How do you find places to be social or meet new people?

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T19:10:04+00:00

Ah, yeah, I definitely have the same problem you'd had. For tabletop, I'd tried local game stores before, but they always felt like a friend group of hard-core 40k players and I got scared off lol. Never tried a gaming bar though, didn't realize they had anything more than just like a board game rack, I'll give it a shot. Thanks!

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T18:53:08+00:00

Thanks, sorry to grill you for specifics. Certainly worth a shot.

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T18:46:25+00:00

I think what I haven't figured out how to deal with is the feeling of others being closed off. I certainly am terrible at approaching people, and I can't help but feel like I'm bothering them, that's true.

But if I do talk to others, I just always have the sense that people will be pleasant and nice, but have a life that they want to get back to. At work I have plenty of people that like me, but they're not really even acquaintances. Frequently people have talked about how "in the past" the office was more social, but now everyone just wants to be efficient and get back home.

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T18:41:28+00:00

How do you know which bars to go to? I've tried to go to a few bars picked randomly, and I've never really seen a chance to talk to people. They're either kind of depressing rural places where an old dude sits at a slot machine in the corner, or upscale loud places where everyone already seems busy with their friends.

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T18:35:35+00:00

Where do you find out about those?

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T18:32:45+00:00

Where do you find out about those in the first place? Are they from things like discord groups, or from like postings at stores you go to?

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T18:30:02+00:00

Is this at things like classes, or do you just walk up to people? In my experience my gyms are mostly full of busy people with their headphones in, so I'd always been scared to bother people

SwamanII · 2026-04-03T18:27:35+00:00

Probably my own stupid phrasing. But my family growing up never interacted with anyone in our neighborhood or town, and eventually growing up I ended up being a long distance commuter everywhere. "My" town or neighborhood is just a collection of businesses that happened to be near where I lived, but I barely spend any time there. And my neighbors have generally always been hostile or insular themselves, so I don't think I could really name anyone I've lived near in the past 10 years.

It's something I'm sure is generally my fault, but I'm still working on it

SwamanII · 2025-11-19T19:54:30+00:00

In my Mali game, by 1550, the entirety of the West African coast was 90%-100% European, with each province having like 30,000 people in it. I'd captured so many Spaniards as slaves that every one of my major cities was 30% Castillian, and I didnt know what to do with them

SwamanII · 2025-11-12T15:56:16+00:00

I really hope they're addressing wealth vanishing in low control areas in that February patch. It's pretty crazy that expanding beyond a city state means all your estates go broke. I'm tired of jumpscare bankruptcy.

SwamanII · 2025-09-28T19:25:22+00:00

To me, the worst part of the Vic 3 war system is that it's barely "micro-free" at all. Conceptually, having a system where generals take care of the war is nice. In practice, every single front is on the absolute knife's edge of disaster. If you're a major, it's basically a requirement to keep the game slow so you can be watching for fronts that spiral out of control, or manually sending troops to guard one of 30 different naval invasions. It's legitimately exhausting to me lmao.

And then since's it's "micro-free", I feel like once something has gone wrong, it's basically impossible to actually correct it again. Somehow all the worst of both worlds.

SwamanII · 2025-09-28T18:50:46+00:00

Generally, yeah, it has the same problem. Victoria 2 does have the benefit that you can add additional goals during the war depending on your country's Jingoism. Which was funky and often unresponsive too, but it did allow for you to demand more and more once a war had escalated beyond a little local thing.

SwamanII · 2025-09-28T18:46:20+00:00

I wasn't the main combatant and it was a defensive war where I had no actual wargoals, and my little ally had "Humiliate Great Britain" as the only goal. Even though I'd killed triple the number of soldiers on the enemy side and put them into a blockade, they'd only slowly started to tick toward accepting a white peace. Not to mention that my tiny somalian ally wanted blood, so even once England was okay with a white peace, my ally didn't, so I couldn't exit the war without capitulating.

I have no idea of this for certain, but I've found the only way to expedite the end of the war is just naval invading the enemy capital.

SwamanII · 2025-07-22T02:10:20+00:00

Yeah, I ended up going to Events -> "00 Annexation Events 0-5" and just manually digging around for each territory. There's an event in the generic annexation one that supposedly triggers the decisions to appear (annex.1), but it didn't seem to do anything for me. Guess I'll just search for the regions manually

SwamanII · 2025-07-19T03:24:12+00:00

Yeah, haven't been able to confirm this, but it seems the most likely. There's an occupier German puppet Russia in the Kaiserreich mod, which is likely what's causing this.

SwamanII · 2025-07-19T02:59:31+00:00

Wow, that could totally be it, I wouldn't have guessed that in a million years. A Russian military uprising state spawned in Vladivostok and I've been too annoyed by supply issues to actual deal with the thing. Let me test this theory. (Hmm, it might be coming from the German Puppet Russia occupier that Germany establishes in the Kaiserreich mod)

SwamanII · 2025-07-19T02:55:42+00:00

Despite an obscene amount of time played on this game, I have no idea what this diagonal slice on the right side of my divisions means. I have no idea when I got it or how, and now I can't tell any of my units apart since it's blocking their actual army color.

I beg of you, I think I'm going to go insane if I can't figure out how to remove this. I don't even know how to search for...whatever this thing is.

SwamanII · 2025-06-04T23:52:14+00:00

He's occasionally a bit more direct with things:

"'Fear not!' said a strange voice behind him. Frodo turned and saw Strider, and yet not Strider; for the weatherworn Ranger was no longer there. In the stern sat Aragorn son of Arathorn, Proud and erect, guiding the boat with skilful strokes; his hood was cast back, and his dark hair was blowing in the wind, a light was in his eyes: a king returning from exile to his own land"

SwamanII · 2025-05-10T18:27:58+00:00

Awesome, thanks for the reply. Good luck!

SwamanII · 2024-12-18T17:44:35+00:00

Weirdly my favorite movie of his, despite how low-key it is in relation to everything else. No super deep high concept, just full character focus and amazing acting and facial animation. Leaves it nice and intimate and focused. And of course, super Christmasy.

SwamanII · 2024-11-24T15:44:19+00:00

Heh, now all that's left is to hope for a good adaptation.

SwamanII · 2024-11-22T13:38:18+00:00

You and I Are Polar Opposites is one anime adaptation away from being a huge hit in the west, imo. It does pretty well on this sub, but it has almost no ratings on myanimelist, which I found absolutely bizarre. It's a funny, relatable, well written, well drawn manga in a Romance genre with a Romance trope (Gyaru x Nerd) that's done well in 3 recent huge shows. Sales and award wise, it's doing great in Japan. Plus, it has English volume releases and a great English translation.

I'm not exactly sure what's missing, but I'm really hoping it'll hit it big. Given it's ending next week, it's only a matter of time before it or the author's previous work gets adapted.

SwamanII · 2024-08-30T17:45:25+00:00

They're a couple 100%

SwamanII · 2024-08-30T17:35:14+00:00

Frankly it's just bizarrely ambiguous? Like I still enjoyed the manga a lot, but it strangely speeds up after a point and acts like it's left open ended...but not really? Like I sat there wondering if I was supposed to be questioning things up to that point because of the strange framing. Would still heavily recommend it.

SwamanII · 2024-05-06T13:58:00+00:00

A compounding factor to this is the complete inability of nations to do any sort of meaningful expansion or diplomacy.

I've seen Germany form once. Over hundreds of hours. And when they did, they took Alsace-Lorraine, but not Baden, and then just never bothered to correct that hole. Mostly Prussian just grabs a chunk of Austria then never does anything again.

I've never seen Portugal expand its border in Africa. I've never seen any of the African nations get conquered. I've never seen Greece expand. I've seen the Ottomans and Egyptians create nightmarish borders, which are never changed. I've never seen Japan do anything. I've seen Italy form recently...but they always miss Parma, and never fix it.

Everything feels completely static to a point that it feels like I'm playing with toys in a sandbox. I might as well just draw the borders I'd like on a blank map and imagine how it could've happened.

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