I thought my screen was dusty.

A couple of book recommendations for people worried about this kind of thing.

“Bonk” by Mary Roach. She’s a very good science communicator and is also quite funny. There’s a lot of good info in here.

“A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships” by Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas. This book is not rigorous science, but it is no total junk. It is also informative and entertaining. A tidbit of generalized info: men tend to think about dicks and look at dicks way more than women do.

Some of us have moved on from atheism to post-theism. In part, because some atheists can be very annoying. (Thanks a lot, four horsemen of the dorkalypse).

To your point, I do sometimes miss the music, rituals, fellowship, and liturgy of my old church. It was a mostly wholesome experience, and many of the people were very good people. In particular I miss being a member of the choir.

It was interesting (and revealing) when I left the church to experience which of my old friends from that church were very accepting of my walking away, and which ones wanted nothing to do with me anymore.

Anyway, I have found that my table top gaming groups (mostly RPG games) have helped a lot with social needs. Not a full replacement for a church, of course. But it is an activity that creates interpersonal bonds and encourages folks to be vulnerable around each other at times. And, a little bit like churches and temples, the quality of the experience can vary greatly from one group to another.

It’s good for fast food, but that bar is very, very low. My spouse used to love it, but we stopped going there years ago. And you’re right, it has a cult following like Starbucks and other places have had from time to time.

Does “thanks, mother fucker, have shit ass day, and please go fuck yourself” bring up my numbers?

Late stage capitalism. It’s all rent seeking, all the way down.

You could say they went down a…puts on sunglasses…FernGully.

And how am I supposed to ignore my family without it, exactly?

ShutUp10 is awesome. I have sent them dog treats (donations) multiple times.

Do custom installation (ISO) creation utilities like NTLite still allow you to remove the requirement?

I’ve been to Vegas a couple of times, many years ago. I enjoyed the shows, food, and silly debauched spectacle of it all. But it gets old after a day or two.

Did almost no gambling at all. The machines are very boring to me, and I’m too intimidated to play at a real game with other humans. I would misunderstand the rules and the odds, and screw up the etiquette. I know enough to know that the house has a significant edge in almost any game you play against them. Even on the “best” odds games.

One of the guys that I went with made a decent chunk of money at Texas Hold’em. He said he really wasn’t that great at it, he just got lucky and found a table full of drunk tourists who couldn’t play for shit, and yet they would try to chase after it.

The casinos that have popped up in my home town all look dreadfully depressing.

It’s sad how normalized gambling addiction has become.

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If you return ‘too many’ items they may suspend or even ban your account. I’m not sure what the threshold is.

I use bullshit answers for these, and save them in the notes section of my password manager.

Google voice is hit or miss. It’s worked for a lot of smaller sites for me, but the bigger / more corporate it is, the less likely it seems to work.

When you forget to allow the druid into Leomund’s Tiny Hut.

Dredge players: I need those!

Paid an electrician to fish ethernet for me from my utility closet where the router is to my home office. Was well worth the expense. WiFi is great, and I use it for all the other devices in the house. But I work from home most days, and I got tired of the random slow-downs and drops.

Seems like maybe another trope is a character refusing to eat when they are upset or grieving. This happens in real life, too, of course. But it’s kind of a frequent go-to for writers.

The literal-minded still struggling with figurative speech, I see.