That’s all well and good, but are you really suggesting that trans people who are fearing for their lives should stay put to help the electoral college issues four years from now?

Appropriate.

slug metal

Also, may I introduce you to our slug metal overlords, Slugdge

Windhand was my gateway into this whole world, and I couldn’t agree more. The first time I heard their stuff, it just blew my mind in a way I hadn’t experienced in probably a decade.

I came into metal from metalcore, and there’s no faster way to get yourself banned from the metal subs than posting metalcore, so I feel you in the gatekeeping, too. The doom scene really does pull from all sorts of influences and tends to be pretty accepting of a ton of fringe bands and sounds so you get people that are excited to talk about music instead of just shitting on other people’s taste. So you get “doom wop,” stoner rock, doom ‘n’ roll, fairy doom, witch metal, caveman battle doom, and so on.

Have fun exploring it all! There’s a ton of good shit out there, and for my money, to this day, nothing hits like that first time hearing “Forest Clouds”

Not really all that related, but if you like Panopticon by ISIS, you might also appreciate the best Appalachian atmospheric black metal I’ve ever heard, Kentucky by Panopticon.

Happy to get you excited with some new music! I’ve listened to heavy music for decades but it had definitely gotten a little stale for me. It was only in the last 2 years that I discovered stoner/doom as a sub-genre, so I’m not all that far ahead of you. Some really great stuff that is frankly just as heavy but much catchier than most other metal subgenres. I mean, I love me some black/death metal, but I’m just not really getting obsessed with those bands/albums/songs the same way as I can with this slow riff worship you see in stoner/doom.

Pallbearer and Ahab are both pretty good for funeral doom or death/doom (depending on who you ask).

I like a little bit of “epic” doom themes but trad doom, power metal, and actual epic doom are a little too cheesy for me, so I lean toward Conan (very heavy, approaching a sludge-drone hybrid) and Khemmis (who describe their sound as “doomed heavy metal”)

I actually usually skew more psychedelic doom or stoner/prog doom, which has a lot of great stuff in the past few decades. Sleep’s Holy Mountain (classic stoner metal), Grief’s Infernal Flower by Windhand (psych doom), Clearing the Path to Ascend by YOB (heavy stoner/prog), Lore by Elder (very proggy but still catchy).

Also, I assume you’ve seen the most common recommendations for classic sludge, The Melvins (especially Houdini and Bullhead), Eyehategod, and Side B of My War by Black Flag. If not, get started there

edit: Obviously I’ve got lots of other fun options in each of these veins, so hmu if you want more

The music is all written by a member of ISIS, which is pretty heavy, but in an “atmospheric sludge/post-metal” way. So I can see how you’d think that if you’re looking for something more death metal (which would fit in the fight scenes, although atmospheric sludge or funeral doom would go pretty well in the rest of the game)

Me too. I was really wondering what sort of interview this was.

Not, you’re thinking of Deadshot. A deadlock is a Scottish body of water that has been polluted to the point that no life exists in the lake.

You’ll be hard pressed to find someone deny basic science in today’s world.

They didn’t outright deny it (out loud), but they cast doubt and equivocate about the parts that don’t agree with their preexisting worldview.

Jesuits have done some decent work for humanity, but they are not scientists, mostly because they start from a premise they want to be true and find evidence for it instead of the other way around.

Edit: in fact, why did knowledge need to be “curated” through the Dark Ages? I’ll give you a hint: it starts a “C” and ends with an “atholicism”

Not OP, but mine was really pretty manageable. 2 days of sitting in an easy chair and icing my balls, 2 days of “walking is fine, but avoid any sudden movements,” and a week of “it’s a little sore, but it doesn’t really hurt.” After that, it was about 2-3 weeks where I didn’t really notice it unless I moved the wrong way too suddenly (whereupon I’d get a quick twinge, but nothing too bad).

Really a pretty small cost for the benefits. I don’t really like painkillers, but I do recommend some THC gummies for the first week and a fresh series to binge

I’m inclined to agree with you, but Valve doesn’t often miss

I have tons of playlists and saved music on spotify; how is Tidal at importing data from other services? It’s not really a deal breaker, but I’m really picky about my music (so I don’t really care about “radio” features or curated playlists), so it’d be a real pain in the ass to start from scratch.

It’s sad to see the sequel get abandoned like this.

Especially when KSP has had such an active and vibrant community for a decade

I do go without. The only time I ever play online is playing PvE games with my good IRL friends that live in different countries and states now, and that’s maybe twice a month.

No randoms, no tantrums when we make noob mistakes, no toxicity. When my friends aren’t around, I play single player games or play with bots instead of people. I highly recommend it.

That’s some survivorship bias shit right here. I can’t tell you how many shitty, buggy games I played in the days of early console and PC gaming. Even games that were revolutionary and objectively good games sometimes had game-breaking bugs, but often it was harder to find them without the internet.

Plus, don’t you remember expansion packs? That was the original form of DLC.

Even though weed is legal in Canada the legal stuff is the worst and most expensive.

Give it time. I’m far from a connoisseur, as these days I mostly just partake in edibles 1-2 times per week, but California has some pretty sweet weed prices, at least compared to my college/grad-school days. I saw an ad on a billboard just yesterday for 10 USD Eighths at a pretty reputable shop in my town, and I think I usually pay 35 USD for a pack of 10 2-dose THC:CBD gummies (compared to 40 USD for an eighth of mediocre bud in the early 2000’s).

As people get less paranoid about enforcement and local governments ease up on restrictions, the price should come down and the quality should go up (although this probably depends a lot on local government, so who knows, really)

I wish this was true for me, but I only have one record shop within 45-minute drive of my house (and their prices and selection are far from competitive), so I wind up buying pretty much all my records online through Discogs. Frequently, the new represses are just flat-out cheaper than the vintage vinyl, especially for a lot of the more esoteric albums I buy. For instance, even though they’re not really hard to find, for Black Sabbath’s first four albums I paid just as much for mediocre, water-damaged copies of Sabbath and Volume 4 as I did for brand-new represses of Paranoid and Master of Reality. If you actually buy your vinyl to listen to, buying used online can be a pretty big gamble as far as quality, so for the same price, I frequently wind up consciously choosing the new vinyl over the used copy.

Even though I do frequently manage to package one or two cheap used albums with each new album purchased to take advantage of that sweet “media mail” shipping, it’s not even close to a 10:1 used:new ratio.

Edit: I suppose now that I think about it, I’m starting from a pretty decent used vinyl collection from my days in the early 2000’s as a hipster music snob before used vinyl got nearly so expensive, so my collection overall has much more used vinyl than my current buying habits would indicate (I probably have 200 albums, of which 30-40 were purchased new in the past 3-4 years)