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.

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?

Why is it whenever I find a new favorite anything, it’s Finnish? Most of my favorite bands are Finnish, I’m playing Alan Wake II and it’s great, I follow several Finnish comics artists. So much good stuff coming out of Finland.

Anyway, that site is awesome, I’m glad it was shared.

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.

I googled “Muji flashlight” because I had no idea who or what Muji was, and found this:

https://www.spoon-tamago.com/muji-flashlight-redesign/

Yeah, cultivating a growth mindset is really, really important. And it really is cultivating…you’ll have a hundred reasons why you “can’t” knocking on your door, and you’ll have to be persistent to slay each one.

But once a “growth mindset” is habit, it gets easier.

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.

Maybe if you take LSD while watching it, the multi-fingered, multi-limbed speech will start to make some sort of divine sense…

So what I’m hearing is that computer code will eventually drift closer to DNA where “noncoding” sequences actually perform regulatory functions but in a way that’s super-arcane, and all you know is if you get rid of the noncoding bits the proteins change expression for some bizarre reason…

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.