FFXIV is a fantastic game, with a fantastic free trial that lets you play the entire base game for free (and i think they recently expanded that to the first expansion too), and its beautiful as hell, has a fantastic story, and doesnt require a super computer to run.
SWTOR has one of the most balefully hateful f2p systems I have ever seen in a mmo. Which was enough to make me not subscribe to the game while I was testing it out.
because I have massive, chronic depression. I find no real joy in playing new games with rare exception (Starfield was one, at least, until I got into playing it and realized how bad it was…), for the most part, and prefer to wrap myself in the comfortable known of a select few games, and even those I cant sit and play for a very long time before all drive disappears.
Which is why government typically rubberstamps every developer request to clearcut new forests and turn under new grassland, to build a new poorly built development of McMansions that will probably have to be extensively rebuilt within 5-10 years due to the apalling build quality.
Same reason no one builds affordable homes. Why develop homes for the poors, for 100k, when they can make McMansions on the same land, and sell them for 1mil+ a pop.
If Central Park was proposed today, it would be decried as a waste of valuable property (and probably liberal wokeism)
They spent billions to fix traffic issues and failing infrastructure.
The greenspace was a byproduct. That was only allowed to happen because buildings along the former elevated roadway would see a massive increase in land value with the roadway gone that was more valuable than shoving more buildings into the strip of land.
Something seems odd with the idea that high rises were ‘natural’ :-)
They are better than spreading single family homes and ground floor commercial spaces over a huge swath of land that would inevitable need clearcutting and plowing under to be suitable for development.
Lesser reason is that these companies are risk averse, and would rather spend 500 million risking a flop on a remake of somethign that has an existing base, than spend 10million to support something new, unique and creative.
I think the immediate deaths would all be from people who need electricity to run medical devices.
Followed shortly by people who require refrigerated medication.
Followed by elderly who die from exposure to extreme, unconditioned temperatures.
and that would be in the first, oh, say… week or two.
Then, with fridges full of rotted food, your first major death wave will occur as masses of people lose their absolute goddamn minds in panic and fear and start food riots/try to rob from others/raid big industrial farms/neighborhood gardens/etc, which leads to mass deaths from starvation, exposure, exertion, desperation, and gunshot.
Which will even out after about a week or two.
Then you settle in for the slow burn. 3 months out you’ll have another, comparatively small wave of deaths from people who run out of non-refridgeration requiring medications.
Then another slow burn until manufactured canned goods run out in stores and scavanged homes until a wave of starvation.
All in all, I’d say you’d probably be over the bulk of the mass deaths after 6 months, and with a significantly reduced population… Which will be to the benefit of the survivors, since less people per mile will make farming/hunting easier, and life safer… because while raiders/thieves will always be a overarching concern and safety issue, at this point, most of the desperation should have passed along with most of the desperate.
There will also be, for at least a generation, possibly two, the lingering unspoken understanding that more people than anyone would ever care to count only survived the famines and fall by eating the long pig.
I avoid the hangover all together by drinking smart.
Drink a water between each beer/drink. All it takes, Never had a hangover, regardless of how excessively I imbibed (it also really helps to keep the bill cheaper)