If you look here, the way the fetus is situated, the delicate clasp of the proto-hands, that's what we in the medical profession call "kinda fruity"

Sex trafficking teen girls is on the more extreme edge, but you see it everywhere. Think about the casual cruelty dished out by politicians, celebrities and even the petit-bourgois on service workers, employees, or anyone who doesn't have the power to fight back. It's all just blithely accepted.

I'm a pretty big believer in individual freedom in most ways, in the right not just of special people, but of everyone, to be strange, outre, express and explore potentially troubling ideas or horizons - especially for art and thought - but that ends at the abuse & exploitation of others!

I think there's a kind of pervasive idea in Liberal society that, if you're a Special Person, a Great Genius or whatever, then you should be permitted to do horrible shit and treat people like garbage. That your genius is more important than the wellbeing of us NPC cattle.

oh yeah brother

Firing up a new game felt like such an adventure, like you had no idea what was coming and anything was possible. Part of that is just childhood for sure, but also I think the industry lost a lot of that by becoming so commercial, so formalist, refined and safe.

As a kid I probably spent more time with the character creator than in the game, just imagining all kinds of guys, imagination unconstrained by knowledge of the underlying limitations. Also I miss big, diegetic text heavy manual's like BG and Alpha Centauri!

Also worth explaining you could do different kinds of installs that would load more or less data (music, cutscenes, backgrounds) onto the hard drive and read the rest from disc - but this meant much longer load times and sometimes fewer bells and whistles, since a CD is slower than a hard drive.

Still it's crazy that I can download an 80gb game to a 2tb hard drive and have it running in like 10 minutes, complete with light or no load times. I used to have to uninstall everything on my PC to play Diablo 2 with Lord of Destruction (with a full install)

I think I always did the full install and also I had a computer that was barely adequate to the task. Or maybe when you're like 12 everything feels like it takes way longer.

Oh man, forgotten what that looked like. It's funny it's probably been almost 20 years since anyone played it this way, that one element of the game utterly forgotten as people play cracked/modded/remastered versions installed all in one.

Not even a little. They came in a big cardboard fold out. BG used a lot of prerendered backgrounds and those take up a ton of space vs sprite tiles or polygon data and lower res mapped textures. Also why Final Fantasy games where 3-4 discs on PS1.

Admittedly I picked the worst example, but even one disc games you usually had to punch in a 16+ digit CD key and get it wrong three times and wait 20-90mins (dep on game/hardware) for it to finish installing.

You could still do merch!

"I firmed a parasocial relationship with an internet microcelebeity and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt." shirt.

"Don't be parasocial with me until I've had my morning Coffee" mug.

"I want to believe (podcasters are my friends)" poster

You should've trademarked that shit. $5,000 anytime someone wants to call something parasocial.

I remember once a woman posting "this is what I'm beating off to" and it was a a cgi porn of a woman, from her pov, getting fucked by a huge-cocked velociraptor.

Which, y'know, still way easier to understand than wanting to fuck RFK

Now, don't get it twisted, I love women for this. But sometimes weird, disturbing shit washes up on the beach of the perceptible noosphere and you can't help but feel mix of awe and terror about what else is lurking down there