A Boy Can Dream, Can't He?

A boy can dream, can't he?

There's something that I find equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

On one hand it is so funny watching the generation previous to mine (I was born in 84) absolutely say the most unhinged shit online, doxx themselves, and get fired, after spending my entire childhood teaching me online opsec because every stranger was a potential murderer. Social media done rotted their brains.

But on the other I'm seeing kids coming up, seeing them spew all their personals online, and using that to model their unsafe behavior and put themselves at incredible risk because the internet actually got way more dangerous than it was, ironically, when I was coming up being told I had to basically outsmart the fuckin CIA. Now the actual CIA and other bad actors (government, private, and individual) really are out there and these kids are watching fucking meemaw post a photo of the front of her house practically captioned with her fucking SSN and thinking, "yeah, sure, the adults know what's safe."

I gotta be a fuckin millennial about this and beg younger folx to listen to the VCR generation: hide yourself online. Nothing should go there you wouldn't want in the hands of the person who hates you the most.

Be safe, be smart, be a fucking ghost.

I get that the new world is struggling to be born but can we get an epidural or something

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

The idea of homer being an f1 commentator is so funny to me

yeah I'm a serious gamer

*plays oregon trail on the oregan travel website*