Adam Something is a favorite of mine.

As long as I tense my jaw, I guess, but it’s kinda awkward for me. I kinda have to pop my jaw down and hold it. I feel I’m making a silly face when I do it, so I’m not holding it long.

Wait a minute. If I hold my jaw right, I do get a very short rumbling apart from my breath. Is that what you guys mean?

I can’t block my nose in that way. I tried when your comment came in, but I can’t conceive of how to do it.

With the ear popping thing, I just hear the rushing of my breath. I can see how you might be able to hear your heart. I might be making this up in my head, but I feel like maybe I could hear it when I was younger.

I do this thing where I pop my ears (like when pressure changes from altitude) and then it’s like I’m hearing my breathing inside of my sinuses or something. When I breathe this way, it effectively blocks conversations I don’t want to overhear. Do other people do this, or am I odd?

Life in the Crimson Corporation is typical: there are good times, when benefit packages and bonuses improve and bad times, when the corporation has to lay off some employees. Only, if one is out of job, one is out of luck. Since everything on Druuge worlds is Corporation property, every ex-employee is instantly trespassing and guilty of stealing corporation property, like air and sunlight. The only suitable punishment in Druuge laws for that is to feed the Furnace. Retired ex-employees are, however, allowed to breathe Corporation air (albeit at decreased rates).

Reminds me of the Druuge from Star Control II

That would be phenomenal, but I imagine it’s unlikely.

However, if we’re in the realm of unlikely scenarios, maybe they can give me a follow-up to Xcom: Enemy Within that proceeds from an Xcom victory in the first game. I never got into Xcom 2 because it ignored the buildup to the greater enemy foreshadowed at the end of Enemy Within. Not knocking those who liked what we got…it just didn’t work for me.

Alpha Centauri with the Alien Crossfire dlc

Best 4x ever.

Honestly, I could deal with Adrian’s shenanigans just fine. That whole thing was supposed to be over the top, so they shifted most of his story to non-canonical status. I understood why, at the time. But then, the main storyline moved on to a lot of odd muscle porn stuff that was kinda not important to the story. I was dealing with that when I came across a thread lamenting the fact that the actual Gilgamesh of ancient legend was coming into the story as a living character somehow. I read ahead to confirm, and then I gave up. It was just one ridiculous bridge too far. The beautiful HFY story I’d started reading all the way back with Kevin Jenkins (whose character transformed in some nonsensical ways himself) was just too off the rails for me at that point. Add the dismissive treatment of female characters later on, and it was just another story ruined for me. So many great characters and so much unrealized potential…

There were some seriously emotional stories in the Jenkinsverse, but there were so many side stories that went nowhere. I’ve just been disappointed too many times to continue to sort through it all.

If you liked it all, more power to you. It had some pretty fantastic moments. It just transformed too far away from what I enjoyed about it for me to continue.

It’s just the ice wall on the edge of the flat earth. Checkmate, globe-lovers!

/s

God, I’m still so sad that that universe went so off the rails. It’s like the GoT of online fiction.

I wish I had seen your comment earlier. You said it better than I did just now.

I haven’t watched the show, but reading your comment about the shopkeepers, the “problem” appears to be that they MAY be lesbians and they exist. That existence and possibility might be a trigger is sad to me. The hateful folks say it’s about homosexuality being shoved in their face, but, really, it’s a total rejection at the heart of their beliefs. It’s why when activists talk about the dangers of this bigotry, we ought to listen, because the existence or mere possibility of gay people being a problem for some people is only a short step away from the solution for those people being elimination.

Making an important distinction, my friend.

Star Control I and II

Medieval II Total War (except that diplomacy was a joke)

Civ III was great, but Alpha Centauri may have been the best 4x game ever.

I remember the term for the fascists in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here was corporatists. That novel was contemporaneous with the rise of fascism as I recall, and it’s a chilling look at how America might have gone fascist back then. It’s pretty relevant to what’s happening now.

So when hard times come to the executives, then it’s a problem. Got it.