"Paralives has a key advantage over The Sims - characters who can use the bathroom by themselves"

Um.

Maybe I'm just missing something here, and not to take anything away from Paralives or whatever, but...

Uh...

No...

Sims have been able to autonomously do that stuff ever since the original The Sims. If a Sim is hungry, they will go and make a meal on their own. If a Sim needs to use the bathroom, they will damn well use the bathroom on their own. In fact, whenever I played The Sims games, one of the first things I would always do was turn the autonomy off for my own Sim households (for the later ones that let you do that, anyway), because I actually got tired of them wandering off to use the bathroom or eat or read or watch TV or play in the sprinkler or whatever on their own when I was in the middle of trying to make other plans for them. Like, sometimes they would actually interrupt and delete my queue of actions I'd laid out for them to go do their own thing, and that was rather irritating. And I figure if I ever played Paralives, I'd likely do the same thing in that, as well, at least for the characters I was directly controlling, assuming such a thing will even be possible or allowed in that game.

So... yeah, not sure where this whole "Paralives characters can do this stuff that The Sims characters can't" thing is even coming from.

(Honestly, at least for the time being, I am marginally more interested in Life By You than I am in either Paralives or whatever next to nothing I've heard about The Sims 5 so far.)

"Charles Martinet is no longer the voice of Mario"

"It was-a him"

On the one hand, that's kind of sad and Mr. Martinet will be missed. (I mean, he's not dead or anything, but...)

On the other hand, dude has been doing this voice since 1991 (well before even 1996's Super Mario 64). I'd probably be ready to move on after doing silly voices like that for over thirty years, too. (Especially if I got unceremoniously replaced by fucking Chris Pratt in the big screen movie based on the character I'd been doing for so long up to that point.)

On the weird mutant third hand, I haven't personally played a Mario game myself since Super Mario Galaxy and my brief, aborted attempt at Galaxy 2. And then I sold all my consoles in 2014, which mostly made the whole thing a moot point. Well, outside of emulation anyway, I guess, but if I'm going to play games on emulators, it will be games that are more interesting to me than Mario games are now. That said, though, I have actually considered at least maybe finding and replaying the Game Boy Super Mario Land games (even if the third one was actually the first Wario Land game), since those were the first Mario games that I ever officially owned myself. But then, that's completely irrelevant to this post about Charles Martinet.

(EDIT) As for the new Mario game voice actor, I checked Google to see who it is, and... ...*crickets chirping* (/EDIT)

"A Californian was killed after an argument over a Pride flag hanging outside her clothing store"

So fucking senseless and wasteful and stupid.

I think Confederate flags and Gadsden flags and Thin Blue Line flags and goddamned Trump flags are hateful and asinine. However, if I were to see a Confederate flag or a Gadsden flag or a Thin Blue Line flag or a fucking Trump flag flying outside of a store, I would not go into that store and berate the owners for choosing to fly said flag outside their place of business. And I'm sure as goddamn shit not going to shoot and kill someone over it. I, quite simply, will not give my money or time or patronage to such a business, that is all. At the very most, I might write a snarky blog post here about such a store and maybe recommend that others also not give their money, time, and patronage to such a store, but that's about it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now, could you fucking hateful pieces of GQP shit maybe, just maybe, extend the same courtesy to LGBTQ+ people and their supporters, rather than being your usual fucking hateful pieces of GQP shit selves about it? Just once? To just, for once in your goddamned lives, show basic, bare minimum human decency? Just? Fucking? Once? That'd be real cool of you, you know? If someone is flying a Pride flag at their store and such a thing happens to gripe your ass something fierce, perhaps... just don't go into that store, huh? Maybe, and hear me out on this one, don't fucking murder the store owner?

And that's not even getting into the whole bit mentioned in the CNN article about the "unprecedented wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in 2023" and other such more generalized asininity on the part of fucking hateful pieces of GQP shit.

Truly, this is just yet another instance in a very long list of instances that demonstrates why the GQP, and everything the GQP stands for, and everything that supports and props up the GQP, all need to utterly cease to exist, and the sooner the better.