I think I'm largely in agreement with you -- yes, I absolutely want people to respect each other, and start from that perspective. Mostly because there are a lot of super lazy jokes about groups of people that aren't funny because they're not clever, they're just bigoted.

But when people say, "too much political correctness", that tends to be what they're talking about. E.g., some jerk makes a joke about their pronouns being attack/helicopter or something, showing that they don't understand pronouns and that they don't understand that humor should involve something unexpected, not something super expected, if one assumes the person has bigoted ideas.

But plenty of people make good humor with various groups because they don't fall into those standard tropes.

And if someone is punching up, absolutely respect should be kept to the bare minimum.

Or, in other words, basic respect is about learning about a topic. "Too much respect" would be never pointing out various oddities in a group that you otherwise have basic respect for.

Because, yeah, people act in funny ways. Especially when acting as a group.

Being creative does oftentimes require taking risks, and oftentimes unintentionally crossing lines, so I'm with you on that.

On the other hand, the only mention of women being how they're required to go commando is... not likely to be an environment women want to be in.

As for political correctness, to quote Neil Gaiman:

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin. And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’. That’s just treating other people with respect.”

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

Maybe there are times when that's not what's happening, but most of the times I see it used, it's people complaining that they can't act like jerks without consequence.

It automatically restoring all those unsaved notes has made me so lazy.

The only sensible logic I could come up with is where a new version is broken in some awful way, but an older version is not.

But, obviously, that only works if the people haven't already upgraded.

I like that you're describing an anti-Twitter, where people have to express themselves in over 250 characters, rather than under 140 or 280.

FidoNet does still exist, but it's commonly called "fight-o-net" for a reason, as there are... some characters there.

If you do resurrect your node, I'd suggest also picking up FSXnet, as it's the second largest network, is better maintained, and has a no-politics-or-religion rule that makes it way more pleasant to be on.

Or, you know, you could call one of the BBSs out there, and make a sysop's day by being a user, as non-sysop users are not super common, at this point. You can try my BBS at http://bbs.stormbbs.com or telnet://telnet.stormbbs.com, if you'd like to see FSXnet and FidoNet in their current lives.

But there are plenty of other BBSs out there, too, and my BBS is really only special because I have an ANSI calendar with a different graphic every day that I made 370-ish graphics for. It celebrates a holiday every day.

And if you're wondering about BBS networks in general, I recently found out about https://clrghouz.bbs.dege.au/domain/list , which has way more info than I was expecting about what the available FTN networks look like.

Yeah, I think they could've done that one better, though I guess they had a variety of reasons why they didn't have those campaigns. Some things that just didn't work right because of it not being the AoEI engine.

But I don't recall specifics on that one, as I haven't paid a whole lot of attention, given that, despite having the Rome DLC, I haven't actually played the AoEI content, at all.

That said, I thought I recall some rumors about them working on porting over the original campaigns, so I wouldn't be surprised if you get those campaigns eventually.

But, yeah, not yet, and not something they mentioned specifically in this update, in any way. At least as far as I read.

Yay! That said, have you noticed a difference? I know that one may be harder to notice, as it's an absence of annoyances.

For new path-finding issues, I'm wondering about the mule carts. Since having them follow the villagers sometimes winds up with villager collisions that stop villagers from going anywhere. So I tended to micro the carts to be near, but not at, woodlines. And that... is more micro than my current ability can reasonably handle.

I followed that link, and the post itself seems to not be that, no one in comments was pointing to anything that was a smoking gun on that, and someone else linked to the CEO directly saying that, no, absolutely not, it'd be bad business to do so.

Which feels weird to defend GoDaddy, because, while I haven't used them in a few years, my experience with them is that they're an awful registrar, but mostly because of how hard they make it to transfer away and how sleazy they get with sales tactics. And their ads haven't been... good, but I'd probably let that slide if they provided reliable, good service.

I thought that was the sensible solution, though -- you have your own domain names, but then use some reputable e-mail provider for the actual server.

E.g., I use mxroute, and wouldn't imagine setting up the e-mail servers myself, even though I still wind up having to muck about in the DNS records when getting things set up.

On the note of corporate addresses, I remember that I had a bigfoot.com e-mail address, that was supposed to be "permanent", and work as a forwarding thing, as I switched between various ISPs for my e-mail address.

It was significantly less permanent than having my own domains. And, with Google, we never quite know when they're get bored or run into money issues. But some of my domains? I'll probably have them as long as I'm alive, and that's probably long enough.

It's been having monthly updates for a while, at this point. The thing is, yeah, it was released in 1999, but it remained popular despite no significant updates in years, other than fan-made enhancements.

But they released the HD edition in 2013, and then the DE in 2019, with a variety of expansions / DLC along the way with both of them. Most recent expansion was to add Romans as a playable civ, and port Age of Empires I into the AoEII engine, so that you wind up playing AoEI in AoEII.

But, yeah, kinda cool that the game continues to receive support, and continues to receive support because it continues to be popular.

And, yeah, my desktop is overkill for the game. Though the requirements have gone up a fair bit since it was released in 1999. But it's not like it's slinging around a full scene of detailed 3D models or anything.

I'll second that. I've been using them for 4 or 5 years, and have been pleased.

There even was a day where there was an outage for my server, and they made it right by giving everyone credits roughly equal to 3 years of service or something. I thought that was overkill, and I guess they'll take a loss on it, but... the instincts are nice. It seems like a place where it's some dude taking care of servers, rather than a giant corporation who is more focused on extracting money than providing a great service for a reasonable cost.

Agreed!

As a child playing this, I got to be decent at the arcade version (biggest hint is to not use nitros, unless doing so would directly result in winning, because otherwise the computer starts speeding up because of them.), and would happily play for an hour on only a few tokens.

And, yeah, it was fun that steering was, "...and now go spin as fast as possible, and grab onto the steering wheel to stop when the truck has turned the correct direction."

It wasn't really accurate, but I liked Super Mario Kart (SNES) and Stunts (PC) for driving things, and a certain amount of unreality was part of what made them fun.

But this post was about the console versions of it, none of which I was able to get into, probably because of it not being like the arcade.

All the same, it's a bit of a white whale for Lynx, and I'd jump at the chance to own it for any moderately-reasonable price. Even though, obviously, I'd want to own four copies for the one random time when I had enough interested people together in the right place to play the game.

Hah! This is kind of like how the one non-telepathic person is still completely unaware. Really is nice that The Onion keeps track.

undefined> What is your most memorable childhood event and how has that impacted you today?

Hah, fellow human! I am definitely not a robot and do not need to pass the Turing test.

I, too, am certain a human, and not a robot, who finally got my instance working a couple days ago.

But my server has all of four completely-normal humans (totally NOT robots!!!) who have signed up, so far.

But, yes, it would be nice if more humans like me were to sign up, rather than bots.

Speaking as a noob trying to see if I can respond from another server... Hi!

I spun up an instance for a friend group, to test it out, and while I think no one has a real clue what's going on, it's nice to have something new and positive. And since I or a friend control the server, no worries on the perverse incentives of the internet giants.

So, yeah, hopefully we can learn, and hopefully the ecosystem can grow.