And you can’t just dismiss all their worries, either. Seeing a military vessel in a civilian sector can be genuinely worrying for some crews that aren’t used to having converted ships around, especially if they’ve had encounters with pirates in the past. I get that, I really do, but I’m not trying to scare anyone here. I just want to drop off my cargo and leave, and this is already way more stressful for me than it needs to be.

I was raised Evangelical, and this guy sounds a lot like a true believer struggling to reconcile the actual words of their messiah with the culture and beliefs of the fascist death cult that has co-opted said messiah as tribal identifier. My guess is, he has since become either the chillest agnostic you could ever meet or a literal domestic terrorist.

Yeah, and sometimes your meat ship comes with the wrong parts installed but if you ask to swap your torpedo launcher with a scanner module they say you can’t possibly have a science vessel because only battleships come with torpedo launchers. Then you try to explain that your ship really isn’t designed for combat and you don’t even have any torpedoes on board but they just send you into battle anyway and then get mad at you when your shields fail.

I fucking hate Meatfleet.

I think you replied to the wrong person? I drink a cup of coffee every morning. Sometimes it wakes me up and sometimes I end up napping on the couch right after. I also drink a ton of water every day.

Something I have noticed is that, whenever I want to get rid of a stim or a habit, I can’t just stop doing it. The impulse can never be destroyed, only shifted to something else.

Hey, that’s farther than I’ve gotten! I’ve only recently discovered that I’m AuDHD, after a lifetime of failure and then the pandemic completely wrecking all of my (terrible) coping mechanisms. I also fidget with my dice and my character is canonically narcoleptic now because I can’t show up to sessions on time to save my life.

I was mentally halfway into composing a rant about how unfair you are being to Pablo when I got to that last paragraph. “He has ADHD! He’s obviously stimming and self-medicating and you are terrible for criticizing him for that! This is just what untreated ADHD looks like!”

I’m glad you were able to turn things around and I hope you can be a little easier on your past self now.

I don’t think streamers and video creators are more likely to be sex pests. You’re just more likely to hear about a sex pest if their career involves trying to be seen by as many people as possible.

Oh, sorry, I had the wrong guy. I was thinking of Dan Vasc, whose red-faced screaming meltdown is embedded in the article you linked. Must have gotten the names mixed up.

Let me try this again.

Why am I not surprised that the guy who turned out to be a pedo also gets upset about other people having pronouns?

Why am I not surprised that a guy who had a full crying meltdown over the existence of pronouns would turn out to be a pedo?

There’s a novel titled Glasshouse, by Charles Stross, where members of a far future civilization sign up to live in a simulated mid-20th century town. At one point the protagonist disassembles a flashlight and discovers that it’s just a flashlight-shaped case containing a small wormhole whose other end is in close orbit around a star. No one knew how to make an LED or incandescent bulb, or understood enough about early electronic components to hook one up to a switch and a battery. It was easier to make a wormhole generator and stick it in a metal tube.

My father pulled that “just ignore it” shit, too. Somehow it wasn’t the bully’s fault for attacking me, it was my fault for being such an entertaining target.

Conservatives are still quick to suppress speech they don’t agree with, though. Their criticism of censorship isn’t a cause, it’s a smokescreen.

That gay and trans people are all disgusting perverts who hate me and want to destroy everything good. My queer friends provide more emotional support in a day than I ever got from my family, the church, or anyone else inside the Evangelical bubble I was raised in.

That people in “The World” (those outside the church) are all evil or unknowingly controlled by Satan and will always try to hurt me. Textbook cult programming from the people who were emotionally abusing me.

That God is speaking directly to me through a voice in my head, except when that voice says I’m a girl, then it’s actually a demon or something. (It was likely undiagnosed DID as a result of childhood emotional neglect and repressed gender dysphoria.)

That scientists are all part of a massive satanic conspiracy to trick people into leaving the church.

Dungeons & Dragons being a satanic conspiracy. Satanic Panic stuff in general.

Lots of anti-evolution propaganda that turned out to be misrepresentations of science or complete fabrications.

That they actually believed in all that stuff Jesus said about loving thy neighbor, helping the poor and the sick, and being kind to immigrants, instead of spending their whole lives voting to hurt all of those people as much as possible.

I already turned down a free copy of this game because it installs a rootkit, and now this happens. I hear the game itself is a lot of fun, and I feel bad for the actual developers who are watching people shit on their work because of management and publisher bullshit.

I mostly watch anime these days so I’m reading subtitles regardless. The dialogue sounds pretty clear, though; I may not know what the words mean but I can easily make out the syllables being spoken. American stuff, though… If it was made in the past 15 years then it’s probably going to be full of mumbling and too-loud background noise. I suppose it’s possible that my friends have cheap speakers, but I remember sometimes having the same issue at the theater, back when I still went out to see movies.

More recently, I’ve been watching old British and American shows that a friend has been streaming. Stuff from the 60’s and 90’s. Didn’t have any issues understanding what was said.

I get what you’re saying and I wish I didn’t need subtitles, but it’s kind of hard to understand what’s going on when 90% of the dialogue in modern shows is unintelligible mush.

I thought I was going deaf because I struggled to make out what people on screen were saying. Then a friend got a bunch of us together to watch a TV show that was filmed in the 90’s and I could clearly understand every single word being spoken. The problem is on the production end.

I eat two meals a day. I drink mostly plain water, with some black coffee and unsweetened tea. I cut out soda over a decade ago and sweets are a rare luxury. I can’t afford to eat massive amounts of food even if I want to. So why am I still fat?

Inertia. I hate that word. I’ve been hearing it my entire life from my father, who clearly noticed this trait of mine, but instead of helping me he turned it into a means of piling on guilt and shame. “You have too much inertia.” “You need to stop having so much inertia.” “Why aren’t you fighting the inertia? You said you wanted to do this.”

I hate that word.