You better believe I'd be pissed. I was pretty tempted to actually pick one of those games up until my daughter pointed out that disclaimer. I was certainly gobsmacked by that. I might have been a little less so if maybe they had a PDF link where you could print out the cards or models to 3D print replacements. It could have even softened the blow if they said all pieces were made with 100% recycled and biodegradable pieces. The business models today are getting shittier and shittier - either it's enshittification, shrinkflation, single use and toss it, or subscription based. This is not the future 25 year old me had envisioned...
25 year-old me imagined accumulating a huge music and movie library and going to concerts for many years to come and eventually dying in a mosh pit or something...
(or getting crushed against the railing at the front of an AC/DC concert...)
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
I imagined that I would have been more of a ski-bum and trying to finagle a way to buy a slopeside townhouse. The two things 25-year old me almost had was the Lotus Esprit Turbo and the townhouse at Jay Peak, but had to be more responsible instead...
(only a decade and a half later when I told the wife I was pretty close to buying the Lotus, she said "You should have" - d'oh!)
Of course Nancy says you should have, many years after knowing you were safely not going to get one.
But then knowing Nancy, I'm sure she meant it and would have loved riding shotgun in the Lotus. Would it have been blue like in Test Drive? Or would you have gone with the standard black option?
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
I was looking at the blue one. When I was looking for a new car before getting the Mercedes, I was pretty close to picking up a 2009 Porsche 911 Turbo AWD. It was selling for $35k just a few towns over. The guy selling it was pretty proud of himself for saying that the car had never touched snow. What a shame. An AWD sports car and never got to play in the snow. I would have fixed that. But despite the awesome price tag, it just isn't a practical car in any sense of the word.
But I must say that I'm pretty happy Nancy isn't one of those "I won't allow you to have a motorcycle"...
Oh, that is the primary reason that living here isn't the greatest. And when someone asks about living here compared to CT, I always end up bitching about the weather. It's way too freaking hot here, summers are just plain miserable. At least in CT, the seasons are reasonable, by the time you're getting tired of one it's shifting into the next. Here, we even have summer on New Years Day. It's always in the 50's and 60's on NYD, for some weird reason...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
That is weird. We have zero consistency. Some New Years it's a blast chiller, or it's 70 degrees. And we can have 50 degree shifts between two days. But the absolute most frustrating is when there's a storm bringing a lot of moisture from the south and the arctic jet stream is supposed to dip below the state and then as soon as the storm shows up, we get 10 minutes of snow and then that arctic front decides to retreat leaving us with copious amount of rain. The whole time it's raining, I'm like, that could have been 5 inches of snow, now 10 inches, now a foot and a half, almost 2 feet. By the time the rain ends it would have amounted to at least 3 feet. But no. We get flooding instead. Stupid weather...
I dunno if the weather is getting more random or not, but growing up it didn't seem quite so extreme. But then again, there is that Sam Clemens quote about not liking the weather then just wait a minute...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
It definitely wasn't as extreme as it is now. Sure, I remember some summers where we'd have a three day heat wave where it was just super hot, but not a lot of humidity, and no one was outside. We'd just hang out down in the basement or the one room that had the crappy air conditioner. But what we have been missing for quite a few years now are the summer thunderstorms. We've had two this year...
We had a beautiful thunderstorm last night, a decent downpour and lots of lightning. The close by stuff with awesome lightning bolts, and the far away stuff with just fully lit skies. And just constant flashing, it was so very cool. But the heat and humidity is killer this summer...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
Yesterday we got probably half a month's worth of rain - no thunder or lightning. That's another thing we're missing are the frequent afternoon downpours that would last like 10 minutes and then the sun comes popping back out. What I also haven't seen in a long time is the "heat lightning" on those clear nights with the faint flashes in the sky. I guess it makes sense since there haven't been really any storms here or the neighboring states...
It's weird here too. For a few weeks we had the daily afternoon showers. They would usually get in the way of doing yard work since they always happened right around the time I was ending my day. But now we haven't had any rain for a while and now I'm having to water the plants outside to help make sure they're not shriveling and the tomatoes are still going to be juicy and not sun dried...
and so what uranus is a star - Rob
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Kruger
I'm not much of a fan of sun-dried tomatoes. But a nice ripe and juicy tomato picked fresh off the vine, still warm from the summer sun, and made into a tomato sandwich is probably my most favorite way of eating them...
