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.

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.

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.

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.)

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 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.

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.

Funnily enough, if as an intellectual you let go of the idea that others are dummies and start examining what they do and why and start brainstorming about what might motivate them, you might get a better idea of all the dynamics that go on when it comes to an individual’s choice or motivation. Including, yes, why people are “anti-intellectual”. And perhaps how to “solve” it.

I’m a bit snarky here, because I get irritated by other supposedly “smart” people looking at things through a tiny, biased and prejudged pinhole.

You’re smart? Ok. Get out there, observe things, learn them, then come back and form a hypothesis that aligns with what you’ve observed.

I sometimes run into interior design pics where books are organized by spine color, and I gasp and clutch my pearls at the heresy.

…but yes, some people do use books as decorative props instead of as things to be read and enjoyed for their content.

I had a dictionary of etymology that I truly loved. Can’t say I’d read it from start to finish like a novel, it’s not meant to be used that way, but I did spend time jumping from word to word learning about their histories.

But I’m a writer so I’m one of the few that would genuinely be into that.

I was going to contradict you, that bookstores always carry bibles…but then I realized the memory I was thinking of was from the 90s.

I’d say this is just a good excuse for me to go to the bookstore and check…but they’ve all become so small and sad that I kind of don’t want to. I just get depressed.

I know ebooks and audiobooks have massively taken off so people are reading/listening still…I just miss my childhood refuge being stuffed chock-full of treasures.

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.