being the only one not to switch is also painful, possibly more than just switching.

As an Arizonan, I disagree with this point. I don’t really experience any downsides with not switching and I think very few people would.

Alone Again, Naturally by Gilbert O’Sullivan.
A small twist, but a very devastating song

La Fuente or really anything else by Adiós Amores

China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.

The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.

Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.

Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.

My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.

I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that “watermelon” would be “kili telo” (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that “kili telo” would not be understood as “watermelon” unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived “kili telo”.
If you’re going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.

I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.

P3P uses the same combat system as Persona 4 and 5, while the original P3 and P3FES system was quite different.

The actual changes are pretty subtle, but it makes the whole system feel totally different. The “1 More” mechanic did not activate on partial knockdowns with multi target moves, and being knocked down would result in skipped turn. Being hit while knocked down would also undo the knockdown.
Basically, multi target moves were much more situational, type weaknesses were much more dangerous (for both player characters and enemies), and there was a lot of potential strategy in getting enemies to skip turns.
I think it was a lot more interesting this way and P4/P3P/P5 simplified it to the point that P5 added a “play the game for me” button that autoselects the best move.

I agree with the other commenter that both P3Re or P3FES would be mostly the same as what you’ve already experienced, but I think it’s worth it for the epilogue, especially if you liked the characters in the base game.
Between the two, I would personally recommend FES but I think most people would recommend Reload.

Surprised I didn’t see anyone mention Persona 3 FES.

The definitive version of Persona 3, before they simplified the combat system for 4, 5, and remakes of 3.

The epilogue of the game, The Answer, has the best story in the series.

Persona series is [almost] totally standalone; no need to play 1 or 2 first.

What was the math? Doesn’t salt increase the boiling point?

It may be pronounced either way, and may also be spelled “broach”, an alternate spelling which is very common although probably slightly less than this chart implies given multiple meanings of “broach”.

I’m not really informed on this history of this word, but I think it’s possible that the “brooch” spelling increased in frequency along with the pronunciation that rhymes with “mooch” while people who pronounce it to rhyme with “roach” are more likely to spell it as “broach”.

What dialect of English will we base the new spelling system on?

What would you call it instead?

About a year ago I got a high-speed (so-called “gaming”) hard drive on sale for about 100 USD. It has 8TB, so I kinda stopped uninstalling games or worrying about file sizes.

I don’t really play any games that have more than 80GB file size anyway, but I imagine at around 90-100 is when I’d start being reluctant to download.

As for what I prefer, I feel like smaller file sizes usually yield better games on average. If I find a game that has 100MB download, I’m already lookin like this: 😏
I’m pretty happy with anything up to 10GB. If the original Dark Souls (my favorite game) is 8GB, surely that’s within an order of magnitude of the maximum file size a game can reasonably be, for me at least.

I’m not complaining about the Ghosts 'n Goblins series though, Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts is one of the best games ever

I did find it more difficult than DS1 but, as in my metaphor, in a more artificial way. I’m thinking of the nerfed rolling frames (before you level ADP), more difficult parry timing, far more multi-opponent bosses, and especially the way that dying will reduce your max health. Any of these on their own would be totally unremarkable, but all together it feels like there was much more explicit focus on adding things to make it more difficult (which I believe was also reflected in the marketing of the games).

I also think that the atmosphere and artstyle of DS1 was much more serious and unique, whereas DS2 has comparatively much more ghoulish cartoony vibes, which just made it feel incongruent. Eg: the undead are now green and less scrawny, making them seem more like generic goblins rather than how they were in DS1. I just feel like there was an overall shift in the focus to be less about the unique world and its story and more about a Ghosts 'n Goblins -esque rage game.

I don’t think Dark Souls 2 is the most difficult in the series but I think it’s the first one where the difficulty started to feel unfair and like it was missing the point.

Basically here’s the vibes I get from each game:
DS1: A somber and holy journey
DS2: Ghosts 'n Goblins but 3D
DS3: Killing cool bosses is so cool
ER: All of the above

I agree with your critique of souls-likes, but there was something really special about the original Dark Souls that none of its successors really captured. This was before they decided that “ultra-hard” was a good selling point and the attack patterns were far more simple. The atmosphere and difficulty were still there, but they made sense and fit with the rest of the game and its ideas very cohesively.

Not sure if anybody will understand this, but it’s like the difference between spicy food that’s spicy because it has peppers and spicy food that’s spicy because they added a bunch of artificial stuff. Spicier usually means tastier, because it has more of the flavorful peppers. But in the case of, for example, Dark Souls 2 or Elden Ring, it’s like they just added a bunch of capsaicin (difficulty) without including any more flavors of the peppers. The difficulty is beyond the degree to which it was artistically meaningful in the original Dark Souls.

If Alyx counts as Half-Life 3, surely Opposing Force was Half-Life 2, Blue Shift was Half-Life 3, and Alyx is like… Half-Life 7 or something.

It’s not actually a tier list, I just used a tier maker website to put together this play order and put rough labels on them. BotW and TotK are far apart cause we didn’t want to play them back-to-back.

Also, who’s the genius that said we don’t play Hyrule Warriors, and what is wrong with them?

I humbly admit that I am the genius in question.
Doesn’t really look very fun or interesting, and it’s certainly not mainline. So to be honest, I didn’t even consider including it. Maybe I will try it at your recommendation.

Currently playing through all the Zelda games with a friend in this curated order:

So far I recommend it, although I’m only 3 games in.

I just finished Wind Waker and it was far worse than I remembered, and I didn’t remember it being very good in the first place. Probably a conversational opinion, but I think Wind Waker is the most lazy and forgettable Zelda game. Curious if anybody liked this one for more than just the music and artstyle.

I can’t wait to move on to the DS games which I really like, but I’m waiting for my buddy to play Wind Waker first.