Gale has a problem where he interprets interest in his backstory as romantic interest. Which is kind of realistic, but no one wants to be on the receiving end of that in real life or in a game.
Like bro, put your dick away and tell me some gossip about Mystra.
The crash in DC is the big one and accounts for about 2/3 of the 2025 numbers. Incidents like that don't happen every year and will skew this somewhat.
That said, removing that outlier still leaves us with enough fatalities in 2 months to reach our yearly average. I think many of them are still being investigated, so it's hard to say for sure what would cause this increase.
There's a restaurant in Chicago called Honey Butter Fried Chicken. They serve fried chicken sandwiches with honey butter melted onto them. 10/10
Also, don't sleep on Mexican, Cuban, or similar food. I know Chicago has great restaurants for both and I struggled to find good Mexican food in Europe.
I'm a fan of birch beer. Though that's hard to find even in most places outside of Pennsylvania
Not just Americans. You won't even commonly see them in mainland Europe
Would you put whipped cream on jello/jelly? That's also dairy and features heavily in dessert. Cream cheese is used to make some icing, cheese cake is basically a brick of sweetened cream cheese. So cream cheese also shows up in desserts.
So the person who came up with it was just familiar with how desserts work.
Salad doesn't mean vegetables. Salad is a dish made of a mixture of discrete pieces. See other things like potato salad, macaroni salad, tuna salad, antipasto salad, caprese salad, etc. You're going to have a lot of food hangups if this bothers you.
Very few would include all of the things listed above and I've never actually seen veggies in one.
The one my family makes is just a dessert that's primarily jello with a thin layer of cream cheese and pretzels. Has a nice combo of salty and sweet.
Not sure why people are so grossed out by that, what's wrong with it?
Sphinx: You there, knight. I am the guardian of this place and cannot allow you to pass without a battle.
Me: My name is Ender, Sir Ender to you. And I'm a bit weary from my long journey here, would you accept a pun battle?
Sphinx: Aye, Sir Ender.
Me: Thank you, please move aside
For me, they manage to trigger the "SNAKE!" and "SPIDER!" panic responses simultaneously. The rational part of my brain likes them, the instinctual part tells me to smash it with a rock
Absolutely post relevant info, I'm saying your audience here doesn't consider what you posted to be relevant.
If your comments had tied in to the greater anglosphere discussions around trans people or used the examples as a thing to emulate or avoid, that would be relevant.
As they are, your comments just sound like you think of England as an extension of the US or at least you think the lawmakers of England are concerned about bathrooms in California
The "how are you" exchange is really just a conversation starter, a way for either one of you to talk about something that is on your mind. If you don't reciprocate that, most people will just assume you don't want to talk to them.
In general, if you just respond and don't make any effort to ask questions or keep the conversation going, people will assume you don't want to talk to them. You aren't obligated to respond, but they are also not obligated to continue talking to someone who is clearly uninterested in talking to the .
So I guess the question is: Why do you want to talk to people if you aren't interested in them at all?
If you're looking for support and friendship, that is a 2-way street that requires you to support and care about them as well. Otherwise the other person can feel like you are just using them.
If you just feel that this is something you need to do to not feel like a failure, that's different. It's not a failure to struggle with something, even if it seems everyone else just "gets it". It's just human. You might be happier with more socializing, but you are fine and perfectly acceptable without it.
All that said, depression is also a liar. It will tell you that people don't like you or at least don't care. It will cherry-pick bad memories to drive a wedge between you and others to feed itself.
I hope at least some of this helps