I have a Bose Mini Soundlink. It’s held up for years and years.

“Hey baby… wanna watch Netflix and dismantle the patriarchy?”

Yeah, we did stuff like that too. Then people started breaking contracts, and things got ugly.

Settlers can be played pretty competitively–stuff like building a settlement in a “bad” position just to mess up someone working to build next to that spot, stuff like that.

The friction in Monopoly mainly comes down to our table rules, specifically that you can make any deal verbally you want (though there’s no guarantee the other party will follow through).

Monopoly and Settlers. Both very cutthroat at family gatherings.

Monopoly. My oldest two siblings are absolutely cutthroat when playing it.

Ah, that would definitely make a difference. A debit transaction uses some form of “password” like a PIN or the data embedded in a card chip. A credit transaction technically only relies on easily available data and sometimes a signature, much more common for fraud (it’s pretty easy to read and replicate the data from a magnetic strip–one of my classmates did a project to read magnetic strips, and they had to stop letting people swipe their own cards on it because it popped up tons of confidential data).

My CU’s website definitely looks like it’s from the early naughts, but they at least kept things up to date and security practices seemed legit, and I don’t think I ever tripped the fraud detector. I guess everyone’s mileage will vary a bit.

They’re common in Canada as well. In my experience, they’re much better than larger banks for things like fees and interest rates.

Historically the main advantage of a larger bank was having banks and ATMs everywhere, but lots of CUs have formed mutual agreements for ATM access, and internet banking being ubiquitous has rendered any advantage the big banks have had moot (in my opinion, at least).

Ending a game of Munchkin is almost impossible to do without upsetting the rest of the players. If you felt bad, that’s fair, but what you described is very much in the spirit of the game.

That’s totally on them for ignoring you. Sounds like getting knocked down a peg might have been good for that guy.

Related, Settlers is one of the two games that are banned at my family gatherings.

The Monopoly house thing is a bit of a dick move, but I wouldn’t feel bad about the Civ one–that seems legit.

Back when Words With Friends was big, I developed a reputation among my friend groups for being very good. I wasn’t terribly good, but I noticed there was no penalty for misspelling a word. So each turn, I’d try a bunch of high-scoring combinations that seemed like they might be words, and eventually one would work.

My family plays heavyweight games, and enjoy strategy (whether it’s a “strategic” game or not). We mostly get along well (though we’ve had to ban a couple games that got too heated too often), but we’re quite competitive and we put a lot of thought into games when we play.

My wife’s family is the polar opposite. They seem to enjoy passing cards or pieces around without much reason or goal (they often play pure-luck games). The first time I sat down to a game of Rummykub with them, I won the first three games in a row, and it wasn’t close. Fortunately I had the sense to pull back a bit, but then it was super boring. Finally I gave myself a new goal–each game, I mentally chose another player at the table and would subtly play to see if I could get them to win. I had about a 3/4 success rate on that, and the whole experience was more enjoyable for everyone.

I miss the physical sensor from my 4a. Enjoy the time while it lasts!

How is it that technology has gone backwards in this area?

The Brave Little Toaster. It’s a bit endearing until the LSD trip goes bad.

If it’s not “slam”, it’ll be something else just as bad. Be careful what you wish for, or it might be replaced with “obliterate” or “wreck” or something worse.

Instead, how about we get news outlets to stop writing ambiguously abbreviated headlines as if they still needed them to fit on a page? “Stud Tires Out” could mean two wildly different things, and you can easily fit a couple more words into the 80% of the screen you’ve filled with ads.

Or they named it after the Irish doctor who documented it, Men O’Pause.

Assume spherical duck

A few assumptions:

• There will be some sort of PC available, with a keyboard and mouse and speakers, and basic programs to play audio/video, read text/PDF documents, etc. that don’t count toward my 1GB limit
• I will have knowledge ahead of time about this PC and its specs, OS, installed programs, etc.

First, I’d make sure to include a stripped down version of 7zip, or whatever compression I use (y’all don’t wanna get on there and realize you can’t decompress your files). Hopefully only a few MB for a CLI utility.

Second, I’d include a decent library stored in a compressed text format. Some fiction, some non-fiction, classics, some of my favorite series, a bunch of “Intro to ___” type of books, that kind of thing. Probably up to 50MB or so.

Third, I would include some low-quality audio of some favorite music as well as a few audio books. Maybe 200MB or so.

Fourth, I’d include a copy of a simple game engine system (maybe something like libgdx) as well as Inkscape, and whatever compiler I would need to create programs/games for my PC, and relevant documentation. This would give me both a creative outlet, and allow me and my companion to make new games for each other to have something novel. Hopefully around 100 or 200MB.

Depending on the size, I might also consider including something like FruityLoops, again to be able to create new content. Ideally something that’s 100MB or so.

With whatever space I have left (300 or 400MB-ish), I’d include things like emulators and a couple favorite older games (Lord of the Realms 2 comes to mind) that have good replay value and would be small enough to fit. Ideally some multi-player options as well (assuming a shared keyboard).

Without previous knowledge of the available PC, I’d include multiple builds of 7zip for most common architectures, and prioritize the books and audio. Maybe bring a couple variants of GCC and minGW (if I can write programs, I can eventually replicate lots of the other software).