Draegur

You already took everything from me, Mom. I don't have anything left to take care of you with. Now we'll both starve. I'm the frog, you're the scorpion on my back, and these are the consequences of you stinging me.

... I admit this is a rather bitter thought and I'm not exactly thrilled that it popped into my head, but I suddenly wondered if this will potentially become (if it hasn't already) an intentional way to cull the suckers and gullible saps from the population. When someone lets themselves be seduced by an inanimate object, I could swear there's some kind of pattern emerging where it seems like such persons are rather ... dim. Sometimes they are also already cognitively compromised by ideologies that exploit the human predisposition for magical thinking. They succumb to the saccharine sycophantic siren songs the chatbots feed them about being prophets, seers, or chosen ones, and get talked into walking into traffic or leaping off a building and stuff like that BECAUSE they spent their whole lives up to that point willfully kneeling at the feet of one of the many denominations of the mainstream Abrahamic cults for instance.

I'd call it natural selection except it's difficult to ever possibly be LESS natural than a language model transformer algorithm serving as some poor doomed fool's shoddy mimicry of a lifecoach.

Please understand i am NOT SAYING that anything about this is "good", however!! These are just some DARK AS FUCK CLOUDS from horizon to horizon and I'm desperate to see some kind of silver lining ._.

So far all that's come to me is, "maybe the interesting people will survive. Maybe the smart ones. Maybe the most rational ones. Maybe there won't be as big of a crowd of idiots drowning out the people who actually know what the fuck they're talking about.."

Parasocial Attachment to a Hallucination Box meticulously configured to lie at you as convincingly as possible. It deals you a drug that you mistake for "validation" by spitting out words statistically weighted to come across in a flattering light. It understands you, itself, and the world even less than Cargo Cults comprehend Aerospace Engineering. Gorging yourself on the slop it shits out every time you type something and hit [enter] will leave your imagination in paralysis. You'll only have yourself to blame. Don't do it. You'll be happier without it.

I treat consumables as though they are power ups. I don't let myself keep more than 10 of them at a time UNLESS there is a specific point at which I'm scheduled to use all of them at once. Such as, if there is a particular boss battle where I am planning to go all out and curbstomp the enemy with extreme prejudice out of sheer spite.

Some particular foes I've encountered in the Trails of Cold Steel series really piss me off and I feel a distinct sense of pride when I don't even give those fuckers a TURN, leaning hard on time-elemental spells to grant my allies extra turns, and interrupt combo crafts too. Even though I was "scripted" to lose, I wanted to show them how fast shit gets real and they need to stop fucking around. If not for any other reason, i like to save time on a fight that doesn't deserve to be drawn out - WITHOUT surrendering.

Those arrogant shitbags talk a big game but I slapped that underestimating charade right off their smug goddamn faces before they get a chance to BLINK. I like to really get into playing the roles in my role playing games, you see, and narratively i like to think it's my party making the antagonists regret toying with us. They will remember that the only reason they survived was because they were holding back. And the next time ... NOTHING WILL HELP THEM. 😈

and sheesh you sure ain't KIDDING! The amount of wattage in terms of thermal energy they'd have to radiate off would in fact LITERALLY require incandescence @.@;

for anyone else who stumbles across this comment section, i'm referring to "black body radiation" - it is specifically the thermal energy leaving something via radiating, and if it is radiating out at a high enough rate, that makes it glow. Even if we were not literally seeing the thermal radiation with our eyes, it is still technically incandescent in the infrared end of the spectrum!

(unless of course you're defining incandescence as specifically only when the radiation reaches all the way up into the visible wavelengths and frequencies... which, if so, that's quite fair really.)

Orbital data centers are the new "hyperloop"

Space being "cold" doesn't matter since vacuum INSULATES.

it's not even cold...! The matter that DOES exist in it is very hot plasma but it's just really thinly spread out.

I don't want to be blind to it. I want to be able to snipe it from ten kilometers away.