I sorta remember Earth: 2025 and Utopia being a bit like that. You’d generate turns over time and login once or twice a day to spend the turns. Not sure if that’s exactly what you meant by BBS though, and the only ones I know offhand I think were all late 90s starts.

If anything it’s more of a language thing that stuck when translated. Japanese uses their word for confession (kokuhaku) both for confessing to a crime and professing one’s love/attraction. The latter is also often how people are asked out (think “I really like you, do you want to go for dinner” – the “I really like you” bit is the “confession”).

It could’ve been localised as asking out instead, but the more literal translation was used often enough to become normalized. So now we see “he confessed to her” instead of “he asked her out” in translations a lot when the former is a fairly typical Japanese way of saying the latter.

A little over a decade back, I had a laptop that came with Windows 8 but didn’t actually meet the specs for it. I installed Ubuntu back then to get the thing to run reliably, and it performed really well that way.

On my home computers I kept using Windows, but with the trend toward less ability to control your system, more ads and AI nonsense being baked in, and just general bloat, when they announced the end of life for Win 10, I decided I’d switch to dual booting Linux Mint at the start of the summer. (I’m a teacher, and it seemed like the best time was when I could deal with my computer being on the fritz for a while if I messed it up.)

I set it up as dual boot because I figured here and there I’d still need to go back to Windows for some specific reason or other but that was back in early July and I’ve yet to encounter a reason why I really need Windows, so I genuinely haven’t booted to Windows even once since the time I originally setup the dual boot and made sure it was working.

Honestly, so much of what we do these days takes place in browser windows that it barely feels different, other than it runs a little smoother and I occasionally have to run an old windows app through Lutris. (Had it installed anyway for games from GOG, and it turns out it works just as well for non-gaming apps.)

A redemption arc this late would’ve had to have been quietly making a great game, no big announcements in advance until it was done or nearly so and playable, and then letting it speak for itself.