I'd have to pick gryphons, for a variety of reasons:

• Lions are badass, eagles are badass, making gryphons badass squared
• Historically associated with strength and protection
• They're often portrayed as having human-level intelligence and how fucking cool would it be to talk to one
• They would give the absolute best cuddles and you cannot convince me otherwise

because growing up, I only ever heard that word from neoconfederate types, and so I'm conditioned to associate that word with "the South shall rise again" bullshit

I know that it's Chinese and it translates roughly as "white/Western left." Looking it up on the Chinese wiki, Google translate gives me... well, this:

It is used to describe people who support policies such as the abolition of the death penalty , [ 3 ] animal protection , environmental protection , body equality , skin equality , LGBT , feminism , vegetarianism , marijuana decriminalization , euthanasia , abortion and immigration , that is, people with cultural leftist ideas in the European and American world.

This paints baizuo as something akin to American conservative terms like "woke" or "SJW." On the other hand, I've seen baizuo on Hexbear a few times, but in those contexts it seemed to mean something closer to "succdem" or "Western chauvinist" rather than the definition above. Obviously, a term used to insult feminists, LGBT people, and environmentalists would be incredibly out of place on this site, hence why I'm asking about it rather than taking a machine-translated Wiki article at face value.

I'll start off with Raiden II's Repeated Tragedy.

A local restaurant had this game, and every time we went, I'd beg my parents for money so that I could play it. I wasn't very good at the game, so I never got past the first stage, and so I heard this song a lot. Really gives me nostalgia.

Also got to shout out Streets, from Timesplitters too. I put a lot of time into this game as a kid, and this song is what got me into futurepop (love me some VNV Nation).

I have a passport, but aside from some half-remembered Spanish courses from high school, I'm completely monolingual.

Sadly, the US prohibits travel to Cuba for vacations, otherwise I'd gladly put some money into their economy.

Nothing quite like the simultaneous awe and dread of looking at a construction so gargantuan that you feel like an ant on the floor of a cathedral

Pic is by Étienne-Louis Boullée. Also if you're into this kind of stuff, check out the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Also have a look at the short film The Centrifuge Brain Project.

I know it's senseless. I know it's unreasonable. I know it's unhealthy. There is, objectively, no reason to be in a bad mood because I lost a game being played for fun that has no stakes attached.

To be clear, this isn't directed at the person who beat me (unless it's someone who's really rubbing my face in it). I want to win, I'm doing my best to win, I wouldn't ask them to do any less, and I wouldn't get any satisfaction from a victory against someone who was pulling their punches anyway. My negative feelings are largely directed inward: when I lose, I feel like a failure even though I intellectually understand that you'd have to be a complete tool to judge anyone else so harshly for losing at a game.

I've been like this as long as I can remember. I've definitely gotten a much better handle on my emotions when I was young, but I'm sure it it still comes through, even if people don't say anything. It's not fair to the people I play with, and I wish I wasn't this way. I actually greatly prefer cooperative games over competitive games because of this, because that way if I lose, the other player(s) is/are in the same boat - we all failed together, so I can't be judged negatively in comparison to anyone.

Anyone else have similar issues? Anyone who can offer insight as to why I might feel this way?

As in, what's something you loved as a kid, found cringe as you get older, then gained a new appreciation for as an adult? Here are some of mine:

• Pokemon. I expect this will be a common one. It's got cute creature designs and fun tactical battling, and since I've outgrown my shame at liking cute things, I'll happily keep coming back to it.
• Yu-Gi-Oh. I still don't much care for the CCG (I'm opposed on principle to any game where your ability to win largely depends on how much money you're willing to sink into it), but the anime bursts with dorky charm and the video games are fun. A setting where reincarnated ancient sorcerers and billionaires are stone-dead serious about a children's card game is also a nice break from the modern plague of "well that just happened" Marvel soy banter.

Oni Tank T-34

How much longer will they deprive us of Shadowrun: Hong Kong 97?