could ever win a tournament for either game, but I might be able to teach you a thing or two :)

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)

I don’t know your planned teaching strategy, so forgive me if you’ve already taken this into account.

Smash Bros is a pretty intense game that requires a lot of focus, even when playing casually. I can barely speak English when battling, let alone a language for which I’m not a native speaker.

It’s a lot of pressure that I suspect would actively hinder language learning. You want to keep your learners in the ZPD, where they’re not bored and not overwhelmed, to maximize their acquisition and retention.

I would recommend finding games where there’s a lot of relaxed time between bouts of action or a game that’s generally relaxed throughout that encourages conversation and banter.

Party games might be good options here. Mario Party (if it has a remote play option, I honestly don’t recall) has all the board sections where there’s plenty of time to converse (and commiserate lol). Something like Jackbox games might also work, especially ones that are more focused on creative input and not overly reliant on preprogrammed English text (there might be Japanese versions of this sort of thing, maybe?). Heck, you could even do Tabletop Simulator and play all sorts of games that make for a great learning atmosphere.

Turn-based co-op games are also interesting options. Sunderfolk might be a good option there, or even a co-op campaign of Baldur’s Gate 3. The gameplay mechanics might make for difficult on-ramping for the language learning piece, but you’d certainly have plenty of content to discuss!

Willingness to play and learn

I think this is a really neat idea and would like to see you succeed. My ability to join is pretty limited though. Between a full time job and family obligations, I’m reliably available only between 9:30pm and 12:00am US Eastern Time (UTC-5:00 for now, UTC-4:00 during Daylight Savings Time), Tuesday-Sunday.

Best of luck!

If it helps, I don’t think I’ve run across any obviously right wing comments on Lemmy in a long time, at least not any that haven’t been ratioed to hell and back.

Another fun story is c/conservative. It was started by a conservative, iirc, and for reasons I can’t fully recall, is now modded by leftists, and the whole community’s purpose is calling out conservative nonsense.

The social fabric of Lemmy seems to be very anti-conservative, which is really refreshing for me, at least.

Best advice I can think of is to hit up your local hobby shop, or a Renaissance fair, if you have one nearby. Those places are chock full of ttrpg nerds.

If you wore a sign or badge that says something like, “looking for D&D group,” I bet you’d get asked by at least a few folks. Especially if you’re already being nice and friendly and joining in the other activities there!

That said, playing online is not as bad as you’d think. I’ve played with a group fully online for over a decade now (shout-out to Foundry VTT).

I wish you luck in your ventures!

Aaaaa yeeeeaaaahhh

Crazy and incompetent are somehow not immediate disqualifiers.

Minnesota. Don’t you dare.

We do! Although now I think about it, I haven’t heard many people say it ever since “vibe” got really popular as slang in recent years. More likely to hear “it’s got some kind of vibe” for the same purpose.

This has big Guilty Great vibes.

If I’m not mistaken (and I might be) the immutability can actually be toggled off for power users.