You know, I just realized how dumb it is that I grew up on TNG and yet have never written a bald dude into my sci-fi.

I need to stop sucking and do that.

So, I don't know your ex, and I'm not commenting on her. I don't know your circumstances.

I do know old fandom people who chose Slytherin as their house.

The choice of Slytherin in fandom is more complicated than it sounds, esp. since when the books were at their height of popularity, the wizard/white supremacy undertones of the books were taken more in a "oh, here's yet another basic black and white symbol from the author of why the bag guys are extra bad" rather than the actual problem we have on our hands 25 years later. (And fuck the assholes who decided to make it a problem relevant to current events. Fuck them with a rusty saw.)

People who actually have a pretty strong moral compass that's compassionate and inclusive often ended up self-catagorizing as Slytherin back in the day, because in real life what happens is that if you're gay/bi/trans/whatever growing up in a conservative household, or an intellectual, or dealing with ADHD or autism or the like, and living in a conservative household, you're basically turned into the black sheep of the family through family presure.

Like, you're pressured to not be a smarty pants, pressured to be neurotypical, pressured to not be a "sinner" that is "choosing" to be gay or trans or whatever. And in that era (late 90s, early 2000s) you'd often also be bullied at school for the same things, by the local popular/jock type people. And that type in the books is Gryffindor. And Rowling even has Harry's parent's generation bullying Snape as canon.

(Rowling is actually a pretty good MIMIC of human behavior, but from her words and actions recently I can see she doesn't actually understand much of what she writes about. She's like a lyrebird, adeptly matching a sound she heard without being able to understand what's going on on the human side of things. So she writes characters that are vivid, but she sucks donkey balls when trying to get the psychology underneath and the morality beneath right.)

Anyway. So Snape (or Draco) and Slytherin was sometimes more comfortable for people actually already being outcast in real life. Because growing up poor in a shit home with an abusive dad and being bullied in school too was something a number of fans lived themselves.

The thing is, conservative households happily persecute the smarter/more empathic members in their family and drive them away. And thus some of those people end up as goths or punks or involved in similar communities, and Slytherin is closest to that. So you end up with people dressing in black, but still being more accepting of people who are different or strange than the people trotting around with crosses on their chest or wearing more traditional styles.

Interestingly, I've recently had some experiences which had me mingling with a different social class than I usually do, and I realized there's two types of tatted up people. There's the nerdy, arty intellectual types--band kids, librarians, writers, etc--and there's folks with criminal or addiction histories. But "normal" people see tats or whatever and throw both types into the same bucket.

But because Harry Potter was a nerd fandom, I always assumed any fan I interacted with was probably an intellectual (because why would people not into books get into a book fandom?) and thus them picking Slytherin probably meant they went through some sort of shit at home.

But maybe the fandom got big enough to break boundaries and get enough non-book fans that that's no longer a great assumption. I haven't been in the fandom for at least 15 years, closer to 20, so ::shrug:: I would be suspicious of a NEW fan selecting Slytherin, but not an old-school fan unless they had other behavior that was off.

Didn't the FBI already say shit about bombing California?

Given every accusation is a confession with the GoP I immediately figured they were going to do it themselves and blame Iran. And that California was chosen to try to scare it into line, much like other blue states have been targeted by the current administration.

I feel like there's some old RPGs out there this would fit right in with...

Buy up all the media outlets, especially Fox, and ACTUALLY turn them into progressive propaganda outlets.

Once actual progressives are in power, Lobby for government with the teeth to break up my big media empire monopoly and prevent a new one from forming.

Make a trust in each state to have local news outlets with good journalists.

Fund something to help find and stomp out propaganda bot/slave centers in other countries.

Lobby to regulate the fuck out of AI to stop its use as a programmable propaganda slop machine.

I read somewhere that for some people they also get better with age.

And for me that was true. My intrusive thoughts were worse as a teen and twenty something than now.

Then as I matured I relaxed, and also got proof from my own past behavior that I don't act on any of it, which made me relax more.

Pterosaur is a good one to look up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur

So, I am normally very skeptical about people yelling about bubbles...but I went from working in IT like you to working blue collar, and thus essentially went from being mildly smarter than most of my coworkers to being very obviously the smartest in the room barring infrequent encounters with others like me.

There are folks around me in blue collar work that are very experienced at what they do and wise in that specific niche due to their experience, but in general my overall mental capacity seems quicker and more flexible than most individuals I meet now, which wasn't showcased nearly as much when I was with other nerds in IT.

So yes, you're in a bubble. I had also been in a bubble for many years and had forgotten WHY I had fled to IT and nerd shit, and got a pretty pointed reminder.

Purrmaid

I think the word "nerd" got rehabilitated, and was replaced by incel or neckbeard for those even more useless, gross, and uncool than a nerd was ever portrayed to be.

I'm definitely a nerd, but thoughtfulness, optimism and such take me out of the incel or neckbeard category. I just don't have the blame everyone but myself nihilism outlook.

A psilocybin laxative for cats would recreate what my robot vacuum did when my roommates cat shat on the rug while I was at work.

Solar panel and battery tech are finally mature enough to keep small electronics powered off grid near indefinitely now if you take the time to understand its capacity and build properly.

If your system is too small you might run into problems cooking, charging a car, gaming, or running an ac, basically things that draw huge amounts of power, but it can run a freezer, phone and laptop, and led lights pretty well. And those things can get you 75 percent of the way to feeling civilized if weather or disaster affects your neighborhood power.

So I'm a fan of this stuff, we are nearly in sci-fi territory with it, and think smart people with a backyard and some space should consider it for storm preparedness and the like. The tech will only improve with time, there's some recent developments with new battery tech on the horizon that are hopeful.

When I'm elderly in 40 years, I hope to live in a home with plenty of solar and a huge house battery setup in the basement. If I can cover all my electric off grid including cooking, I would feel very rich and secure.

I always wondered what pre electric gas lighting looked like.

One rowdy moment with someone throwing something and the whole place is on fire.

Cat.

Nothing. If I eat breakfast I'm hungry by 10 and that sucks.

If I don't have a choice about eating breakfast, but I do get to select what to eat, eggs and hashbrowns.

But I also eat those for lunch and dinner because they are yummy.

There's another treatment on the horizon though that grows entirely new teeth. There's an article with a pic of a ferret showing an entirely new tooth that was grown. I think it's a research group in Japan that managed it?

These techs together mean some pretty exciting things coming in a decade or two for shitty teeth when the technologies mature.

Cataclysm DDA.

Curiosity, cats, etc

I don't, and haven't, and I've lived in poverty before that the average person would find humiliating.

That said, I can see I have a stronger sense of righteousness than the average person, probably due to some type of neurodivergence. I have dealt with plenty of bullying for it. So the pain that comes from it sometimes is something I'm used to and no longer afraid of.

It's easier once you lose the fear. Fear is what pushes people to compromise their morals.

It also helps that I'm relatively smart and can always find alternative options so far.

Not exactly hacking, but other people made me remember it...

If you ran early software like a forum, often passwords/DMs/etc. weren't encrypted in the database, so you could just look in your own database (or in the case of the perl-based forum I ran, the text files) and get people's passwords and private messages. I remember my shock at seeing that when I was poking around the back end of my own forum, lol. Luckily for my users, I'm not an asshat, so I never got up to mischief with that. But I absolutely could have, and I know plenty of dudebros in IT who would/did.

I still operate today on the idea that once you interact with an online system, the admins of that system basically have everything you give them and there's no privacy.

(Also, often if you, the user, "delete" something, usually what the system does is check a box for that data that is more or less a binary, "Is deleted? Y/N?", and then shows/hides the data based on that flag being set. This is due to corporate customers crying if they delete something by their own fat fingers, but it means if you do intend to delete something, you should assume it's not actually deleted, it's just hidden from the view you, the user, have permissions to view. Of course this all depends on the specifics of the system you are interacting with, but I still default to assuming the "delete" function is just a flag that alters the view you see, not a true delete feature.)