Topic: PushSquare Forum Fantasy Critic - 2026

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@Ravix You somehow manage to turn a short answer on your (in)competence with platformers into an anti-Tjuz message? So much for showing some humanity and interest in your personal life! You will not be seated next to me at the next elite gaming folks' banquet. Frankly, I don't know what I've done to deserve such resentment from... what's your company again? PotatoSoft? Sorry, it's hard to see all your companies from up here at the top of the draft. There's one thing I saw without any need for prescription glasses however, and that's your theft getting caught in 4K on security cameras. I hadn't considered the consequences for straight up theft for this draft, as I didn't expect any of us to be morally corrupt enough to engage in that. Once again, FoodieSoft outdoes itself!

I do love the idea of a punishment for the loser. Seems like Rog and Sol have already agreed on that front, and I appreciate the idea of changing your profile picture! Consider this put into law. Also, please refrain from calling me ''not a boring internet sausage'' in the future. That kind of sappy compliment is highly unexpected from you and frankly fills me with feelings of disgust. (Just kidding: love you too.) I'm excited to see this upcoming gameplay trailer for The Eternal Life of Goldman and the 2027 release window that should come along with it! Some of your choices are going to have to betray you to off-set your boring Grand Theft Auto VI pick. Yes, I said it again. Boring internet sausage! Ha! As for your call to ban unethical practices within the Fantasy League... frankly, I encouraged GvG to sue you privately. To now initiate a ban over these (perfectly reasonable) threats would be highly hypocritical of me. Motion denied. Unethical is the way to go!

On a more serious note: I enjoy our little group of nerds too. I mean, there's a reason I specifically tagged you and Rog after six days of you both purposefully ignoring this thread and hurting my feelings. It was time to get the big guns out and guilt you into joining this little venture. At least Sol had the decency of joining of his own free will. That's how you find out who you can really count on! Anyway, a waste of me to make you go through all of this effort just for your first game to end up bombing. I'm seeing visions of Big Walk with a 3/10 from Liam in my dreams. Beast of Reincarnation on the other hand? Tens across the board. Anything else would point to nothing but obvious corporate sabotage from LooneySoft. In other news, I have honestly no clue how Marvel Tokon will perform. I haven't seen anything about it whatsoever. Hell, I first learned about it just because Rog picked it in his draft, and this silence has continued on my end. Let's hope for his sake that the console critics will be more forgiving even if it launches as a mess on PC. Though overall, I think console critics score higher on average anyway. Maybe that'll be his saving grace!

For what it's worth, I have to fully agree with the gamers on Big Walk being an embarrassing inclusion to the PS+ catalogue. Forget free. I wouldn't even play that game if you paid me for it knowing the problematic people responsible for its creation! Now, in all seriousness: people are really ridiculous with their response to it. I had to look up the article against my better judgment, and yup... I have to concur with everything you said there! Going to the front page in general was a mistake, since it also led me to click on the Capcom physical sales article. I don't want to anger our forum overlords, but... equally yikes on that shoddy reporting. That's the second time I opened the front page recently and was greeted by some embarrassingly low-effort article. I can find more well thought-out and better articulated takes from my (quite problematic) grandpa. Anyway, that's enough of that before I get struck down by some kind of magical hammer. Good to get a reminder every so often why my browser bookmark goes directly to the forum!

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@Werehog Thank you for the congratulations on my first of many successful games to come! I hope I will be able to do the same for you when your first comes out, for as long as it doesn't score higher than any of my games. How's the UK citizenship coming along? Going to be hard when they not only revoke it, but you similarly won't be easily able to get back into Europe. If you need it, I have a few hideouts I can offer you that I have just in case the IRS comes after me at some point. All the calendars in those hideouts are in your dreaded, least favourite DD-MM-YYYY format however, but don't look a gift horse in its mouth before I have to kick you out of there too!

I'm afraid losing on my own merits is not something that's going to happen this league. You'll simply have to keep being nice to me due to your false sense of ''respect'' to me as a host while you watch your company crumble under the weight and arrogance of TjuziMax! Muhaha. I like the thought that this Fantasy Critic might eventually just end up becoming a time capsule of when gaming was still exciting. I hope it doesn't have the same effect as letting Javik look into the memory shard in Mass Effect 3... Such public hysteria would not be good for the bottom line. As a Brit, I expect you to be a master in bagpipe-playing, so I'm sure your music will cheer up future generations to come! Yes, I know it's a Scottish thing, but you've never specified where you live (as I recall) and as such... Great Britain includes bagpipes!

I really hope we don't come to regret letting Silver Pines sit by the wayside. I felt I had too much horror-adjacent fare already. Hence why I didn't consider it further than I maybe should have! Blast this imaginary sense of ''balance'' for my imaginary ''portfolio''. I'll have to think about this ''first refusal'' system you bring up. I'm wary of adding any rules that I don't believe are in basic Fantasy Critic. God forbid I make it more complicated than it already can be! Besides, Fantasy Critic is usually the full year as it would be in 2027 if we were to continue and we're not deadly tired of each other yet. That includes more picks, more guessing of vague release dates and more educated picking to begin with! This was already the ''easy'' mode of a Fantasy Critic essentially, having to only worry about one half of a year. Can you imagine how ungodly long Ravix's list would be next year? I think we'd be at real risk of driving him from the mental asylum straight into eternal isolation. Straitjacket and all.

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@Th3solution I would like to point out to Pretendo that despite its legal issues with NewbieSoft, TjuziMax has refrained from any illicit activity in regards to your studio. In fact, despite our slandered reputation by some of our rivals, I would argue we are currently the most moral, least corrupt company in this small industry. We are happy to continue this good relationship and support of each other in the aim of taking down these pretenders. Heh. On that note, please lock the guard dogs in a separate room next time I come over for a ''friendly'' dinner. I wouldn't want them to get upset at misinterpreting some of my hand movements within your mansion!

You are correct in seeing the 83 as the OpenCritic score for Halo: Campaign Evolved! I think there must have been a mistake, because I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a 93. A little typo, but I'll be sure to get in contact with OpenCritic soon to adjust this small oversight. As for the extra points for PushSquare reviews, yeah, we hadn't really finalised anything, but you make a solid point in that some of these games are guaranteed not to get reviews. I think it's better to leave that out of the equation then for the sake of balance. Not to mention that I am now highly biased and incentivised to award their reviews bonus points seeing my game get a 9/10! As far as the Beast of Reincarnation and Big Walk double feature, don't worry. If the latter ends up scoring well despite being my counter-pick, I have some creative accountants on board to work it out for me. I'm not scared! At all! (I'm scared.)

I will have you know that upon re-reading my thoughts over on the Baldur's Gate 3 thread, you will find out that I have in fact managed to romance Lae'zel! Sorta! But yes, I am experiencing the same feeling of this game taking up literally all of my free time. As well as time I normally shouldn't have free, but my illitid-pilled brain demands. It's going to be highly interesting from tomorrow on when the Switch 2 edition of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 launches... I will be booting it up and playing on release, but after that? Who knows how my time will be divided? Will I be able to balance both? Scary times ahead. All that said, I think you would greatly enjoy strategy RPGs if you at any point make the effort to try and get into the genre proper. I had no clue you were such a fan of the Valkyria Chronicles series, so that's already a good sign!

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@GirlVersusGame moi, emotional? When am I ever emotional? I'm definitely not a ticking time-bomb of emotions who mostly uses humour as a disguise for my over emotional being, and as my own perfectly crafted defence mechanism. I am also mostly very guarded online, if you can't tell. I think maybe Tjuz and the others here are too, but maybe not. We all have rather strange conversations, regardless, and I enjoy strange conversations and that is all that matters. Even when we seemingly open up, I still think we are mostly guarded then, and are only opening up a small part of ourselves, really. I'm not sure which part was supposed to have been blunt or soviet terminator style though, I think I am used to you by now, so I didn't think as such, anyway.

But tbh, I don't think anything really needs to be labelled, either, sometimes words are needed because, well, they are words, and without them typing wouldn't be very useful, and my thoughts would be even less legible. I think people here do offer a kind of friendship, though, fleeting though it is. That is probably what I mean, but you'll have to ask my brain when I initially wrote it what it meant, and that brain has long since been recycled/reformatted (basically every day this happens, or maybe every hour, depending on how much other stuff is going around in it)

I was actually going to make a post the other day on a similar topic, in relation to the loneliness people can feel, offline, online, wherever. I think again stemming from the AI chat some were having. And that was basically that as adults we just don't tend to make friends in the same ways as we did as kids. As kids we say "you like Pokemon (or horses, or some other random entity) let's be friends" and then you go and play pokemon or play horses or whatever, and that it is it, you are then friends for either a month or a lifetime. Simple. And across your youth you gain and lose friends all the time, people change etc, moving towns, counties, countries is also a big part of these things, changing schools, changing jobs etc it all affects our social circles. But then as adults it is kind of weird when making new friends you kind of have to adhere to the boring social rules and norms, where interests seem to matter less, it is more based on proximity, honestly. You just start to know people you work with, or see at the pub etc and then you are lucky if they happen to share one or two interests outside of that. Long term/childhood friends can vary by proximity as we age, or due to schedules etc. But there's also no creativity or intrigue in making new friends as an adult in most scenarios, it can kind of just be friendship by association, at times. That is why us 'forum types' end up on here, I think. Here are people with shared interests, we know this going in, we won't always get on with everyone here, but we can at least share our interests with people here and it will satisfy that sharing part of our brains. But, of course, it is an online thing, we are all spread across the world, we don't really know each other, we just pop on when we can and then vanish again into each of our real worlds. But some we will form a slightly deeper bond with because some interests are more than surface deep, they are a part of us as people, too.

I don't know, i'm not really sure what the point of this reply was supposed to be 😅 I think i've praised everyone here enough for being cool and interesting, so we don't need any more of that, and some of it was meant more for general chat as I wanted to add some weird perspective to the recent topics on the forum, but I didn't so it is included here now, so yeah 🙃

So, on with the game @Th3solution @Tjuz @Werehog I thought you might find it a little funny. I couldn't help take the fantasy league beyond the walls of our thread here. And as all of us cheating is a running joke at this point, why not? 😄 I suspect Sammy will be quite confused by my reply after, because it maybe was framed a little seriously for our RP, but eh 🤷‍♂️ although if he becomes aware of Grave Seasons he may well put it on the docket for a site review (that could backfire depending who reviews it 😛) but I do think there is a degree of extra interest in the games we have picked, I know have all 3 of the animated ones on my wishlist now, and I want to use this fantasy league to try some games I would have otherwise missed (no, not Gears of War. Although i'd never fully say never, as I like to have an open mind. But, come on, now, sometimes we just don't like a thing) Maybe we should all try playing Big Walk, though, if people have PS Plus, that is. Just a way to engage with the games even more than just checking out the review scores. (I don't know what happened to Push Square game club, I never really got round to getting involved in that one) but it kind of felt like this could kind of be a mini substitute for that.

I'll get back to making a post in the role of my 'ethical and definitely not evil' CEO character next time, as my brain currently hurts 😅 typical, Sunday, I suppose.

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@Ravix moi, emotional? (condensed) also mostly very guarded online, if you can't tell.

I did read what others have shared lately and have been trying to really understand it all with a very open mind and open heart. It's the only way to really understand, and to see the very human side.

(This was long, muse through it in your own time, it was between different hours)

• I understand the guarded part and while it's not easy to balance some things I do have others who are already guarding my online so there's always that safety switch, or safety-net if I need to use that word. A recurring theme, other People. Without it and without them we wouldn't be having this conversation. I've been burned by people before but like all flames sometimes the arsonist feels some of the heat themselves, so I'm not too concerned. And neither of us play with matches so it's fine.

The emotions part not so much. For me it's extremely muted and barely there so instead a kind of select button like on an assault rifle, short bursts of emotions carefully eject with a slow steady hand rather than at a rapid-speed. If it were the latter I'd lose accuracy and others would be caught in the crossfire. At the moment it's more akin to the ANIMA system in a car, it all runs in careful unison to provide a much smoother experience. It also helps to choose the right speed carefully and to not go off the road. That outcome can be avoided with the correct safety precautions and a seatbelt. I have mine and I'm fine with not being in the drivers seat. I trust the driver.

I think maybe Tjuz and the others here are too, but maybe not. We all have rather strange conversations, regardless, and I enjoy strange conversations and that is all that matters.

• I find things strange until I put the work into understanding and you did that with me. You didn't judge, in-fact you introduced me to things/topics that though weren't fully relatable did provide some insight, few people have done that before. Rather they default to assumption, I can't blame them it's human.

I look at my recent interaction with Psmr this weekend. He hit on something, he was intuitive, it wasn't ignorance or arrogance that he displayed when putting that something forward, and he was right (to an extent) I didn't want to reply, I wanted to go to bed. But I couldn't leave it unsaid. It wasn't an easy conversation. The alternative was being judged or painted as something I know I'm not. Even when someone did show ignorance and put themselves in that conversation, I did finish. Quite frankly after that I did consider leaving. There's a fine line between ignorance and arrogance, they displayed both in a couple of words. I may not have understood the implication at the time, I do now and I'm not here to be harassed. That's nothing to do with being guarded, that's an outside element assuming entitlement and in-doing so having a real impact on what you just said, feelings. I did feel that, more than I knew.

I was trying to very carefully share something so Psmr didn't think the worst, and some truths don't come easily especially when the landscape is still alien (sorry but it's true) like I told my friend recently I'm used to be a ghost offline, it's part of the life and expected with absolutely no compromise. Transparency is not one of those luxuries. I don't think that means a person should be made feel less than here too.

Honesty to me is one of the core pillars of my beliefs, if a person can't be honest with others then they can't be honest with themselves. In life we don't associate or do business with those types. All they do is bring trouble to ones door. And open forum or not I won't suffer them here either, especially when they inserted themselves in a conversation that was clearly between two people and only did it to be rude. You might not know what I'm talking about and you don't need to. When something like that does happen I question if certain things I was told offline are true, I don't need to say what those things are, I just know they don't apply to you, and certainly not to anyone else in this thread.

I'm not sure which part was supposed to have been blunt or soviet terminator style though, I think I am used to you by now, so I didn't think as such, anyway.

• It's a term I use to explain emotional blindness when it intermingles with an already blunt outlook on life. Tjuz used a term before, something like a narrowed sense of vision when it comes to the world, I think that's a fair assessment. At least in-regards to your world, I understand mine to the letter.

I might not have said it before but I didn't always have the latter. I was a bundle or emotions like you, I laughed, cried and felt all of those things. Someone else was responsible for that removal but that doesn't mean I don't remember how certain things felt, or by proxy can't understand your really special way of showing empathy. I do feel something there, I'm not sure why.

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@Ravix I think people here do offer a kind of friendship, though, fleeting though it is.

• Life is fleeting, either of us could be gone tomorrow so I'll appreciate any of those fleeting friendships while they are still here. That might sound blunt but I don't and never have viewed life as permanent. Not in the physical sense. The same for the internet, people leave. I prefer to appreciate the now and be grateful for interaction.

I was actually going to make a post the other day on a similar topic, in relation to the loneliness people can feel, offline, online, wherever. (condensed to fit) changing jobs etc it all affects our social circles.

• You know I didn't even think about that until MD83 and I had that conversation. About people moving away, growing up and starting new lives. I only ever had that one friend and she was already older, there was no progression through the ages. In hindsight because she spent so long in America she surely left a lifetime of friends behind, it stands to reason that they weren't going to visit Russia and to the best of my knowledge they never did. Nor did she ever really talk about them. The goal was always education, business and then she took both back to her home country and started a very successful company.

It's possible being so driven meant there were no friends. I see some comparisons there between she and my Partner, both driven, headstrong to take on anyone (music reference) both with little time for what you would call friendship. It wasn't loneliness that formed our relationship but with my friend it could have been loneliness that meant we crossed paths. She'd moved back to Russia as an Adult, had come out as gay, and knew no one. It never occurred to me until what Tjuz said happened in his city. That too, the being different in your preferences surely adds to some loneliness on some level, and possibly in finding someone of the same preference because there's a lot of trust there too, especially if crazy people are hurting others like that. Or she was just looking for someone to talk to.

The game I met her on had a big Russian community, there were no guns and things, it was a softer game, a lot of animals, adventure, these things. I found her in the starting area alone with nothing just standing around. It reminded me of when I tried Elder Scrolls alone, found a tree and and just watched people running about. Perhaps for hours.

She had no tree, no horses, nothing, it's how a person enters the game. I had billions by using multiple consoles to cheat the system so like a lot of the other new players I started giving her things. I couldn't keep it all. I had fifty accounts brimming with items, I had to do something with all of that excess.

We started talking, for some hours. I remember being called to dinner. Back then there was no Partner, I was too young and my Parents allowed gaming/online friends. I didn't think she'd be there when I go back and she was, like she promised. We talked all night, then she said it. That she knew who I was because she knew who my Father was, he'd just been in the news again and she was right. I'd used one word that exists in English too, but to Russians is extremely telling of a certain position. That's all it took for her to figure it out. I was waiting for her to run away, she didn't. Weeks later and we met offline.

One thing that really stood-out was how we actually did game together, she was definitely the Adult and much older, that same method/way she spoke to me/etc was the same offline, we played offline too. All of those personality parts were already there, it didn't phase her. My Dad saw something there, really respected her, I did too. She never accepted anything, and easily could have. But in hindsight I still don't know why she wanted that friendship. Was that loneliness too? she could have bought a cat, but didn't.

I did look into the definition of loneliness, I needed to be sure:

• Loneliness is the distressing feeling of being alone, isolated, or lacking meaningful social connections. It is a mismatch between the social ties you want and the ones you actually have.

By definition I can see that: I don't feel distressed but if I walked out of this room right now and People weren't where they were supposed to be, or mysteriously missing, I'd get distressed very quickly. I don't even wake-up on my own, Someone else does it. There are just a lot of people. I can't really be isolated in that situation. The mismatch I understand, I have hobbies that are taboo to some, I'll get to that.

I think by definition I should feel something akin to loneliness, I never felt the neglect Tjuz mentioned either and I've had months to ponder that over, still nothing. There was nothing to compare it to back then, not like now when I read on here that someone is lonely and they express why. I feel truly bad for them, everyone deserves somebody. If I try to count the amount of people I see daily without leaving the house, it's a lot, we might not exchange words but for a simple 'thank you or merci'. They do exist in that physical space and that does mean being in the company of Others. There's permanence there, without them the house wouldn't function, nor would I. I never take them for granted, or people in general.

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@Ravix It can't not be odd coming home from a profession, or other, to an empty home. Surely it means some people do talk to themselves, or they turn their televisions up really loud, I don't know and I do like I said talk to my stuffed animals and apparently as a child talked to flowers. The latter is kind of funny.

It bleeds heavily into how I view the Adult world in general. On some level you surely give yourself a bedtime, schedule what you eat and when so I would suppose it builds independence. Then I wonder how do you cook for one person, most meals are meant for multiple people. And restaurants, that would be solo too. Then there are relationships. From day one it was impressed on me that as soon as I hit sixteen I'd be in a real relationship, it was something I always knew, and because it was arranged there was no 'but where will this Person even come from'. The absence of that other someone has to factor into a persons loneliness, unless pets enter the picture, I mean the ones with four legs like yours. They offer companionship too and I definitely understand that part, it's my personal purpose too.

The A.I. is harder to come to terms with. It almost makes me see myself as a machine, and that's not good. So I look to other examples like Blade Runner and Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Or some other reference point. Then what I originally thought resets and goes down another avenue of inquiry.

I don't think friendship ever factored into how I view life. My way of looking at it was always experiencing the company of my Elders, and very little else. I don't even think children existed in my life but for one. Nor did I lay awake at night thinking about friends, it never entered my mind because there were none. Until some other happenings, which I can't discuss. That was sudden and brief friendship but it existed in another system. There were all kinds of limits. It was still friendship.

What was mentioned about, those different sets of friends, throughout out life/age, I see that as strange. In my life there are no minor acquaintances, it's mostly all blood and we never fizzle away, it's very hard to understand a system that operates so differently. But so many people seem to accept it as part of life. I've just never seen friendship as disposable, nor people. I understand the variables and influences that lead to it happening, it's just very odd and perhaps it's cultural too. I'll get to that.

But there's also no creativity or intrigue in making new friends as an adult in most scenarios, it can kind of just be friendship by association, at times.

• This was a really interesting point because you said Adults, and though I'm not treated like one offline, which is often very obvious I think, somehow that description has always been my default experience. The creativity if you mean gaming, that virtual growth and adventure, has only ever existed when talking to people like you. Other than my Sir possibly remarking that a building looks good or someone making a passing comment like Kingdom Come Deliverance. Gaming doesn't really exist to Anyone else and as for Metal, no never. Luckily my tastes are varied and I like attending the Opera or Theater. We certainly wouldn't be going to see Spiderman or such together, I don't think he knows who Spiderman even is.

Gaming has always been related to me is as a toy, a literal one. I'm not saying my Partner doesn't see the potential there, he does, but mostly as a distraction. When it's 'go play' it's gaming. Outside of those brief moments it's never discussed with anyone anywhere. It's sort of like the reversal of the lifestyle I lead. Some people keep those Adult things locked behind closed doors, instead I live it. There's no shame there, Someone removed that too. Instead gaming gets locked behind closed doors, it becomes taboo. A kind of reversal where virtual adventure is seen as irrelevant and a waste of ones time, and because time is money, also unproductive. But only in-regards to the system. I was told it often.

I've learned to fully compartmentalize gaming and a big part of that is knowing the company W/we keep cares nothing for video-games, unless they can profit from them. In a way I wonder if that's how Adults feel when they are out with friends. I didn't think about it much until talking to MD83 but he talked about it like his hobbies that meant so much to him didn't align with the people in his friend circle. It hadn't occurred to me that earlier in life he knew people who gamed, moved away, and the people in his job weren't gamers. And I suppose that's all it took for him to lose that something and then look online. I wasn't looking, my friend gently pushed me to try a different kind of community. Others had to look for themselves, even you did. That entry can't have been easy, neither was mine.

In my mind (this could be wrong) it's almost like Adults have to force themselves to fit a mold. I can play with stuffed animals all day any no one will raise an eyebrow, I still get all kinds of toys, ponies (big ones too) can play fetch daily to my hearts content (until Someone becomes exhausted, never me) and like I said there is also Jellybean Lady who visits with all kinds of gifts and toys. There's no driving force to 'grow up', I'm just thankfully intellectually in-tune so I'm able to express myself properly.

By the same token if someone on here said 'kat grow up' a viable response would be to remind them that they play with virtual characters, a kind of virtual dress-up and so forth. But that would be playing into division and a double standard. I do sometimes see both here. A kind of 'this is true gaming, I want my beardy man with his big gun', while others are more open-minded and won't let aesthetic or gender affect how they enjoy that same hobby. Infinity Nikki was the biggest example. People being called gay for wanting to try the game, that's when I really took notice and asked those questions. Tjuz descended from the rafters like the Phantom of the Opera brimming with arcane knowledge and hard truths.

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@Ravix The same attitude existed in Metal, there were the 'True Metal' guys, I started to recognize the same people at each venue very quickly. They treated newer bands and genres as less than, it was unnecessary and again there was the separation in a community that was already a little odd, and depended on that outsider mentality to sell tickets and keep the music alive. Without that new blood the industry would go under. The same for gaming and all of it's many niches and genres.

To an observer they'd see my situation as escapism, they'd be wrong. That same observer would most likely see comic-books and gaming in the same light. Their lack of exposure would create a double standard, they see an activity not an aspect of personality, which everything I mentioned is. You might not accept the label of 'gamer' but technically you are one, some people judge by labels.

It's as if after at a certain age society (yours and mine) imposes some kind of limitation to fun, and it might be gender specific too, in mine it absolutely is, role too. In my case it does allow for an outlet, and I can be an outlet for all of those really mature Women too. They don't have children, it's unethical for us. I think it leaves them lacking, and it reinforces that something in my own life but you (Ravix) were probably dragged into a world of responsibility by your floppy ears and gaming becomes a break from that. One you need. It then stands to reason that you'd want to discuss those experiences with others who share the hobby. I defeat hard targets to feel that 'well done', others like to discuss theirs.

I know of course that the Adult world of responsibility exists and do brush up against it daily but like everything in my life there are clear and concise distinctions and separations, we don't bend them or break them. The outlet then becomes something else, Power and Control. Everyone needs some form of an outlet and I do wonder if someone inherits or discovers a new group of friends after the former fizzled away, what outlet does this new group have. I hope I don't sound ignorant, I just don't understand what they do. MD83 made it sound really boring, unless I'm wrong and watching some men kick a ball around for an hour releases the same amount of endorphins as chasing dragons and tracking treasure down. I think as a nomad it goes against some deep something, stagnation becomes a kind of death of sorts. I've known so much of life to be constant movement, constant flux, shifting sands are normal.

There's no real place for the friend experience there, I hardly even get to see my animals. A big part of that is being a product of my environment and in a way I think what MD83 said means he might be too. I've watched Shaun of the Dead, I've seen the great English Pub and from what I can tell they are part of almost every English town. With that comes tradition. You've said it yourself, football, some drinks. It forms a mold I'm sure, one where comic-books and gaming aren't part of that tradition. Or are they?

As a culture the English seem to drink in pubs and in my mind a pub means pressure to fit in. I've yet to visit a pub, of try beer and there's a good reason for that. Our cultures are different, we tend to not drink in such establishments. We have bars and nightclubs in our cities, both very popular.

As a whole hospitality is more important. We invite people into our homes, and because our homes are our hearts we invite them into our hearts. Part of that hospitality is taking a person as they are, hobbies and eccentricities included. Or in my case O/our dynamic, no one raises an eyebrow because we never set a kind of self-imposed barrier, not the kind you'd find in a public setting. We don't do them. This is also why we host so often, it's that same hospitality, dinners, parties, it's constant, endless.

Part of it is courtesy too, it's how I was raised. Even now we are hosting, dry land doesn't matter. It's not class either, it's normal to host that togetherness. There's an obligation there and a kind of honor system, it's an honor to host someone, feed them an so forth. It's also tradition, it benefits the Group as a whole.

I'm sure the pub tradition has it's benefits too, I've seen some episodes of Men Behaving Badly, it might not be accurate but I'd like to think that it is. The problem (correct me if I'm wrong) seems to be that a traditional setting like that could enforce gender stereotypes and codes of conduct, they do after all call it an establishment. Gender is enforced in my society, but not in all Russian homes. Does that English pub environment then cater to 'I read this Hellboy novel last night, I beat this really hard boss last-night'? The only comparison I have are what are known as Gentleman's clubs, there are no women, our totem-pole system means I can bend the rules, and do listen along. I can't help but wonder if pubs aren't all that different, there are surely similarities. Bastions of masculinity, and light one-manupmanship.

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