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.

As far as I know, everyone dreams every night…it’s part of the sleeping process…but you usually forget it ASAP so it seems like you didn’t dream.

As for dreams I remember…less often as I get older, I find. Although I do get a few vivid dreams when using magnesium supplements, but I also acclimate to those quickly. And if I’m woken prematurely, sometimes a dream sticks around a bit more than it otherwise would.

Because it’s very difficult to get things you need to live solely through barter. Many trades are very niche, and an economy that uses money allows those trades to continue being viable parts of society.

Like, think of plumbing. If everything goes well, you don’t need a plumber. But when you do…you really need it. Now imagine being the plumber who wants some bread and eggs but the farmer has no problems currently that needs the plumber’s skills. Plumber can’t eat, leaves profession, there’s now no plumber when the pipes do break.

Obviously, the next thought here might be, “Well, why doesn’t the plumber say if they get eggs and bread now, they’ll come and fix your toilet later if needed?” But that sort of re-invents credit, right? “I’ll trade 3 future plumbing problems for 3 boxes of eggs now.” If you have that, why not money?

So basically, money is very useful. It can be traded for many things you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get if you were only able to offer as barter a specific item that might be rejected by the other person you want to barter with. Money is a “universal” trade good, and it’s also easy to store (you don’t have to have lots of physical room to store your Universal Trade Good).

The BEHAVIOR of people surrounding this very useful thing can absolutely be suspect, depending on the person (greedy sociopaths hoarding wealth)–but that’s a human thing, not because money is innately a bad thing. It’s a social problem, not a technology problem. You could totally have a greedy hoarder storing up a non-money trade item too…see people and toilet paper/sanitizer during Covid.

I really don’t like this article because it reminds me of the crazy health nut parents who get disgusted by fat babies and try to make them diet for “health” and instead starve them. Babies are supposed to be fat.

Is the writer here applying guidelines for adults to babies? Babies are supposed to take in foods that are high calorie. I think Nestle is a shit company, but I am extremely suspicious of the article.

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.

I’m skeptical too.

Lots of software is designed so the delete button just flags an entry so it doesn’t show to low privilege users on the front end, while the data persists in the database where database admins and the like can still access it.

Online it’s wise to assume every website acts like this if you don’t actually run the site yourself with full admin access to the underlying web server and database . Once what you write gets on a site it is permanently out of your control in most cases.

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.

I’ve nibbled at trying to use Linux on my home computer for years and years, but games didn’t have a good track-record in Wine so I never went over.

I recently heard differently, and tried PopOS, and I’ve mostly been able to get all the games I wanted to play to play, mostly using Steam’s own emulation using Proton, and a few using Lutris.

The only two that gave me trouble were Starfield–it had a bug with Nvidia cards and I had to wait for a Linux driver to be updated with a driver fix. (And honestly after playing Starfield, it wouldn’t have mattered if it never played.) And Crusader Kings III…but only if I had it playing natively on Linux, as it’s supposed to be able to. It kept constantly crashing if I clicked on a character portrait. When I switched to playing it on Proton (so emulating Windows) it’s been rock solid.

I’ve played No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, Rimworld, Control, Alan Wake II, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Valheim all successfully. (And Starfield and Crusader Kings III after some troubleshooting.) Those are modern enough that I don’t feel any more disadvantaged gaming on Linux than I did on Windows (accounting for my last-gen hardware and such.)

Thumbs up for the World Tree.

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.

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

This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.

But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.

So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I’m naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they’re part of my family and dynasty–so I’m giving them names that have a lot of personal “worth” to me.

Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn’t white, and I couldn’t figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt “right” for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none “fit”.

And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was “high worth” to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn’t get the name of this other character I really liked.

Now, if I was doing that in a frickin’ video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are “high worth” to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.

And it wasn’t like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this “gut feeling” that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow “weren’t right” for her, even though that frickin’ inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.

So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.

Khan Academy is amazing.

I’m using it to fill in math gaps too.

I can’t speak for other mediums, I mostly know genre fiction best.

(I also agree that the system we have in place is not the most ideal–it’s just the framework current authors work under, and thus the framework that pirating of their works interacts with, if that makes sense.)

If you exclude textbooks (which work under a very different model) and non-fiction (which likewise works in ways I am unfamiliar with), libraries collectively have a ton of purchasing power and can make or break a mid-list author of genre fiction.

Library buy-in can mean an author gets contracted for another book or not. It can mean that author is given another year of breathing room to grow their career or not.

A novelist–and I’m talking specifically about traditionally published fiction novels, not short stories or screenplays or anything else–is part of one of the few cottage industries left. They are not employees of a publisher. Genre authors do not get salaries and health insurance and benefits from the publisher. They are contractors/small businesses.

They hand-craft a unique product, partner with a publisher for a measly $10,000 (or often less) advance for their year of work and some hypothetical small % of royalties from books sold beyond the first advance. That % of royalties may or may not materialize depending on if their work takes off or not, and so many of these authors generally do not make even minimum wage. Also, they are taxed like a small business, about 1/3rd of that measly $10k advance goes towards taxes.

So yeah. A small-time author sells one book for a $10k advance. That advance already has 1/3rd eaten by taxes, and it also gets doled out in shitty little $2k chunks according to whatever points their contract specifies. 10k would be tiny income to trickle in over ONE year, much less across multiple. And most authors don’t have the stamina to write more than one book a year–“unicorns” like Seanan McGuire or Mercedes Lackey who can do like 4+ books a year are rare.

Most average genre authors do NOT make Stephen King-like money, most basically work/act like a small one-person business who have a contractor-like relationship with a publisher. They have families or spouses that support them, or a day job, or they live in abject poverty because the publisher does not give them much.

Things like AAA games or movies are different in that there’s a lot of funding there and the whole financial aspect of those works very differently.

But your average genre fiction author is basically the same as a one-man indie game team who does nearly everything from art design to storytelling to game mechanics.

And the publishing house is like–hell, let’s say Unity because that’s all over Lemmy today. You can say the power of a game engine is roughly equal to the power of a book publisher/distributor, if you are examining power dynamics between the actual creator of something, and the tools they partner with to get their thing made and “out there”.

Like, if that foundation poofs, whether Unity fucking over devs with weird contract shit, or the publishing house abruptly pulling support from the next books in the author’s series, the author/indie developer is super-fucked.

So when you pirate genre authors who probably got less than $10k for their book (spread out over 3 or 4 payments over 1-3 years), the publisher doesn’t see enough financial income that would give them incentive to contract that author for another book. So they say “bye” to the author.

And traditionally-published authors are fucked if their name/pen name gets tarnished like that. If they get a rep in the sales databases for being a low performer. You either try to go indie even if you don’t have the skills for the business side of things, or you start from scratch with a new pen name that’s not tarnished and try to build a new reader base. (Starting to build a base from 0 is hard.)

Whereas if you use the library, the library DID buy that book, and that purchase appears on the publisher’s accounts, and gives a tick towards the author being profitable enough to contract another book from. So that author gets another chance to grow their career.

Most authors don’t break out with one huge book in genre fiction. Even Terry Pratchett–who died as “Sir” Terry Pratchett by the end of his career–had some real shitty books early in his career, and if his publishers had dumped him early on because there wasn’t enough of a profit to justify letting him grow his career and get better we might not have ever gotten the good books he wrote.

Many authors build their careers one brick/book at a time. They slowly get better with time and experience. They slowly accrue fans over time as they develop a backlist of books that a new reader of the latest book can find and devour.

And it’s pretty easy to disrupt that process for small-time authors if you choose pirating over library. Because they’re one-person dev teams, basically, and the ecosystem is fragile.

(Big name authors–like, ones you actually KNOW have made shit-tons of money–are less affected. King, Rowling, Sanderson, Nora Roberts–are probably financially fine. But in the middle there are authors whose names you KNOW who actually aren’t making all that much. It’s weird–you might have read a midlist author’s books and know their name but they’re not raking in all that much even though instinctively you think that because you know their NAME they MUST be rich, right?)

Now, big-budget movies and games…those act differently and are funded differently, they’re not one-man shows. There’s a lot of greedy corporate assholes at the top of those chains (thus the recent writer/actor guild strikes.) The impact of piracy on those creative mediums is probably different. I’m not informed enough to really know.

But fiction? Yeah, most genre authors are tiny little indie creatives, and pirating actually does potentially fuck them over to some extent, if the author is still alive and still writing as their career.

The big whale authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson or Nora Roberts or J. K. Rowling are the exceptions, not the rule. Most authors are not bringing in that much with their works. The truly giant authors probably won’t notice if you pirate–but the smaller authors, that you might mistakenly think is “rich” because you recognize their name, might not actually be all that rich and might actually encounter problems if there’s more pirating going on than library checkouts.

Libraries, as a demographic, can add up to be a nice chunk collectively (think how many libraries there are), so an author who is popular in libraries can see continued support from publishers. But if people choose pirating over libraries…well, that support goes away and it’s easier for the publisher to say “bye” to the author.

Maybe sometimes it’s warranted, some authors just aren’t good. There’s an element of sink or swim going on with making/selling a book by the nature of it.

But I know as a reader there’s several authors I like, and who later won awards…who kinda had crappy early books. Publishers nurturing them through their early wobbly careers is what allowed them to grow into the greats they became. (These days, Publishers are much more cutthroat in getting rid of midlist authors, as I understand it, compared to the 70s/80s/90s.)

And although I mostly talked about traditional publishers above, indie authors can have it rough too (or even rougher) because they directly foot the cost of things like editors and cover artists and the like without being able to spread the risk of marketing and selling their book across a bigger pool of authors like a publisher can.

Yeah, there’s a reason horror films and fantasy universes often base their stuff on Catholic trappings.

Like, when was the last time some horror flick brought in, I dunno, Baptists or Mormons or Lutherans to deal with the exorcism of a demon?

No, you bring in the Roman Catholic Priest, or MAYBE the Eastern Orthodox Priest, he’s MUCH cooler and has rituals and robes and everything.

The theater and singing in the Catholic tradition is generally top-notch, and it’s one thing I miss about being Catholic. They know how to tap into artistic showmanship in a way other religions seem to have purposefully shed.

…I sometimes wonder how much of the metal community is ex-Catholic. It has the same theatrical flare.

Stuff like that has never been unique to self-checkout. I remember in my teens in the 90s you’d run into things like the credit card system being down or the check-checking system being down when you went through the line with a physical cashier, or some barcode not scanning because it’s some niche product that didn’t make it into the system. Or you only had a $50 on you and the cashier was struggling to make change because it was too early/too late in the day, so you had to hold on while they flagged down someone who could help them open another register to break it. Or there was a coupon being weird, or, or or…there was always something now and again. If not for you, for someone ahead of you in line.

Basically, minor inconveniences always happen now and again regardless of your method of checkout or payment. Feeding your own anxiety by stressing out whether you look stupid because a touchscreen has stumped you for this or that reason is unproductive.

Like–yeah, I get it. I’ve felt frustration too. I have felt the same things you talk about.

But I consider my own feelings a “me” thing? I’ve always felt that was a thing I had to overcome in myself, my own impatience, my own frustration over an everyday minor blunder. My own fears that I look “stupid”.

Blaming the world around me (such as the self-checkouts) for being imperfect is…unrealistic, to me? There will always be minor things, minor delays–it’s just a facet of life that will never change.

So it’s always seemed to me that it’s more productive to be zen about it. Especially when looking at my own memories I remember just as many minor checkout “upsets” when going through a line with a physical cashier as I have encountered in the self-checkout. Small errors happen regardless of system, so why not learn to flow with it?

I always take a peek at the comment history when I see things like this. And this guy basically just woke up to say things like this in one specific thread.

I’m no longer a mod of anything these days, but if I had a mod-hammer I’d send you into the next galaxy.