Not from a video game exactly, but in the early days of the internet, I had urges to delete things instead of putting them into the trash.

Dungeons and (bad) Dragons

I was raised Catholic in a deeply Evengelical town. The little girls were saying out of the blue that I wasn’t Christian. I was like 8, they were like 6. They were absolutely parroting what their parents said, there’s no way the little girls I played with daily came up with that shit on their own, and since then I’ve noticed that’s one of the “protestant culture” things that gets passed around in those circles and occasionally escapes. That Catholics aren’t Christian because saints or whatever.

They get all wound up about the “pagan” elements of Catholicism then turn around and worship their dollar bill golden idols. Hypocrites!

But basically, Catholics get crapped on when there’s no other minority around and they are tired of talking about Jewish folks.

I don’t practice, I’m atheist, but in the USA from a culture perspective Catholics aren’t in the WASP good old boy group, even if you are otherwise white. And WASP types are happy to let you know it, although its less common than it was a few decades back.

Biden being Catholic, and JFK before him, is basically a dog whistle to certain rightwing groups to make them lose their shit, it’s just less obvious than, say, Obama being black esp if you don’t have a family background that would expose you to that stuff.

People reading along here should note this person is trying to turn blue states purple, they admit it with their own words, and they are appealing to morality to lure suckers in.

As if nobody but them is a moral person

Bullshit.

But a lot of us have religious triggers planted deep, yeah? That if you toddle along with the person claiming they are of virtue, maybe you’ll be a good person too?

Anyway.

Vote like your hair is on fire, because if assholes like this fine upstanding “moral” person has their say and causes blue voters to stay home, we’re gonna be fucked, just as we were before. They’re trying the same tactic that worked before even to give us Trump. And why wouldn’t they? It worked.

No state is “safe” from flipping.

Also note that playing with voting demographics is why a lot of the anti-abortion laws are being pushed…to cleanse purple states of blue voters by driving them out. So when you see anyone encouraging you not to vote because a state is safe, understand it’s part of an effort to flip states from blue or purple to red.

Nah, you say it to sap unity and make people stay home from voting.

Your vibe is the same as the girls who say they bluntly “tell it as they see it” in their dating profile, but anyone with any relationship experience knows that means they’re completely willing to make things toxic as fuck because they’ll just vomit their selfish so called truth anywhere without caring about consequences or how it destroys, because it serves some sort of other motivation for them.

Using words to encourage people to embrace hopelessness and not vote is a propaganda technique to put Trump back in the Whitehouse, and him being there weakens the nation so immensely and catastrophically that it’s extremely attractive to cash and weapons poor enemies to plop someone in front of a cheap computer to spread propaganda to attempt to destroy a nation from within. People who can’t fight the US with military might will use words instead.

In short, your words are not neutral. You’re either what is called a useful idiot, an ordinary person who swallowed outside propaganda whole and does the work of other interests here, or you’re a knowing perpetrator.

I hope people here use whatever skills they picked up in English class however many years ago to think about not just the exact words of the poster I’m responding to, but why they posted this thing at this moment, their motivations beyond what they claim they are, and the effects of an appeal to truth on a reader and how that can influence perception even when the thing said isn’t actually necessarily true or contains such a small flake of some truth that it is effectively turns into a lie when put beside the bigger and more vast and complicated truths.

For a long time I had a fear of plumbing. It mostly stemmed from growing up in a house severely falling apart, and I had incompetent guardians, so I felt stressd that if invisible pipes in the wall broke, it would cause cataclysmic water damage, and sane adults in other households always sort of nodded knowingly that water damage was Very Bad, so clearly if something broke in our house it would be on me to fix it, but I was only 8 and didn’t know what to do and my guardians were mentally ill and useless to go to for help because they’d start screaming about the 90s equivalent of maga shit. Like, I never knew what topic might set my mom off, it could be the most innocent thing.

So yeah. Thr shower making funny whines when you run it? Scares the crap out of me because I don’t know how to fix it and everything you would touch to fix is behind drywall and Water Damage is Bad according to saner adults outside my family circle.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

Aren’t there, in blind cave species where there’s no pressure to select for coloring to protect from the sun or to camouflage or display for mates?

Uh, well…I grew up in a technologically-backward household. So the tech I grew up with was behind the times, even then.

Examples: in the 1980s/1990s, my household didn’t have a basic answering machine, when everyone else did. And our telephone was still the old rented-from-ma-bell rotary phone where you stuck your fingers in the holes and rotated the dial. Modern landline phones in the 90s were NOT rotary, and some were even wireless (the handset talking to the wired receiver on the wall attached to the landline). I think the rotary one we had probably dated to somewhere between the 50s-70s. Everyone else I knew had ordinary buttons on their (landline) phones, we were the only ones I knew with a rotary phone.

We absolutely didn’t have a computer. We didn’t even use the TV we had, it was banned.

My very first exposure to COMPUTERS was therefore at school. School had the big-floppy (that were actually floppy) type, the 5.25" ones OP mentions, and school also had the ones that used the smaller floppy disks.

But my first exposure to computers-for-fun were neighbor’s computers. One neighbor, a grandpa like guy who I think at some point worked trades but was retired (maybe disability), showed me how to make holiday cards on his computer. Like, dot matrix printer type of graphics, very very basic. Thinking back, I vaguely remember the command line, so I think it was a Windows DOS computer we used.

And another friend, a boy 5 years younger than me, had DOS computer at home, so we’d play things like Commander Keen and Lemmings. Since there was no Windows GUI yet, we had to use the command line to launch the game executable. This was like 1993, I think?

I also had a different friend and she had an Apple computer, and I remember King’s Quest.

The town library had computers too, and I played Oregon Trail and the first Sim City on it, before these computers had internet on them.

Later, by middle/high school though, the internet was taking off. And I was an ‘early adopter’ of that because I was a nerd and used it to find other nerds, and I would go to the library and basically do the then-equivalent of social media–individual niche message boards and email groups for my fandoms and interests–before I had a computer of my own. Those were usually Windows 98 or Windows 95 machines. I was even running a message board and website before I had a home computer or my own home internet, using library and the local community college computers to teach myself. It just sucked I couldn’t do it at home.

Oh, and most teens used AOL to chat, although MSN and Yahoo messenger apps also had their crowds. And ICQ existed too and was very popular, although more with the nerdy niche-topic crowd.

Finally, at 18 in 2001, I got my own computer, and that was Windows ME (a SONY VAIO) with one of the early flat-screen LCD monitors which was super fancy for the time. A few years later I upgraded it to Windows XP.

But I didn’t like that it was a propitiatory type that wasn’t easy to upgrade. I was trying to play WoW with friends and doing Wrath-era Naxx would cause my FPS to become utter dogshit because the integrated graphics and the shitty amount of RAM couldn’t handle it. It was a joke in the guild, me disconnecting in fights and my DPS being so spiky. So I eventually did away with that first computer because its poor performance would make me gamer-rage, haha. The first computer I BUILT myself in the early 2000s to replace it had an AMD cpu. I don’t remember what video card I chose, but ANYTHING was an upgrade over the previous computer, lol. And I got a lot more RAM, upgraded from MBs to GBs.

But anyway, since then I’ve mainly had desktops I’ve built myself, although recently I got a backup laptop. It came in unexpectedly useful when I broke my foot and couldn’t sit at my desktop without it swelling to high heaven, so while I still prefer a desktop, I give that laptop some grudging respect, lol. It saved my sanity.

The rate of improvement in computers has massively slowed down, it’s stabilized, so I’m not as interested in continually upgrading as I used to be. Phones and tablets are the thing that took over in the “rapidly changing” niche…but I have something of a phone-phobia, and as a writer can’t write effectively on a tablet, so I’m not much interested in phones and tablets from a tech perspective. They’re underpowered and/or expose me to phone convos which I hate and avoid whenever possible.

Utility locators.

Everytime someone digs a hole, whether to install a fence post or dig a basement, existing utilities have to be located so they don’t get hit. Its needed literally everywhere rural or city, and very understaffed.

But its long hours and outdoors. Less taxing than other trades though, and women can do it as it doesn’t require much physical strength.

Oh damn, didn’t know he’d written more than the original 3

When I was in middle school, Sabriel was a stand-alone book with no sequels. It’s STILL weird that there’s other books in the series!

We might need to define “unhealthy” here. Mine is going to be different from other people’s.

Regarding food, I believe the pop definition of “unhealthy” is wrong. As far as I can tell, after having worked in the food industry on the regulatory side, and after having tried to understand nutrition from a truly scientific standpoint, the biggest goof people make is portion size, and, less commonly, having too “small” a pool of foods they’ll eat so certain vitamins/minerals are lacking. The rest of it with added sugars or fat or this or that ingredient being “bad” is smoke and mirrors. Portion size is really, really, really fucking important.

You can be healthy eating just about anything (even McDonald’s) as long as the portions are appropriate for your size and amount of exercise, and so long as your diet is varied enough overall to bring in enough vitamins and minerals. So, eating 3 super-sized meals at McDonald’s might screw you up because the calories are too much for your level of activity, but if you scale it back to 1 a day and keep the meal size “small”, or even eat a happy meal as an adult, you’ll be ok.

Regarding vitamins and minerals…in the modern day, people tend to be deficient in vitamin D because they don’t get enough sun, so that sometimes needs to be supplemented. And individuals will sometimes be deficient in iron or vitamin C. I supplement with C because I tend not to eat many foods with it, and D because I’m a vampire-like nerd that stays away from the sun.

Anyway. To get back to the question, I basically eat what I want, without regard for whether pop culture thinks it’s bad or not, but I pay attention to portion size and I do not snack. I’ve sometimes fallen into keto behaviors or one-meal-a-day but I don’t follow either with any dedication, my natural patterns just fall close to those.

Do I sometimes buy and eat things that are unhealthy for me? Well, by MY standards…not really. I understand nutrition, and I understand portion sizes, and it’s not all that hard for me to eat appropriately for my size without worrying about whatever the latest health food fads are blabbing on about. And because I understand what I’m doing, and I have control of it, I don’t feel guilt.

While I think in theory it’s possible for them to work–and they might indeed work for specific people with specific needs–a percentage of people using them are probably of a similar type to others who have gravitated towards food fads through the past century.

Like, if you hit up the Wikpedia or some history site and look at food/diet ads from 100 years ago, those products look pretty ridiculous to modern eyes. But they’re marketing the same thing, right? Health? Convenience? They’re targeting people who are desperate for solutions to their problems, using marketing language common to that era.

And I think a large percentage of these meal replacement products are doing the same thing to modern people, that all the “health food” stuff from decades prior did to our grandparents and great-grandparents. People are, after all, people, and it’s easy to fall for marketing regardless of what era you live in.

I guess when you see everyone’s thoughts, you see ALL their thoughts. No secrets 'tween the tadpole’d.

Yeah, I probably did. Gonna do a second play through anyhow. We’ll see if they chill out. Maybe all the brothels will open again so they won’t try to be banging me.

I was too afraid to ask, I thought we’d gone into spoiler territory over some other shapeshifter.

I know you’re meme-ing, but bear with me.

Media tends to present things as black-and-white because it makes for an easier story to digest. The occasional downside is that people take in the media without adequately critiquing it or pulling it apart and thinking about it. So you get your “something something dark side”, or other people operating on advice about anger that they got from children’s shows when they were 5.

Anger…yoked to the PROPER cause…is powerful. It can be useful as all hell.

Waking up my anger is how I got myself out of an abusive home–it gave me the ability to act instead of just staying there frozen. So, being motivated by my anger got me out of the situation, which bettered my entire life.

Anger is also how I broke the cycle of abuse, funnily enough. I got so angry that they DIDN’T break the cycle for my sake that I dove head-first into self-improvement to figure out how not to repeat it myself. Anger at them being stupid failures is how I drove myself to be better.

Sure, you can think of anger as something that only ever is destructive–but in the real world, that’s not true. It’s a kid’s tale. You can yoke the motivating factor of white-hot anger to get you out of shitty situations or to improve yourself…and you won’t actually get black veins crawling over your skin and red glowing eyes.

People underestimate how powerful anger yoked to the proper cause can be.

I romanced Gale early (picked him over Astarion), and I was surprised at how quickly we were doing romance stuff. So I can totally see how if someone wasn’t interested in that it would’ve been weird.

For me, Wyll was the one who jumped the gun out of nowhere. I’d hardly had him in my party, and suddenly we’re romantically-dancing around the camp for some reason. Dude? I hardly know you!

It was way too easy for companions to fall into bed with you in this game, lol. Like, if I DO choose someone, I don’t want to have to crawl over glass for my video game husbando…but this game went too far in the opposite direction. You act like a vaguely decent person, and suddenly all the panties are falling off and you’re practically having all the bisexual poly sex you could ever want. Game’s SUPER horny, and everyone’s pan by default XD .

Astarion seduced me like someone was paying him to do it, Gale responded TOO quickly when I made a pass at him, Wyll comes out of nowhere to dance when I had hardly even had him in my party…

That said, aside from Wyll being pouty, the way they react to being turned down is really well written. Astarion impressed the hell out of me. Halsin’s reactions/suggestions when I reveal I’m already with someone is something I found really funny. And La’zel’s reaction to not being the first to ask me (I turned Shadowheart down a moment before I spoke to her) I found hilarious too.

And I won’t even mention the REALLY unexpected one for fear of spoilers. That one almost made me cheat on Gale, just to see what’d happen…but I like Gale, and also he kinda has a dark side, so I didn’t want to be a dick to him both because I like him and because I think he’d turn me into a very fine mist if he got truly pissed.