This is Korea. For whatever reason every single animal they consume that has unpleasant bits inside, they leave em in. Bony fish, bony chicken, grisly pork, soup full of shelled shellfish, and shrimp with tails. Hell, frequently entire shrimp head and all. Also locally where I live they have these different shrimp that have I dunno extra tough and sharp carapace. They don't even try to shuck those things.

If you can afford it, absolutely.

There's also an argument to be made for good equipment making a hobby more accessible. Musical instruments especially. It's almost always much harder to make a cheap musical instrument sound nice than it is a good one. From clarinets to guitars to synths. I wouldn't be surprised if half the people who quit an instrument do so because they're trying to learn on a $100 Walmart special, something that ironically would only sound good in the hands of a professional who wouldn't touch it in the first place.

Sorry to tell you that my particular location is pretty much irrelevant. Centipedes and roaches are just about everywhere. The further north you go, the safer you are.

So many bedroom audio producers are all about having the latest and greatest gear, and then don't make shit beyond a tech demo or two. There's nothing wrong with that I suppose. It just seems a bit odd to me to collect a pile of expensive, useful tools, and then not even use them.

Or not even know how to use them. I remember one guy in particular. He had a $10000 Moog One, and used it to make a piece of music where he held an A minor chord for 20 minutes. There was almost no modulation or movement at all. Just the same chord for twenty minutes. I like outre music, but come on!

Doesn't less demand mean cheaper gas? That sure hasn't happened here.

Yes. I'm using the same search methods I've always used that used to get me relevant results, and I get a bunch of fucking sponsored links instead. I've noticed lately that if the result of a search is a YouTube video and I click on it, it doesn't go to YouTube but opens up as a search result and plays me ads somehow bypassing my adblocker that works just fine in actual YouTube. More than once after the ad was done, the video refused to load, which was utterly infuriating.

Google assistant on my phone has also become garbage. They changed the functionality of the few key things I liked to use, and now it's totally useless to me. Google is swirling down the shitter faster than yesterdays tacos. Honestly, if it wasn't for email, photos, and using an Android phone, I'd probably be done with them entirely.

The point where Star Wars totally lost me was when it turned out C3PO was fucking built by Darth Vader when he was a kid. I just couldn't suspend my disbelief anymore. I loved the original three movies when I was a kid, but damn, it's completely left me behind at this point.

My favorite part of the satanic panic was when sometime in the eighties, our local preacher dropped by our house (we were not church goers) and saw a mangled, black candle on our kitchen table. We'd had a power outage recently, and Internet-less, kid-me loved to heat up paper clips over the flames and use them to etch the wax. Totally innocent of any dastardly doings aside from slightly mischievous me. He left in a bit of a hurry and sent along some hilarious VHS tapes decrying the evils of this and that. Particularly Dungeons and Dragons. Which was how I discovered Dungeons and Dragons and how awesome it is.

"Bored" pisses me off. There's too much to do, to learn, to experience to be fucking bored. I mean, unless you're stuck at work or some shit.

Kids are way cooler than most adults I know. At least those past the age of screaming to be fed. They're willing to listen and learn. They're excited about everything. You can fix a kid's bad mood by making a funny face. Fucking adults are the ones out there screwing everything up (including kids.)

I make music, but it's not really music anyone would want to put on at a party, so I don't tell anyone about it. There's nothing more awkward than standing there trying to explain to someone that what they're listening to is a chord progression played with each note slightly out of phase such that rather than distinct chord changes, you just get an overall impression of it as time progresses while they screw up their face in confusion and disgust. Not that everything I make is a conceptual experiment, but that's inevitably what someone will put on if they discover my music.

Have you played Baldur's Gate 1 recently? 2E is a nightmare of THACO and instant death waiting around every corner. Weapons break constantly, mages inevitably hold your entire party, it's very easy to wander off in the wrong direction and die, NPCs have wonky stats that cannot be respecced. Save scumming is mandatory unless you really, really know your stuff.

The writing is still amazing, though.

BG3 does not feel like it came out in 1998.