Haha! I'm glad you stuck with it. It changed my thoughts on consciousness and I'm always trying to infect others whenever possible.

Mage: the Awakening 2E, for the same reasons

Can I mute posts with just this photo

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Though as a general rule of thumb I think each major bit of info should get three avenues of acquisition, and have a fail state that doesn't end the game immediately.

I haven't run them myself but I've heard Gumshoe and Night's Black Agents do clue based adventures well. I believe NBA pioneered the "Conspryamid," a template/worksheet to help GMs build mysteries and conspiracies.

Information tiering is always a weird one for me. I think I would have let them have a big chunk of information (within reason, as others mentioned) but the droid becomes a mini MacGuffin as they're apparently a solid resource on the Malicrux and thus sought after by the Imperials.

OH NO

*net splits

Oh god, that's a detail I've since forgotten. Best I can recall is that the owners of TMOL picked some node that was prone to web splits (they all were) but a lot of lols were had

Everyone was older than me but teenage me thought it was cool to interact with and learn from the 20/30 somethings. Lots of mailing each other things (spare computer parts, media, etc). Made some lifelong friendships!

Penny Arcade felt like the center of the "gaming" part of the internet back then, I guess? It's been literally 20+ years so my memories are spotty but I remember thinking that the PA forums were SomethingAwful lite. TMOL by contrast was a much smaller group of people. Cozy, friendly. IRC chat also

The truemeaningoflife.com forums (now defunct) by way of a Penny Arcade post, circa 2004. From there I went on to post on a private music message board (bco.org) that still persists (elsewhere) to this day.

See what he wants through the door?