What the fuck, I like to think that I lived in places where people hate to talk (northern Europe), and at most people would ignore you.

Being vocally angry at you for nothing is not them being antisocial, that is them being angry and aggressive without an outlet. Or them being miserable people with nothing but petty drama in their life.

But the dwemer fucked off / killed themselves while summoning their omnissiah (iirc the lore gets a bit weird), and the falmer… well… yeah.

Actually, this part of the Skyrim world is the one that I hate the least. Sounds like every proxy conflict ever. The parallels to many real-world conflicts from Vietnam to Ukraine are obvious.

And it is a nice dilemma: do you support the clearly colonial empire, which however seems to be half ok at running things, when they are not on an oppressive execution spree? Or support the self-determination of the people, who are propped up by a rival empire that is even worse, and half of them are horribly racist? It is pretty well balanced and not quite as black and white as the usual video game lore, it has layers, and makes you think. I like it.

I really wanted to love Skyrim, the world is so cool, and it has so many cool story lines in there. It is just that they are so… shallow. Not connected at all. Not responsive or immersive in any way.

Meh, the 70s had half the world population that we have now, and created much of the kick-ass music and arts that we still hold in high value. And, to be honest, a 3b pencil is really a luxury first world problem. Besides, the more important metric for that will be population density. In a city of 100000 or more, it makes sense to have a dedicated arts and crafts store, maybe even more. In a village of 1000, not so much.

“Nicer” cities are growing in almost all parts of the world, right? If anything, rural infrastructure will dwindle as people move to the cities for opportunities and amenities.

Username checks out… I am not particularly happy about many of the things china does, and I don’t think “but they are not the US” is an excuse for authoritarianism and imperialism, they got a way better culture of how to deal with old people than the west, both in traditions and in institutions.

Society is going to collapse anyway, the question is, how hard and how badly. The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something. I personally rather hit the brakes than accelerate before hitting the wall.

Probably some paralyzing agent, to stop you from twitching and moving while they worked. And probably a tiny miscalculation, or maybe even intentionally to avoid you doing something stupid before your rational brain was done rebooting.

You can absolutely get yourself to respond to a trigger that you make up. Sure, relaxation is also useful on its own, but I am pretty sure that a good chunk of the effect of that is Pavlov-ing yourself to sleep. “I always do this right before I fall asleep, so when I do this, I will fall asleep”.

Hm. I am not super firm on the definitions, but I remember having a hard time forming new memories when I took quite a bunch of cannabis. Scary shit. I basically “existed” in intervals of around a (subjective) minute or so, with nothing to do except to wait it out.

When I had to get surgery, they gave me opiates first, then the other stuff. I remember them giving me the opiates, everything became… soft and fuzzy. Like, not visually, just, the opposite of sharp. Actually, quite a nice feeling. And then they announced that they’d proceed with the other stuff, and I time-skipped to when it all was over.