Mulvad gives you a 16 digit random number when you sign up. Anyone with that number can use that account, it’s on you to not lose it, if you do you have to make a new account. You send them money and an account number and they add balance to that account. When it’s out, that account is blocked from service until they get more money. You hack their service and you get a list of numbers and whether or not they have service. They keep no documentation and if you pay with card you have to manually input every time. I know them better than they know their users.

Mulvad. That’s how I do it.

I have a desktop hard-drive dock and keep most of my games installed on cheap SSDs. Feels like starting an n64 when I use steam.

You don’t need to kill every wolf to protest the village, you just need to kill enough that the wolf learns the village is a death sentence. The smart one’s will always still be in the woods and when one slips they’ll remind the rest why they hide there.

The biggest sin of the American government was failing to hang every single confederate sympathizer. The problems only cascade from there.

Yes! That’s going on the watchlist

Oh you are in for a treat! it’s an antique instrument with a very distinctive sound.

That you either passionately love or viscerally hate droning instruments.

Too many beautiful sculptures melt under the scorching gaze of capitalism.

The biggest sin is when you see cheap plastic goggles with gears and spikes covering one eye. The point if goggles is to protect the eyes, not obscure your vision and carry your trash.

It’s not quite the same as you describe, but I do carry the tenets of that old steampunk to my modern crafts. Right now I’m making an electric hurdy gurdy cello out of a broken guitar, a kitchen mixer, and 3d printed models of my own construction. If steampunk taught me anything it’s that anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

I’ll have to listen to this after work, but I already feel at home in the comments.

I’m much the same. When I got into it, the brass goggles forum required you to hand make and chare your goggles to be a full member. By the time I had the skill to do that, the forum had died and the fandom was a tag on Etsy for dropshippers.

I have a tangentially related thing. I got big into steampunk decades ago when it was still young. Back then, it was a maker culture, a loosely defined idea of cogs and boilers that gave you a fun little world to practice your craft in. It wasn’t just form, it was function. Hammering brass to make functional goggles, learning the Victorian techniques to whalebone corsets, clockwork to accomplish something we only do now with variable controllers.

Now I look for my people and I find a rusting husk of I knew. Gone are the color and texture, replaced by brown on brown in cotton and leather. Where once gears and cogs were carved to spin and move, now they serve only to be glued to cheap accessories. The gleaming promises of brass and copper and steel, userped by soulless luster of plastics.

We should Never have let the world in.

Speaking from personal experience, that’s simply not true. Narcisism is a mental disorder just like any other and can be treated with it’s own form of therapy. You are right that it can be difficult to treat as the onus of understanding falls on the patient choosing to want change in their life which means they have to admit they are wrong. That’s not impossible at all though and many full on narcissists often have a eureka moment when their cognitive dissonance can’t write off an event. On top of that, hormonal changes through life can also play a big role with many people literally growing out of it with different stages of life. Lastly, it’s often adopted by people as a trauma response, meaning that fixing the traumatic stimuli can lead to lessening narcissistic tendencies.

I personally was raised to be a narcissist, lived only with narcissists, and still have narcissistic tendencies that spawn from formative points of trauma. My moment was finding myself alone with a kid I never wanted to have and realizing that I literally had no one in my life to blame anymore. When you put yourself on an island alone so other people can’t fuck up your life anymore only to find out your life is still steadily fucking up on its own, it’s hard not to realize it’s actually you. Couple that with the pressures of parenthood, hormonal changes that no one warns men about, and the realization that I was going to do to my kid what was done to me until he found himself on that same island at 21, I decided to take drastic action.

It’s been a decade. I compartmentalize by joking that I killed that person and took his place. I still occasionally slip, I have a hard time being corrected by people I don’t respect, I instinctually judge things I don’t like as inferior, and I’m sensitive to people blaming me for things, but all of these are now within normal human response levels instead of where I was. Having that kid taught me a lot about empathy. I’m a lot more understanding of people because i realize threat people that aren’t exactly like me aren’t just idiots and fuck ups.

Narcissists are people and nobody is incapable of change.

It’s messy. Kinda like knowing you have anxiety disorder doesn’t make you not anxious. Knowing is a big step but from there you have to work out the behaviours and viewpoints that come from it and fight the instinctual drive to respond that way.

I was raised with some heavy narcissistic tendencies and my first response when I hear about people growing up with power ragers is still to assume they’re trashy and beneath me despite knowing more examples to the contrary than the supporting. I have to stop myself and actually remember not to be judgmental every time. Eventually it becomes your nature, but dome things will always put you in that head space.

I mean, we’re doing a great job terraforming earth, just not for us.

That’s exactly what I’m thinking, newest game I play is 10 years old so I’m not expecting my cards to be out any time soon. I’m just miffed that I said I’d get more ram in December and then AI decided to eat all of it in November.

Funny enough, I’m actually running bazzite. That’s why i know there’s a memory issue instead of windows dicking around lol