I never had a chance to try Earthdawn, but it looked like a lot of fun.

I'm a fan of old-school Shadowrun (2nd ed.); it didn't matter how bad-ass your character was, you could get killed by a lucky shot from a punk with a zipgun. It kept the grime of Cyperpunk, and added fantastical elements to it. IMO, it required more role-playing than is strictly necessary in a lot of D&D games, because going in guns blazing all the time was almost certain to lead to death; properly played (IMO), the GM should be brutal in how they handle stupid players.

The downside was so many six sided dice.

IIRC, this hasn't been debunked per se, but it was a very small, very limited study, and doesn't really do a great job of explaining homophobia in a broader population. (I mean, you're talking about 64 people in total; depending on your inclusion criteria, that could be a meaningless sample size.) Penile plethysmography is a proxy for sexual arousal; it's useful in some instances--like predicting whether or not someone will commit more sexual offenses in the future--but isn't even that great in those instances. If I remember correctly, there's strong evidence that disgust is a trait strongly associated with conservatism, and homophobia is a an extreme disgust reaction.

FWIW, I was casually--but quite virulently--homophobic when I was younger. I'd been raised in a very conservative, evangelical religious group, and I believed all the bullshit that I'd heard about gay people. That changed once I lost religion, and actually met people that were gay. That, of course, is only anecdotal evidence, and does assume that I'm neither gay nor bisexual (and I don't believe that I am), but it fits with what I've seen from conservative thought.

It depends on how you're looking at homosexuality; are you looking at it as sexual attraction, or as behaviour? If you're talking about behaviour, then a lot of that is certainly environmental, e.g., if you're raise a non-permissive location, you're much, much less likely to engage in homosexual behaviour. But if you're talking about sexual attraction, then it seems very unlikely that it could be anything other than primarily genetic.

I think that the fact that there's a difference between how people act, versus how people feel, is what confuses so many people about being straight, gay, bisexual, transgender, etc., and why conservatives feel like there's a 'gay agenda' to make kids gay (or trans) when a permissive society allows more people to act freely on the way that they feel.

If you need to regularly scratch your anus, you probably have parasites. That's one of the prime ways for some species of parasites (roundworms, I think?, probably tapeworms too?) to spread.

I named a black cat Svartur. I also had a cat named Potet. ("Black" and "Potato" respectively.)

I had a cat that my partner nicknamed pants. He answered to it.

Currently doing exactly that. My partner and I just bought a house and a few hundred acres in northern Maine, and will be moving in less than two months. Yeah, winters are cold and long, and yeah, the mosquitos and blackflies suck, but triple digit heat is really rare up there.

No, the "entire planet" has decided that states ultimately own your property--and you, since you don't have absolute, individual bodily autonomy--and we use an incorrect shorthand in the way we verbally talk about property rights.

Single digits, 100%.

Single digits range from -9F to 9F. Triple digits start at 100F, and can go way the fuck up from there. (And with climate change, they will!) Once you start approaching triple digits, you have to worry about humidity, because you can easily hit a combination that's literally too hot to live.

Is -9F unpleasant? Sure. But you can layer clothing, and that will keep you comfortable. Death Valley has hit >130F, and when that happens people die, even if they drink gallons of water and stay in the shade.

Yeah, no. Some text services and websites can/do remove content, so you might not be able to return to something at a later date without saving it locally. Once an email has been received on your end, that's it: you have the email locally (or at least in your email provider); it can no longer be removed by the person that sent it.

If I screenshot an exchange on Bluesky where someone is saying wildly racist shit, they can later block me, delete the top-level comment and all the sub-comments, but I'll still have that digital proof. If someone gets doxxed on Reddit and you screenshot it, you've got that forever, even when Reddit deletes the doxxing five minutes later. (They did that with someone that found out who Administrative Results was, and posted all the links backing up their claims. Also, Admin Results in a shitty person, and that's why he and Garand Thumb/Mike Jones get along so well.)

Yes, a vampire could enter with a warrant, whether or not you invited him in. The state ultimately 'owns' your property; if it didn't, then it couldn't kick you out and seize it if you don't pay property taxes. So therefore the state has the authority to give a vampire the right to enter your dwelling. (But what if the warrant was illegally issued, and so the vampire didn't have actual permission to enter? Hmmmm.) Similarly, if you rented an apartment, your landlord could give a vampire permission to enter for a valid reason, e.g., the vampire worked maintenance, and you had a water leak that was damaging another apartment and needed immediate access.